Wargaming and Free Will

One of the interesting things about writing this blog is to see whether I actually understand what I write. It may seem to you, on the receiving end of these posts, that I am a supreme expert in wargaming ethics and philosophy. I can assure you that this is not the case, and mostly I am at least  as puzzled by the issues I raise as the rest of the world is.

Be that as it may, I do attempt to obtain some understanding of what I am trying to write before I start, and sometimes this understanding, such as it is, arises purely serendipitously. This week is a case in point, although it does return to a consideration of ethics and wargaming. I am sure by now that some of my readers are getting heartily sick of the subject, and wish I would move on, but I, at least, find it moderately interesting and if I can find something which seems worth trying to say, I will carry on and say it.

The case in point here refers to some of the comments from ‘The Owl of Minerva’ post. Firstly, there is the fact that within a wargame, or even a campaign game, most of what we do, and most of our decisions are fairly mechanical. What we do within a wargame are to make decisions based upon our knowledge of the rules of the game, that is the mass of models which constitute the framework for conducting the game, and the concrete situation of the game which is presented to us.

The argument here and I think that it is probably a valid one, is that there are no real moral decisions contained within these sorts of mechanical or ‘plain’ decisions. I think that there are probably one or two caveats to that, but on the whole I do not think that these decision are particularly moral or ethical ones.

Let me give first a non-wargaming example, and then try to construct a wargaming one. The non-wargaming example is taken from IT Ramsey’s Freedom and Immortality (1960, London: SCM) p. 36. This is the serendiperty. I was not expecting the book to have any bearing on the topic of wargaming. 

Suppose someone says ‘I have decided to marry’. If we ask ‘Why?’ we might get a response like ‘It is too expensive to live on my own,’ or possibly ‘It is cheaper than hiring a housekeeper’. You  can tell the vintage of the book from the nature of the example. The idea is not that these are moral decisions; nor are they in fact immoral. They might be manipulative or on the far side of grim rationality, but that does not, in fact, make them immoral.

On the other hand, suppose the answer is ‘Because I am truly, madly deeply in love with this person’. While being a socially more acceptable reason for getting married in the first place, this also reveals a depth of feeling, or, put another way, a transcendence to the person replying. There is something more than purely empirical, rational decision making going on here. By this, I mean not that getting married to someone you love is irrational, for it is not, given the premise, but that there is simply something beyond the mechanical decisions making process here.

Now, being in love of course might show itself in various, measurable, practical ways, but these ways may only be explained by something beyond the empirical observations, in this case of being in love. This concept is not vacuous, or disingenuous; we use these sorts of ideas a lot in normal life.

Now, to try to work this around to a wargaming point of view, I think we can start with the example of ‘My grand battery opens fire’. This is a purely mechanical process. We know the rules indicating that a grand battery is effective in firing at certain ranges, against certain targets and so on. We have compared that model of grand battery fire with the situation on the wargames table, where we have a grand battery and a suitable target within range.

So far as I can tell, in those circumstances, there are no real moral considerations to be had. The decision is a plain one, a mechanical one, such as our person to be married was making a plain decision based on rational thought about money.

So is there a different sort of decision to be made in wargaming, one which is transcendental, or, in Ramsey’s terms, leads to a disclosure of something broader? This would be a free decision, a decision taken of our own free will and hence, quite probably, a decision which is loaded with moral and ethical implications.

I suspect that such decisions do exist, but that, on the whole, they do not occur within wargames, but in the decisions that lead up to a wargame. A simple example might be given by a scenario, however, if, as someone mentioned in a comment, there are civilians represented on the table (or implied, of course). In that case, calling an artillery barrage down upon them would be a moral (or rather, immoral) decision. Such on table scenarios are, however, something of a rarity.

It is more likely, in my view, that moral decisions are taken before a wargame. The questions which we might ask ourselves are, for example ‘What army shall I build?’, ‘Which rules shall I use?’ and so on. These questions may well have a moral aspect to their answer, although it will not be the only aspect of consideration.

For example, suppose I know that my regular wargame opponent Fred is building a Unionist American Civil War army. I may well consider building a Confederate one. Fred may well have asked me to, or we may even have decided that I will. Thus, I have an obligation to Fred to build such an army.

On the other hand, it might be that, on reading a history of the ACW I discover that the Confederates were defending slavery in the US South, and that I have a moral repugnance for slavery. (Let us assume I was ignorant of this fact prior to my reading). I now have two conflicting moral issues: my duty to Fred given my agreement to build an army, and my repugnance to the values (or at least one value) that the army stood for and defended.

While the example might be slightly trivial, it does show, I think, a real moral dilemma. Perhaps the outcome of this post is to suggest that our moral decisions are not, in most cases, simple choices between good and bad. Which should win here? My duty to Fred, or my repugnance of slavery?

Multiple Models and Wargame Emergence

It should come as no surprise to regular readers of this blog that I understand wargames rules as models of reality. They cannot, of course, be reality itself, or it would not be a wargame, and we probably could not get away with, for example, firing 25 pounder artillery in our quiet neighbourhoods just to find out what happens.

The situation is, in fact, slightly worse than we might think. A set of wargame rules is not a single model . We have models built in for all sorts of things, such as movement, shooting, close combat, morale and whatever else the designer thinks might be important. The way the model set is presented might, and usually is, different, but, nevertheless there is this set of models.

In fact, I think it might be argued that there are nested sets of models. For combat we have, perhaps implied, models for each different troop type against each other type. These may, indeed, sit within an overall combat model, but we could regard each combat type, by which I mean say, cavalry against cavalry, or infantry against artillery, as being a model in itself.

This might sound slightly alarming, but I do not think there is a particular cause for panic. In many areas of life assorted models are used quite happily up against each other. In physics, for example, we have wave-particle duality of quantum particles. This is, in fact, two models, that of an electron being a wave and that of an electron being a particle, which coexist quite happily alongside each other, even though the idea is counter-intuitive.

Even in less esoteric worlds of human endeavour we tend to have multiple models. I have two alarm clocks in the house, and they do the same job, but the user interface they present are different. The designers, presumably, had different ideas of how a person would come and set up an alarm clock. These interfaces are, of course, models, in that they attempt to form in my mind a mental map of how to set them.

The fact that one is more successful for me than another is not really here or there. The fact is that they are two models of a task that I would like to do.

So, two sets of wargame rules are, in essence, two different sets of models of some sort of battle reality. I think this has some implications for how much we like given sets of rules.

Firstly, there is the question of whether the individual models in a rule set fit together. If, say, the morale and command rules bear no relationship to each other, or contradict each other, then we might not like the rules. If my commander is within command radius and yet cannot encourage his men, we might look a little askance at the rules and declare the inconsistent. There has to be an internal coherence to the model set to make the rules work at all.

Secondly, the model set has to, in some way, correspond to our expectations of the real world the models are abstracted from. If, for example, our early WW2 Matildas are regularly taking out Tigers, while 88 mm shells bounce of the armour, we might suspect that the rule set was not a particularly accurate one. Similarly, if our Assyrians routed when a single Egyptian chariot appeared on the table, we might think that the rule model set needed some adjustment.

Thirdly, the way rule models sets are constructed is via the modern philosophical standby, reductionism. In my description above is reduced the battle to a set of component parts: cavalry against cavalry, tanks against tanks, or whatever. We then can model the individual bits, and build up our set of models to acquire an overall process of the battle. The battle, we imagine, is simply to be reduced to a set of interactions between these constituent parts, in more or less complex ways.

The question that arises is, of course, the one which arises for reductionism anyway. Does the sum of the parts actually give us the whole?

I have mentioned before the interesting fact the individuals behave differently in a crowd to when they are on their own. Of course, in military units that goes further. Individuals are trained to act in a different way within the unit. That is, after all, part of the point of having a unit at all. So we cannot, in principle, model a unit in the same way that we model a whole bunch of individuals. There is, in a unit, some emergent behaviour.

This is not, of course, fatal to our ability to wargame. In fact, given that we do not need to model the individual because of the emergent behaviour of the unit, it simplifies matters considerably. All we need to do is to successfully model that emergent behaviour.

The question is, then, do we need to go further. A set of units is, of course, a higher level unit, a division, or a corps, or even, depending on your scale of thinking (or the size of the historical prototype) an entire army. Do these objects exhibit emergent behaviour too, and can we, should we model it?

Now, many rule sets to at least pay lip service to army level emergent behaviour. In PM:SPQR (and, I think, PM: ECW, I must be more persuasive than I think) army morale is modelled. As a rule set they are not alone in having a model for emergent behaviour at the level of the whole force, but, given that there have been a fairly limited number of armies (as opposed to units) modelling the top level behaviour can be a little tricky.

Nevertheless, I believe that, historically, army commanders can affect the emergent behaviour of armies. Montgomery seems to have been able to do it. Wellington certainly seems to have thought he could do it. But it is not something that, it seems to me fits easily with our highly reductionist standard model sets for wargame rules.

Or, maybe, I am simply overemphasising something quite obvious again.

What is a Wargame?

Everybody, I imagine, who is a reasonably regular reader of this blog, knows what a wargame is. The thing is, though, that I suspect that a wargame is something that we know when we see it, rather than have a hard and fast definition of it. In this, wargames are no different from a lot of other human activities, of course.  A game of football is recognisable as such whether it is a dozen children with a ball and piled up jumpers for goalposts, or Premier League players on a pristine pitch at Old Trafford.

It is probably, I think, worth thinking a little more deeply about wargaming and exactly what a wargame is. This is because it may, in the fullness of time, add some context to considerations of wargame ethics and how the things work in the first place. So I will attempt to develop a description of a wargame in fairly general terms, and see if it helps.

The first thing that we can describe a wargame as is a complex set of symbols. Whatever attention we give to our wargame figures, they are symbols; they stand for something else. For example, a figure of a 1854 21^st lancer may stand for 20 such ‘real’ lancers, or a squadron thereof, or something similar. No matter how historically accurate the figure is, it is a token, a symbol of something else.

Two sets of such tokens make up two armies, and in most wargames there are these two symbol sets, moving over a third set of symbols, which is the wargame table and terrain. The army tokens and the terrain are in some sort of relationship; the latter can influence the movement and history of the individual tokens in the army symbol sets. Similarly, the individual tokens in the army symbol sets can interact with each other, in a way which is mediated by yet another set of symbols.

This next set of symbols is typically written, and is the rules of the game.  These specify how the army symbols and tokens may move, when they may move, and how they interact with the terrain symbols and with each other. The rules usually incorporate some sort of randomising factor as well, and delimitate the possible outcomes of the interactions of the army tokens.

At this point it may be worth mentioning the three level model of the wargame which I have written about before. Essentially we can see a wargame as a table level, a rules level and a real world level. The wargamers inhabit the real world, but are also actors in the table world, in so far as the army tokens are not going to move themselves. The interaction between the players as wargamers and the tokens is via the rule set, which mediates real world decisions to the table, and relays table information to the players. I am not saying that this is how it works consciously, but it seems to me to be a reasonable description of how a wargame does happen.

So, on the table level, we have three sets of symbols, the two armies and the terrain. At the rules level we have another set of symbols, the written ones which constitute the rules. At the top level we have the wargamers, who act on the table tokens via the medium of the rules, as well as acting directly by moving the toy soldier tokens around.

I do not think that this is a particularly radical understanding of a wargame, but it does have some implications.

Firstly, as I think I have mentioned before, we tend to collapse the levels when we play the game. Thus ‘the French Grand Battery opens fire’ becomes ‘my cannon shoot you’, to the possible consternation of passers-by.  This is the cause, I suspect, of some of the suspicion which occasionally accrues to the hobby, along with accusations of glorification of violence and so on. However, on this model it is simply a packed up use of language.

The second implication is a bit more serious, at least in theory. In a historical wargame, at least, the symbol sets relate, in some way, to the real, historical world. That is, our army symbol sets relate to the English at Agincourt, or the French at Waterloo, or whatever.  I think that there are two implications for this. Firstly, we expect our armies to represent or model the original, and secondly that they behave, tactically, in the same way. There is also the issue of the terrain to consider, as well.

These last points are, of course, where the rules symbol set comes in. It specifies how the tokens move and interact with the terrain and with each other. Again, we expect the rules to reach out beyond the table to a historical context where “what really happened” is normative for the rules, and the rules and other sets of symbols can, in some sense, model the outcome.

This, I think, is where the other ethical issue might arise, and it is a little more important than ‘my guns open fire at you’. As rule writers and wargame players of a historical bent, we have to have some eye on what really happened, so far as we can know it. It is, therefore, perhaps our ethical duty to ensure, so far as we can, that what really happened in the original battle is at least reproducible in principle on the wargame table.

This is, I think, a cause of some unease among some wargamers and members of the public. What if the RAF was defeated in 1940? It can happen in a wargame; indeed, half the players of such a game would probably be hoping that it will happen. The idea of clearing the path for a Nazi invasion of England might well cause some to hesitate before winning.

On the other hand, there are plenty who would cry ‘it is only a game’ and get on celebrating the victory of the Luftwaffe.

This is, of course, something that I have vaguely explored before, and I might come back to it again. But I hope it is a long time before I have to type the words ‘symbol set’ quite as often.

Emotion and Wargaming

It be seem an odd thing to you that I have linked the idea of emotions to that of wargaming. After all, most wargamers are chaps (with a few notable exceptions, of course, as the wargame blogosphere will show) and chaps, of necessity, do not show emotion.

I could demonstrate this in a number of ways. For example, Wellington responding along the lines of ‘By gad, so you have’ to a colleague’s exclamation ‘By gad, I’ve lost my leg’. Or Stan, the handyman on Victoria Wood’s ‘Dinner Ladies’ reporting that, after his mother had left his father in 1950-something  ‘He didn’t cry until 1966, when Germany equalised’. On the whole, then, men are supposed, in western culture at least, not to show much emotion.

This is perhaps especially true in England, where the still upper lip is supposed to be the true aim of all true born Englishmen, and young boys are encouraged to ‘be a brave soldier’ when confronted with a broken arm, leg, train set or whatever.

This is all well and good, except that Kierkegaard teaches us that it cannot, in fact, be true. He observes that decisions, ultimately, have to be taken using emotions, which he describes as passions. The issue is this: We can continue debating and trying to discern the outcomes of the various choices before us for ever, if we choose. But, in normal life, we have to make a choice, a decision, and see what happens.

This is, in fact, one of the criticisms laid at the door of the ethical theory of utilitarianism, or consequentialism. The idea of utilitarianism is that you weigh up all the possible outcomes, and choose the one which maximises some measure of happiness or good for the most number of people. Firstly, of course, it is impossible to perform this sort of calculation in any way, shape or form. But secondly, we can keep analysing until the end of time before we actually decide which is of no use to anyone if we need to decide here and now whether the player was offside, or if we should vote for this or that political party.

Fortunately, human nature has been endowed with a function that allows it to make decisions and get on with living them out. We have hunches, or intuitions, of whatever we want to call them, make decisions, and get on with life, and the consequences of those decisions. We have to, or we would never get out of bed in the morning.

So, how does this play out in wargame terms?

We can, of course, sit in our armchairs by the fire with a pile of rules and army lists by our elbows, rationally contemplating which army we will build next. We can draw up lists, scour the catalogues of toy soldier makers to ensure that they produce figures with exactly the correct form of scabbard for the year we have in mind, sigh that the number of gaiter buttons is incorrect on all known figures, and write our orders (or ready them for email).

At this point, we have to decide. Is this army the army we want? Will it perform as we hope? Will we possess enough will power to paint it and get it on the table? All of these questions, and more, have to be answered in some way before we commit. And yet we do commit, quite easily. Not because we have analysed all possible combinations of soldiers and all the foes they are likely to meet, but because we feel that it is right to order. It will work, we will paint them and do battle with them and even, perhaps, win.

Similarly, on the wargame table, we have to make decisions. I have mentioned before that I do not really think that knowing the percentage chances of winning a given combat between two groups of soldiers is particularly useful, and this is why. A battle is much more complex than a combat between two different groups of soldiers. We might win the combat, by riding the skirmishers with our heavy cavalry, but that is not of much use if our heavy cavalry was, in fact, required on the left wing to exploit a momentary advantage, the neglect of which leads to our downfall.

The human mind, even in something as relatively simple as a wargame, thus needs to do a lot more than just thinking about the rational moves to be made. Firstly, we need to make some sort of decisions or, as I implied above, we will never have a wargame at all. But secondly, we need to assimilate so much information, so much about the content of a given situation on the table (even in a relatively simple wargame, such as DBA) that rationality cannot be the deciding factor in what we actually decide to do.

Now, this does not mean, as I hope I have said above, that we are actively irrational in our generalship. What it does mean is that we cannot afford, and in fact do not, analyse everything. Some situations are non-analysable in a reasonable time anyway. But mainly, we just have to get on with our decisions, backing our hunches, intuitions and judgements.

I believe that there is some recent work in psychology that suggests that we make decisions even before we actually become conscious of those decisions. I am not a psychologist, but I do suspect that the results need a bit of caution. Nevertheless, it does suggest that our rational decisions are not as rational as we might like to think, or, at least, that our rational deductions are, in the main, only there to justify our emotional response. Human decision making is a lot more complex that it appears.

The upshot of all this, of course, is that even to us stiff upper lip types, our emotions or passions are the only way we finally get to make decisions. Maybe, therefore, we can argue against those who wonder why grown-ups are immature enough to play with toy soldiers by suggesting that it is a sign of both intellectual and emotional maturity…

The Postmodern Wargamer

It was suggested recently on a nearby blog (http://joyandforgetfulness.blogspot.co.uk/2013/03/the-monday-papers-part-one.html) that I was the first postmodern wargamer that the author had encountered. After an initial period of outrage and amusement, I thought I had better see if he had a point.

Excluding the sillier versions of postmodernism which claim that things do not exist if we do not talk about them, I think there might be a case to answer. Not that I am particularly happy with that idea. As you may have gleaned from the posts here in the past, I have a background in science, and science does not really do postmodern. A frequent stance, after all, between scientists and postmodernists is that of distinct hostility (see the Sokal Affair: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sokal_affair). Still, let me ponder my ponderings and see if a case can be made that I am, in fact, a postmodern wargamer.

One of the main tenets of postmodernism is a rejection of meta-narratives, by which is meant a rejection of overarching explanations of events, people and things. Thus, postmodernity can reject such ideas as ‘progress’, on the basis that progress is only progress for some, for others it is exploitation. Similarly, hierarchical structures of human society can be rejected as exploitative; things do not have to be as they have always been, as used to be assumed in, say, the medieval period.

Whether this last point is historically true is rather moot, or we would still be there, of course, but that is not really the point here.

With respect to this blog, I suspect that it does tend to reject overarching narratives of wargaming. As I have mentioned several times before, I do not believe the notion that one set of core rules can provide a reasonably accurate representation of warfare over the last several thousand years, no matter how much chrome is applied in the form of expansion packs, extra rules and army lists and so on. I do get somewhat disheartened by the selling of large sets of very expensive rule sets whose mechanisms basically refer back to one original idea in a given period.

So that, I suppose, is the first tick in the postmodern box. I do not buy into the idea of an overarching rule set, from which all other rule sets are derived, with just a bit of polishing.

A second point is that, more or less as a consequence, I do not agree with this idea that a single model of an event will capture the events, or even a reasonable subset of events. That is, a single model or rule set will not capture all the nuances of a battle.

At some level, this is astoundingly obvious. An army level rule set will not, cannot, capture the events of a single person at, say, the Battle of Balaklava. Some individuals were in the lancers charging up the valley, some in the infantry or the heavy brigade, some making tea in the camp overlooking the whole debacle. A few were generals. We might be able to capture the important events and influences on the units, but not the trajectory of the individuals on the day.

To tackle the events in an individual’s battle, we would need to narrow the focus to, say, a skirmish level game, or even a role playing game. This, of course, would allow us to track the progress of the individual, but we lose the bigger picture, at the unit or army level.

I also do not think that we can, in principle, assume that many role playing game level activities going on will give us the battle. An army unit is, in some senses, more than just a crowd of people. It has training as a unit, esprit de corps, and whatever else is drilled into it. It is not just a bunch of several hundred people hanging around together. So even several hundred role players will not, I suspect, give us a historical unit’s behaviour.

Even at a given level, I am really not sure that a single model will yield the results that we need. Any model surely has to take some sort of average of behaviour, and exclude the extremes. A unit may have run at the first shot, but most units do not do this. The average tends to blend out the extreme. So we have to choose our models to pick out the things that we thinks are important, and the way we think they are important.

Clearly, these decisions about importance and the interactions of the important things will vary among models. At a simple level, interactions between training, morale and tactics will determine how we are imagining our soldiers will fight. Some may close in for close action; others stand off and shoot at long range. This may not be due to a single factor, but the ways even these three items can interact can, and will, vary from model to model.

If, therefore, postmodernism indicates a fragmentation of overarching narratives, then, as a wargamer, I probably am one.

If postmodernism means that I do not think that one single description of reality (or, in this case, a historical event) will do, then again, I suppose I am probably, in that sense, postmodern.

Furthermore, I have, in these posts, occasionally questioned our sources of historical, and hence, wargamer-ly information. I suspect that lurking somewhere in here is something that could be accused of postmodernism – a scepticism about what people have written and why. As it happens, I do not subscribe to postmodern theories of deconstruction (which I think tend to the incoherent), but I do think that, as wargamers, we have a tendency to pick out the bits about battles we like and ignore the rest.

As a brief example, frequently classical writers bemoan the poor state of the army, and explain how a new general got them up, trained, fit and generally raring to go, and thus winning the next campaign before the enemy (used to the old, lax, army) got out of bed. This happens too often to be particularly true, I think; it is a literary trick to explain a success, to lay it in the hands of the victor. We need to be more careful with how we read, but we do not need to dismiss everything we do read.

So, counting up the issues here, I seem to be about two-thirds postmodern. 

I'm not sure whether to say 'oh dear' or 'hooray'...

The Owl of Minerva

‘The Owl of Minerva,’ the philosopher Hegel wrote, ‘flies at twilight.’

Now, you might think that I have finally flipped my lid, and, of course, it is perfectly possible that I have, but let me try to explain, unpack what on earth Hegel was talking about, and what it has to do with this blog.

Minerva, as I am sure you are all aware, was the Roman equivalent of the Greek Athena, the goddess of wisdom. She was also, as I am sure you also know, the protector of Athens. Her symbol was an owl, and hence the Athenian coinage, the obol, was also embossed with an owl. An interesting reference to all this is, in fact, in the children’s TV series ‘Bagpuss’, where there is an episode called ‘The Owls of Athens’, which, as a bonus, also explains why nightingales sing and owls hoot. But I digress a little.

So, with “The Owl of Minerva” we have some sort of reference to wisdom, of, in Hegel’s case, philosophy. Flying at twilight, however, is a reference to the fact that we are usually philosophical in reflection, or, to put it more colloquially, wise after the event. So wisdom and philosophy are reflective, backward looking human intellectual undertakings.

This does not mean that philosophy is useless, however, but it does mean that without something to reflect upon, philosophy will not usefully happen. In my case, in an Anglo-American analytical philosophical tradition, I cannot really engage in philosophy until I have something empirical to try to understand. Anything else is dangerous speculative metaphysics, which Hegel is often accused of, and is best left to those weird people who want to undertake what is usually called (in the said Anglo-American tradition) ‘Continental Philosophy’, often with a sneering curl of the lip.

Now, far be it from me to join in the sneering. After all, as some of you might have worked out, I am something of a fan of Transcendental Thomism, which certainly does not fall within the normal Anglo-American tradition. Nevertheless, I think it is worth trying to unpick what Hegel’s comment might mean for this blog, at least.

Obviously, without wargaming in general existing, there would be nothing to reflect on and nothing to worry about ethically. Given that there is something like wargaming, we can attempt, as I do here from time to time, to reflect on what it might mean, and how, ethically, we might proceed about it. However, the issue is, of course, that the Owl only flies at twilight, that is, the pondering about it does not, itself, change the subject of the pondering. Thinking about wargaming does not, itself, alter wargaming.

This is clearest, I think, with the recent bits about ethics. As you might be aware, I have suggested that, ethically, we choose what we wargame because we accept those representations as being part of ourselves, of the narratives that we construct about ourselves and are prepared to tell other people. I might, for example, have a penchant for wargaming the nastier elements of the SS, but I may not wish to share that bit of myself, my narrative with anyone else. My public narrative could be squeaky clean, but my private one could be vicious. If you do not believe me, just have a quick look at the press stories about how some very squeaky clean public reputations have been found wanting recently.

As it happens, my private reputation, on the SS front, at least, is as intact as my public one; I do not wargame World War Two, so the question is irrelevant. But the ethical answer I have found to the question ‘What shall we wargame’ does rather beg a preceding one: why does having a coherent narrative matter?

There are some people, of course, who would argue that having a coherent narrative of our lives does not matter. Some existential philosophers (in the continental tradition) might well argue that it does not matter, for example some of the work of Sartre suggests that coherence is not an issue; we do not need to live our lives coherently. We could be vicious at one point and virtuous a few minutes later. As long as we exist in the moment, how we exist, compared to how we existed a moment ago, does not matter. The only thing that is important is now.

This is, of course, a point of view, but it is not one that I, at least, subscribe to. Many, if not most, people actually do seem to think that having a coherence to one’s life is important, at some level. Thus I can say that I would no more play the SS than I would fly to the moon unaided. It simply does not fit with my view of myself as a human.

Obviously, people do play the SS, even, occasionally, the nastier parts of it, and some players will play the baddies, and so on. The question then arises as to why this should be. Clearly, in, say a WW2 battle, someone has to play the Germans, or there is no battle. Similarly, in a role playing game, someone has to play the bad guys for the player characters to try to beat. How can these players assimilate these items to their narratives and still be true to themselves?

I think that there are two responses here. Firstly, that some players are quite willing to shave their narratives to include playing baddies, on the basis that no-one was all bad. The German army in WW2 was not stacked full of ideological Nazis, they might argue, and anyway, they had cool uniforms and equipment. Well, maybe that is a good enough reason, but it will not wash with me, I’m afraid. ‘Good’ weapons are not a sufficient reason in my book to play the army, not when compared with the murder and mayhem it caused in the world.

The second response, which might be a better one, is to admit the evil caused by the army and not to justify playing it in terms of its equipment, courage, organisation or anything else. This way needs to keep some sort of emotional and intellectual distance from the activity of the army historically, so the deeds of the original do not intersect with our narratives of ourselves. In effect, we invent a ‘clean’ version of the original, and wargame with that.

Of course, you could suggest that this is what we do with any historical army. I doubt if any ECW wargamer seriously considers the New Model Army as having committed war crimes. But, perhaps, with WW2 the issues are a lot more pointed, as well as more recent.

The Medium and the Message

What do you expect from a set of wargame rules?

My guess as an answer to that question is that a set of wargame rules is a fairly conventional book type thing with an introduction, definitions, and some rules for battles and, maybe, some suggestions for campaigns, or some army lists or something similar at the back. Maybe there are some nice colour pictures of toy soldiers in the text, and a few photographs which try to explain some of the finer points of the rules, and so on.

I can think of few rule sets which do not conform to this sort of structure. I suppose that the one sort which do not are computerised rule sets, but they do not seem to be actually that popular. At least, I’ve never used them and I think I have only seen computer wargame rules at one show, and I cannot remember if they were on sale or used in a demonstration game.

There may be a number of reasons why rule sets are usually in a given form. The overwhelmingly like reason is that most of us do not want a computer cluttering up the wargame table alongside everything else. Certainly in the days before wafer thin lap tops, tablets computers and Smart phones, most people did not want to wheel a great big PC into the room just to calculate the results of a few dice rolls.

Speaking as someone who spends most of his days sitting in front of a computer screen, I, personally, do not wish to do so in pursuit of my hobby as well. Aside from the fact that computers go out of date faster than you can say ‘Moore’s Law’ and the fact that often, at the most critical juncture, they go wrong and refuse the calculate the effects of the advance of the Imperial Guard at Waterloo. I might work with them but I do not have to like them.

Be that as it may, I’m still not sure that computer moderated rules are terribly popular. The point is, I think, the computer moderation of the rules. I have reasons to suppose that placing wargame rules on computers, so they can be read as, say, a PDF, might be popular, but that is simply because you can then read the rules on, say, a Kindle rather than on a paper page. The medium has not changed that much; a book on a Kindle is, in all important respects, an analogue of a book. After all, that is an important aspect of the marketing of e-book readers.

 The result of this trend, that of placing conventional rule books in computer formats, is that the full use of the possibilities of computers are not exploited by format. By this I mean that, for example, video or audio channels are not exploited and nor, in most cases, are ideas of, for example, having an army list calculator built into the rule set. A wargame rule set, conventionally, is a flat document which does not do an awful lot. A wargame, however, is a dynamic thing acted out in some sort of real time.

Now, I suspect that computer moderated rule sets are not terribly popular because we like to ‘see the workings’, as it were. If I am the general of a wargame army, I want to roll the dice and see the result, not tap a few numbers into the machine and get a result. I want to feel personally responsible for rolling that 6, or feel the terrible sinking feeling of the double one that sends my hussars scurrying the wrong way across the table.

So a computer moderated wargame rule set probably pushes the boundary of what we want from rule sets a little bit too far. We do not want to be confronted by a completely black box which just issues inscrutable results. Part of the reason for wargaming, I suspect, is a desire to see the logic behind outcomes, even if that logic is moderated by random dice rolls. After all, the randomness more or less balances itself out within a game or two, if not within a given game itself.

The fact is, the medium does have a role to play in determining the message. A book gives a way of receiving the message: you have such and such factors, you have this terrain effect, you have a dice roll and you look up the results of this table. The result is explicit and intelligible. This is not the case in a computer moderated rule set. Inscrutability is not what we are after, even if it can be argued that it is more accurate (whatever that might mean).

Wargaming, of course, does use computers extensively, but not for the actual game itself. You, gentle reader, are an example of this, reading a wargame related blog. But the rules are not really a part of this. One answer might be that wargamers are inherently conservative; another might be that I am completely out of touch with wargaming reality, but I suspect the answer is much more widely known than that.  If we use computer wargame rules, we change the nature of what we are doing.

It is well known that, for example, a text of a story and a video of the same story give different responses in the viewer, even if the events in each are the same. The medium in which the story is delivered is a part of the story. While, of course, it is an exaggeration to declare that the medium is the message, there is a real effect. If we computerise our rules, we are doing something different from having the rule book to hand; it is not a totally different sort of event, but it is, to paraphrase Star Trek, ‘wargaming Jim, but not as we know it.’

I am probably writing from outside left field here, and do not think I have been very clear, but I would be interested to know: would you use computer moderated rules?