Utopia or Oblivion?

Daveed Gartenstein-Ross & Madison Urban

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Introduction

This report is part of a broader project on wargaming and futurism that included the design and execution of a futurism-focused wargame, Utopia or Oblivion?, that was cohosted by the Canadian Department of National Defence (DND) and Johns Hopkins University, and ran from March 25 to April 10, 2021.[1] The game that Valens Global designed and ran helped to inform this report’s understanding of best practices for leveraging insights derived from wargames for the practice of irregular warfare and futurism. This report makes two overarching contributions:

• The practice of futurism can be nettlesome, yet it is of grave importance to defense planners—and, indeed, to everyone with substantive decision-making power. The twenty-first century is characterized by rapid pace of change and dense interconnectedness of major issue sets. The challenges posed by strategic competitors using irregular means to undermine U.S. interests are complex and often opaque. Thus, the report contends that well-designed wargames are a valuable tool for advancing the practice of futurism within governments for reasons related to the structure and function of games. Of particular relevance is games’ three-dimensional nature, their tactile characteristics, and the way they make participants consider issue sets through multiple frames.
• Having established this baseline argument, the report provides a set of best practices for using wargames to advance the practice of futurism.