Fenwick McKelvey presents to DDI

Fenwick McKelvey (Concordia University) will be joining the DDI in person for a presentation, as part of the Spring Speaker Series.

“You Played Yourself: The Origins of World Politics as Computer Game”

In 1959, political scientist Oliver Benson created the first computer simulation of world politics. Written to run in the drum of an IBM 650 machine, Benson’s Simple Diplomatic Game simulated international crises between nine nations. “Players” could read the print-outs if the United States declared all-out-war against the USSR (codename HBOMB). The simple game was a “modest beginning” that Benson thought had no utility for prediction. In spite of its humble origins, Benson was not the first nor the last to imagine the world as a game. Benson’s slippage to describe international relations as a computer game has stabilized into a power socio-technical imaginary about politics and world order central to American defense intelligence. In 2020, the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency — what Sharon Weinberger calls the “imagineers of war” — announced a new program to support its work on military artificial intelligence, GAMEBREAKER (https://www.darpa.mil/program/gamebreaker). It trains a new generation of strategic AIs to master commercial computer games, presuming that masters these virtual competitions will port to predicting and defeating American opponents in the game of realpolitik. My presentation explores how it became sensible to imagine global politics as a computer game. The chapter focuses on the early prototypes that gradually legitimated computer simulations of world politics to understand how a simple game became GAMEBREAKER.

Email ddi_comms@sfu.ca for details and Zoom link.