Historical Accuracy

What do we mean, as wargamers, by the term ‘historical accuracy’? It is an expression that you hear bandied about quite frequently, so there must be some common understanding of it, but I’ve never been quite sure what it signifies.

Perhaps it is just me, and the rest of the wargaming world will laugh at me because I don’t know. But maybe it is simply because we don’t examine the basis of what we talk about in much detail. Or, possibly, I’ve been infected by the ‘turn to language’ in modern and postmodern philosophy and I’m now so sceptical of language use that I can hardly speak.

Wittgenstein taught that meaning is given by use. So how do we use ‘historical accuracy’? Generally, I suppose the usage is: ‘This is historically accurate’, or ‘That is not historically accurate’, where this or that may be rule sets, miniature figures or whatever. The hidden parts of these sentences (I hope) contain qualifiers, such as ‘in my opinion’. It is here that I think we start to have a few problems.

History, as is well known, is a matter of interpretation. We only need to look at the wrangles going on between holocaust deniers and everyone else to see that people can interpret history in very different ways, even in defiance of the evidence. Is military history, and specifically the history of individual battles open to the same interpretation? I would say that probably it is.

Take, for example, the Spanish Armada. We all know the history there, the invincible armada sails up the Channel, is beaten by the plucky Royal Navy and blown away by a storm. Is this correct? Is this a matter of interpretation? In order to ensure that Drake et al win, do we have to incorporate ‘+2 if English’ into our rules? Don’t laugh; I’ve seen it in an Armada related rule set.

Another possibility is that the Armada brushed past the RN and moored as planned, waiting for Parma’s army to embark. The fact that it couldn’t showed a flaw in Spanish planning and communication, rather than anything else. Even after the fireship attack at Gravelines, the English managed to do only a fairly small amount of damage, and were forced to shadow the reforming armada into the North Sea with little chance of stopping them, until the wind blew and they were scattered.

Which account is right? A lot of your reaction to that question might depend on your education, knowledge of the period, nationality and so on. When I was a lad, the first interpretation was widespread. The second is more recent, deriving from archaeological work on Spanish wrecks and research work in Spanish archives. The question ‘which is right?’ degenerates into ‘which do I prefer?’ In terms of historical accuracy there is no absolute answer as to which is right, at least for the individual. The facts are a matter of public knowledge. What they mean is a different thing.

So then, historical accuracy is a function of our interpretation of battle accounts, which is in turn moderated by academic history. Unfortunately, academic history ignores battles, on the whole, and so battle history is left to enthusiastic amateurs and some professional historians with an eye to the main chance (of selling books, mainly). That isn’t to say that some of this stuff is not very good and useful, but wargamers delve into areas which historians don’t, and want answers that history cannot give.

The upshot of this is that wargamers rely on some venerable accounts of battles, by such luminaries as Sir Charles Oman, A. H. Burne and Peter Young. There is nothing wrong with this, of course. All of these authors were careful, read the evidence and so on. But they supply interpretations based on their time, knowledge, outlook and culture, which may have moved on.

So what do I mean by historical accuracy? When I started ECW wargaming, I meant that the miniatures laid out on the table looked like those contemporary prints, such as the one of Naseby, or it looked like the Sealed Knot re-enactments that I saw, or Brig. Young’s diagrams of Edgehill. Was this ‘accurate’? Almost certainly not: the prints were highly stylised and probably showed far too many pikes in the infantry, for example; the Sealed Knot were not trying to kill each other; and it is unlikely that our neat diagrams of battles with arrows and phases were ever realised in reality. My historical accuracy of the ECW was not much like the reality, and was, for me, based on George Gush’s Airfix guide to the ECW.

So the next time you think ‘Gosh, that isn’t accurate’ pause again and ponder “What exactly do I mean by that?” You might find, like me, that upon analysis, you don’t mean very much except your own assumptions.

Wargames Rules and Philosophy

I have long considered that there must be some philosophical or ethical problems associated with wargaming, ever since I had the misfortune to do some philosophy courses a few years ago. I have not, however, allotted a great deal of brainpower to working out what these issues may be. After all, wargaming is a hobby, a leisure activity, not something which is supposed to give you serious brain strain, of the sort normally associated with philosophising about anything.

Recently, however, I’ve revisited these thoughts. Ethical considerations I might come back to later, but my wargaming philosophy, or at least thinking about how I’ve been writing wargame rules, has moved on a bit.

I think the catalyst for this was a talk I went to by a philosopher of science called Nancy Cartwright. This was actually at a conference about physics, but her ideas are more widely applicable. As she now a professor at the London School of Economics, this is probably just as well. Anyway, her two books of interest are “How the Laws of Physics Lie” and “The Dappled World”.

The key idea Cartwright has is that, in physics, we only get answers to questions, and hence general laws of physics, when we set things up in a certain way, called an ‘experiment’. The law we derive from this tells us only about the conditions within the experiment, not in the general, wider, world. In this way, Cartwright claims, the laws of physics lie, because they make (or are used to claim) universality, for which we have not a shred of evidence.

Whether we agree with Cartwright or not, I think the concept has applicability to writing wargame rules, as we are doing exactly the same as she argues scientists do. We have a small number of battles and incidents. We extrapolate them to be general rules for all of warfare of a period, and if those rules do not behave as the incidents did in reported history, then we modify them until they do.

We could also admit that we do rather worse then science, as at least scientific experiments are supposed to be repeatable, in the way that battles are not.

So we land up with a set of generalised laws, derived from historical accounts of dubious value, in some cases, and then apply them to all warfare in a broad sweep of history. Ancient’s rules, for example, get applied to everything from chariots to Wars of the Roses dismounted knights. And they then get praised or castigated for something called historical accuracy. Even though more recent periods of history are covered by rules of more focus, they still tend to cover much change under the banner of “Horse and Musket” or “Modern”.

Nearly as bad, in fact, possibly in some cases worse, are those rules that have a core set of laws, and then add supplements to cover each sub-period. Somehow, this seems to me to be the worst of both worlds, in that the assumption is that there is a base set of laws of wars for a period, and that differences between periods and armies are simply bolt on chrome. No so, I’d argue, for the contexts which create an army are as important as the weapons they carry. You cannot, I think, reproduce an English army of 1415 simply by making the longbow something akin to a machine gun in a general rule system. The reasons the English won in 1415 are complex (and more to do with French politics than machine gunning bowmen).

Let me hasten to add that I’ve not bought, read, or used many of these systems. Most of them are too darn expensive, for one thing, and I’ve only got so much time. So I'm not criticizing those who write or use them, but questioning the underlying concepts of stretching the same rules over many cultures are time periods. The point is that, going back to Cartwright, you cannot build a general system on a few well known but arguable facts.

Do I have an answer to this? I’m not sure. My answer is, obviously enough, a system like Polemos, where come core concepts (but not rules) like tempo points and bidding, are carried over from one set to another, but the whole rule set is rethought for each period and sub-period. Which is why, by a roundabout route, I find myself trying to write rules for Ancient Greeks when some people would have simply adapted a system already written for Imperial Rome. A degree of generalisation is, I suppose, vital, otherwise we’d be writing rule sets for individual battles (they exist, and are called board wargames, aren’t they?), but too much generalisation leads to strange results, in my view.