ASC: A Proposed Architecture for Computing a Social Capital Gaming Metric

Serious Gaming is an environment that has been turned into a multi-national recovery team training environment of the future. Gaming is a comprehensive, cost-effective format for creating a situational and sociocultural understanding among a multinational team interacting with a disgruntled, contested host nation (H ) population that may or may not be cooperative during SSTR (Safety, Stability, Transition, and Reconstruction) efforts. Persuading contested populations is often accomplished by the use of financial and/or social capital, or some other stratagem used to change behaviors of the local population in favor of supporting SSTR efforts. A tool for computing the value of actions to produce minimal negative population effects needed to train these teams in SSTR operations during serious gaming is discussed. The ASC (Architecture for Social Capital) metric is based on the ldquosociocultural perspectiverdquo of the congruence between the value of accumulated social capital given the perception of the effects of courses selected to modify population behaviors and the tasks involved in fulfilling the various groupspsila intentions.