The Politics of Play: Wargaming with the US Military w/ Aggie Hirst

About this event
Since 2014, calls to expand the use of wargames and simulations in the armed forces have emanated from the highest levels of the US federal government, specifically via the Defense Innovation Initiative (DII) and the Third Offset Strategy (3OS). In the ensuing wargaming renaissance, a small but committed wargames community of practice (CoP) has been empowered to proliferate their craft across the military’s strategic planning, professional education, and tactical/operations training regimes. Combining 100 hours of original empirical data - gathered with pioneers and practitioners at US military wargames, CPXs, and school-houses - with a new theory of deconstructive play, Dr Aggie Hirst's forthcoming book provides a new critical analysis of the use of wargames to produce soldiers in a digital age. In this talk, Dr Hirst will argue that prevailing analyses fail to grasp the nature and depth of the power of pedagogical wargaming. By promoting a non-reflexive immersive state and cultivating a drive towards victory conditions, she will argue that gaming has subject-producing properties. She explores Hans-Georg Gadamer’s claim that far from the player playing the game, the game plays the player, and offers a new conceptualisation of play - ‘deconstructive play’ - suggest how we might better ensure player agency and expose and explore games’ aims, assumptions, omissions, and politics.
Bio
Dr Aggie Hirst is Reader in International Relations Theory and Methods in the Department of War Studies at King’s College London. Her research is situated in IR/political theory and critical military studies. She has published widely on play, games, and the military wargaming renaissance with International Studies Quarterly, International Political Sociology, Critical Military Studies, and Review of International Studies, and she is author of The Politics of Play: Wargaming with the US Military (forthcoming, Oxford University Press). In addition, she is co-author of a new textbook, Global Politics: Myths and Mysteries (forthcoming, Oxford University Press), which takes a critical pedagogical approach to theorising international politics.

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