Using simulations and serious games for the purpose of training and education is no new practice. Serious games have been used by strategists for centuries, with one of the earliest recorded “Kriegsspiel”, or “war game”, dating back to the early 19th and 20th centuries (Davis, 1995; Graham & Hall, 2012). Today, simulations and games are valuable training tools for a variety of purposes, applications, and contexts. This thesis serves to understand how simulations and games have been practically used as a pedagogy for instructing aspiring intelligence professionals and construct an original analytic exercise based on a sample, four-stage framework designed for its development process. The utility of this original exercise is demonstrated as an activity for Penn State’s College of Information Sciences and Technology (IST) Undergraduate Recruitment and Student Engagement programs.
