Of the 34 Level-1 Conflict Scenarios highlighted by a 2015 Council on Foreign Relations study, a staggering 32 are in Asia. Why do these conflicts persist despite seemingly endless and repeated interventions and negotiations? How do we educate students to acquire the necessary skills to better understand the complexity of historical hostilities and their possible resolutions and preventions? The Asia Writ Large project focuses on one of the most powerful ways to change our understanding of and response to conflicts and their dynamics: serious gaming.

The project is a response to the limitations and blind spots of currently available modeling tools, which are prevalent in political science and business schools. To addresses these inadequacies, the project conveners have started developing a new gaming platform in collaboration with TNO, a Dutch research firm specializing in game development for the Dutch government, NATO, and the EU. The platform they are inventing addresses two oversimplifications common to current models.

First, the game mechanism expands the understanding of “culture” beyond superficial rules of etiquette and polite or offensive behavior systems, allowing players to engage with deeply ingrained social mechanisms that undergo nuanced historical changes. Even if they don’t come to embrace the differing cultural perspectives brought into play, players will develop an understanding of the rationale behind the seemingly irrational and emotional reactions of other cultures.

Second, current gaming models also tend to assume that each party to the game is a homogenous entity and its members share interests and goals that do not change over time. The Asia Writ Large gaming model features multiple agents and diverse agendas within each party, allowing them to negotiate variable and conflicting goals that develop over time and may or may not align perfectly with those of the group as a whole. The more realistic assumptions encourage deep understanding of the intertwined histories and emotional structures of cultural conflict and develop the analytical skills to necessary to parse their divergent logics.

The game further encourages players to question their own moral high ground, relativism of perspectives, and the forces of history beyond individual actions or best intentions of involved parties to deepen the understanding of history as a dynamic interaction of multiple power relations. Pedagogically, this mechanism allows experiential learning of culture through an interactive game-based approach to learning and teaching, rather than relying on passive learning via lectures or textbooks. The game is structured to motivate students to become involved actively in their own learning process.

The next stage of the project will involve three arms.

(1). Monthly meetings to discuss readings, play games, and consider further progress on the game design. These regular forums will bring together a broad cross-section of enthusiastic undergraduates, professional students from the Business School, Computer Sciences, and faculty in Public Policy, School of the Environment, and Political Science who are conducting interdisciplinary research on conflicts and global security.

(2). Two week-long game design workshops, one in the Fall and another in the Spring with project collaborators in education gaming and game designs.

(3). Two courses: Conflicts, Culture and Gaming in the fall semester and Partitions in Asia in the spring. Conflicts, Culture and Gaming will introduce students to the history and theory of war games in the context of the emergence of the post-WWII nation state in Asia while engaging them in basic game design and development. Partitions in Asia will examine the problem of historical memory from the Middle East to the Asia-Pacific, and will incorporate student research and game-play to further develop the game.

The project is energized by an overarching conviction that a humanistic perspective, which takes into account culture as a key component in conflict resolution, significantly enhances the relevance of gaming as a pedagogical tool.

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