Certificate in Cyber Wargaming



The MORS Certificate in Cyber Wargaming examines the challenges of gaming cyber through a combination of lectures and practical exercises. Lectures will focus on games and game design, along with the application of game design to cyber issues. Practical exercises will give participants the chance to experience different types of cyber games, allowing them to assess requirements, plan budgets, practice response procedures, and examine player actions during play. These games will place them in decision-making roles during a simulated real-world problem—be it historical, contemporary, or projected into the future—and are currently used by decision makers within government, industry, and academia to examine policy issues and outcomes. At the end of the course, students will research, design, and present their own cyber game.

 

Objectives:

Our expert instructors will introduce participants to the various ways that game design can be used to address the challenges of cyber operations and policy. Participants will:

  • Learn how to think about cyber technology and processes to build effective games
  • Build an understanding of how to represent cyber capabilities in games, including how to match the technical layers of game play with operational and strategic layers
  • Build games directly addressing cyber operations
  • Develop an awareness of the gaming tools available for cyber, and begin to associate specific game techniques with various cyber gaming requirements

Speaker and Presenter Information

Dr. John Curry is a senior lecturer in games development and cyber security at Bath Spa University, in the UK. He has an international reputation in conflict simulations and has worked with many of the key personalities in the field. He has authored/ co-authored/ edited more than 100 books on various aspects of wargaming. He co-authored The Handbook of Cyber Wargames: Wargaming the 21st Century, edited Graham Longley Brown's Successful Professional Wargames: A Practitioner's Handbook, editor of Peter Perla's Art of Wargaming (2nd edition) and co-authored Matrix Games for Modern Wargaming. Currently, he is spending a lot of time considering new ways of modelling cyber conflict. In his spare time, he plays games. Currently, he is spending a lot of time considering new ways of modelling cyber conflict.

 

James "Pigeon" Fielder joined CSU as an Instructor after retiring from the U.S. Air Force as a Lieutenant Colonel and Associate Professor of Political Science at the U.S. Air Force Academy. He is also serving as a Marine Corps University Non-Resident Krulak Fellow for academic years 2021-2023, is the professional and educational gaming lead for Mobius Worlds Publishing, and consults on organizational wargaming, crisis response exercises, and scenario planning.

 

Dr. Fielder researches interpersonal trust and emergent political processes through cyber-based interaction and through tabletop and live-action gaming as natural experiments and has over two decades of experience designing, executing, and assessing training exercises and wargames. Pigeon is on the editorial board of Simulation & Gaming and The MORS Journal of Wargaming, was a TEDx speaker, and has been interviewed on game-related topics by Reuters, USA Today, and NBC News.

 

Dr. Nina Kollars is a former adjunct senior fellow for the Defense Program. Associate Professor in the Cyber & Innovation Policy Institute (CIPI) within the Naval War College. Kollars is a scholar of future warfighting, military technological change, innovation, cybersecurity, and cyber warfare/information operations.

 

Dr. Roger Mason retired after 29 years of public safety experience in Los Angeles County. For the past fifteen years he has specialized in emergency management and the development of wargames and exercises.

 

He has designed over 50 emergency management and public safety wargames and hybrid game/functional exercises. His clients include National Defense University, Penn State University, the University of Hawaii, the US Army, and the CNA Corporation. Dr. Mason has served as the wargaming professor for the Institute for Intelligence Analysis, Juan Carlos University, Madrid Spain.

 

Mason is a published author on the topic of wargames. He is the co-founder of LECMgt, a strategic management firm based in Camarillo, California. He holds a Ph. D in Management and Decision sciences from Walden University and an M.A. in Public Administration from the California State University, Northridge. He retired after 37 years of service with the Air National Guard/ USAF Reserve.

 

Dr. McGrady writes, speaks, and teaches on the design of professional games. He is an adjunct senior fellow in gaming at CNAS, teaches and manages game design courses for MORS/Virginia Tech, and runs a business devoted to using games and game techniques to bring innovative experiences in new areas. His recent book, Roll to Save: Gaming Disease Response, describes designing games in support of public health professionals.

 

In the past Dr. McGrady built and directed a team of 10-20 analysts at CNA devoted to the design and execution of professional games. Dr. McGrady has written, taught, and presented on the topic of games and their use in organizational and individual learning. He has designed and run games for many different clients ranging from the White House to the Department of Agriculture to the automotive industry. Dr. McGrady has also built a team at CNA devoted to chemical and biological response operations, including domestic response operations. Dr. McGrady has deployed as an analyst with US Forces in Haiti during operation Uphold Democracy, onboard USS Nimitz for Desert Storm and with operational E-2C squadrons. Dr. McGrady holds a Ph.D. in Chemical Engineering from the University of Michigan. He has published extensively in the Chemical Engineering, physics, and national security literature and is widely cited for his work on the mathematics of aggregation and fragmentation.

 

A retired naval officer, Peter (Pete) Pellegrino served as the Game Division Director of the War Gaming Department at the US Naval War College, where he also taught electives on war gaming, game design and strategic game theory.

 

Pete is a regular contributor to Junior General (www.juniorgeneral.org), a website dedicated to promoting the use of historical simulations as a tool for teaching history by providing free games that make use of historical miniatures (paper or plastic toy soldiers), maps and counters, and matrix arguments.

 

After 26 Years in the Navy, and eight years conducting Net Assessments, Mr. Pournelle joined Group W. He constantly seeks to analyze national defense strategies and conduct Net Assessments employing multi-method approaches.

 

Mr. Pournelle has extensive experience in analytic and managerial aspects of strategic studies within the national security apparatus. His national security experience includes expertise in contingency planning, wargaming, modeling, simulation, & analysis and assessment and he received his Master's degree from the Naval Postgraduate School in Operations Research.

 

Specialties: Wargame Design, Execution, and Analysis; Operations Research; Concept Development & Experimentation; Philosophy and Application of Complexity Science

 

To employ over 30 years of military operations, operations research, and wargaming experience in support of the development of an effective undersea warfare force through the disciplined application of both analytic and synthetic methods within the "Cycle of Research" (Perla 1990) framework.

 

Promoting research and development into wargaming design, implementation and execution leveraging complimentary aspects of manual "hands on" kriegspiel-style wargaming with "virtual world" and other types of technology that can facilitate player communication and decision-making within the game while also communicating information about why those decisions were made to analysts.

Relevant Government Agencies

Air Force, Army, Navy & Marine Corps, DOD & Military, Dept of Homeland Security, Dept of Veterans Affairs, NASA, Other Federal Agencies, Coast Guard, National Guard Association, Federal Government


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When
Mon-Fri, Oct 20-24, 2025, 10:00am - 6:00pm ET


Cost

Certificate in Cyber Wargaming Registration:  $3000.00


Website
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Organizer
Military Operations Research Society


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