Building Better Games for National Security Policy Analysis
Towards a Social Scientific Approach
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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.
Table of Contents
Chapter One
Introduction: Games for National Security Policy Analysis and How to Improve Them
Chapter Two
Study Approach
Chapter Three
Towards a Social Science of Policy Games
Chapter Four
Four Archetypes of Games to Support National Security Policy Analysis
Chapter Five
Designing Games for System Exploration
Chapter Six
Designing Games for Alternative Conditions
Chapter Seven
Designing Games for Innovation
Chapter Eight
Designing Games for Evaluation
Chapter Nine
Trends in RAND Corporation National Security Policy Analysis Gaming: 1948 to 2019
Chapter Ten
Conclusions, Policy Recommendations, and Next Steps
Appendix A
Sample Template for Documenting Game Designs
Research conducted by
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 Corporation 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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