1/ #Wargaming, a thread. This poses a important challenge to civilian #PME faculty. I think some reasons why (some, many? don't want to overgeneralize) civilian faculty are hesitant to wargame are: ... https://twitter.com/ukfightclub1/status/1328261527627984897

2/ First, the costs of learning wargaming, which is, to my knowledge, not taught in any PhD programs. Any time spent acquiring this new skill is time *not* spent on class prep, grading, mentoring, research, writing, presenting, and service. ...

3/ Second, and related to the first, the prospective rewards to those costs are low, since gaming will always be only a fractional part of the curriculum *and* because we lack tenure, which means there's always a non-zero probability of having to go back to "real" academia, which

4/ will not, by and large, reward the fact that one has acquired wargaming skills (especially if that acquisition has come at the expense of "real" academic activities). ...

5/ Third, generational effects. At nearly 60, I'm of the Pong/Space Invaders generation, so in a sense I'm not embedded in game-centric cultures. ...

6/ Fourth, doubts about gaming as a legitimate pedagogical and/or scholarly undertaking (see 1, 2, and 3), plus (for some) a professional (or personal) orientation that could be vexed by the "war" in wargaming, or ...

7/ theoretical or substantive areas of professional interests that are more focused on non-kinetic forms of state competition, or epistemological orientations that reject the "oversimplification" games entail. ...

8/ Fifth, a lack of robust institutional support. Here at @cisa_jsoma, for example, we would essentially have to create a gaming capability and infrastructure from scratch, which circles us back to the first 3 entries in this thread (sunk costs and barriers to entry). ...

9/ Now for my part I'm open to it, and way back when in the early 70s I played a few of the classic Avalon-Hill games, but that is where my wargaming toolkit pretty much stopped developing (apart from college endurance sessions with "Diplomacy"). ...

10/ In the mid-00's, I did use a game -- the Statecraft sim -- when teaching undergrad intro IR at Pepperdine University with some success, but that was limited in its overall contribution to the course learning objectives, and more recently ...

11/ I attended the last pre-Covid iteration of the Connections series at Carlisle Barracks, where I learned a lot, but was mostly overwhelmed, so one thing I would point out to the wargaming community is that for many #PME faculty gaming is not at all intuitive, so ...

12/ there needs to be a better approach to socializing the idea of gaming and, more importantly, ...

13/ a readily exportable, well-designed "teaching" game that doesn't demand a lot of start-up investment (money *and* time) and is more representative of the current state of the art than the game I dug out of a box to re-learn the basics, the old GDW "Battle for Moscow."

14/ I'd be very interested to hear the perspectives of, for example, @SebastianBae or @RexBrynen on this question of how to break a faculty in to gaming without breaking the bank, so to speak, ...

15/ because it's not just a question of #PME faculty learning how to *play* wargames, it's the wider problem of them being able to *incorporate* games into course curricula *and* to sufficiently master a game(s) to be able to teach them to students semester after semester ...

16/ in the face of all the time constraints and competing demands attendant to the highly compressed schedules that service colleges like @NDU_CISA operate under. ...

17/ And while from my perspective there are clear advantages and opportunities for using gamrs to enhance and extend the PME learning experience, I can't deny there are significant costs and hurdles that would have to be overcome to generalize their use.

18/ This, at any rate, seems to me to get at the question posed by the gamers @UKFightClub1.