When a corporate executive must quickly make an important
strategic decision, he or she can now turn to custom War Games for
the answer.
Fuld &
Company, an organization focused on competitive intelligence
solutions, has become expert at setting up these real-time
scenarios. Providing War Game services to private 
and public institutions alike, they’ve applied this technique
to hot areas such as virtual communities, digital entertainment and
internet advertising.
The company website states that, “War games are about
anticipating competitive moves before your rivals make them. A war
game is a structured strategic exercise. It allows you to
understand unexplored, or unforeseen strategic options. Most
important, a war game will show you the implications of your
decisions months or years ahead.”
This past Tuesday, Fuld & Co organized a War Game focused on
the results of the 700MHz
Wireless Spectrum auction that’s currently taking place. The
company pulled together teams of business school students from
Harvard, MIT, Northwestern and the
University of Chicago and asked each to role-play a large corporate
actor.
The result was a general consensus that the “auction will
produce deal-making with lots of cash changing hands, but only
small near-term tech advances as far as the consumer is concerned.”
(Additional predictions harvested at the event can be found
here .)
While there’s no guarantee that any of these predictions will
come true, it certainly seems like a valuable
possibility-generating exercise, provided you’ve got the
advance-time and money required bring the right people together.
But that might not be such an obstacle in the coming years as
increasingly rich virtual worlds that support multi-user
conferences (Second Life already does) and new
pay-for-expertise-by-the-increment services like BitWine allow for more rapid
organization of top-notch War Games.
What might you need a War Game for?
By Jason M. Vaughn
The world was rocked this morning by the death of America’s
first “immortal,” Madeline Marie Samms, who had only three months
ago reached her 175th birthday. At around 6:45 a.m., a piano was
accidentally dropped on her head as she stepped out of her
first-floor Wyandotte County apartment on her way to the market.
The irony is that she had once credited this daily walk as the
biggest reason for 
her longevity. It was even more important, she had felt, than
her nightly pink-lemonade-flavored telomerase cocktail, her weekly
stem-cell injections, and her numerous casual-sex encounters.
“People can’t go a measly few blocks to get their organics?”
she’d once wondered, incredulously shaking her head. “They gotta
have ‘em delivered by one of those good-for-nothin’
robots? What’s this world comin’ to? That’s what I wanna
know. ‘Cause them robots are kinda scary, if you ask me. I mean,
why do their eyes have to be red like that? Why does one
of their hands always have to be a claw hand? Why on earth
do they gotta have a laser saw hangin’ off their shoulder
at all times? For God sakes,” she continued, “what do they need
teeth for? And just why do those teeth have to be all
pointy, like shark teeth? You know, one of them things
tried to help me across the street one time. I had to beat him off
with my purse. Thought I was bein’ attacked.” (cont.)
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At some point in the not-so-distant future, somewhere on planet Earth… 
Beta Bogdanovsky’s Italian Cācio-model translator spoke with a decidedly male monotone, and had the vocabulary, albeit in 13 languages, of a 3rd grader. Her dog’s translator was nearly as well spoken. Then again, Tóse was a smart dog, an Illyrian sheepdog whose eyes expressed more care than those of most people, and he almost certainly had the capacity to communicate on levels beyond the short sentences programmed into his collar.
“Iz vee NEH tuh,” she said in Bulgarian to a rotund bearded man blocking access to the window seat next to him. A roundish silver and gold box hung from a beaded chain around her neck, and a small bas-relief profile of the Roman god Mercury spoke the Greek, “Syghnomi.”
Excuse me.
The man’s posture shifted to make way even before he looked up, and when he did lift his head he was eye to eye with Tóse. Expressionlessly he made a symbolic attempt to scoot his plastic bags out of the aisle, and Beta sided into the seat, setting her gear on the floor between her feet. Tóse sat on his haunches in front of them both. Beta wondered why it was that people could not seem to rein it in in crowded public places and on trains.
As the ARMA Speed Tram pulled away from the passenger bay, the lights in the tramcar faded slightly as they always did between stations, and Beta closed her eyes and relaxed her neck, as she always did when she was commuting. Bitoli was five stops from the sea, as the tram tunneled through the Korab and Pindus Mountains, and then there were six more on the other side of the water before reaching Monopoli. This trip would be an opportunity to shut her eyes for approximately 2 hours, which was a very good thing, because Beta’s eyes were very tired.
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