Christmas In Hell v1.5

 

I first came across the Battle of Ortona in a brief discussion about mouseholeing in Anthony King’s recent Urban Warfare book. My interest was really piqued though by an episode of John Spencer’s Urban Warfare Podcast from the Modern Warfare Institute (MWI) at West Point where he interviewed Jayson Geroux (a Canadian and now also at MWI) about his Masters Thesis on Ortona. The battle occurred as the Canadians raced up the east coast of Italy late in 1943 trying to get to the Gustav line, which ran from Rome to the east coast. The Allies thought it terminated at the Arielli River, and so thought that Ortona would be a minor mopping up operation. But having taken 2 days to cover a few hundred yards they realised that Ortona itself was the eastern anchor of the line. It really did seem to be the archetypal WW2 urban battle with combined arms, narrow streets, mouseholeing, fires, flame, boobytraps and snipers; and all fought over 7 days in Christmas 1943. Not wishing to reinvent the wheel I did a quick Google search and found that High Flying Dice Games in Canada (run by Paul Rohrborough, a friend of Philip Sabin) did a game – Christmas in Hell (CiH). I duly ordered it and thought it might be a good game to take to COW as I only had a couple of months to get something ready.

My first play through was a bit of a disaster. A long exchange of emails for clarifications with Paul improved things on the next run through, but there were a number of elements that I thought were getting in the way of a good game. And needless to say the more I started modding it the more changes I wanted to make – hence the gradual shift from v1.1 to v1.5! By the end I think the only things remaining from the original game were the events chits drawn for the German AI (this is fundamentally a solo game), the close assault rules, and the rubble! The rubble was why I stuck with the game rather than chose something else. It has a really simple way of representing the way in which a town (and particularly historically Ortona) becomes choked with rubble when it’s the subject of a full-on fight, and how that rubble really impedes mobility. The other thing I really liked was that when I’d played other random chit based solo games (such as Battle for Ramadi and The Battle of Hue – both from Tiny Battle Publishing) there were different pots for each chit type – so it was very consistent (and boring) in what you’d be up against. CiH’s single pot meant that things were more random (odd sometimes but that’s fine), and the use of dummy chits and different number of chits dependent on when you where in the battle all added to the variety.

The main changes I made to Christmas in Hell were:

• The map. The CiH map is a fairly abstract collection of buildings that sort of give some sense of the shape and density changes in Ortona, but without actually looking like it. Using a contemporary aerial reconnaissance photo and Canadian sketch from Jayson’s MA (and some useful clarifications from Jayson himself) I hacked the Open Streetmap map of modern Ortona back to something like its 1943 version.

• The grid. CiH covered the town in about 35 areas in an irregular grid. Ever since I saw Storm Over Arnhem it struck me that irregular grids were the way to go with urban games. However the grid bore no relation to the underlying terrain, and even included big green areas that in real life are cliff-sides and were totally unusable in the battle! It also struck me that any urban grid should separate the main thoroughfares out into their own long areas, so you get the variety of fighting along those main routes (which in Ortona were the only places that tanks could go) and the more close-quarters fights in the side-streets. So I did a new map with about double the areas, and with tank symbols to show which areas tanks could move in, and fire into.  I also gave each area a Protection Value (PV) to represent the density and solidity of the buildings in the area.

• The unit scale. CiH uses platoon manoeuvre units, each rolling typically 4 dice in combat. There are 8 companies involved in the main fight – 24 platoons. The CiH grid gives you a frontage of about 5 areas, so that’s about 5 platoons per areas (20 dice!) before you add tanks and machine guns! Quite apart from all the dice the board gets VERY crowded. The accounts of the battle are very much Company based, and so I decided that that made sense of the game, 25% less counters and dice at a stroke.

• The fire combat system. CiH had separate rolls for anti-tank and anti-personnel fire and then an extra roll when using tanks or anti-tank guns to see if more rubble had been created. I kept forgetting to use the anti-tank rules, and even in the Bath Spa play test I kept forgetting to use the rubble rules. So I came up with the idea of having a single roll but using white dice for HE/AT and green dice for small arms. The number of dice (starting with green) then get reduced for Protection Value and Rubble. When rolling the dice (5s for Infantry hits, 6 for tanks/guns) any double increases rubble by 1, and any triple or multiple doubles by 2. I’m pretty happy with the system as one throw takes care of something that needed 3 throws in CiH, and all seems pretty elegant. 

• Six Pounders. The Canadians in CiH only have MG counters, not 6pdrs, even though the German’s get Pak counters. This seemed odd as the histories of the battle, and the quotes from participants are full of praise for the 6 pounders. They were man-handled everywhere, over rubble piles too bit for tanks and even up onto 2nd and 3rd storeys! They were described by one soldier as "anti-rubble, anti-sniper and anti-house" weapons. So in re-doing all the Canadian counters I added in the 6 pounders.

There were a lot of other smaller game changes, but I think those were the main ones. The two other things I added were more about the narrative of the battle. 

Ortona is nicely contained both geographically and narratively, and the fact that Christmas happens mid-battle just adds to the story. So for each turn (morning, afternoon, night) I did a short piece of narrative, mostly drawn from memoirs, of the battle, and usually tied to some specific game mechanic or phase. 

Christmas needed something special. A famous photo of the battle shows the soldiers of the Seaforths sitting down as a big square table in a ruined church for Christmas dinner. There are debates about the true provenance of the photo, but there is no doubt that the dinner did take place. But the Loyal Eddies were told by their CO to have a shorter and less sumptuous dinner just behind their positions, and some section leaders refused to let their men go anywhere lest they got killed (as some did coming back from the dinner). So I gave each player a set of 4 options for Christmas day – a big dinner, a small dinner, staying put, or attacking as normal. Once revealed those who went for dinners would have to suffer a one or two rounds of mortar fire, whilst those who go on the attack find that everything is at -1 as the soldiers’ hearts just weren’t in it. 

Note: Having just played Storm Over Arnhem I realise how much Christmas in Hell owes to that game, not just the area map but also the close combat system and a few other mechanics. That said the AI and rubble are all CiH's home and the rubble in particular makes it feel "urban" in a way that Storm over Arnhem doesn't acheive.

So how did it go on the day. I had five players, a CO for each of the Loyal Eddies, Seaforths and the Three Rivers’ Shermans, and two  assistants for the German AI.

It was the first in-person COW game I’d run and whilst I knew it would be a push to get close to running all 15 turns in 2 hours I really should have guessed that a COW group would spend far longer discussing things and asking questions than we did in our play test. In the end I think we only just got to Christmas day – so at least we could have the session with the Christmas cards! The rules were a lot more complex than those of the other games I played at COW (a lesson for the future), and so learning them on the hoof took more time – but certainly people were picking them up by the end. I’d decided that it would be nice to have rule summaries and counter legends around the edge of the A1 map, but in practice the areas were already quite small, and that meant even less space for them, and the suggestion that next time I use the whole of the A1 for the map is one I’ll certainly follow. Alex had a useful keen eye for where the very compressed QRS lacked clarity and also identified some other rules improvements (such as it being successively easier to de-mine an area).

Overall though I think that everyone enjoyed it, and I think it certainly gives a good feel for how a town soon becomes choked with rubble as you fight through it with heavy weapons – reducing any ability to quickly move forces between axes or to respond to infiltrations as we had happen towards the end – and that I think was really the objective and focus of my game rather than any other particular aspect of urban combat.

As for the future I’m likely to develop the game in two ways. The first is to turn it into a more generic set of urban rules, particularly for WW2, so as to use with other smaller urban battles. I might also aim for a 6 turn limit, so Ortona would be played in day turns, shorter battles still at 4 hours, or even 2 hours. The second is to make it more abstract so it’s a fight for “anytown”, and use a card-based system to generate a random street to fight down, but with otherwise the same mechanics. That could give a nice introduction to urban combat that can be played quickly (and even competitively) in 30 minutes or so. Perhaps I’ll take that along to COW2023, because having run my first COW game I certainly want to run more. 

My thanks to Graham, Alex, Alan, Ed and Ed for putting up with the fiddly counters, for all the constructive advice and for being patient with a novice GM!

Bibliography:

Chiavini, R. Christmas in Hell. [Game]. Canada: High Flying Dice Games. Available at: http://www.hfdgames.com/ortona.html

Geroux, J. (2021). Italian Stalingrad: The Battle of Ortona. [Podcast] Interview with J. Spencer. Urban Warfare Podcast. USA: Modern Warfare Institute. Available at: https://mwi.usma.edu/italian-stalingrad-the-battle-of-ortona/

Geroux, J. (2021). The Urban Battle of Ortona. Masters Thesis. Canada: University of New Brunswick. Available at: https://unbscholar.lib.unb.ca/islandora/object/unbscholar%3A10433

Gooderson, I. (2008). Assimilating Urban Battle Experience – The Canadians at Ortona. Canadian Military Journal, Winter 2007-2008. Canada: National Defence and the Canadian Armed Forces. Available at: http://www.journal.forces.gc.ca/vo8/no4/doc/gooderso-eng.pdf

King, A. (2021). Urban Warfare. London: Polity.

COW 2022

The COW Sign-Up board - the whole thing is run on pretty much unconference lines

I finally made it to COW - the Wargame Developments Group's Conference of Wargamers. This year it was held at the Defence Academy, which meant that not only was there enough space for any members who wanted to to come, but we also had free run of the equipment halls between sessions. 

I played in 5 games, and ran my own game - Christmas in Hell v1.5 on the Battle of Ortona which I'll cover in a separate post. I also watched a few others which I'll note briefly at the end - followed by some pics of the kit.

Raven 2 is Down

My first COW, my first COW lawn game – it had to be done! Ian Drury did not disappoint with a fun game played out on what passed for a lawn on the edge of the car park. One of our pilots was missing in Vietnam and we had a fine array of 1/72nd scale model aircraft to use to go hunting for him on the gridded lawn. Pesky North Vietnamese kept on popping up, sometimes with AA guns, and soon we forgot about the search and just had fun trying out all the different ways that Ian had found for us to try and hit targets with, including Nerf guns, ping pong balls, darts and chucking paper balls over the back of our shoulders. The NVA flak managed to take two of our aircraft down, and the bail-out was beautifully simulated by throwing a model pilot and parachute up into the air to float down somewhere in the jungle. Back on task we located the downed airmen, and gave covering fire as the Jolly Green Giant came in to pick them up and fly them back to safety. Great fun!

Bailing out!

The only thing missing perhaps was a bit more agency from the player side. Although we had a nice search grid to work with the discovery of the pilot was based purely on a card draw – our track was only important in working out who was firing at us. It would have been nice to have had more of a battleships approach and call out a target square on our track, fight off any AA and then see if it revealed anything – particularly as the NVA seemed to be converging on a location but we couldn’t do anything to improve our search as a result. All of that though didn’t detract from a fun way to kick off my first full day at a COW.

Raven 2 Secured!

OFFSIDE - Space Jack

Space Jack was Mike Elliott’s straight forward SF RPG lite/skirmish game based around the hijack of a spaceship which bore an uncanny resemblance to the Serenity and even had a pilot dressed in a long brown coat! Our gang of hijackers decided to go a bit meta and start a game of Traveller in the lounge as a way of settling in and waiting for a moment to attack. After a few turns our leader called out “I’ve rolled a 20” (obviously never played Traveller!) and that was our signal to attack. Unfortunately, the Captain raced back to the bridge and managed to get the ship to perform somersault after somersault to keep us off balance. With the bridge and engineering beyond our reach we decided our best bet was to head down to the cargo bay, hunt for the contraband which we were after (and found first go) and then make our escape in one of the ship’s boats. 

The brown-coated captain!

With locked bulkhead doors and anti-hijack software running we never really stood a chance of taking the ship down. Like so much “classic” SF the scenario lacked a cyber component which would have let us counter the crew in a different domain and may have added to both the fun and the “realism” of the game. The weapons were also decidedly on the non-lethal side – shotguns missing at point blank range – but I’m sure players had no wish to die too quickly and be out of the game.

OFFSIDE – Petrograd Nights

Petrograd Night’s was Russell King’s "entertainment" on the Russian Revolution. Just as with the lawn game I knew that for my first COW I needed to play some sort of “political” game and this fitted the bill very nicely. I’d initially thought about being a Liberal, but then decided it might be a bit more fun to play the Mensheviks, a good choice as it turned out. The game revolved around the leading faction trying to pass their (or a) policy agenda, with the rest of us voting for or against, and calling the mob out if we were unhappy with how things were going – cue Tim Gow with some nice 1/32nd scale (or thereabouts) rioters and a bit of Petrograd pavement. At the start it felt like things were going a bit off track. For a start the initial deal of the cards gave the “right” an overwhelming and almost unassailable majority, so the Constitutional Democrats led the agenda setting for all but the last turn. The other issue was that parties seemed to be free to vote for whatever motions they wanted – there was no need to be true to their faction’s beliefs – so most just started chasing the roubles they got for being on the winning side of the vote – although in the end the roubles proved next to worthless. However, it was all good fun and it was with the penultimate turn we found that we had the same number of votes as the Constitutional Democrats – but they kept power as the incumbent. So on the last turn we decided to take a gamble on burning our 7 card, only a slim chance of anything higher, but if we didn’t we stood no chance. The Constitutional Democrats did likewise – an even bolder move on their part – and in the end we drew the higher card and had the opportunity to actually form the Government. We’d inherited the Democrats agenda but there was little we could do about that. To secure the premiership all the parties of the left were on our side, but we needed to swing the Liberals to get the majority. Some quick shuttle diplomacy, some donations to the Dacha needs of the Liberal leaders (helped along with a generous donation from the Bolsheviks) and we got our majority and the Mensheviks duly formed the government! Overall a great after-dinner game, the enjoyment of which would have been only marginally improved by playing it somewhere that had ready access to some vodka!

OFFSIDE – Nevermind

Nevermind was a simple offset-square and counter game of a 1950s nuclear missile and bomber attack on NW Europe and the UK. The initial IRBM strike took out several forward airbases and Nike SAM sites with the aim of punching a hole in the defence for the bombers to storm through (SAM sites had 0 range). As the bombers came on I scrambled my aircraft to intercept, but given that they only re-armed on a 6 I needed to keep some back for the second and third wave. As it was the fighters did there job pretty well, almost too well, and by Turn 4 there wasn’t a bomber left in the sky. Mind you we’d meant to be playing the Night rules, but in the scramble to get counters on the table I forgot to check for the bold (?) for all-weather (or the italic for supersonic), so I probably didn’t give the Russians (commanded by Nick) a fair fight. Nick was also somewhat hampered by the fact that the older aircraft only had a duration of 3 turns, by when they’d hardly passed over the Iron Curtain and certainly weren’t about to cause East Anglia any problems before they disappeared in a puff of umpire’s smoke.

OFFSIDE – There’s Something Wrong with Our Wargames Today

John Curry gave an excellent talk on what is wrong with our wargames today – for some strange reason all three of his PhD students were in attendance. As someone who’s been playing wargames with the Ukrainian Army for the last few years John’s in a pretty unique position to look at how wargames match up to reality, and it had been fascinating on Saturday afternoon to sit and watch his Ukraine 2022 wargame. My main takeaways from his talk were the problems (and dangers) of predictive validity, the use of over-optimistic heuristics compared to tried and tested real-world data and the perennial lack of consideration for logistics. Dr Curry’s prescription for trying to improve things included:

• Thinking and considering the unthinkable (aided by a red cell that is brought in from an outside organisation so it owes nothing to the sponsor); 

• Rigorously checking any challenge that the next war will be different, basing design on historical practice, informed but not driven by the present;

• Thinking more about people and morale, and of course logistics;

• Being aware that whilst new technology can help it is often underwhelming when it actually hits the battlefield.

One of John’s parting shots was that if a wargamer and an analyst disagree then the wargamer is probably right as she or he has had to build a model and work with it.

One of the interesting comments made in discussion (by Steven Aguilar-Martin I think) was  that wargames are about building the contours on a map of the future. They don’t tell us exactly what the future will be (i.e. they are not predictive) but they give us some idea of the landscape that the future will occupy. And to draw those contours and build that map you need lots of repetitions – and anything which means more wargaming is fine in my book!

Games Watched But Not Played

 

John Curry's Ukraine game - as played with Ukrainians prior to 2022

A rather lovely Pirate game

Warlord "Epic" scale Waterloo - really just so people could see it

Tom Mouat's "Twilight2000" style RPG of Ukrainian Territorials in 2022. Nice use of Google Maps.

The Equipment Hall

Just a few shots of the collection of modern armour and artillery at Shrivenham - with permission to climb all over them.

A T72

The dismounts in a BMD are meant to fit in there!

Spartan next to a BMP1

Rear of a BMP1, yep could get 8 people in there, just.

Rear of a BMP2, real tight fit for the 7 dismounts!

BMP2 on left, BMP1 on right

Another view down that BMD hatch!

BMP2 with BMP 1 and Spartan behind

ConnectionsUK 2022

 

Spent a great day in Bristol yesterday attending ConnectionsUK 2022. This year, I expect due to COVID planning constraints, it was run as a one-day event alongside the DSET Defence Training and Simulation Conference, rather than the 2 day event at Kings back in 2019 (the last physical one). Also it was purely a games fair, there was no plenary game, lectures or workshops - but great fun all the same. Attendance was complete military, professional and academic wargames as far as I could make out.

There were around 20 games set up to play at various times. The bigger games were more talk throughs than play throughs, but some games were short enough that you could play to completion. There was no structure and you were just free to dip in and out of games as you chose.

So here are the games I played, and the ones I just looked at/talked to designers about.

Games Played

RCAT - Falklands

I've been wanting to play RCAT for a while - hoped we might get it as GFX on a project but failed. It seems to be the Armies "go to" operational level manual wargame. Bn level manoeuvre units, Bde-Div force. Although its using a detailed map the map is divided into zones, reflecting ~ a days movement. The combat system uses attack/defence type factors which are then summed, plus modifiers, and then ratios compared to the a force risk table (simplified copy in Successful Professional Wargames by Graham Longley-Brown - who happened to be running the game) with a CRT then giving for each ratio a spread of results based on a D10 roll. The CRT is sufficiently hidden that it doesn't become too much a game of min/maxing the counter ratios, and it was interesting that very few of the games on show used a ratio style CRT (good news as far as the hobby me is concerned). The game only used D10 and D100 on the basis it's a lot easier to present risks/outcomes as simple percentage chance to military people (agree again), even if they may not find the D10s as familiar as D6s.

We only played the initial air attack on San Carlos Water (only lost the Fearless), and then the attack on Goose Green (lost the whole para bn!), but enough to get a sense of the game. I must admit it was a lot better than I feared and I can see why its been so widely used. The system has been well validated in the Army, and the Falklands scenario has even been played by the commanders of the real battle.

I'd hope I can get my "operational" level rules to a similar level of playability and validity as the PhD evolves.

The Long Village

This was an "influence" game by Stone Paper Scissors, set in an English village not a million miles from Ambridge, which is a flashpoint between left and right wing extremists in some Uncivil War type Britain. Players play the different factions, each with their own aims, and with the UN trying to keep the piece. Each round an "issue" card is drawn and players work out whether to back or counter the issue, whilst also trying to meet their own goals. So its mostly discussion between the players with some basic voting and other actions. As factions become stronger their allowed actions increase, rising up through demos to sabotage, terrorism and insurrection. Nice system, very generic and you can see how you could use the engine for a whole host of different (and more serious) games. Some lovely 6mm UN models too!

Decisions and Disruptions

A very nice "Lego" game by Dr Ben Shreeve set around the issues of protecting a company from cyber attack. Each turn you have a budget to spend on kit, training and software, and then each turn you get told what happened and how much money it cost the company. The game plays over 4 rounds - I think we suffered about £120k of loss, about average I think. The game is very simple, but enough to get the basic idea across. The responses are fixed, so play the game twice with the same  choices and you get the same outcome. Version 2 is under development with far more options and far more interlinkages and random, so should be more "realistic" but probably not quite as accessible. The use of Lego just to show the network layout, and then the stuff you deploy, is insprired.

Shooting Daedelus 

Shooting Daedelus was an MA project from Kings by Ares Compagnoni and Evan d'Alessandro. It was a very different take on a CQB game as it represented BOTH the vertical and horizontal layout in one grid of cards. It was a bit like being in Inception at first but you soon got the hang of it. There were some nice touches in the combat model (damage meant losing cards, so restricting options, and then save rolls based on cards left once under 6). Really nice game. Interesting to compare it to Tango Down which has a slightly more developed combat system, but no vertical dimension. I wouldn't want to over complicate Shooting Daedelus (and I know Evan had to throw loads of ideas away), but a couple of steals from Tango Down (eg range and DM for shooting through doors etc) might round the game out nicely. Interesting both games seem to come down to a grenade slug-fest. Once you're up close you realise that grenades are the best way to go, but if you don't kill the other person they just throw some back, and so on. Something tells me real-world CQB isn't like that. I'm guessing grenade lethality in both games needs to be wound right up - but then it comes down to who's quickest on the draw. Will hopefully get another game in soon on our Discord group.

Games Seen

USMC Operational Wargaming System

A HUGE map of the Ukraine with about a 15km grid and Bn manoeuvre units. This is the USMC's new general purpose manual wargame and was used by them to examine the Russian invasion before it happened - see https://warontherocks.com/2022/03/the-wargame-before-the-war-russia-attacks-ukraine/.

The counters are VERY dense with information:

Units are rated D4-D10 (as in Ambush Alley games etc) and again its a Dice+modifiers game rather than ratio CRTs. Looks way complex though with "a day" to train a player, "days" to train umpires.

Would be fun to actually play it some time, but I think that RCAT is closer to what I'm after.

Air Strike

Maj Tom Moaut (aka all sorts of things) ran Air Strike. One team decided on aircraft and load outs, whilst another decided on air defence systems. The air players then had a quick visual recce to decide which target to go for, the defender could then move mobile systems and arrange the detail of their defense layout. Then the airplanes came in, tried to suppress air defence, beat off  the CAPs and finally release some ordnance and get it on target. Looked fun.

Strike! - Kestrel's Hover

A company force with Section/Squad manoeuvre units of a British assault on a remote airfield somewhere in Africa. Looked pretty conventional, no sign of a ratio CRT again and extensive use of decoy blinds (about 3 decoys per real blind!). Surprised that snipers weren't model as "not at that level" since my reading is that snipers have an effect out of all proportion to their numbers, and even if abstracted ought to be included at this scale in some way.

Space Control

A game based about space situation awareness and offensive action presented by Jim Wallman of Stone Paper Scissors. Two teams, red and blue, with charts representing the layers of ground HQs, ground segment, LEO, MEO/HEO and GEO. You spend your budget to launch stuff and to buy offensive/defensive/ISR kit, and then see what you can do to the other side and what they can do with you. Pity I just missed the start of a session as in principle (if not topic) was not dissimilar to a game I've been working on.

Integrity

A game developed by Outreach Group, 77 Bde as a training aid for anti-corruption and stability operations. You assign staff to G1-G9 desks and then draw incident cards to be dealt with. "Time" and "Resources" are your resources, and you can choose cautious and risky approaches to deal with them, and have to balance resource use with availability and progressing your various stabilisation projects. Again something that could easily be re-skinned.

Don't Fear The Reaper Drone

A really thoughtful game by Edward McEvoy from Kings. One player is Carrie Mathison a CIA analyst and the other a remote Drone pilot. The CIA player has targets to meet and kill and hang the consequences. The pilot has a family and morals. Who's going to crack first! An almost black game touch is that when a strike ends up hitting civilians the pilot has to draw a card from a thispersondoesnotexist.com deck to see who they just killed. Very thought provoking and in considering how to represent and play the civilian population and moral choices in urban conflict some useful food for thought.

Conclusion

A great day with a wonderful breadth of games considering that they were all serious military games. Great to meet up with my supervisor, one of my fellow PhD students and various professional  wargaming friends and colleagues. Hopefully by 2023 Bath Spa will hav as many games running at Connections 2023 as Kings students did this year!

Postccript: Official photos and report up at https://www.professionalwargaming.co.uk/2022.html

ConnectionsUK 2019

Finally got to go to ConnectionsUK, the annual conference for professional wargamers (i.e. those supporting MOD, Government and other organisations). Over 20 countries were represented so a very international crowd. It was a very participative conference with very few sit-and-listen sessions, instead almost the whole time was spent playing various types of wargames (committee games and matrix games very common, but also SPI style).

I got to play a whole day megagame with ~ 15 a side on a "russian" attack on somewhere looking remarkably like Vilnius. This was played double-blind, so running my special force cell all I knew was what my troops on the ground (via umpires) and other HQs told me. Our opening heliborne operation against the main road bridge was a great success and we held it until relieved by ground forces. The weirdest moment though was as the Spetznatz commander briefing the real UK Secretary of State for Defence when he visited.

There was a session on game design where my group had 45 minutes to create the outline of a game on Anti-Access/Area Denial (A2/AD), one of the real naval warfare buzzwords at the moment. Luckily we had some experts in the group and ended up with a good sounding card based game.

Having to miss Thursday my Wednesday afternoon was spent playing the opening scenario from GMT's Next War: Poland. We managed to get through all 3 moves, but it has a horrendous turn structure and the CRT seems overly complex with column shifts, ratio changes and die-modifiers - see next post!

So a great conference, very much along the lines of COW I expect, and can't way to get to it next year (although capacity wise they may have to go back to limiting attendance).

A couple of other games that caught my eye:

Waterloo! There was also an Ancients game, so not all Modern

Battle of Mosul

Cyberwargaming with minifigs!

Some good photos of the events and games on Twitter at https://twitter.com/hashtag/ConnectionsUK?src=hashtag_click

Conference 2.0 - a post #vwlondon rant

After 2 days at Virtual Worlds London I am more convinced than ever that we need to find a new approach to conferences.I've been watching the unconference movement for some time, and it was great that Virtual Worlds Europe emerged phoenix like from the cancellation of their venue as an unconference. But I am sure that there is more to Conference 2.0 than that. I work in the highest of tech, and go to conferences where others are as tech'd (or even more tech'd) than I am. But Conference 2.0 need not be the sole preserve of the geeks - although that is probably the right place to start.

I would love to just work with some conference organisers (and speakers and attendees) to try and start with a clean sheet and think what a Conference 2.0 conference would all be about.

THE SIMPLE STUFF

So what should Conference 2.0 be like? Well lets start with the retrofits - the things we can do with changing the current "big room" format to much:

- shorter presentations - does anyone need to speak for more than 20 minutes, watch the YouTube video or visit the web site or talk to the presenter if you need more
- have free wifi - otherwise we can't do most of the things that follow
- have lots of mains sockets for charging laptops - otherwise we can only do the things that follow for 60 minutes
- an effective back-channel. Twitter is emerging as a great way to let the audience comment on presentations and discussions mid-flow, and to talk about the subject themselves, and to contribute their knowledge. If your audience isn't Twitter friendly use a bespoke IM solution, or even SMS - BUT WHICHEVER YOU USE HAVE A BIG SCREEN DISPLAYING THE FEED THE WHOLE TIME (and an echo screen for the presenters)
- if you're using Twitter promote the hashcode (eg #vwlondon) before the event so delegates can hook up and start networking before they come
- beware of using conference specific networking systems - people only have so much time and you're better off bringing your event to their space (Twitter, Facebook etc) than having your own. And if someone is Twittering etc the conference then it will hit their own network as well.
- publicise YouTube and Flickr tags so that everyone can access all the post-event media
- in panel sessions have someone Googling whatever is being talked about - web sites, projects etc and show this on the big screen - and have their searching fed through to delicious or another bookmarking site so the audience can refer to it later
- have panel chairs who know the audience (easy if informed by Twitter), and can challenge the audience as much as the panelists

The neat thing is that most of the above won't cost you a penny (apart from the electricity and wifi bill).

SOME SOCIAL STUFF

Then we need to start opening the conference out a bit. With most of the conferences I go to the real business is done in the break-out spaces. So:

- make sure you have lots of spare comfy seating (close to mains power and with WiFi)
- relay the conference into the exhibition are and comfy seating areas (many delegates will prefer to watch the conference from here whilst they deal with real work - yet can still contribute through Twitter)
- make sure that tea and coffee are available THE WHOLE TIME, not just at breaks

Exhibition spaces? Still not convinced about the best way of handling those if your event is big enough to warrant a shell scheme type system. But how about:

- poster displays like academic conferences, encouraging a lot of people to put some basic information up for minimal cost, but they can hang around their poster or have their mobile/Twitter ID prominently displayed for easy content
- let all exhibitors have a slot in an exhibition area presentation area

A BIT MORE PARTICIPATION

Now what about making the whole event more democratic:

- let the audience decide the content. put the potential speakers/topics up on the web months before hand and let your audience vote for speakers (but ok, keep the keynotes for yourselves)
- have at least one stream which is an "unconference" - people sign up to speak on the day, just choosing from the available timeslots - they can even enter details on the web there and then so your on-line programme is up to date

Hell, why not run the whole conference as an unconference? It can, and does, work. Shouldn't your golden rule be that everyone who comes to the conference contributes something?

GOING VIRTUAL

So far so safe. If you know what I do for a living then you know what's coming next....

Take your conference virtual. By this we mean:

- create a conference space in a virtual world (eg Second Life). For fun make the space reflect the topic not a conference room (Annual Conference of Sewer Managers or Gut Surgeons anyone?)
- stream the video and audio of the speaker into the space (OK this may cost if you're not already videoing the event - but if not why not - you can put the video content up on the web, an create a podcast with the same material)
- either stream the slides in as well, or have a full slideset in the virtual world (gives better quality but needs to be synchronised)
- have a member of you team in both the real and virtual space - so they can relay questions from the virtual space to the real conference
- ideally have a video screen showing real life attendees the virtual attendees, and a video feed into the virtual space showing the virtual attendees the real attendees (either as projected screens or as "virtual mirrors")
 

By setting up a parallel event in a virtual world you can:

- let delegates save carbon, energy and time by attending virtually
- let delegates who couldn't travel to the event still attend
- let virtual delegates network with each other far more efficiently than if they were each watching web site video feeds - and we're even finding now that the virtual networking is more efficient than the physical networking
- use automated networking tools like Intronetworks in ways that we can still only dream of in the real world (each avatar being told its % interest match with every other avatar in the room!)
- have an event which can live on afterwards - and where visitors can still benefit from serendipitous networking with other late-comers

Of course you still need to make money, and at the moment most delegates will still prefer to come in the flesh - but we are getting to the point where we have enough experience of delivering a good virtual event that delegates would be willing to pay real money to attend them.

STARTING OVER

Now all that might sounds like a great leap forward (and a great challenge), and I'm sure if you did all this you'd have a far more effective conference. But all we've really done is bolt stuff on to a format that probably goes back to the 19th Century. We didn't change things when vu-foils came in,  we didn't change when Powerpoint came in. Please let us change now Web 2.0 and virtual worlds have arrived.

What I would like to see is a root and branch review of how we hold these events. And we've got to start with the audience and what they are trying to achieve. Are they there as passive recipients of knowledge (not sales pitches), are they there to learn, are they there to contribute, or to interact and network? And what constraints do they have in terms of time, cost, energy? And what are they going to do when they get back to the office - I've always felt I'd like a day after each conference just to work out how I spread the stuff I've learnt back at the office - how great would it be if I could use the virtual space to hold my own mini-best-of conference with the event video and commentary all to hand? Then we shouldn't think about venues but about how we can use formats and technology TOGETHER to create the best possible pre, during and post conference experience for our delegates. Only then should we worry about the venue - and my guess is that venue will not be the cavernous halls (or concrete sleeping bags as we used to call them in the Army) of most current conference venues (if I see one more chandelier I'll scream).

So that's it, that's my rant over. Please conference organisers read this with an open mind and try and find time to have a hard think and a good look at the technology before you hold you next event. Yes your delegates might still rate your conference as good - but unfortunately most of them don't know just how stunning it could be.


 

***Imported from old blog***

Being Digital

A day spent at Mashup*Events' Being Digital conference at BAFTA in London.

Panel Comments

Very sterile Advertising debate (but me.jpg) and haphazard Identity panel (must start using OpenID). Will Mclnnes' Content panel was much better but took a while to get to the nub of the matter finally caught by Ivan Pope (but spotted earlier by the texters) that the debate is not about content but the role of channels vs. aggregation and recommendation services - last.tv as someone said.

On the location panel Tim Warr fm Microsoft had some good stuff about the need for better and radical new interfaces for location data (augmented reality?). Richard Wahrman's Locomatrix company sounds fun - outdoor games over GSM/GPS - be good to get them to Brum - or into SL for a mixed reality game. 'Location is ubiquitous' had to be the phrase of the day!

Retail - Brent Hobermann talked through mydeco - neat affiliate model for furniture sales through your room designs. IKEA - multi-channel customer has x2.5 LTV

Search - Jeff Kelisky talked about 3D search and Mirror Worlds (2 MS employees almost talking sense!).

Pitch Comments

putplace = youtube, not web-cen
fav.or.it = del.ic.ous
mapness=GE mash-up
mippin=bango/wapgata
kiwork=getafreelancer
phreadz=yet another cross-poster

Site Recommendations

headmap/scribed/hivemindfireeagle - location brokerrummble - couple of mentionswoe-yahoo-semantic locationfredcavazza.net - social apps maptaptu - mobile search

Overall

Lost count of the comments on Twitter outages. The need for proper semantic markup was highlighted again and again - but never discussed.
Mobile phone camera based AR driven by barcodes came up a couple of times.

Micropayments came up several times cf yesterdays Big Debate. Good SMS comment system from eventspace, again cf Big Debate - next a live wifi message board and then we can almost reproduce the SL experience in RL. Good food and venue.

In summary the whole event felt a bit like the dot-com boom re-visited. Less geeks than I expected, lots of marketing types, a few VCs, few corporate end users.

***Imported from old blog***