The Mind's Lie AKA "Biases With Friends" (Free Beta App)

BLUF:  The Mind's Lie is a free Android gaming app on the Google Play Store available now.  It is similar to games such as Words With Friends in that you are playing against real people and not against the machine.   

The game is designed to implicitly teach you and the other players (up to six players per game) to recognize confirmation bias, anchoring bias, stereotyping/representativeness bias, projection/mirror imaging bias, bias blind spot, or fundamental attribution error in more or less realistic situations. It is based off a successful tabletop game I designed.

Background:  A few years ago, I was inspired by IARPA's SIRIUS program (which seeks to develop a video game which will teach analysts to recognize and mitigate the effect of the six specific cognitive biases listed above) to try to come up with my own game that would do at least some of the same things.

I don't know how to design video games, though, so I did what I could do - design a tabletop game.  Called The Mind's Lie, it uses an argumentation mechanic to implicitly teach players how to recognize variants of the same six biases that IARPA is testing in the SIRIUS Project.  

Eventually, through some good fortune, I did get to be involved in SIRIUS as a part of a team that Boeing put together.  Mel Richey, who worked with me on that Boeing team, eventually tested The Mind's Lie using people from all over the US and showed that it seems to work - the more you play it, the better you get at identifying the presence of the six biases in more-or-less realistic scenarios.  

Since then, we have been using The Mind's Lie in a series of workshops and in class.  I have been encouraged by the fact that it seems to work best with people who understand that bias is a persistent risk in their day-to-day work - people like lawyers, soldiers and, yes, intelligence analysts.

At about the same time, I was asked to submit an idea for a senior project to the software engineers at Penn State (the Behrend Campus).  I have done this in the past and we had explored the possibilities of a balloon based surveillance system and a Bayesian calculator for analysts (among other ideas) together. 

What I wanted this time, though, was to turn The Mind's Lie into a Words With Friends-type game.  I wanted people to be able to re-create the experience of playing The Mind's Lie around a table while on the go.  The engineers, Steve Chalker, Joe Grise and Kit Torelli, along with their professor, Dr. Matt White, decided to turn my game into an android app.

Nearly a year later, the app is here.  It is not perfect - it's a beta version (at best), but it is out there and free to download and play.  Hope you like it!

Is The Games For Change Festival Important To Intelligence Professionals? (Gamesforchange.org)

I hope to answer this question over the next day or two.  I made the decision to go to the Games For Change Festival primarily to see what it was all about.  This idea of "serious games" is gaining lots of traction in a variety of different fields -- almost none of which have anything to do with intelligence.

When people think about serious games, they usually think about improving education or health care or changing the world in other positive ways.  There is nothing wrong with that, of course, and nothing wholly inconsistent with this view and the discipline of intelligence, but I recently witnessed a pretty heated debate over whether games that explain the basics of macroeconomics "belong".  Not sure how anyone will react to the idea of serious games for intelligence professionals...

That said, the intelligence community has been exploring the educational value of games for quite some time (with mixed results, I hear).  The recent Intelligence Advanced Research Projects Agency (IARPA) Sirius request for proposals is clear evidence that the US national security intelligence community intends to continue to explore how games can meet the IC's needs.

Of course, my own (personal and research) interests lie along these lines so going to this summit makes sense.  I just wish it didn't conflict with another excellent conference, the Game Education Summit, which, this year, is on the west coast.  GES is an excellent small conference with a unique opportunity to mingle with academics, designers, artists, developers -- all aspects of the game design and game education fields. 

I will probably be posting at least some updates to my twitter account (@kwheaton) during the conference and will post a wrap-up article when I get back later this week.

"Gamification" And What It Means For Intelligence (NewScientist.com)

"Gamification" is a neologism that highlights the increasing tendency to add game-like qualities to serious or mundane tasks in order increase participation or, in the context of education, learning. 

A recent issue of The New Scientist, one of my favorite science magazines, contained a feature article on the trend and produced the nifty video below to explain the phenomena:




I accept the premise that gamification is a hot trend everywhere but recent reporting and my own research suggest that game-based learning has an important role in educating the next generation of intelligence professionals.

In the first place -- if we are honest with ourselves -- gamification of serious or mundane tasks has been around for quite some time now. I have been able to reliably trace the general trend back to at least 1964 (see the first ten seconds of this video) and it probably goes back much further.

This is true in intelligence as well.  Some of the classic cliches of intelligence, such as "connect the dots" and "put the pieces of the puzzle together" are game references.  Furthermore, to the extent that Kriegspiel has an intel component to it, you can push the date back to at least 1812.

Second, and despite the recent press coverage, I don't want to sound all pollyanna-ish about game-based learning. If there is one thing I have learned, it is that this pedagogical approach has its own challenges.

Many educators think like I thought at this time last year:  Games = attention and attention = learning. While capturing the attention of students remains one of the most important yet increasingly difficult elements of teaching, the idea that games = attention deserves some "tweaking".

To begin with, a game is not really a game unless the players enter into it voluntarily. Jane McGonigal in her new book, Reality Is Broken, talks about games as "voluntary attempts to overcome unnecessary obstacles."

In my mind, "voluntary" is the operative word here and voluntarism comes in degrees.  At one end of the spectrum, you have the passionate volunteer.  For this person, playing a game as a way of learning is a real pleasure.   In fact, if this passionate volunteer has played the game many times, they may have already sucked all of the learning out of it but not be aware of that fact because most of the lessons have been taught implicitly.

At the other end of the spectrum lies the person who hates a particular game or type of game.  Getting these aggressively indifferent players ("apathetes"?) to volunteer to play a game, no matter how tangible the benefits, is going to be difficult.  I often use the example of trying to get a 6th grade boy to play a Barbie-themed math game.  It might work, but I wouldn't count on it...

As a professor, I can adjust the level of voluntarism to some degree ("Would you rather hear me lecture or play a game?") but unless I am linking this new sense of voluntarism to an intrinsic motivation on the part of the student, I don't think I am necessarily increasing the learning. 

The focus, then, for game based learning initiatives (both inside and outside the intel community) needs to be as much on the motivations for playing a game as it is on the game itself.  As IARPA kicks off its SIRIUS program next week (with the goal of creating "Serious Games to train participants and measure their proficiency in recognizing and mitigating the cognitive biases that commonly affect all types of intelligence analysis") this is going to be at the top of my mind.

Previous Posts on this Topic:  Teaching Strategic Intelligence Through Games

Background Brief And Prediction Market Combo Makes For Interesting Intel (Playthenewsgame.com)

Impact Games (the makers of the award winning serious game, Peacemaker) has launched a new service that combines an interactive background briefing on a topic of current news interest with a prediction market engine allowing the user to "Play The News".

Each of the Play The News "games" follows the same pattern. The background briefing (done using a flash-based interface) lays out the essential details of the story and the identifies the stakeholders in the story. Next, there is a short current news video and the game frames the essential question(s) for the player to answer. In an interesting twist, the players can often pick which side of the story they want to play. For example, in the game embedded below, players can choose to play either the Russian side or the Georgian side.



Once the briefings are over and the player chooses a side, the game then asks the player one or more questions about the future of the current situation. Again, the game adds an interesting twist, asking the player both what should happen and what will likely happen (Note: The prediction feature is only available to registered users but registration is painless). The game then shows the player the aggregated results from all other players. Finally, the company drops you an email to let you know if you were correct or not when the results are finally known.

I was particularly impressed by the choice of news stories covered. Most of the games focused on world news and many of those on stories that receive scant coverage elsewhere. In all, I found it to be an extremely engaging way to get personally involved in a current news event.

Can You Balance The US Budget? Can You Make Decisions Like A Chinese Official? (American Public Media And Wikiversity)

With all the brouhaha concerning DIA's recent announcement concerning the creation of several video games to help train new analysts, I thought it would be worth mentioning a couple of other "serious games" I have run across (one yesterday and one quite some time ago).

The first, Budget Hero, is a flash based game (see screenshot below) that lets you pick options to help balance the US Federal Budget. Basically, after a short intro brief, you get to pick tax and spending policies in order to try to accomplish your goals without busting the budget. Once you have selected your series of policies, the game calculates how well you have done against a couple of benchmarks and then reports back to you on how well you have accomplished your goals and how well in tune you are with others who have played the game.

The game really gives you a good idea of the relative values of different policies. It also highlights the fact that some policies are important for their emotional impact but have little real impact on the total budget (By the way, if this game is at all accurate, the next administration will have its work cut out for it. The kind of answers that tend to work are not going to be very palatable). The best I have been able to do is to keep the government afloat until 2044. If anyone figures out a way to beat that, drop a comment.

The second game is one I have been meaning to blog about for some time. One of our former students (he just graduated), Pat Noble, an analyst with the FBI, put together an interesting simulation of Chinese political decisionmaking processes called Forbidden Kingdom (he did this last year in my Advanced Analytic Techniques class so, no, there is no relation to the movie of the same name). The screenshot below shows the game board (which you have to build) and the rules and all the other materials you need are available for free over at Wikiversity.

All simulations have to balance playability with realism. Pat's challenge was to make a game that captured some of the essence of modern Chinese political thinking in a short, interesting game. As someone who watched the research and development of the game, has played the game and heard countless stories about others playing the game, I think Pat accomplished just that.