Protean Media Critical Thinking Game

Background
At the turn of the millennium, National Reconnaissance Office (NRO) sponsored a research project called Proteus. Insights into different ways of “seeing” things were unexpected outcomes of this research. These insights were only metaphorically described. At the Naval Postgraduate School Professor John Hiles stretched, pulled, and examined these metaphors, trying to understand their meaning, their use and how they could be thought. He gave them shape, form and meaning and put them in a context that made sense to end users. He developed definitions. Resulting from testing is the Protean Media. The first setting selected for Protean Media is contemporary Iraq. The Protean Media may be adapted to many other settings or subjects of interest.

The Aim
Protean Media is designed to give players a complex dynamic problem world in which they can learn and try out new ways of thinking and making decisions. It is designed to expose real-world complexities and unintended consequences, elicit unconventional solutions, and help decision makers overcome cognitive and other biases.

Some Protean Media Details
Three characteristics distinguish Protean Media from other games and war-games:

1.   Instead of a zero-sum game with a single well defined, overall goal, the world of this war-game may contain as many conflicting, ambiguous, and hidden goals as there are players.

2.  Insights into future requirements for intelligence (taken from the late 90's NRO Project Proteus) have been transformed into forces that guide, focus, and amplify the classical politico-military forces used in the game.

3.  Human facilitators and software combine to weave the multiple perspectives and alternate images of game play into a single narrative that is the subject of after-action review and the explicit take-away for each player.