Serious Gaming Applied to a Military Intelligence Problem: a Booster for Innovation on Analysis Tools

This paper reports early work on the conception of a simulation platform dedicated to serious gaming applied to military intelligence analysis at the strategic level. This platform can be used for teaching and training as well as for research and innovation. The innovative concept of « intelligence gaming » is at the core of this project and our current objective is to define and characterize « intel games » in order to better control the parameters of our gaming sessions. Therefore, we position intel gaming in relation with war gaming in order to highlight its main features. Then we leverage an analogy with reading activities to conduct our analysis of the concept, which leads to a definition of intel gaming as a collective critical reading framework for a digital interactive fiction. These two components (the collective framework and the digital fiction) and their interactions provide a conceptual basis for investigating the representativity of our immersive platform as compared with the experience of analysts in a real situation. They also provide useful input for the conception of future game sessions based on hypothesis that need to be validate or not by future scientific research, in particular in sciences of cognition.