A Phenomenology of Wargame Figures

After a bit of a philosophical bruising recently, I have started reading a little again, and have run across phenomenology again. Now, phenomenology is not everyone’s cup of tea, and I would certainly not claim to be any sort of expert in the subject, but something caught my eye in an erudite essay about the difference between a Christian icon and an idol.

Now, those of you of a nervous and/or atheist disposition might have stopped reading at the end of the last paragraph, which would be a shame because I promise not to start ranting about theology, but it just happened that the point about images and their representation was contained an essay about Husserl and icons and idols. I do not know any other way of approaching the subject, but there you go.

The point is that there are, according to Husserl (or at least the writer’s interpretation of Husserl, you cannot be too careful here) three constituent objects in an experience of an object (which may not be present – the imagination works as well) which are intertwined by ‘two different constitutive moments’. Now, as ever when reading philosophical gobbledegook I start wondering how this applies to wargaming. The examples given are of art, so it should be straightforward enough.

The first thing is a physical image, in the example think about a painting. The physical object is canvas, paint, brush strokes, a frame, and so on. In wargaming terms this would, I suppose, be a wargame figure, painted and based. It is metal (or plastic), painted with acrylics (often, these days anyway; does anyone still use oil paints or even enamels?), placed on a base that is itself of a certain dimension, possibly textured and painted itself. That seems fine to me – a physical object.

Secondly, there is an image-object. When looking at a painting a lot more than the paint and canvas appears to us – we recognise an image, a picture of something (something else, usually, I suppose it is not infrequent to have a picture of a picture, but even then something appears to us as other than brush strokes and paint). The image-object is not reducible to its constituent paint and canvas, and so on. In terms of our wargaming figure, the image-object is what we see when we observe, say, an Eighteenth Century fusilier or a Sherman tank. We have no access to the original fusilier, but we have representations of the real people who were those and have reproduced them in the figure, in metal, paint, and so on. This image-object is related to the original image but is not reducible to it. In a similar way, we do not have the canvas of Da Vinci’s Leda and the Swan, but we do have a copy of it.

There is then what the image shows to us. A painting of a woman and child is viewed differently when we know something about it. We do not see something resembling a woman holding a child, we see a woman holding a child, in the example, the Madonna and Jesus. Thus in the wargaming example, we see a fusilier of the 13^th Foot (or whatever: I am making this up), not a figure that resembles the original.

So far, I hope, so good. We have an original fusilier of the Eighteenth Century and an image of that. That image is then transferred to a physical object in our world, painted and based as a wargame figure. But we do not see the metal and paint, we see the original, a fusilier in our wargame. The wargame figure resists, somehow, being reduced to a bit of metal and paint. On the other hand, our nice toy solider, with bright colours and varnish, may not really resemble the original muddy, washed-out tunic of a fusilier. This too is termed a resistance: our figure is not the original, now lost to us.

We are not inclined to take are wargame figure to be just a pile of metal and paint. The figure aims at being apprehended as a fusilier, somehow, or at least we, the wargamer, aim at the figure being apprehended as a fusilier, just not an actually existing one at the present time. We perceive a metal object of a certain size and shape, painted in a certain way. But then our imagination kicks in and somehow claims the object as a fusilier.

The image-object is the impression we get when we see a painted wargame figure. The image-subject is the final stage when we recognise it as a fusilier. There is a tension here: we are representing, somewhere along the line, something that does not exist. The original object of our image object does not exist, in that Eighteenth Century fusiliers do not currently exist (if you argue that re-enactors of fusiliers exist, I would agree, but they are still image-objects, not the originals).

There is something of a puzzle here, and the usual word is ‘transcendence’. Now before palpitations set in, I am not suggesting that our wargame figures are gods or even god-like, but that they do represent something beyond themselves, that is, an Eighteenth Century fusilier, not a lump of cast metal painted in a certain way. Even if the scales are different and the animation is absent, we still take the figure as a fusilier, not just a lump, or even an image of a fusilier. We take the figure as a fusilier, even if at another level of consciousness (or whatever) we recognise that this fusilier has attributes that tell us what it is, even though some of them also tell us that it is not that at all.

This works its way up, as well. A bunch of wargame figures represent, somehow, a unit. A load of units give us an army. We operate in a world of image-objects and image subjects, what the things present to us, and what we see them as. And this is even before we get to a phenomenological account of wargame rules….