I looked over the green plastic soldiers I held in the palm of my hand as my colleagues debated whether one figure should represent a battalion or a brigade. As I placed a single figure on the board, I was conscious of the fact that it wasn’t just a piece of plastic and that the discussion over what it represented wasn’t mere talk. Instead, what we were debating was whether we would put 400 or 4,000 men and women along the border of the Demilitarized Zone on the Korean Peninsula to potentially face combat. The outcome of that debate would in turn determine how people playing the game — whether they were uniformed military or high-school-age girls — would think about how a potential future conflict between North Korea and the Republic of Korea and the United States could play out.

When I tell people that I’m a war gamer, I’m either met with blank stares or overly enthusiastic questions about what it is like to play Call of Duty or Risk for a living. In reality, war gaming for the Department of Defense is more than a board game or a computer model. A war game is an analytic or educational game that simulates war and creates a synthetic experience for players to consider different responses to a crisis and to see the consequences of those choices. The goal is to fight wars in a “safe” environment without real weapons or people, often to gain insight into a specific policy question.

As a game designer and facilitator, I have to create a believable environment and tell a compelling story that makes the players — usually United States military and government officials — take the game seriously, believe that their decisions have repercussions and play hard so that the results simulate the real world. I need to take a problem, boil it down to the basics and identify the details that really matter while still leaving enough color to make it interesting. For instance, while a future war between two major powers like Russia and the United States could be fought in Estonia and farther afield, in a peripheral arena like Syria, scaling it down to a single geographic area may be critical to addressing the singular question that the game seeks to inform. Finding the sweet spot that fits with my players’ knowledge is important, so designing a game for military officers is different from designing a game for young women without a military background, like the one my female colleagues and I recently designed in partnership with Girl Security, an American nonprofit that encourages young women to pursue national-security careers. Too many options make the game ponderously slow, with players never getting a chance to see the results of their decisions; too few choices mean that I have potentially predetermined the game’s outcomes.

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But there is something else dictating the available choices in war gaming, and that is a lack of gender diversity. War gaming — as with war more generally — has long been a male domain and has significant barriers to entry, retention and advancement. You can’t learn by reading; you have to learn by doing. Many women — myself included — find themselves doing managerial or administrative work for games in a bid to break into the field and learn about war game design and execution, but they often find themselves stuck in that track. I didn’t grow up playing Axis & Allies or memorizing all the fighter aircraft flown by the United States Air Force, like some of my male colleagues did. These are the sorts of things that started me at a disadvantage. Everything about war gaming and military operations more broadly I have learned as an adult, from scratch, whereas most of my male counterparts have been inadvertently training for this job since they were children. Even now, 10 years into my career, I am still playing catch up. This sense of disadvantage tends to discourage women from joining war gaming teams — let alone the national-security field — because many feel that there is not a clear substantive role for them to play or a path to advancement.