Fake Wargaming

The world is full of fake at the moment. In particular, we have the phenomenon of ‘fake news’. We can, of course, argue that fake news is nothing new.  Disinformation has been planted as news at all times and everywhere since Adam was a lad. After all, the serpent told Eve that she would not die as God had said if she at the apple. Either God or the serpent had planted fake news; it is a bit moot as to which it was.

Nevertheless, what is, I suppose, new about the modern obsession with fake news is the speed at which it propagates. A lie, after all, can be halfway around the world before the truth has got its boots on. It is very, very hard to persuade people, who may not wish to be persuaded, that their current favourite bit of prejudice masquerading as news is false. I am sure that you can think of lots of examples of this, and I am not particularly keen on sullying the reputation of this blog (such as it is) by repeating any of them here.

The point is that most human activity proceeds by belief. We believe, to a certain extent, what we are told about something. We believe, for example, that the Battle of Britain was won by the ‘few’ who fought off the might of the Luftwaffe.  We might believe this on the basis that Churchill told us so, and that he was in a position to know. In some terms, of course, Churchill was right. But he did not have full information about the state of the Luftwaffe, and could not know that actually the RAF outnumbered it. But the point is that the picture painted is one of the few nobly defending civilisation against the foe. We all like to be on the side of the heroes, after all.

Belief is not just to be found in politics and its rhetoric. Belief is found in spades in science. I do not repeat all the experiments that have been performed over history, even those that pertain to my particular specialism. If I did, and everyone else did, scientific progress would stop. We rely on testimony. Specifically, we rely on a specific sort of rhetoric, the journal article, which reports methods and results. Occasionally, such reports are found to be inaccurate, wanting, and not backed up by further work. In such cases the results are checked, the experiments repeated, retractions and corrections issued. But mostly, scientists believe other scientists.

How does this play out in wargaming? Indeed, is there such a thing as fake wargaming, or, for the matter of that, is there such a thing as authentic wargaming? I think a few distinctions are necessary, however. Firstly, by ‘authentic’ I do not mean something like ‘accurate historical wargame’. We all know that really there is no such thing, A wargame can perfectly well be authentic, in the sense I am meaning, while having little or no bearing on real life as we know it, or history as we accept it. What I mean here is that a wargame is authentic as a wargame, not that it is authentic as a historical display, for example.

Now, it may well be that I am barking up the wrong tree here. A wargame is just a wargame, a bit of an expression of a hobby. It really does not need an assessment of authenticity. It is just a thing that we can treat as we like.

That may well be true, of course, but I think we do worry about authenticity in many walks of life. Politicians, for example, who are found to have paid relatives for work that was not done have doubt cast over their fitness for public office.  Aristotle argued, reasonably convincingly that our choices become habits and our habits carry over from one thing to another. A habit of being inauthentic in wargaming may carry over into inauthenticity in other areas.

On the other hand, I doubt if inauthentic wargamers would get very far in the hobby. As a teenager I did have some doubts about some of my wargaming colleagues, who seemed always to have the right roll at the right time. The answer was, of course, to take away their calculators with random number generators and to get them to roll the dice across the table. The further answer was to go and play with someone else.

But I think there are deeper or more subtle forces at play here. We all know, I dare say, reputable sets of wargame rules that include such things as ‘+3 if an English crew’. Now, at one level, we can argue that this represents the better seamanship and level of training of English (or, in the Napoleonic Wars, Royal Navy) ships. We can argue that it is entirely fair, mostly by pointing to the fact that the wargames come out with the right answer – i.e. that the English win. That is, in some senses, an empirical result that is acceptable, but it does not really wash that well, I think. The ‘national characteristic’ is a fix, a fudge, and thus can stand accused of being fake.

The answer, in this case, is to dig a bit deeper and assign value to training and experience. This, of course, has the effect of making our rule, potentially, more complex, or at least making the pre-game set up more difficult. Nevertheless, in terms of something authentic it is probably worth it. We arrive at a result where, say, RN crews are trained at the same level as French, but have more experience because of the months spent on blockade duties. We thus have embedded in our rule set the rational explanation for a given result, rather than a claim that this nation is inherently better than that nation.

While fake wargaming, then, might be something of a misnomer, I think that authentic wargaming, in the sense of a game and set of rules that give a reasonable and rational account of a game, is an important concept that, perhaps, we do not acknowledge readily enough.