Gaming's Next Mission: Revolutionizing Military Strategy

AI-Powered Political and Military Simulations Are Changing How We Think About Modern Warfare

We’re excited to announce that we’re building Mr. President, a political simulator. Last October, the House Committee on Oversight and Accountability published a report titled, “CCP Political Warfare: Federal Agencies Urgently Need a Government-Wide Strategy.” The report states that, “The CCP’s fight against the United States relies on its deployment of unrestricted warfare and political warfare.”

In this era of Great Power Competition, the ability to simulate complex political and military strategies in synthetic environments has become increasingly vital. Traditional wargaming approaches, primarily centered around analog, human-driven tabletop exercises, struggle to keep pace with modern warfare that operates at machine speed.

The future of military strategy analysis lies in simulation-based wargaming powered by artificial intelligence. Large Language Models (LLMs) have unlocked unprecedented capabilities in simulating human behavior. Rather than relying on human assumptions about unit behaviors, we can now create AI agents that accurately simulate individual military occupational specialties (like 11B) and, collectively, these agents can simulate mission-essential tasks with remarkable realism.

The video game industry has emerged as the leading frontier for both researching and implementing AI agent technology. In 2023, Stanford researchers created 25 agents that interacted with one another in an interactive sandbox environment inspired by The Sims. Today, many large game studios have applied this research to create believable bots in their games to reduce spend on skyrocketing user acquisition costs. One game studio showed us that 60-80% of their users are bots, which significantly boosts their bottom line.

Mr. President represents the next step in this evolution, bringing these technological advances to the critical domain of political and military strategy simulation. By combining cutting-edge AI systems with detailed political modeling, we're creating a platform that will enable decision-makers to better understand and prepare for the challenges of modern geopolitical competition. Mr. President is powered by a robust simulation library. This architecture allows us to run simulations “headless,” meaning they don’t need the full game engine to run. As a result, an AI agent can launch hundreds of simulations in parallel, collecting valuable data on the political outcomes of specific decisions.

Mr. President: The American Presidency 2000-2020 was created and designed by Gene Billingsley, the co-founder and CEO of GMT Games, the leading commercial wargame publisher. GMT has published wargames for 35 years; their games range from deep simulations with hundreds of parameters, such as their Next War: Taiwan, to accessible “entry level” games like Commands and Colors. We’ve recruited a team of experienced AAA developers that brings a powerful combination of success in game development and enthusiasm for history to the project.

First is Ananda Gupta, of Twilight Struggle, Imperial Struggle, and Teamfight Tactics fame. Twilight Struggle (GMT Games), is a board game about the Cold War; it has won six awards and held the #1 spot on Boardgamegeek.com for five years, and in 2024 it was inducted into the GAMA Hall of Fame. Imperial Struggle, the spiritual successor to Twilight Struggle, won the Golden Geek award for Best Wargame of 2020. Ananda is Exia’s game designer focused on translating the tabletop game to a digital experience. We’re thankful that Ananda introduced us to Gene to make this all happen.

Next up is Aaron Rutledge, an Experience Designer from League of Legends, Call of Duty, and Apex Legends. Designing the interaction, animations and UI systems are crucial to evoke the playing the board game’s feel and keeping the player squarely in the President’s chair, even as they eliminate piece management and rules lookup.

Joshua Balcaceres is our Art Director. He has a 27-year Art career in Film, Games, and VFX. He has worked for Industrial Light & Magic, 2K, EA, Ubisoft, Disney Imagineering, Obsidian and others studios. In his spare time, he’s a published author, painter, faculty member for the Art Institute, and more. Connor Walsh is leading game engineering. He’s spent the last 8 years at Riot working on VALORANT and an unannounced title.

To learn more about how we can integrate military and/or political simulations into your project, please reach out to contact@exialabs.com.