Naval Research Program 2019 Annual Report

NPS NRP Annual ReportThe Naval Postgraduate School (NPS) Naval Research Program (NRP) is funded by the Chief of Naval Operations and supports research projects for the Navy and Marine Corps. The NPS NRP serves as a launch-point for new initiatives which posture naval forces to meet current and future operational warfighter challenges. NRP research projects are led by individual research teams that conduct research and through which NPS expertise is developed and maintained. The primary mechanism for obtaining NPS NRP support is through participation at NPS Naval Research Working Group (NRWG) meetings that bring together fleet topic sponsors, NPS faculty members, and students to discuss potential research topics and initiatives.Chief of Naval Operations (CNO)This research is supported by funding from the Naval Postgraduate School, Naval Research Program (PE 0605853N/2098). https://nps.edu/nrpChief of Naval Operations (CNO)Approved for public release. Distribution is unlimited.

Proceedings of the 2004 ONR Decision-Support Workshop Series: Interoperability

In August of 1998 the Collaborative Agent Design Research Center (CADRC) of the California Polytechnic State University in San Luis Obispo (Cal Poly), approached Dr. Phillip Abraham of the Office of Naval Research (ONR) with the proposal for an annual workshop focusing on emerging concepts in decision-support systems for military applications. The proposal was considered timely by the ONR Logistics Program Office for at least two reasons. First, rapid advances in information systems technology over the past decade had produced distributed collaborative computer-assistance capabilities with profound potential for providing meaningful support to military decision makers. Indeed, some systems based on these new capabilities such as the Integrated Marine Multi-Agent Command and Control System (IMMACCS) and the Integrated Computerized Deployment System (ICODES) had already reached the field-testing and final product stages, respectively. Second, over the past two decades the US Navy and Marine Corps had been increasingly challenged by missions demanding the rapid deployment of forces into hostile or devastate dterritories with minimum or non-existent indigenous support capabilities. Under these conditions Marine Corps forces had to rely mostly, if not entirely, on sea-based support and sustainment operations. Particularly today, operational strategies such as Operational Maneuver From The Sea (OMFTS) and Sea To Objective Maneuver (STOM) are very much in need of intelligent, near real-time and adaptive decision-support tools to assist military commanders and their staff under conditions of rapid change and overwhelming data loads. In the light of these developments the Logistics Program Office of ONR considered it timely to provide an annual forum for the interchange of ideas, needs and concepts that would address the decision-support requirements and opportunities in combined Navy and Marine Corps sea-based warfare and humanitarian relief operations. The first ONR Workshop was held April 20-22, 1999 at the Embassy Suites Hotel in San Luis Obispo, California. It focused on advances in technology with particular emphasis on an emerging family of powerful computer-based tools, and concluded that the most able members of this family of tools appear to be computer-based agents that are capable of communicating within a virtual environment of the real world. From 2001 onward the venue of the Workshop moved from the West Coast to Washington, and in 2003 the sponsorship was taken over by ONR’s Littoral Combat/Power Projection (FNC) Program Office (Program Manager: Mr. Barry Blumenthal). Themes and keynote speakers of past Workshops have included: 1999: ‘Collaborative Decision Making Tools’ Vadm Jerry Tuttle (USN Ret.); LtGen Paul Van Riper (USMC Ret.);Radm Leland Kollmorgen (USN Ret.); and, Dr. Gary Klein (KleinAssociates) 2000: ‘The Human-Computer Partnership in Decision-Support’ Dr. Ronald DeMarco (Associate Technical Director, ONR); Radm CharlesMunns; Col Robert Schmidle; and, Col Ray Cole (USMC Ret.) 2001: ‘Continuing the Revolution in Military Affairs’ Mr. Andrew Marshall (Director, Office of Net Assessment, OSD); and,Radm Jay M. Cohen (Chief of Naval Research, ONR) 2002: ‘Transformation ... ’ Vadm Jerry Tuttle (USN Ret.); and, Steve Cooper (CIO, Office ofHomeland Security) 2003: ‘Developing the New Infostructure’ Richard P. Lee (Assistant Deputy Under Secretary, OSD); and, MichaelO’Neil (Boeing) 2004: ‘Interoperability’ MajGen Bradley M. Lott (USMC), Deputy Commanding General, Marine Corps Combat Development Command; Donald Diggs, Director, C2 Policy, OASD (NII

Rerolling Boardgames: Essays on Themes, Systems, Experiences and Ideologies (Studies in Gaming)

Despite the advent and explosion of videogames, boardgames--from fast-paced party games to intensely strategic titles--have in recent years become more numerous and more diverse in terms of genre, ethos and content. The growth of gaming events and conventions such as Essen Spiel, Gen Con and the UK Games EXPO, as well as crowdfunding through sites like Kickstarter, has diversified the evolution of game development, which is increasingly driven by fans, and boardgames provide an important glue to geek culture. In academia, boardgames are used in a practical sense to teach elements of design and game mechanics. Game studies is also recognizing the importance of expanding its focus beyond the digital. As yet, however, no collected work has explored the many different approaches emerging around the critical challenges that boardgaming represents. In this collection, game theorists analyze boardgame play and player behavior, and explore the complex interactions between the sociality, conflict, competition and cooperation that boardgames foster. Game designers discuss the opportunities boardgame system designs offer for narrative and social play. Cultural theorists discuss boardgames' complex history as both beautiful physical artifacts and special places within cultural experiences of play

The Rationalist’s Spirituality: Campbell’s Monomyth in Single-Player Role-Playing Videogames Skyrim & Mass Effect

This thesis is an investigation of how mythographer Joseph Campbell’s monomyth narrative pattern manifests in computer and console role-playing videogames (CRPGs). It argues that this pattern is conducive to the CRPG being received as a spiritual experience, one potentially transformative in its capacity to impart and facilitate the practice of monomythic values by players, both within the game world and without. Focusing on two CRPG games, Skyrim and Mass Effect, it considers noteworthy parallels between the monomythic quest structure of these games and the ‘quest’ nature of authenticity—the modern, individual, personal search for meaning, analysing how the CRPG’s emphasis on the ‘epistemologically individualistic’ reflects aspects of alternative spirituality (as against traditional institutional religion). As such, the CRPG actively seeks to reconcile the spiritual with the material in a ‘rationalist’s spirituality’, a fact best represented in the game’s logical structuring of the monomythic hero’s journey to apotheosis as rites of passage (that is, as successive stages of narrative, but also as a numerical ‘levelling’ system for avatar development). The spiritual is exemplified by the presence of the monomythic pattern and by how the videogame draws upon themes native to fantastic fiction (ruins, deep time, dark genesis, the sublime), themes which evoke the enchanted world and ‘porous self’ of pre-modern society and represent a desire for re- enchantment and thus an enduring interest in the spiritual. These elements together operate within the rationalised framework of a rule-based game system, where the player has the freedom and agency native to the modern, rationally empowered ‘buffered self’ but is ultimately (and somewhat contrarily) answerable to these very same rules, as determined by a god-like designer. This relationship suggests a continuing albeit surreptitious belief in the transcendent, validating Victoria Nelson’s assertion that art and entertainment in the modern world serves as an ‘unconscious wellspring of religion’ (2001: viii). This thesis also explores the CRPG’s capacity to fulfil the four functions traditionally played by mythology—the mystical, cosmological, sociological and pedagogical—as described in the writings of Joseph Campbell, looking at how the sociological and pedagogical in particular are addressed by the monomythic narrative and the implicit values of this narrative (such as devotion of the self to the community). It will argue that the CRPG—in its capacity to facilitate embodied learning and action (as ritualised performance and contest)—serves as an ideal environment for the practice and possible adoption of such values by the player. Adoption, as I will illustrate, is influenced by a number of factors. Firstly, the game itself as an experience (its narrative and emotive credibility, and thus player investment in their character, or more specifically that character is an idealised construct—the ‘projective identity’). Secondly, how the player’s role is framed within the game world, and thirdly, how the player reads his/her experience. This reading can be to some degree shaped by a game’s goals and rules, and this is where procedural rhetoric—the use of game-based systems for the purposes of persuasion—may help to foreground monomythic values and lessons as well as encourage active practice of these values in day-to-day life. Herein lies the CRPG’s potential to fulfil the Romantic proposition that art can inspire moral improvement in the individual and instigate efforts to realise an idealised world. While games are ultimately shaped by the tastes of the market and the demands of the CRPG community, the question of whether a videogame should actively adopt such an approach is one that arguably falls to game designers: authors of the game-as-text. Chapter 1 provides an introduction to the thesis, while Chapter 2 explores the transition from pre-modern society to modern secularity as a default position in the West, the disappearance of the enchanted world, the emergence of alternative spiritualities as a recourse to institutional religion, and the ‘quest’ spirit that characterises the modern search for meaning (authenticity). Chapter 3 looks at the four functions previously played by mythology and how the CRPG can fulfil them, arguing for a classification of the CRPG as an alternative spirituality, and also as a continuation of a tradition of fantastic fiction representing a desire for re-enchantment, one whose origins may very well be found in modern crises of meaning. Chapter 4 details the origins of CRPG in wargaming and fantastic fiction, discussing the videogame genre’s unique emphasis on player choice, agency and autonomy, while analysing how the monomythic pattern manifests in Skyrim and Mass Effect, as well as its implied values, such as the commitment of the individual to the service of his/her society. Chapter 5 discusses how the CRPG combines fantastic fictional worlds with rational rules. The spiritual takes the form of the abovementioned aesthetic themes and the monomythic pattern, which together signal an enduring interest in re-enchantment and thus the spiritual. The rational takes the form of the videogame’s distinct emphasis on the powers of the player as a rational agent, powers that nevertheless are shaped by the rules of a transcendent, god- like game designer. This melding of the spiritual with the material, it will be asserted, represents a desire to reconcile these two disparate elements in a form of ‘rationalised’ spirituality. Chapter 6 analyses how the videogame as a form of external symbolic media can facilitate the transference of monomythic values and act as an arena for the embodied practice of these values. The transfer of such practice into the world beyond the game depends upon player investment in his/her role (via his/her idealised ‘projective identity’) and the game as a ritualised performance and contest for, if not representation of, monomythic values. Chapter 7 investigates how procedural rhetoric may help to persuade players of the significance and possible utility of monomythic values, by not only involving the player in everyday moral/ethical dilemmas within the game world but also giving him/her the freedom to address these dilemmas as s/he see fit, while discouraging actions that compromise the ‘heroic’ image of the monomythic hero. This chapter will also suggest ways for CRPGs to avoid formulaic storytelling and problematic depictions of the monomythic hero, so as to better improve the CRPG’s ability to persuade players of monomythic values and hence fulfil the pedagogical and sociological functions ascribed by this thesis. The question of whether such functions should be associated with the CRPG is one, I will argue, that game designers alone can address

Pastplay: Teaching and Learning History with Technology

In the field of history, the Web and other technologies have become important tools in research and teaching of the past. Yet the use of these tools is limited—many historians and history educators have resisted adopting them because they fail to see how digital tools supplement and even improve upon conventional tools (such as books). In Pastplay, a collection of essays by leading history and humanities researchers and teachers, editor Kevin Kee works to address these concerns head-on. How should we use technology? Playfully, Kee contends. Why? Because doing so helps us think about the past in new ways; through the act of creating technologies, our understanding of the past is re-imagined and developed. From the insights of numerous scholars and teachers, Pastplay argues that we should play with technology in history because doing so enables us to see the past in new ways by helping us understand how history is created; honoring the roots of research, teaching, and technology development; requiring us to model our thoughts; and then allowing us to build our own understanding

Computer Spiel Welten

Eine diskursarchäologische Studie zur Entstehung von Computerspielen entlang der Begriffe von Reaktion, Entscheidung und Regulation in Mensch-Maschine-Systemen. Sie rekonstruiert die Emergenz des Computerspiels aus heterogenen Wissensbereichen wie Experimentalpsychologie, Arbeitswissenschaft, Kriegstechnologie, Hard- und Softwaregeschichte, Graphentheorie, Meteorologie, Speläologie, Philosophie, Behaviorismus, Kognitionswissenschaft, Spieltheorie und Kybernetik.The study attempts an archaeology of computer-game-discourse using the topics "reaction", "decision" and "regulation" in men-machine-systems. It tries to reconstruct the emergence of computer games from heterogenous fields of knowledge such as experimental psychology, scientific management, technologies of war, hard- and software-history, graph-theory, meteorology, speleology, philosophy, behaviorism, cognitive science, theory of games, and cybernetics

Viet Nam Generation, Volume 6, Number 3-4

Edited by Dan Duffy and Kali Tal. Contributing editors: Renny Christopher. David DeRose, Alan Farrell. Cynthia Fuchs, William M. King. Bill Shields, Tony Williams, and David Willson

Alasdair Gray and the postmodern.

The prominence of the term ‘Postmodernism’ in critical responses to the work of Alasdair Gray has often appeared at odds with Gray’s own writing, both in his commitment to seemingly non-postmodernist concerns and his own repeatedly stated rejection of the label. In order to better understand Gray’s relationship to postmodernism, this thesis begins by outlining Gray’s reservations in this regard. Principally, this is taken as the result of his concerns over the academic appropriation of his work, and his suggestion that ‘postmodernism’ is an entity wholly constructed and primarily active within critical theory, with a tendency to elide the political dimension of literature under its own assumed apolitical solipsism. While acknowledging these reservations, this thesis goes on to explore the extent to which theories elaborated under the ‘postmodern’ heading possess utility as an approach to Gray’s work, primarily focussing on the extent to which they necessarily stand at odds with his political concerns. To this end, subsequent chapters go on to read Gray’s major works in parallel with appropriate theoretical models drawn from the diverse configurations given postmodernism. Comparison between Gray’s project in Lanark of providing contemporary Glasgow with imaginative depiction and the cognitive mapping demanded in Fredric Jameson’s account of the postmodern not only highlights their similarities, but identifies this notion of the ‘epic map’ as a central aspect of the political dimension of Gray’s writing. The ‘epic map’ recurs in consideration of 1982, Janine, which explores the potential political agenda in its narrators’ seemingly postmodern fabulism, and its relationship to seemingly less ‘postmodern’ concerns of the novellas The Fall Of Kelvin Walker, McGrotty and Ludmilla and Something Leather. Likewise, ‘mapping’ also plays a part in approaching Poor Things in the context of postmodern historiography as described by Jameson and Linda Hutcheon. The penultimate chapter explores A History Maker as a complex negotiation with the very notion of postmodernism, installing, rejecting and subverting tropes drawn from postmodern theories, principally those of Fukuyama, Baudrillard and Jameson. In the concluding chapter, while no final conclusion is reached regarding a fixed relationship between Gray and the postmodern – a notion taken as impossible, given the heterogeneity of the values ascribed to the term – a degree of utility, and certainly of relevance, in approaching even Gray’s political concerns is thus established

DU JEU VIDÉO AU SERIOUS GAME: Approches culturelle, pragmatique et formelle

This thesis is situated on the border of the Computer Science and the Social Sciences. It concerns the conception of Serious Games and their use within the context of targeted learning. By a Serious Game we mean a computer application, whose initial intention is to combine coherently the serious aspects (Serious) in a neither exhaustive nor exclusive manner, with instruction, learning, communication or further on information, assorted with the playing aspect of Video Games (Game). A Serious Game is thus for us a way to integrate an educational scenario into a Video Game. Our questioning will lead us to see how this relationship will be realized. After having examined the principal mains of application of the Serious Game and having defined it, the study of this questioning is realized in three phases concerning the cultural, pragmatic and formal systems in accordance with the Game Designers Salen and Zimmerman. Thus the cultural system means a transversal approach, taking into account in our case, the human, economic, technical, artistic, pedagogical, playing and organizational aspects. This system is explored by the development of a Serious Games for pupils at the Secondary School. We particularly try to understand the complexity and the multitude of parameters that come up at different levels during such a realization, during the phases of conception, production and use. The pragmatic system allows us subsequently to refocus our approach and study the game and educational aspects. The aim is to identify a form of pedagogy that takes into account the use of a Serious Game. The formal system, at last, leads us to close our field of investigation and focus on the Gameplay which according to Jean-Noël Portugal is a link between the learning and the Video Game. This leads us in particular to analyse within a computer context, some of the game rules and to conceive a classification of these games. Once this classification realized, we then compare the rules of the pedagogical screenplay and those of the Video Game. At this stage of this study we try to observe if Serious Game is a new kind of computer application offering its own characteristics, or if we are facing of Video Game.Cette thèse s’inscrit à la frontière de l'informatique et des sciences humaines. Elle traite de la conception de serious games et de leur utilisation dans des contextes d’apprentissage ciblés. Nous entendons par serious game, une application informatique, dont l’intention initiale est de combiner, avec cohérence, à la fois des aspects sérieux (Serious) tels, de manière non exhaustive et non exclusive, l’enseignement, l’apprentissage, la communication, ou encore l’information, avec des ressorts ludiques issus du jeu vidéo (Game). Un serious game résulte ainsi pour nous de l’intégration d’un scénario pédagogique avec un jeu vidéo. Notre problématique consiste en particulier à appréhender comment cette mise en relation s’opère. Après avoir exploré les principaux champs d’application du serious game et défini ce dernier, l’étude de cette problématique s’effectue en trois temps au travers des systèmes culturel, pragmatique et formel au sens où l’entendent les concepteurs de jeux (game designers) Salen et Zimmerman. Ainsi le système culturel qui sous-tend une approche transversale, prend en compte dans notre cas, les aspects humains, économiques, techniques, artistiques, ludiques, pédagogiques, et organisationnels. Ce système est exploré grâce à un retour d’expérience qui a consisté à développer un serious game destiné à des collégiens. Nous tentons d’appréhender en particulier la complexité et la multitude des paramètres qui interviennent à différents niveaux dans une telle réalisation, durant les phases de conception, de production et d’utilisation. Le système pragmatique nous permet dans un second temps de recentrer notre approche en privilégiant l’étude du jeu et de l’apprentissage. L’objet étant d’identifier une forme de pédagogie qui puisse prendre en compte l’utilisation d’un serious game. Le système formel, enfin, nous conduit à refermer notre champ d’étude pour nous focaliser sur le gameplay qui assure selon Jean-Noël Portugal le lien entre apprentissage et jeu vidéo. Ceci nous amène notamment à analyser dans un contexte principalement informatique, certaines des règles qui gèrent le jeu vidéo et à concevoir une classification de cet objet par le gameplay. Cette démarche effectuée, nous comparons les règles du scénario pédagogique et celles du jeu vidéo. A l’occasion de cette étude nous tentons d’observer si nous sommes réellement avec le serious game face à un nouveau type d’application informatique présentant des caractéristiques propres, ou bien si nous sommes en présence d’un genre de jeu vidéo. [Lien vers la HDR de Julian Alvarez : https://lnkd.in/g5Gig89