◂ RETURN TO EXERCISE

FLASHPOINT:2027 · FACILITATOR ANNEX · FOR TEACHING USE

Running FLASHPOINT:2027 as a seminar exercise

What this is. FLASHPOINT:2027 is a crisis-origins exercise, not a forecast. It is a branching decision environment built to make students feel the pressures crisis decision-makers describe — time compression, ambiguous intelligence, audience costs, alliance management — and then to interrogate those feelings with theory. Treat every outcome as a discussion prompt, never as a prediction.

◢ WHY A GAME AT ALL

Wargaming's pedagogical claim is not that games predict; it is that they generate synthetic experience and surface decision logics that lectures cannot. Reddie and colleagues argue in Science (2018) that next-generation wargames can produce researchable data about crisis decision-making while remaining, first and foremost, engines of insight rather than prophecy. Peter Perla and ED McGrady's "Why Wargaming Works" (Naval War College Review, 2011) locates the power of games in narrative immersion: players make decisions inside a story and therefore own the consequences in a way spectators never do. This exercise is designed around both claims — immersion first, analysis immediately after.

◢ SESSION FORMATS

60-minute seminar (single role)

90-minute seminar (side-swap format — recommended)

Asynchronous / assessment use

Issue one EXERCISE CODE to the whole cohort (or distribute a link with ?seed=CODE appended). All students then face identical field rolls in the same role, so divergent outcomes are attributable to divergent choices — which makes the downloaded After-Action Report usable as a marked artefact or as the appendix to a reflective essay.

◢ EXERCISE CODES (SEEDED RUNS)

Every run is stamped with an exercise code. Chance events ("field rolls") are drawn from a deterministic sequence derived from the code and the role. Same code + same role + same choices = same run, replayable and comparable. Codes are entered on the role-selection screen or passed in the URL as ?seed=CODE. The code appears in the HUD, on the ending screen, and in the exported report.

◢ SEMINAR MODE

The SEMINAR toggle in the header reveals two kinds of panels beneath the advisor dissents:

Recommended use: off for the first playthrough, on for the second. Students should meet the pressure before they meet the vocabulary for it.

◢ LEARNING OBJECTIVES

  1. Distinguish deliberate escalation from inadvertent and accidental escalation, and identify mechanisms of each (entanglement, delegation, time pressure).
  2. Apply core deterrence and coercion concepts — commitment, credibility, the threat that leaves something to chance, escalation dominance, off-ramps — to concrete decisions.
  3. Rehearse the same crisis from rival doctrinal standpoints and articulate how each side's "defensive" measures read as offensive to the other (the security dilemma in practice).
  4. Evaluate the role and limits of third-party mediation and international institutions in great-power crises.
  5. Criticise the model: identify what the game's structure assumes away, and what that implies about all formal crisis modelling.

◢ DEBRIEF STRUCTURE

Each ending generates 3–4 debrief questions tied to the path taken; they also appear in the exported After-Action Report. A robust 15-minute debrief:

  1. Reconstruct — walk the timeline. Which single decision most constrained everything after it?
  2. Counterfactual — use the "paths not taken" annex. Would the rejected option have been better given what was knowable at the time, not in hindsight?
  3. Theorise — attach one concept from the analyst notes to one moment in the run, and one historical analogue. Where does the analogue break down?
  4. Criticise the model — what did the game not let you do (back-channel timing, coalition side-payments, leaking, resignation)? What does that omission teach?

◢ PLAYING THE ADVERSARY SEATS WELL

The Beijing and Moscow seats are written from their own doctrinal logics — "winning without fighting" and the coercive quarantine playbook for the PRC; reflexive control, escalate-to-deter debates, and regime-survival calculus for Russia. Brief students that the objective is not to perform villainy but to pursue that seat's genuine objectives under that seat's genuine constraints. If a student reports that the adversary run "made sense from inside," the exercise has worked; the debrief then asks why it made sense and where the logic ran out.

◢ SAFETY, LIMITS, AND HONEST CAVEATS

◢ PERMISSIONS, CITATION & FEEDBACK

◢ FURTHER READING FOR FACILITATORS

FLASHPOINT:2027 · DESIGNED FOR SECURITY & STRATEGIC STUDIES SEMINARS · THIS IS A SIMULATION, NOT A PREDICTION

An Escalation Lab project by Hallam Burnapp · © 2026 Hallam Burnapp. All rights reserved. Free to use for non-commercial teaching and research, with credit.