Building Better Games for National Security Policy Analysis

Towards a Social Scientific Approach

Elizabeth M. Bartels

ResearchPublished Apr 7, 2020

This dissertation proposes an approach to game design grounded in logics of inquiry from the social sciences. National security gaming practitioners and sponsors have long been concerned that the quality of games and sponsors' ability to leverage them effectively to shape decision making is highly uneven. This research leverages literature reviews, semi-structured interviews, and archival research to develop a framework that describes ideal types of games based on the type of information they generate. This framework offers a link between existing treatments of philosophy of science and the types of tradeoffs that a designer is likely to make under each type of game. While such an approach only constitutes necessary, but not sufficient, conditions for games to inform research and policy analysis, this work aims to offer pragmatic advice to designers, sponsors and consumers about how design choices can impact what is learned from a game.

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Bartels, Elizabeth M., Building Better Games for National Security Policy Analysis: Towards a Social Scientific Approach, RAND Corporation, RGSD-437, 2020. As of September 12, 2024: https://www.rand.org/pubs/rgs_dissertations/RGSD437.html
Chicago Manual of Style
Bartels, Elizabeth M., Building Better Games for National Security Policy Analysis: Towards a Social Scientific Approach. Santa Monica, CA: RAND Corporation, 2020. https://www.rand.org/pubs/rgs_dissertations/RGSD437.html.
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This document was submitted as a dissertation in March 2020 in partial fulfillment of the requirements of the doctoral degree in public policy analysis at the Pardee RAND Graduate School. The faculty committee that supervised and approved the dissertation consisted of Steven Popper (Chair), Stacie Pettyjohn, and Yuna Wong.

This publication is part of the RAND dissertation series. Pardee RAND dissertations are produced by graduate fellows of the Pardee RAND Graduate School, the world's leading producer of Ph.D.'s in policy analysis. The dissertations are supervised, reviewed, and approved by a Pardee RAND faculty committee overseeing each dissertation.

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