The title is a reference to the 1983 movie WarGames when the computer program WOPR asked what kind of game a young Matthew Broderick wished to play.
Recently, I saw an episode of LittleWarsTV in which the club used ChatGPT to craft a Peninsular War scenario between Spanish Guerrilas and a French force. The approach taken seemed unbelievably easy so I decided to take some practice runs at this AI-driven scenario generation.
I started off by asking ChatGPT to craft a wargames scenario during the Russo-Swedish War that occurred between 1656-1658. Surprisingly, it provided me a scenario for the Battle of Nyen which I played a few years ago with my friend Alex. I was blown away so I asked for a hypothetical scenario and the AI program gave me a battle where the Swedes were defending a ford crossing and even gave me the historical context. Simply incredible! Pushing the envelope, I asked the program to craft the scenario using Liber Militum: Tercios wargaming rules and it tailored the scenario, more or less, to what the AI could find regarding the rules. There were things that I would need to tweak but the whole experiment was really quite impressive.
I don't often have a lot of time to game and sometimes scenarios are a time-consuming stumbling block. Using AI to generate plausible scenarios (real or hypothetical) along with the historical context will be incredibly helpful to improve my gaming experience.
Funnily enough Norm Smith (Battlefields and Warriors) has also been experimenting with AI scenario generation and the "AI" largely quoted his own Web content back at him! I do worry that in the absence of any actual intelligence this stuff just becomes ever more self referential, but it is a handy way to automate the processing of all those googlesearches I usually do when designing scenarios.
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