Players can also negotiate trades and agreements with other players.Ī demo of the online version of SIGNAL. Players have the opportunity to “signal” their intent to take actions such as building civilian and military infrastructure or attacking an opponent with conventional, cyber or nuclear weapons. On its surface, SIGNAL looks like many other military strategy board games: Each online player represents one of three hypothetical countries, and the goal of the game is to maintain territorial integrity while amassing more resources and infrastructure than your opponents. “The more we can understand that, the better we can inform policymakers on possible options for reducing the risk that those weapons pose to the world.” “What we’re working toward is being able to better understand how different force structures, like what types of weapons you have in your arsenal, might change how people act in a crisis,” said Bethany Goldblum, a researcher in UC Berkeley’s Department of Nuclear Engineering.

Sandia National Laboratories and Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory are partners in the effort providing subject matter expertise and student mentoring. SIGNAL, made possible by a grant to UC Berkeley researchers from the Carnegie Corporation of New York, was designed to explore how various weapons capabilities, such as low-yield, high precision nuclear weapons, may affect the behavior of different actors in an escalating global conflict.

Love military strategy games like Risk and Diplomacy? Try SIGNAL, a new online game that lets you satisfy your appetite for virtual global domination while simultaneously helping researchers understand the risks of real-world nuclear conflict.

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