An Approach to Gamifying Acquisitions for Assessing Impact on Military Strategy of Nation States

Complex Systems in which humans play a role, namely Human-Integrated Complex Systems (HICS), can be difficult to model or simulate due to the uncertainty introduced by the human component. Traditional modeling approaches such as physics-based modeling do not provide predictive insight towards situation awareness and management. War game designers, and game architects are familiar with HICS problem spaces, and use gamification of such complex contexts as a means of modeling human behavior to inform, predict, and manage an HICS style problem. The game play thereby becomes a means of providing situation awareness and management of the HICS by using human action during game play as a heuristic for pruning the intractable possibility space of the problem at large into a likely probability subspace based on the actions players actually take when playing an HICS game simulation. This paper explores the approach of gamification of real-world HICS problem spaces for situation awareness and management. A gamification methodology is introduced and investigated through the use case of military acquisitions.