War Game Documents an All-Star Political Live-Action Role-Playing Game
Near the end of Donald Trump’s first and possibly only term as president, a fad took hold in the political class: live-action role-playing games.
In the summer of 2020, amid all the other weirdness of that year, a collection of academics, officials, and pundits called the Transition Integrity Project gamed out what they thought might happen if Trump refused to concede the election. A few months later, two Trumpier groups—the Claremont Institute and the Texas Public Policy Foundation (TPPF)—responded with a post-election exercise built on a rather different worldview. Trump’s exile from D.C. didn’t end the trend: This year some folks from the TPPF joined forces with members of the Heritage Foundation to imagine the outcome if President Joe Biden refuses to leave office. (I think we can safely say that events have overtaken that one.) And now we have a documentary, War Game, that has been playing in select theaters and starts streaming on various platforms today. Here a cast ranging from retired Gen. Wesley Clark to former Sen. Heidi Heitkamp (DNL–N.D.) simulates a bigger, noisier January 6 where a chunk of the military sides with the rioters.
Scenario planning, of course, is a well-established practice among everyone from business consultants to the Defense Department. (As the title suggests, the simulation in War Game is supposed to resemble a Pentagon war game.) There is nothing inherently wrong with it. But observers kept processing the LARPs of 2020 in one of two dubious ways. The first was to act as though we were reading about some sort of scientific experiment—a tool for prediction rather than planning. That wouldn’t be true even under ideal lab conditions, but it didn’t help that each of these exercises involved trying to get into the heads of people the organizers disliked. For example, the 2020 Transition Integrity Project tapped the famously anti-Trump pundit Bill Kristol to play Trump, a choice that tells you something about which Republicans were in the game designers’ contact list. (That said, Kristol did anticipate some of Trump’s moves. The most ridiculous moment in that group’s gameplay involved the Biden player going haywire: In one of the scenarios, he tried to get some leverage by encouraging the West Coast to secede.)
In the other dubious reading, these operations are elaborate plots to carry out these exact scenarios. Now, these exercises certainly do give us insights into the ways the people involved with them think: They show us what the game designers imagine is plausible, and they suggest how the role-players might imagine themselves acting in certain situations. But that doesn’t mean you can use one as a skeleton key to explain what happened after Election Day 2020 or to check out what’s in store for Election Day 2024.
It does mean it’s possible to imagine a wonderfully weird documentary about one of these games—a fly-on-the-wall, vérité-style record of powerful people thrust into a fiction and revealing themselves in their reactions to it. A movie like that could be a poker-faced, sometimes darkly comic masterpiece.
That, alas, is not the approach that the directors of War Game took. But if you peer closely enough at what they did do, you might occasionally feel like you’re catching out-takes from that other picture.
The scenario in War Game was devised by the Vet Voice Foundation, a group concerned about radicalization in the armed forces. Its dungeon masters sketched out a scenario where the 2024 election is contested, with a right-wing challenger accus
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