Calling All Gamers: Valens Games Reimagination of Gaming for a World With LLM, AI, and Quantum Computing – HS Today

I recently had the pleasure of interviewing Valens Global’s founder and former CEO Daveed Gartenstein-Ross about his recent move from Valens Global to Valens Games CEO.  

Gartenstein-Ross, an editorial board member of HSToday, describes Valens Games as a “serious games company that has a very different approach to games and simulations than you’ve seen before.” 

Daveed Gartenstein-Ross is a scholar, author, practitioner, and entrepreneur who is the founder and previous CEO of Valens Global. Gartenstein-Ross’s previous positions include senior advisor to the director of the U.S. Department of Homeland Security’s Office for Community Partnerships; fellow with Google’s think tank Jigsaw; faculty positions at Carnegie Mellon University, Duke University, and Georgetown University, among others; and senior fellow at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies. 

In our chat, we delved deeper into what’s next for Valens Games and for him, and how he sees gaming developing in both the homeland security landscape as well as government and private industry as a whole. We also covered key challenges and opportunities anticipated in the gaming industry in the future. 

HSToday: What inspired this move between companies, and what do you hope to achieve as the CEO of Valens Games? 

Gartenstein-Ross: Valens Global was designed in part as an incubator. It has several distinct practice groups, and so the idea of having a company that spins off was baked into the DNA of Valens Global when I founded it.  

So what inspired this move? Well, part of it is that Valens Global is a mature company at this point – it’s 10 years old and has done some really impressive work that I’m proud of. It has an extraordinary team and it has an extraordinary person who took over as the next CEO – Derek Jones. Valens Global has a broad mission, and a lot of different capabilities that add value to one another.

Valens Games, in contrast, is built around a single set of ideas that are truly important to me at present., The decision to leave Valens Global is based on the fact that it’s a great organization that I get to leave in great hands and focus my time on exactly what I want to do. 

HSToday: Valens Games is described as a “serious games” company with a unique approach. Can you elaborate on what sets your gaming and simulation approach apart from others in the industry? 

Gartenstein-Ross: Valens Games does something very different in what we can call the “war gaming space”.
The two terms that are used to define the space are war games or serious games. 

Whatever you call it, the idea is that these are games that are trying to yield some insight into the world, whether it’s being used for educational purposes, or training purposes, or analysis, or policy formation. The goal behind the game is to engage the players and provide insights that mirror the real world. 

Valens Games not only designs strategic-level games with intense media environments, but it makes a set of investments that I think is uniquely implemented in the space that we’re in. We’ve made significant investments in what we call narrative shaping – that is, we have very well-built worlds. We have a mix of real people that appear in our games and also fictional characters with very carefully built characters that represent the kinds of people that one will encounter, world leaders or other influencers in the environment in which they function. And there’s a narrative arc, a storytelling arc to most of our games. And that’s in part because we, as humans, are storytelling creatures. 

So there’s a set of investments that make this a unique way of doing games at this point. We believe that our approach is best suited to the world that we’re living in. 

HSToday: How do you see the role of gaming evolving in homeland security and across government and academia as a whole? 

Gartenstein-Ross: The number one thing that I see is gaming being used more extensively for Homeland Security workforce development. We are currently working on a study funded by NCITE, DHS’s center of excellence at the University of Nebraska, looking at the impact of games on DHS workforce development. 

I think that the reason why games are positive for workforce training development is relatively clear, in that games are tactile and immersive. In a well-built game such as the games that we design, multiple factors influence one another. We try to model complexity in our games. When you’re just in a classroom discussion, it may be hard to understand how different factors fit with one another. There are a lot of things that one might think they understand in a classroom conversation focused on theory, but when it comes to living it or owning an issue, there’s a huge gulf. Games are designed to bridge that understanding gap. 

In addition, you can already see the demand signals within the U.S. Government. We’ve run our games in places ranging from the DoD to the Department of State’s Foreign Service Institute to the Global Counterterrorism Forum, among others. 

As we compare games to 21st century needs, and to other modes of education and training and understanding the world, their power is clear. Adoption will be widespread. 

HSToday: Finally, looking forward, what are the key challenges and opportunities you anticipate in the gaming industry, and how does Valens Games plan to navigate them? 

Gartenstein-Ross: The biggest opportunity I see is with the massive breakthroughs in large language models. There is now an opportunity to both digitize and incorporate Artificial Intelligence in areas that would have been difficult previously. 

First and foremost, we believe a platform that allows a rapid build of a customized game will be valuable across multiple segments. We have already begun demo–ing the Providence game design platform. The platform engages users with a series of questions—just as Eleanor Ross (the lead game designer at Valens Games) or I would do in a consultation. From there, Providence automatically generates a full-fledged, custom game tailored to their unique needs. No prior experience or deep expertise is required. This product represents an enormous leap forward in making simulations and experiential learning accessible to everyone.  

Second, the role of AI in adjudication is extremely important, but also quite nascent. In our games, we incorporate open-ended moves where you can touch virtually any aspect of the game world – they’re not bounded moves. Two years ago, this would have been extremely difficult to get AI to adjudicate. 

But now large language models have advanced to the point that if you’re training them right and putting in place proper constraints within the game world, you can have strategic games with open-ended moves and strong AI-driven adjudication of those moves. Quantum computing may in the future further drive capabilities, speed, and scale in that regard. Quality games can be developed more rapidly than ever. Properly understood, this is great news for game designers.

The potential of LLMs and other advances in computing to reshape the gaming experience couldn’t be clearer. In that regard, Valens Games is on the bleeding edge of what is possible.