Telling stories: A metagame description of a conflict

This paper describes the use of metagame analysis to describe and explore a conflict situation. The analysis was carried out by the author, who was associated with one of the parties in the conflict, for his own benefit. A full description of the analysis is provided. A particular characteristic of the situation was that it was not possible to specify preferences for scenarios for any of the actors with a reasonable degree of confidence. This made the standard matagame analysis approach unworkable, and an alternative approach, involving the development of stories describing a variety of possible future events, was used instead.