The Score

I have been reading, very slowly (due to other commitments), The Score, by C Thi Nguyen. It is certainly worthy of attention as a wargamer, let alone as a citizen of the 21st-century world. If you would like a bit of an introduction, Nguyen was on BBC Radio 4’s Start the Week program a bit ago, and you can still listen to it here.

Wargaming is not Nguyen’s main point in writing the book, of course. The main aim is how our lives are taken over and, ultimately, controlled by numbers, usually imposed upon us by parties beyond our control. Our values, he maintains, are captured by these. For example, Facebook is dominated by how many ‘likes’ you get, and how many ‘followers’ you can claim. Instead of using it as a medium for communicating with other people, you slowly become captured by the numbers, and start writing posts which will maximise your number of likes, keep and grow your camp of followers, and so on.

This value capture works more seriously (perhaps) in other areas of life. For example, the assessment of schools is (still) given by a single word or phrase in England, despite its devastating potential. As Nyugren observes, this sort of thing makes, in principle, it easy to compare schools. Thus, as a parent, you choose the school for your child that comes with the highest rank. The rank, of course, abstracts from all the context of a particular school. It might, for example, be a wonderful school for a certain sort of urban child who, simply, would not fit into a normal academic environment. But that context is ignored.

Nguyen uses a lot of examples from games. He observes that games hold a sort of middle ground in our lives. They have rules, scores, and assessments, but they also allow us to be creative. A simple example is of soccer. The rule is (among others, of course) that you cannot touch the ball. This forces you to do other things, to get creative with feet and head. The rules force creativity.

Nguyen does not specifically address wargaming, but he does say some things about role-playing games. He observes, for example, that actually, role-playing games, or rather the players, need rules of some description. Apparently, if the players are left rule-less, the stories become staid and repetitive. It is the dice rolling, the attempt to make a score, which leads to the storytelling. The failure to achieve something forces us into creativity, by making account for the unexpected.

I do not think it is too much of a stretch to apply this to historical wargaming. We can, if we so desire, re-fight Waterloo every week, but probably, most of us would eventually find that a bit boring. That might be so even if the results, as a consequence of dice rolling, would be different each time, at least slightly. But we can start imagining the what-ifs. ‘What if Ney had not gone so far?’ ‘What if Hougomont had held out less long?’ ‘What if the Prussians were delayed?’ Some of these things might give us greater insight into the outcome, but would we still be re-fighting Waterloo?

By giving us different outcomes within an overall envelope of possibility, our imagination and creativity are put to the test. Perhaps it is this that we risk outsourcing to artificial intelligence if we start using it to create our scenarios and campaigns. Nguyen observes, as do other commentators, that we are heading in a direction that leads to us outsourcing almost all our decision-making. This is done by reducing our choices, essentially, to numbers, even if they are probabilities in a large language model, and relying on the computer to decide for us.

Of course, this is what we do when we write rules. In my case, I can ponder how many points in combat a charging cavalry unit should get compared to, for example, a base of dispersed skirmishers. We abstract away the details of all the encounters we are aware of between such troops and come up with an answer. Then, through various factors,, such as terrain, training, and morale, we add context back in. That is pretty much how the wargaming world works, I think, whatever rules and mechanisms we might use.

The scoring system in a game is, however, important. Nguyen observes that a lot of game designers start with the scoring system. This conditions the players, and what they can and choose to do in order to win, whatever winning might mean (he has some interesting examples). I have encountered this in the difference between one-off and campaign games. In the latter, keeping your force in being might be more important, a bigger win, than dying gloriously but vainly on the battlefield. Sometimes, in my campaign games, it is simply better to march away. What it means to ‘win’ has changed.

Incidentally, on that matter, I have just been reading an interesting article in History Today on the run-up to the disaster (for the Crusaders) of the Horns of Hattin. A few years earlier, they had gathered a large force and seen Saladin off without a battle. But this was regarded as cowardice. So in a similar situation, an advance to battle was ordered. We know how well that worked, but the point here is that in real life, the goal was altered, and not being thought a coward was placed above winning.

The above might be a little less than coherent as an argument. My excuse is that it is a very rich book and I am only halfway through it. But it has made me think about what sort of goals we set in wargames, and how these affect the ways that we might play the game. Indeed, the nations in 1600-Something do have strategic aims which, on occasion, do suggest courses of action. So the French, for example, want to break the Spanish Road, and are piling up forces on the frontier to that end. But each individual battle is directed to attempting to obtain that strategic outcome, rather than just destroying the enemy.

A fair bit to ponder then, even leaving aside the complaints about how big businesses and government go about evaluating everything and controlling outcomes. I shall, quite probably, return to the subject.