Student Experience
National Security Simulation Course
Go inside a semester-long game for graduate and undergraduate students.
What’s it really like to work in the national security space? How do countries, organizations and businesses negotiate when their national interests are not aligned? What about when there are allegations of spying, or other nefarious actions? This is what students at the Sanford School of Public Policy at Duke University explored in a recent course, National Security Simulation: Domestic Terrorism, Migration and Misinformation which featured a semester-long game, “Acceleration.”
Developers describe the game this way: “… a fractured world confronts white nationalist insurgencies, mass migrations, and escalating climate disasters.” Set in the future, gamers navigate “climate and extremism crises, Germany’s response to Russian influence campaigns and Euroscepticism, and Google’s role in global power dynamics. In this high-stakes game, will your choices mend the divides or deepen the fault lines?”
The student/gamers were divided into five teams, playing countries like Germany and organizations like the California Governor’s Office and Google. At the outset, each team was given a set of strategic interests to try and advance throughout the game. Teams took positions on key issues and even negotiated game-world agreements. They had to synthesize information to make nuanced decisions. Each move a team made influenced the plot of the story.
This is the fourth time the class has been offered at Sanford. It was led by professor David Schanzer and Daveed Gartenstein-Ross, Founder and CEO of Valens Games. (Valens Games offers “strategic exercises to understand a complex world.”)
'Shockingly Real'
Master of Public Policy student Eni Owoeye (Team Germany) said the course was very different from a traditional class. Rather than being passive recipients of knowledge, students “produce a lot of the knowledge sharing and the wisdom,” which requires research and “very thorough analysis.”
Several students noted how real the game felt.
“It's almost shocking how real it feels sometimes,” said Lauren Maynor (Team Google), a masters student student studying bioethics, tech ethics and science policy. She recalled a time when her team was negotiating with another group, “and then we happened to catch them trying to sneak somebody's phone into our room so they could hear what we talked about when we got back from the negotiation.”
“The game is not only incredibly realistic and steeped in the modern world,” said Professor David Schanzer, but Valens Games was able to duplicate “the messiness of the information environment” in which real policymakers and organizations are operating. “Forcing students to grapple with all the complexities of the modern world make[s] it an incredibly rich experience for them."
Master of Public Policy student Rush Patel (Team Google) called the course, “genuinely the best class I've taken. It's super engaging, super fun, it's super unique. It really forces us to kind of be prepared for what the real world is going to ask of us.”
Impact on career plans
In preliminary research, three quarters of the students reported that their experience with the game had some impact on their career interests. Some students indicated a new interest in pursuing a career in the national security field, including intelligence, cybersecurity, and homeland security.
The course is open to graduates and undergraduates at all levels. Graduate students serve as the team captains.
The course is part of Duke’s American Grand Strategy program and has received funding from a grant from the Department of Homeland Security via the National Counterterrorism Innovation, Technology and Education center (NCITE) at the University of Nebraska Omaha.