Wargaming Lab
The Wargaming Lab is a student-led research team focused on enabling students to conduct crisis simulation and strategy-based research by creating and playing original wargames and simulations. Through these simulations, we research topics ranging from climate change to military tactics. Our most recent project was to develop a crisis simulation, in collaboration with the London Politica, on how AI might affect geopolitical tensions for the 2023 Future Impact Summit at the London School of Economics.
Focus Areas
The Wargaming Lab focuses on the research and application of contemporary international crises in a simulated setting. We create simulations with an educational intent for the students who create the wargames, and for the clients who play them. Through rigorous open-source research, students investigate the product's topic and formulate how it might be best presented in a wargame to suit the client's objectives.
Sofia Valle established the lab to expose students to strategic, operational, and tactical decision making. Via the lab, the researchers engage with the public and private sectors, as well as academia. With the latter, we seek to quantify the findings derived from a simulated, controlled environment. In these simulations, we alter variables to attain various results pertinent to the tested hypothesis. Thus, we desire to elucidate international dynamics by testing and predicting the success of theories.
Project Contacts
Sofia Valle '25 (Director; svalle01@wm.edu), Ian Harman '26, Thomas Le Gouellec '24, Lilly Doninger '24, George Hage '25, Dax Penney '26, Ronan Gormley '25, Jackson Cantrell '25, Rosetta Li '26.
