A Wargamer of Wealth and Taste

Looking back through the records of this blog it has been going an amazingly long time – who knew I could type so much?) there is a theme which keeps coming around. It is not about history, accuracy, authenticity or anything else which is, or could be, particularly objective. It is about taste.

Taste is, of course, hard to define, hard to pin down and highly personal. What is to my taste is reasonably unlikely to be yours. As, I think, W. C. Fields once said ‘Don’t do to others as you would have them do to you. Their tastes may be different.’

And so to wargaming, achieved much sooner than in the posts of late. I have, no doubt, drivelled on before rather a lot about wargames and taste. I might find a particular sort of wargaming highly acceptable. For example, a game set during the Lebanese civil war, where victory might consist of using a car bomb to assassinate my political and military rivals. That may not be to your taste. Fair enough: you do not have to play.

However, in the tradition of the blog, I have to push things a little further. Is simply refusing to play a sufficient sort of response? Your offense at my game is palpable. My reaction could be deemed to be inappropriate. Is there simply a matter of taste at stake?

I have, I think, mentioned before vaguely, that non-historical and fantasy or science fiction games might be used to explore recent or contemporary issues. In science fiction, for example, some well-known novels, such as Joe Haldane’s ‘The Forever War’ is exploring the effects of Vietnam on the United States and its soldiers. Ultimately, the latter are fighting, more or less, for themselves and each other, not to defend a home society that they can barely recognise at the end.

Similarly, fantasy role playing games could be regarded as being related to their societies and as reactions to those societies. In a world where moral certainties were unravelling, is it so surprising that role-playing games emerged which had distinct categories of good and evil, order and chaos?

Do non-historical historical wargames explore the same themes? The obvious answer is, of course, no. A matchup between medieval French and Aztecs reveals little except an overwhelming desire to have a game.  There is, at least on the surface, no commentary here. If we look a little deeper, we might find themes of colonialism and imperialism, of course, both in terms of the highly trained and armed few against the many, and also in imagining that such a wargame is at all viable anyway.

However, non-historical games, as role playing and science fiction, can be ‘based on’ a historical original. Then the resonances become, perhaps, a little more interesting. Plays, for example, can be ‘updated’. Sometimes it misfires horribly. But sometimes the resonances can work. How would Richard III work updated to the Brexit campaign? What resonances could we find between the election of Mr Trump and Macbeth?

We can, naturally, if we look hard enough, find a resonance between today’s politics and any particular part of the past. The past is a bit like that; we can read bits of the contemporary scene into it, and gain some sort of insight, understanding or, at least, parallel with it. Similarly, the reason that Shakespeare can be updated is that classics are like that. We can read and re-read them and find further resonance with our own situation.

Part of the issue is, of course, that anyone can do it. So long as the past is not a total fabrication, resonances between, say, Agincourt and Brexit can be found on both sides. One could emphasise the plucky English against the might of the European hordes of faceless bureaucrats, one the fact that Henry V and Katherine Valois got it together in the end. Of course, you could go further and note that their son was a lunatic, but that might be pushing the resonances a little far.

As with the classics, and with history, so too with wargaming. I could wargame Agincourt. Which side would you choose? The plucky Brits (I mean English, of course, and Welsh, but not the Scots, nor the Irish – resonances continue). Why would you choose that side? Are you on the side of Brussels – the European integration project? The English independence movement? Does that even inform your choice consciously?

So too with other games of course. What leads people to want to wargame the army of Nazi Germany? What sorts of motives lurk beneath those who push the SS, in their smart black uniforms around the table? I, for one, really do not know. I cannot say that it is strictly, in my view, tasteless, although it is certainly not something that floats my wargame boat. After all, the SS existed and fought. History, as with nature, cannot be gainsaid.

But there seems to be a stop sign lurking somewhere near here. A few bases of SS on the table is one thing. Having nothing but SS units is another. A group of SS re-enactors seems beyond the pale entirely. We all have, I suppose, our own lines in the sand, but there is some broad agreement as to what is acceptable and what is not. A leaflet describing the battle of Agincourt is fine. One including comment on the current turmoil in the European project might raise a few eyebrows.

Those of you who are still awake might notice the title of this piece. If you have really imbibed your coffee you might note the allusion. And so, I think, the bottom line possibly emerges. Wargaming is a hobby of personal involvement. I do things – open fire with the grand battery, order the troops over the top, turn towards the enemy and damn the torpedoes. As a commander of World War Two German armies invading, say, Russia, am I demonstrating ‘sympathy with the devil’?