The Role of Operational Gaming in Operations Research

The scientific investigation of an actual conflict situation usually leads to the study of a simpler conflict situation that may be formulated as a game a set of rules that govern and fully determine the possible courses of conflict. The study of a game involves its formulation, its solution, and instruction in its implications. The two principal techniques employed in such study of a game are the use of analytic game theory and the use of operational gaming. It has been inadequately recognized that the analytic game-theoretic approach and the operational gaming approach, different as they are, both require the use of a model of reality. Neither deals directly with reality itself. Moreover, once reality is represented by a rigorously formulated game with a complete set of rules, its solution, though unknown, is determinate. In their efforts to find the solution of such a game, users of analytic game-theoretic methods and users of operational gaming must start from the same point, the rules of the game. The process of operational gaming suffers greatly from its lack of a rigorous method for calculating the required size of the sample of plays. This required size, though not known exactly, is far greater than is commonly suspected. Whereas chance effects require a sample of plays to be statistically adequate, competitive effects require a sample of plays to be strategically adequate. It is the latter requirement that is most often overlooked.