Simulating conflict and competition.
8 topics · 10 curated works
No prior grounding assumed.
Little Wars
H. G. Wells · 1913
Sets out rules for refighting battles with toy soldiers and a spring-loaded gun, arguing a game can model real tactics closely enough that its…
+2 more at this level
Assumes you know the vocabulary.
Game Balance Concepts
Ian Schreiber · 2010
Teaches game balance as a set of transferable numeric relationships — cost curves, transitive and intransitive mechanics, randomness versus skill —…
+3 more at this level
Primary sources and full treatments.
Enhancing Strategic Planning with Massive Scenario Generation: Theory and Experiments
Paul K. Davis, Steven C. Bankes & Michael Egner · 2007
Argues planners should generate thousands of computer-varied scenarios rather than a handful of hand-picked ones, because a strategy that survives…
+2 more at this level
10 works
H. G. Wells
Sets out rules for refighting battles with toy soldiers and a spring-loaded gun, arguing a game can model real tactics closely enough that its outcomes teach something true about actual warfare.
about 60 minutes to readlink checked 17 Sept 2026Sid Meier (GDC Festival of Gaming)
Argues that players systematically misjudge probability and attribute outcomes to themselves rather than chance, so a well-designed game must account for how the player misreads it.
link checked 17 Sept 2026Sid Meier (GDC Festival of Gaming)
Argues that a game is a series of interesting decisions, and that a decision is only interesting when the options are genuinely balanced and the player can reason about the trade-off.
link checked 17 Sept 2026Ian Schreiber
Teaches game balance as a set of transferable numeric relationships — cost curves, transitive and intransitive mechanics, randomness versus skill — rather than tuning specific to one game.
link checked 17 Sept 2026Peter P. Perla & Ed McGrady
Argues a wargame's purpose is to change how its participants think rather than to forecast a result, and that treating its output as a prediction is the most common way professional wargaming is misused.
link checked 17 Sept 2026University of Foreign Military and Cultural Studies
Argues red teaming is a distinct discipline for surfacing an organisation's own unstated assumptions, and only secondarily a way of simulating an adversary.
link checked 17 Sept 2026Ben Boudaoud, Josef Spjut et al.
Argues top esports players are best understood as evaluated on holistic, task-specific practices rather than on raw reaction speed, the same way a musician is judged on phrasing rather than finger speed alone.
link checked 17 Sept 2026Paul K. Davis, Steven C. Bankes & Michael Egner
Argues planners should generate thousands of computer-varied scenarios rather than a handful of hand-picked ones, because a strategy that survives only the scenarios its authors imagined is not tested at all.
link checked 17 Sept 2026Vinyals et al.
Argues real-time strategy games are a harder test of general intelligence than board games because they combine imperfect information, a huge action space and long-horizon credit assignment at once.
link checked 17 Sept 2026Matthew B. Caffrey Jr.
A history of professional wargaming from Prussian Kriegsspiel to modern defence simulations, arguing a wargame's value comes from forcing hidden assumptions into the open rather than from predicting an outcome.
link checked 17 Sept 2026