Chatter: National Security Insights from Board Games with Volko Ruhnke
The Lawfare Podcast
The Lawfare Institute
4.7 • 6.4K Ratings
🗓️ 20 July 2023
⏱️ 90 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
Gaming might seem far removed from national security, but Volko Ruhnke's experience proves otherwise. During his career as an intelligence analyst and manager, he designed and published many commercially successful historical board games that, in turn, informed his work. Additionally, he applied his skills in gaming to training intelligence officers.
David Priess hosted Volko for a deep dive about board games that included discussion of various game types, the value of in-person vs. virtual gaming, Volko's intelligence career, his many published games, the use of cards in gameplay, the importance of honoring historicity while avoiding forced recreation of exact historical timelines, similarities between game design and intelligence questions, the collaborative nature of historical boardgaming, why military wargaming matters, complexity in intelligence analysis, games ranging from political coalition management to Polynesian exploration and from the suffrage movement in the early 1900s to the manipulation of public perceptions about the functionality of Machu Picchu, and much more.
Among the works mentioned in this episode:
Volko Ruhnke's page at GMT Games
The Kevin McPartland-designed game Conquest of Paradise
The Alison Collins-designed game Wiñay Kawsay
Chatter is a production of Lawfare and Goat Rodeo. This episode was produced and edited by Noam Osband and Cara Shillenn of Goat Rodeo. Podcast theme by David Priess, featuring music created using Groovepad.
Support this show http://supporter.acast.com/lawfare.
Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.
Transcript
Click on a timestamp to play from that location
| 0:00.0 | The following podcast contains advertising to access an ad-free version of the LawFair |
| 0:07.2 | podcast become a material supporter of LawFair at patreon.com slash LawFair, that's patreon.com slash |
| 0:16.9 | LawFair. Also check out LawFair's other podcast offerings, rational security, chatter, LawFair |
| 0:25.6 | no bull, and the aftermath. |
| 0:28.2 | Welcome to chatter. I'm David Priest. This week, game designer and former intelligence officer |
| 0:39.2 | Volko Runky on national security insights from board games. When physicists try to understand |
| 0:49.5 | complex systems better, they model them. We could make greater use of all kinds of models, |
| 0:56.1 | but including tabletop models, games, because games are all about examining interactions |
| 1:02.6 | of actors and factors in a simplified simulated setting. We can use these games to look in |
| 1:10.8 | the past. We also can use them to look a little bit into the future, how might a conflict |
| 1:15.5 | go and what can we test out and learn about that. We do want not to guarantee that the |
| 1:24.0 | story goes exactly the same way as it did in history. That wouldn't be a game. We need |
| 1:28.7 | plausible outputs for the player's inputs, historically plausible outcomes. |
| 1:34.5 | Volko, thanks for talking to me today. |
| 1:42.7 | Hi, David. Always great to chat with you. Sorry, it's taken so long. I think I told |
| 1:47.2 | you when we started chatter, you were one of the people on my short list of this is the |
| 1:52.5 | kind of thing we want to be talking about where issues of national security intersect with |
| 1:58.0 | some other field that people aren't as familiar with, or it gives you a different perspective |
| 2:02.7 | on things. You are into gaming, but I think we need some taxonomy first, because gaming |
| 2:11.4 | brings up different ideas for different people. There's definitely different ways of |
| 2:15.9 | classifying what people will generally call games. On the one end, gaming now, I think in |
| 2:23.7 | popular conversation, tends to mean the video gaming, right? The fortenites and word of |
... |
Please login to see the full transcript.
Disclaimer: The podcast and artwork embedded on this page are from The Lawfare Institute, and are the property of its owner and not affiliated with or endorsed by Tapesearch.
Generated transcripts are the property of The Lawfare Institute and are distributed freely under the Fair Use doctrine. Transcripts generated by Tapesearch are not guaranteed to be accurate.
Copyright © Tapesearch 2026.