Dr Elizabeth Bartels Epistemology of Wargaming

Speaker: Dr Elizabeth Bartels, Co-Director of the RAND Center for Gaming and an associate policy researcher at the RAND Corporation.

Gaming has often been positioned as an art, in contrast to quantitative analysis which is framed as scientific. Framing gaming as an art makes it too easy to divorce game design from foundational research practices. It also rests on a fundamental misunderstanding of what it means for inquiry to be "scientific".

Elizabeth Bartels, the co-director of the RAND Center for Gaming, will explore different logics of scientific inquiry, and how gaming can support research within each. She will also discuss how these considerations shape an approach to game design that promotes traceability and transparency to generate credible findings.

Biography:

Elizabeth Bartels is a specialist in national security policy analysis gaming. Other research includes work on defence planning, force development, and measures short of armed conflict (including long-term competition, gray zone, hybrid warfare, and irregular warfare).

Prior to joining RAND, Bartels was a senior associate at Caerus Associates and a research analyst at the National Defense University’s gaming center. Her PhD is from the Pardee RAND Graduate School, where her work focused on how to apply social scientific practices to the design of games for policy analysis.

Chair: Ivanka Barzashka on behalf of King's College London.