by Ian T. Brown, 8 August 2024
Don’t fall in love with your mental model—since about 2018, that’s been a mantra I’ve used whenever I challenged someone to move beyond their assumptions and entertain the possibilities offered by thinking of or trying something new. I first took this mantra from research I was doing on famed Air Force pilot and military theorist John Boyd when he directed his audience to look beyond Carl von Clausewitz—and the Prussian’s 1832-era ideas—for cognitive frameworks through which one examined war. Boyd’s mantra formed the foundation for my book on the United States Marine Corps’ adoption of the maneuver warfare philosophy; this effort was an institution-wide challenging of assumptions following Vietnam. I thought I did well in following this mantra. Then I brought my wargame to the 2024 Origins Game Fair—and was forced to confront my own rigid mental model in the mirror, and look at it good and hard. And it was great.
My game—a deck construction wargame called #Maneuver Warfare (now taking pre-orders at the Dietz Foundation)—had been in development for about 2 years when I attended Origins 2024, and had gone through what I believed to be a pretty robust play-testing process. I’ve spent the last 5 years as a professional wargamer (with many years of casual play-time before that), seen and helped other designers test their games, and so thought I had a good sense of what kinds of play-testing needed to be done.
I took my game to larger events like AwesomeCon and Circle DC; took it to venues like the Armchair Dragoons’ Fall Assembly where I knew I could find grognards to stress-test it; and used the “Break My Game” play-test circuit to deliberately place it in front of non-military players for non-military feedback. I did small play-test sessions by request from interested military folks. I mailed play-test sets to Marines in 29 Palms and Miramar, and even NATO play-testers in The Hague. Heck, I even played it on the tailgate of my truck to ensure that it truly met my “expeditionary” design concept.
I have a small book of play-test feedback on everything from graphical layout to theories of victory. After 2 years, I felt confident that with all the play-testing feedback, the design was stable, and thus my only goal at Origins 2024 was boosting awareness in the wargaming community of my game to drive our pre-orders while waiting to begin the final production process.
click images to enlarge
Then, at Origins, Dr. James Sterrett and Mr. Tom Vielott played my game, and proceeded thereafter for almost 5 hours wire-brushing it with their feedback. I’m quite confident that the expression on my face while they talked was that of a person slowly dying on the inside. More accurately, it was probably the expression of someone who saw their mental model crumbling in real time. That mental model was “my game is stable;” after all, I’d spent 2 years refining it and my play-testers included some names in professional wargaming for whom I have the highest respect (Jim and Tom, I have the highest respect for your too, just framing the narrative here…).
Jim and Tom had a lot of feedback—hours’ worth—but the main thing that made my mental model collapse was their assessment that the way I linked the game’s currency for taking action directly with the victory condition—draining your opponent’s will to fight, as manifested by their stack of ‘currency of actions’ cards—risked creating a death spiral that could turn a single player mistake into a near-immediate endgame. And if a player thinks a game is so poorly balanced that a single mistake is irrecoverable, they won’t play it again. So much for having a game that I hoped would be a teaching tool—no one’s going to learn anything if they play it once and decide it doesn’t teach anything useful.
I didn’t sleep much that night because their critique cut to a core aspect of the game—I wanted “will to fight” to be the victory condition, and my approach for modeling the impacts of losing will to fight was a declining ability to take the actions that you wanted to. So if I disaggregated “will” as the victory condition from the currency for action, how would players feel the impact of poor decisions on their ability to make decisions and take action in the future? I wanted poor decisions to matter, to be felt by the player who made them; but I didn’t want a single bad decision to end the game, because that’s not what happens in warfare. Wars are full of bad decisions made by the ultimate victor; the victor becomes the victor by learning from those bad decisions, by adapting and adjusting, by showing mental and moral resilience in the face of a mistake and recovering to make better decisions another day.
I thought my game already provided that opportunity to make mistakes, learn, and keep fighting. Jim and Tom made compelling arguments that it did not. Then there was that mental model hanging over everything: the game is stable. The final production process is coming fast. It’s been 2 years and nobody’s made a similar comment. The game is stable…My mental model became a little devil sitting on my shoulder. I frankly wanted to be “done” with this game so I could move onto other projects sitting on the back-burner. I was afraid changing the game further based on their comments would require lots of second-order changes, pushing back our release date, requiring more and more play-testing, perhaps even diluting the spirit of the game that I wanted to impart to the players.
If I really gave a sh*t about my own game—if I really thought it could be a valuable teaching tool and a fun game to play to boot—then I owed it to future players to make the game better if there was room to do so.
Fortunately, the other part of my mantra had lived in my head long enough that it whispered back, don’t fall in love with it. And that was the part of my brain that knew Jim and Tom were right. They were right about the risk of poor gameplay design turning players off the game, and that was coupled with something else they’d told me during our 5-hour debrief: “there is no amount of effort you should spare to get the player into the game.” If I really gave a sh*t about my own game—if I really thought it could be a valuable teaching tool and a fun game to play to boot—then I owed it to future players to make the game better if there was room to do so. If that took more work on my part, well, sucks to be me; but it would suck worse if I knew I could improve it, but didn’t.
So I got up the next morning ready to look at my game with fresh eyes and gently place a pillow over my old mental model until it stopped twitching. Jim and Tom were right, victory conditions and currency for action had to be disaggregated—how could it be done? Perhaps I should have had more confidence in my own design, as well as my own background in military theory, because it turned out there was a way to do so without smashing the rest of the game.
Action was now separated from will; and all my study of Boyd and maneuver warfare had repeatedly discussed how human beings observed the world around them, make decisions based on those observations, and then act on those decisions. “Action” was the “A” on OODA loop; and I had somehow gone 2 years in working on my game, called “Maneuver Warfare” for God’s sake, and not found a way to work the OODA loop into it. Thanks to Jim and Tom, now I had an opportunity to get the OODA loop in, and it was in a place where it made perfect sense. I turned the former cycle of “will” into an OODA loop, where players expended Actions to do things, but then had a couple of steps to wait to observe the effects of those Actions before their Actions came back to them. And this cycle offered new opportunities for players to interfere with each other’s efforts outside the confines of the battlefield itself. I came up with new ways for players to use existing cards and game mechanics to either accelerate their own OODA loop or degrade that of their opponent.
It was fantastic. As I fleshed out the OODA loop concept—first with a hand drawn sketch for the next day of Origins, and then with more formal rule modifications and card updates later—I was getting genuinely excited about the changes I was making. These changes got the game even closer to the spirit of what I wanted it to impart to players, both about future warfare and more Marine Corps-specific concepts. And my years of play-testing were not wasted; the game’s other elements had been well-tested, and the overall structure of the game still supported what was ultimately a subtle shift in how players took action.
So: don’t fall in love with your mental model. There’s an element of humility in hearing that your baby isn’t as pretty as you thought it was, especially if you think you’ve already spent sufficient time making your baby as cute as it can be. And it was somewhat ironic that I was blind to that mantra in game design when it was something I’d absorbed repeatedly in my writing projects—I came to welcome the sight of red ink from an editor on my written materials because I’d seen, repeatedly, how the feedback from a good editor can make a project you think is already pretty good even better, and in ways you couldn’t have imagined yourself. I came to Origins thinking I was done with my game. I was wrong. And allowing I was wrong to disrupt my mental model was one of the best things to happen to my game since I first sat down to sketch it out.
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