Going Digital: Consequences of Increasing Resolution of a Wargaming Tool for Knowledge Elicitation
Wargaming is used to facilitate Knowledge Elicitation (KE) during design thinking events for the development of advanced concepts. These wargaming sessions follow brainstorming and consensus building exercises where diverse teams of end users and technical personnel enumerate and vote on innovative features to develop into new systems, or for innovative means to leverage and exploit existing technologies. A tabletop, turn-based board game was used to conduct these wargaming sessions for vetting concepts; however, the time required to execute and evaluate (process) each turn led to the development of a digital version of the game where the mechanics of moving certain game pieces was automated. Although increasing technology levels of tools and processes is generally viewed as an upgrade, unintended consequences of introducing technologies into systems can and do occur. An assessment was performed to empirically assess the effectiveness of the digital version of the simulator. User perceptions were captured with a questionnaire, and user behaviors with the tool were captured through observational methods. The digital wargaming platform succeeded in reducing the amount of time dedicated to process each turn of gameplay; however, there was no observed gain in perceived utility of the new digital tool, nor any observed increase in the quality or quantity of KE. Future research efforts will aim to empirically measure the quantity and quality of discussion during gameplay.