Gaming out Global Influence
Insights from a Matrix Game on the COVID-19 world
Last week, I ran a Matrix Game about how countries will compete for influence over the next year.
The lessons are troubling for anyone in Foggy Bottom or Brussels.
Why play a game for politics?
In the early 1800s, the Prussian military played a game on a wooden table that simulated a battle (below).
The Prussians found the game interesting and, more importantly, useful.
The downside of any military education is that you can’t let officers learn through doing. A country won’t start a war just to give students a chance to try out different tactics. Once you’ve fought a battle, you can’t go back and fix your mistakes.
The wargame helped solve that problem. Students could practice without cost of life, and military leaders could play out what might happen in any number of scenarios, to prepare better for whichever one did.
The idea proved successful.
The British Navy used games to defeat U-Boats in the North Atlantic during WWII and tech firms have used it to plan out their M&A strategy after the financial crisis. Organizations have found that playing games leads to faster learning and better strategies.
The US Naval War College even has a department for wargaming that they allowed a YouTuber to visit for a tour.
What is a Matrix Game?
One drawback of these games, though, is that they require a lot of preparatory time and effort.
To send my platoon to capture a hill requires rules for whether they succeed or fail. Those rules require an estimate of the strength of the platoon, the strength of anyone they might meet, the effects of going up a hill, and any other relevant variables. It can get complicated fast.
This is feasible in military scenarios where the weaponry is known (especially with high computing power), but gets much more difficult in highly complex political scenarios.
Let’s say we’re playing a game about a 2020 Senate race.
If I say that my candidate comes out in favor of a Universal Basic Income to deal with the recession brought on by COVID-19, what’s the result?
How would any rulebook be able to resolve a question to which we don’t know the answer for a situation that only became relevant a couple of months ago? And by the time we finish drawing up that set of rules, the recession may have become a depression and we have to start over.
The Matrix Game, first introduced in 1992, addresses this problem.
The creator, Chris Engle, wanted a “system that could take into account anything the players thought was relevant, including intangible elements such as culture, beliefs, and perceptions of themselves” (quote from a game on ISIS used by the Canadian military stored here).
It’s a game driven by the participants themselves. Playing as a key decision-maker, a team chooses what they will do and argue why it will work. Other participants argue why it won’t work. The participants and the umpire collectively determine the probability of success and roll dice (or use the random number generator in Google Sheets) to find out what happened.
This style of game is highly flexible and can be quickly prepared. Most importantly of all, given that it was being used for political risk, it encourages participants to think creatively about what might happen in the future and justify their thinking with clear reasons.
Competing for Clout
I split the participants into teams representing the United States, China, the European Union, and the Rest of World (acting as a different non-G3 country each turn).
They had to come up with a plan each turn that would help their country increase their soft power around the world over the next 12 months. They had to argue why their plans would gain enough domestic support to become a reality and boost their international prestige.
We kept track of it all on a Google Sheet and used the below as a quasi-game board.
The results were fascinating.
Immediately, the participants moved away from taking the usual tactics of soft power and ratcheting them up.
They instead incorporated the specifics of the COVID-19 world and their countries’ comparative advantages to come up with new ideas. They combined themes that are usually unconnected, thought about long-term and short-term trade-offs, and debated the two-level games that all leaders must play.
Some of the more surprising ideas included:
The United States government partnered with streaming websites and universities to support a Voice of America-equivalent of online learning. They adapted the tactics of the Cold War to a time when people are stuck at home.
China expanded their Belt and Road Initiative into the health care sector.
The European Union sacrificed influence on their first turn, choosing to work on their own health care sector to be better prepared to reach out to the rest of the world in later rounds.
What this tells us
First, some clarification.
This is by no means a definitive view of the next 12 months. Matrix Games are path dependent. The EU failed to create a unified health response in their first turn due to an unlucky roll of the virtual dice. Had they done so, they would have had greater space for new efforts later on. Re-running the game a few times could lead to radically different outcomes.
Nonetheless, their results were still pretty remarkable.
The team representing China saw clearly how Beijing could use existing diplomatic and economic relationships to facilitate healthcare diplomacy, which appears to be happening.
The USA team had to battle arguments about Washington’s ability to deliver foreign policy wins when Secretary Pompeo is running down international good will.
The EU team saw that the greatest threat to Brussels’ external influence was in internal divisions.
All in all, in less than two hours, a group came up with 16 different plans for how countries will respond to the disruptions caused by COVID-19, debated them, and reacted to changing circumstances like a second wave of the infection and the US General Election (which Joe Biden won, incidentally).
While this exercise showed that American and European face difficult paths to soft power success in 2020, it also demonstrated the value of a Matrix Game for political forecasting.
About Two Lanterns
Two Lanterns Advisory is a political risk consultancy based in Boston, Massachusetts. For information on training courses in political risk, hiring a consultant, or commissioning reports, check us out at http://www.twolanterns.co.