Mapping My Mind?

Further to the last two blog posts, I suppose it is time to try to assess Yarwood’s paper against my views and experience of wargaming as a hobby. Not that my experience of wargaming is any more valid than anyone else’s, of course, but it is mine, and therefore I can explore it.

Firstly, I have to say I agree with a great deal of what Yarwood has to say. Wargamers are, on the whole, male, well-educated and from some sort of social elite – by which I suppose is meant professionals with a degree of money and leisure time. Guilty as charged. Wargaming also tends to be something of a hobby of words – rules and history books – and so does probably depend on a core, at least, of wargamers who are prepared to do leisure reading. Come to think of it, this could be a reason why it is harder to interest younger people in wargaming generally – leisure reading, vicarious experience in local schools suggests, is not something the present generation of children undertake in any great numbers.

A lot of what Yarwood argues about historical miniature wargaming resonates with some of things I have been trying to say here over the years of the blog’s existence. For example, there is a performative element to playing the game: ‘I charge the guns’ is a distinctly performative element, at least within the game world. Overheard by a bystander ‘I slash you with my broadsword’ sounds a bit alarming, but that is because the bystander is not within the game context. The wargamers (or role players in the latter case) understand perfectly what a performative utterance in the game world is and means, and what is an utterance outside the game world (say ‘I’d love a cup of tea, thank you’). The bystander might not have the cues to tell the difference.

The questions of creating miniature spaces and the distortions inherent in creating models are also coherent with some of the things I have written about here. Thus a model is not the real thing, and cannot be. It has to be selective. The question arises as to what the model selects of reality in order to be a functioning model. Wellington stopped the representation of the Prussians at Waterloo. A model of ranged combat will, almost certainly, neglect the characteristics of musket balls in smoothbore barrels (an interesting thing in itself, at least for early modern rivet counters like myself).

Creation of a miniature world is exactly what we do as a wargamer, and it is possible that Yarwood over-emphasises the disconnect between the original and the wargame. While he does recount a description from a wargame of the Battle of Cambrai, which relates the wargame to the events in 1917, he does emphasise that the wargame world is not the real one. However, it perhaps could be made clearer that there is some relationship between the two. Of course, in much wargaming the relationship is less clear. Many wargames, including my own, are only vaguely related to anything historical. Thus my Abbeys Campaign is based around a highly unlikely historical scenario, a ‘what-if’ that almost certainly would not have happened. My  360 BC campaign, similarly, is perhaps based around the nations and armies what existed at the time, but further than that it does not go. Fuzigore is, of course, an imagi-nation (or rather, an imagi-continent) which has, again, assorted historical armies but they are in a non-historical setting. Nevertheless, there is some sort of mediation of what happens by history. I suppose we have a sliding scale from a recreation of a given battle to something which is a game between ahistorical match ups.

Beyond this, I find in myself the definite inclination, at least recently, to distance my games from the reality of war. There are no casualty figures in the Abbeys Campaign. Shaken markers are blanks. In the Ancients wargames, the markers have casualty figures on them, but I have never been really comfortable with that. Partly I justify this historically and in wargaming terms by suggesting that in battles from ancient to early modern casualties ran, for both sides, at about five per cent of the participants. It was the pursuit phase which caused the casualties on the losing side to mount to around fifteen per cent. This phase is not represented in most wargames; after all, pursuing fleeing troops and chopping them down is not much of a game.

Similarly I have decided to ignore civilians – the Mayor of Whitby came to make his peace with the Spanish. I am also ignoring logistics and the fact that an army, even if it could pay for food and fodder often did not bother and, even if it did, would quickly run through the resources of a given local area. I suspect that most wargames are similar, partly because, while we know that civilians usually suffered in war, we choose to ignore it, but also because it is, again, a fairly boring bit of warfare to be modelled.

As I mentioned last week, I think it would be interesting to evaluate the effects of the different scales in wargaming on miniaturisation. I am a 6 mm gamer, for reasons of space and economy, not because I want to employ massive numbers of toy soldiers on the table. Granted most wargamers use 15 mm and above, but I do wonder what sort of effects, in terms of representation and distortion the different scale have on a game. You can, of course, use the same rule for differing scales, but I would wager a very small amount of money (if a) I had any and b) I were a betting person) that there are some differences, if not in how the game is played then in how it is perceived. But that will have to remain speculation on my part.

So, to summarise, I think Yarwood’s paper is very interesting and significantly captures some aspects of the experience of wargaming. I also think, inevitably, it could be pushed further, but that is the consequence of decent research. I must also look at some of the references and see if they are at all interesting.