Originally posted on 8 August 2018
It takes a certain kind of individual to stand in front of an audience at America’s top military university and make a case for rationality being overrated. But this is precisely what Anja van der Hulst did on a recent trip to the National Defense University in Washington DC.
A Senior Consultant Conflict Gaming at the Netherlands Organisation for Applied Scientific Research (TNO), Van der Hulst used her talk in front of a gathering of high-profile military professionals to expand on what she believes is an increasingly important “triangle” in the field of conflict gaming. “There are three crucial things that we are adding to the wargame field – and these are the personality of the leadership, emotions and the non-negotiable beliefs of people in a conflict and how these affect behaviour and may drag those involved in conflict out of strategic thinking.” In a field where wargaming predominantly takes the form of playing out war (complete with amassed tanks and hours of fighting), this trio of intangibles is a bold addition to the terrain. But for Van der Hulst, it’s a powerful example of what she called “the added value of women in my field”.
Van der Hulst got into serious game designing totally unplanned (“it’s the story of my life,” she says of this unexpected turn). Having quite quickly realised that she wasn’t cut out to follow in the long line of school teachers in her family, she graduated from the University of Twente with a MSc in Educational/Instructional Technology in 1990. Determined to get directly into the real working world, it wasn’t only after she’d applied for her “dream job” in using Artificial Intelligence in Education that she was told it had to take the form of a PhD. Like all she confronts, Van der Hulst thought “well then, there shall be a PhD” even though she’d not wanted to study further at that time.
Positive attitude to unplanned opportunities
This positive attitude to unplanned opportunities was the same when a vacancy came up at TNO’s defense lab, in the field of learning with simulation. Van der Hulst says that joining the male-dominated environment of TNO, first a scientist and then a project manager, wasn’t always easy. She was the second woman in a group of 140 techies, in a position where the main clients were military men. “My group at TNO were accepting of the fact that I was a woman but outside of that small group, I could visibly see people wondering if I would be any good precisely because I was a woman. In some ways it was easier working with the military itself where rank matters, when they would realise that I was a doctor, my credentials were established.
Van der Hulst says she was grateful for having worked in a more gender-balanced environment while doing her PhD and so was older - 28 - when she joined TNO. “I was able to build my confidence while working towards my PhD and that was valuable when I started working at the defense lab,” she recalls. After five years, she left to start her own company, Cognitive Tools, but was soon contracting back to TNO, eventually rejoining as a Senior Scientist Gaming in 2012.
Coping skills gained in working in a male-orientated environment
Over the past few years, Van der Hulst has gained a reputation as one of the most prominent serious games exponents in using games to deal with hybrid threats. In recent months, as part of TNO’s newly-established Hybrid Strategies Lab (HSLab), she’s played various conflict scenarios at universities in Canada and the US.
It’s a highly-charged working environment that gives van der Hulst unique insight for her previous teaching of game studies at the University of Amsterdam. Here she faced the new challenge of being the ‘old’ person in an environment of young students who eat, breathe and dream current gaming. “I quickly learnt to use the coping skills that I’ve gained over years of working in a very male orientated environment in my role as a teacher. I had to learn these skills the hard way, because I had no-one coaching or mentoring me. This meant figuring out how to deal with my emotions in a workplace where I was told to keep these hidden because my colleagues didn’t know how to handle them. These real-life scenarios taught me a lot.”
Inspiring young girls to enter technology field – especially gaming
Although the gender balance and sensitivity of men to gender issues is changing in the conflict gaming and simulation field, van der Hulst says “we’re not out of the woods”. She hopes that inspiring more young girls to enter technology, and in particular gaming, will help change that toward true inclusiveness “although probably not in my working lifetime”. How can that be achieved? “That’s easy. We have to start much younger. When girls are eight or nine they are totally adventurous and if you give them stuff to program or figure out, they love it. They don’t have that preconception that they can’t do it because they are girls. I also think encouraging more playing of real-time strategy games is important, to train them for strategic thinking in a fun way. These games are much more gender neutral and can be played by parents together with their children.”
What if Women Ruled the World?
Van der Hulst says the most transformative moment for her in the past year was her November 2017 involvement in a real-life strategy game – albeit one played out on a Dr Strangelove-inspired stage set. She was part of the team of experts advising the all-female superpower government in Yael Bartana’s play,What if Women Ruled the World?, working with the likes of Birgitta Jónsdóttir, an Icelandic politician, anarchist, poet, and activist, and Lone Træholt, Denmark's first female general.
As she wrote at the time, “Spending two days debating with exceptionally bright experts, being forced to start from a fairly uncomfortable perspective of unilateral disarmament and to actually play the scenario out in the night on stage was quite some experience, not to say a transformative one.”
In the end Van der Hulst’s participation in the play, which was staged at Aarhus, European Capital of Culture 2017, led to a profound change in her thinking: “In war gaming, we try to come up with smart, creative strategies, but in my experience, we never really change the basic premises. Evidently, I received a fair amount of comments stating this ‘women ruling’ would be ‘crap’, as would be the idea of unilateral disarmament. Yet, it fundamentally changed my way of thinking and it still does. Shouldn’t we be far more innovative in our conflict games by challenging our basic assumptions as well as biases. Rather than just riding the waves of the growing international tensions, shouldn’t we try to create strategies that actually allow the release of some of those tensions?”