Processes, Outcomes and Campaigns

 You might be relieved to know that I have just finished C. Thi Nguyen’s The Score, and a very interesting read it is too, as witnessed by the fact that this is the third post on the subject. There is a lot to ponder here about the world, and even about how I look at my blog. Nguyen’s main target is the reduction of most of our world to easily comprehended metrics. So, for example, when looking for a car, I can decide that, for example, acceleration from 0 – 60 MPH is the most important aspect of a vehicle, and rank my choice by that. I can focus on the single metric because someone has measured it.

But not all of life is measurable and, certainly from a point of view of efficiency, not all of life conforms to creating and meeting the perfect metric. Nguyen’s measure of this is play. When we play, we engage in a process, rather than an outcome. If we play, say, a card game with our partner, we may well try to win, but that is not the point. The aim is, usually, to have fun along the way. Yes, there are occasional people for whom winning is everything. The secret is to avoid them.

Nguyen’s main example of play is tabletop role-playing games. These are rules-bound, at least to some extent, but otherwise creative and free-flowing. The rules give the spur to creativity. A bad roll needs an explanation in the narrative of the game. We have to create one. In this, there are no winners as such, although there can be losers – the dead player characters, for example. But even that is not really an inhibition to the play. The narrative flexes to absorb the loss and the game moves on.

I have written before about narrative in wargames, both here and in that book. I still think it is probably one of the most important and overlooked aspects of wargaming, but I do not intend to try to defend that view here. But the point is that creating the narrative is part of the process of wargaming. After all, I could set the troops up on the table and roll a dice to decide who won. But the reason I do not do that is an interest in the narrative, the process, of how one side won or lost.

This links back to the rules giving a spur to creativity. As recently happened, a perfectly good cavalry attack on a baggage train was repulsed. I had to adapt my narrative of the action to accommodate this unexpected result. The baggage train incident became a heroic defence by the camp followers. Actually, the winner or loser of the action became a little submerged by this aspect.

Pulling back the focus a bit, I could say the same about my 1600-Something campaign. In my experience, your campaign is going well when the system starts producing results you do not expect, in ways which are perfectly understandable, or at least, in terms of the narrative, explainable. The 1600 – Something campaign is entirely run by dice and playing card draws. Aside from setting the system up initially, I am doing my best to simply let it run. The result is a very human drama of failure, unexpected success, and occasional trauma. But it all fits into an overall arc of a narrative, which I can adjust to accommodate the ‘facts’ of the game.

You might well say, ‘that is all very well, but what is the aim?’ A good question, but there is no overall aim. The actors in the campaign have their own strategic imperatives, such as holding or breaking the Spanish Road from Italy to the Low Countries, or, simply, surviving as an entity in the game. But there is no overall aim, no point at which I can say ‘This side has won.’ In this, the process is everything.

Granted, there are smaller aims. As noted, the countries have their own strategic goals. The overarching aim is to have wargames, preferably connected in some way to each other. But as in real life, no-one is really going to win. All I will have at the end of it are some blog posts, a scrappy map of Eurasia with lots of pin-holes in it, and some happy memories of wargames played.

I have no doubt that my way of wargaming is not to everyone’s taste. I do not like the process of painting; I only paint because the Estimable Mrs P. has, and imposes, the ‘no grey armies’ rule. Other wargamers, to judge by their blog posts, take a great deal of pleasure in painting soldiers. That is a positive part of the process to them. To be honest, for me, painted figures is the desired outcome. The process is not fun for me.

Hence, there is no ‘right way’ of wargaming. And that is part of the fun. At the end of the book Nguyen describes the Boardgame Geek website. It has scores for the games, but they are not really the point, at least, not in the way that the score is the point on Amazon. There is a lot of more nuanced comment on the site, and the score is just a gateway towards accessing that. The point is that a good game is a good game from someone’s point of view, which might be playing with a ten-year-old, or simulating Stalingrad in real time. Good is subjective in this sense.

As with board games, so with wargames, I imagine. It is quite possible people are totally bored with my campaign. So be it. I think it's fun. It is possible that I am very impressed when someone shows pictures of exquisitely painted medieval knights (say). But I know that that is not for me. Different parts of the process give different people pleasure. And that is how it should be.

Which might bring me to the number of views that this blog gets, or the number of followers. I could worry that I do not have as many followers as the next blog, or that this or that post gets fewer views than another. But to adjust my writing to get increased numbers of hits is to be what Nguyen describes as ‘value captured’. What becomes important is the number. And I do not want that to happen, especially as most of the hits on the blog are by ‘bots presumably stealing my intellectual property.

But none of that is going to stop me blogging, or wargaming in my own way. And, sometime, I will probably write the rules for 1600-Something up properly, so that, if there is a like-minded person out there, they can see what is going on under the bonnet.