In post-wargaming debriefings, teachers and students delineate tactics from related areas of military competence such as teamwork, communication, and technology¶

Claim · All claims
Evidence · 1 study · qualitative r3 · q2
Currency · newest study 2025 · not yet checked against its sources · not reviewed by a person

Subclaims¶

q2 i? Teachers recurrently draw distinctions between tactics and other phenomena such as communication, teamwork, and technology when steering debriefing discussions, and students adopt these distinctions. → Sjöblom 2025

Evidence¶

Sjöblom 2025¶

Sjöblom, B., & Lymer, G. (2025). Conceptual socialization in debriefing: tactics as an object of knowledge in wargame interactions. Instructional Science. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11251-025-09717-8

q2 · i? · qualitative · r3

Microethnographic analysis of video-recorded debriefing sessions from wargaming-based tactics courses at the Swedish Defence University. The analysis finds participants, especially teachers, invoke tactics while drawing boundaries, with the teamwork/communication distinction the most common: "the most common distinction that is explicitly drawn in our data".

"Teamwork and communication are very salient features of the exercises, which might explain why it is also the most common distinction that is explicitly drawn in our data."

Discussion¶

Related Claims¶

• Students appropriate the concept of tactics in their own post-game reasoning through thematization of general principles and framing performance in terms of creating dilemmas for the opponent
• Teachers construe tactical reasoning as a generalizable, transferable skill, using the educational design of wargames to downplay concern with realism
• Teachers actively highlight specific in-game actions as examples of tactical decision-making, including distinguishing sound tactical reasoning from negative outcomes
• Educators rarely facilitated connections between playlist activities or to students' lives; introductions focused on instructions and logistics, and debriefings were often unstructured reviews of the activity — related
• Debriefing description phase enacts conversational remembering that turns private recollections into a public, shared epistemic artifact — related