Thoughts Upon A Wargame

In an unusual move for me, I have actually just ‘had a battle’ (to use Mrs Polemos’ expression), or, to put it another way, I have just wargamed. Specifically, the battle was between my new and shiny later Persians, and my slightly less new (but still quite shiny) Macedonians.

The terrain was entirely flat, and the troops were entirely average, as I wanted to test my putative Polemos: Polemos rules, which are, as you probably already know, aimed at warfare in the Classical Greek and Age of alexander era, whatever we might decide to call it.

I meant to get pictures, but never the wargame and a charge camera battery shall meet in my case. I thought the armies looked rather splendid, however, and their deployment was reasonably conventions. Thus, on the Macedonian right, there were some light horse, then the Man himself with six bases of Companions (in two lines), followed by two of peltasts, six bases of pike in a line one deep in the centre, two more bases of peltasts, three bases of Thessalonian horse and then four bases of light horse. Six bases of skirmish infantry covered the front of the phalanx. Fairly conventional, as far as Alexander goes, anyway.

The Persians started on their left with two bases of light horse, then six cavalry, four up front and two in reserve, the Great King (just the one) followed by a front infantry line of eight bases of Persian infantry, with four of hoplites behind. The right was five bases of cavalry, three up front and two behind, then two bases of light horse on the extreme right. In front there were six bases of skirmish foot and two scythed chariots. Again, fairly normal, I suspect, for the Persians.

Now, what happened was that alexander won the tempo, advanced his skirmishers and cavalry. As the lights got to grips, the Companions got into Persian charge range. The Persian horse, sensibly (possibly) refused to charge, whereupon Alexander did so.  On the other flank the Persians charged the Thessalonians, routing two of the bases. The Companions smashed up the Persian horse and then disposed of the reserve, which the Great king had just joined. In my mind I had decided that if the Great King was killed or routed, the Persians automatically lose. So they did.

I sat for a while pondering this outcome. In a way, the result of the battle was entirely historical, at least in vague outline. The armies line up. Alexander charges a perceived weak point. The Great King flees and the Persians collapse. If you wanted a summary of the great Macedonian – Persian battles, that would, pretty well, be it.

The reason I sat and pondered, however, was the thought that although the outcome had been historical, I was not sure if it was a good wargame or not. The whole battle lasted four turns, or about forty minutes. Arguably, as I have said, it had a historic outcome. But the infantry on either side had not moved an inch (or base width, in this case).

However, I did feel that a bit more action, a bit more drama, even some ‘clashes along the hole line’ were called for before one side or the other streamed away in disorder. Now, of course, I could, as the Persian, have fought on but, to be honest, there did not seem to be much point. With six bases of heavy cavalry sitting on their flank, the Persian foot and hoplites were not going to put up a major fight, particularly if Alexander had got the phalanx moving forward. In fact, the Macedonian lights were slowing gaining an advantage over their enemies anyway, and the Persian morale, having taken losses and lost the general, was going to get flakier. So it was a correct call, in my view, to concede.

But I think the wargame does raise a question. Is a good wargame the same as a historical one? As I say, the outcome was arguably historical (even down to the Thessalonians having a hard time on the other flank to Alexander). But I am still not sure if it was as enjoyable as I would have liked it to be.

Pondering further, I could see the crucial point of the battle was at the point where the Persian horse refused to charge the Companions, while the Companions did charge the Persians in the next bound. On the other flank, the Persians got the drop on the Thessalonians and were winning. This of course raises further issues for the wargame rules: is it all a matter of luck on a few crucial dice throws?

Another consideration is that of bias. I do not think my rules are biased towards the Macedonians, nor do I think my set-up or orders favoured them. But as a solo gamer, am I biased either for one side or against the other? I tried hard, in fact, to be biased against the Macedonians. Being lazy I tend to stand on one side of my table or the other, and the near side tends to win. So I stood behind the Persians all game, and they lost.

Now, there are a number of possibilities left. Firstly, the Macedonians do (at least in what I have painted) have a lot of heavy cavalry, but under the rules as they stand at present they are no different from Persian cavalry. So it was not that. Secondly, as the Macedonian, I had a plan, which was pretty well Alexander’s plan, while as the Persian I am not sure I did, at least, not a specific or quick one. The Persians wanted to clear the way for their scythed chariots to hit the phalanx while delaying on the flanks. Like a football team playing for a draw, this was a dismal failure.

So, did warfare of the time favour the attacker? Do my rules? Does fortune simply favour the brave? Is any quick plan better than no plan? Have I painted all those Macedonian and Persian foot in vain?

I suppose that I shall have to have another go to find out.

A Metaphysics of Wargaming

Yes, I know, a title that takes pretentiousness to new levels of ultra-bizarreness. But bear with me, there might be something interesting below.

By some measures, metaphysics is not a popular subject in modern western philosophy. This might be something to do with the influence of Heidegger (or, as the Epictetus blog described him recently, “the tainted Heidegger”. Well, OK, he was, at least, a Nazi sympathiser. But then, so were a lot of other people). Heidegger, of course, was not a fan of metaphysics, to the extent that he spoke and wrote an awful lot about it. I think this might be an older manifestation of the Streisand effect, whereby attempting to ban something simply draws attention to it.

Anyway, metaphysics is rather sniffed at these days, which is a bit of a shame because eventually most things can be tracked down to metaphysical presuppositions. Science, for example, does not do metaphysics. If you run into an atheist scientist (and they do exist) then, if you track back far enough, they will often simply claim that the laws of nature are a brute fact, a given, arbitrary, about which we can say no more. Now, obviously, this is to an extent attempting to admit either ignorance about the origins of the laws of nature, or an inability to define said laws (which is not as easy as we might assume) or a last ditch attempt to avoid metaphysics and the ‘G’ word. But the conclusion that the laws of nature are simply brute facts is a metaphysical one. There is no evidence to suppose that it is the case, it comes from a presupposition.

Similarly, in fact, science uses metaphysical assumptions in carrying out its day to day activity. The assumption is that the physical world is regular, intelligible and predictable. These things may have been shown inductively to be true, but as Hume pointed out centuries ago, there is no justification for induction, and any attempts to do so have failed. Of course, most science is massively indifferent to this; most scientist are just trying to get their experiments to work, write the next paper and grant application and not worry about ultimate justifications.

In the determination not to worry about ultimate justifications and the presuppositions which they might rest upon, scientists have much in common with wargamers. After all, the presupposition of a wargame of any description is that the universe is, in some senses, explicable. If someone is shot at with a musket, a ball will likely fly in their general direction and there is a chance that it will hit them and disable them. We assume that this is the case, without a huge quantity of justification except that we know, somehow, that it is the case. The presumption of regularity in the universe is metaphysical.

In fact, recent historical research suggests that modern science would not have come into existence without Christianity. The presumptions of Christianity are that the universe is intelligible, regular (because guaranteed by a good God) and that part of our activity as humans created in God’s image (whatever that might actually mean; don’t get me started) is to try and understand it. Many early scientists were people of faith, such as Roger Bacon and Robert Grossteste. Without Christianity, modern science might not have got going.

But I digress. I am trying to examine here what I might have referred to before as the framework assumptions or the conceptual archetypes of wargaming. I think that we can probably assume that wargaming, in common with more or less every other human activity, takes some metaphysical items pretty well for granted, such as the regularity of the physical world and the validity of induction. Without that, wargaming, let alone anything else, would not have got going.

So what other assumptions are made in order to have a wargame at all? I think that possibly the main one is that there is an interplay of chance and necessity. As I said above, if you pull a musket trigger, you have a reasonable expectation that a bullet will come out of the other end of the gun, that it will fly in the general direction in which you pointed it, and that it will do some damage if it happens to hit something or someone. But note that the sentences are hedged with conditionals – it might do some damage if it happens to hit something.

Thus the elements of chance are introduced into the game. Few wargames operate entirely without chance elements. Most use dice, but it is not obligatory. I seem to recall that HG Wells used matchstick firing cannon, and I’m fairly sure I read somewhere about entirely card driven games. Whatever the mechanism, we recognise that despite the necessity of some effects occurring given certain causes, chance is also a factor in war and, even more so (because we cannot model every level of human decision) in wargames.

At the risk of reinforcing my pretention credentials, I think I would want to classify such presuppositions in wargaming as metaphysical. I think that such assumptions are made, tacitly, in most, if not all wargames. Stuff happens. There are causes and effects, and sometimes things go a bit awry, but not so much that the awryness cannot be accounted for by chance or awkward human decisions. Hume, after all, argued that we only link cause and effect because that is how we link them together. His claim is that cause and effect are only due to our habits of associating the events. Of course, this is another metaphysical claim, and this from a man who argued that all books of metaphysics should be burnt.

In sum, I think that we should, as wargamers, try to be aware of some of our basic assumptions in holding a wargame at all. I am not really arguing that we should hold the laws of cause and effect, or the laws of nature in mind when wargaming (that way, I suspect, madness probably lies, and I do not wish to be held responsible for a decline in the mental health of the wargame community), but I do think that, from time to time, an investigation of what those assumptions are, and their validity, might be a good idea.

Concrete Wargames

I have, perhaps, hinted before that wargames, wargame rules and wargamers do not really tolerate uncertainty. This is one of the issues there is with respect to wargaming which is one of the most difficult to tackle, both in general and in particular. So I thought I would give it a go, not really expecting to make much headway.

It seems to me that there are at least two issues at stake here. Firstly, there is the creation of fictitious forces in our wargame armies. What I am thinking of here is, for example, “morale”. Morale is often a critical element in our rules and plays a key role in the outcome of battles. But it is one of those things that does not exist, at least to a reliably measurable extent.

In a set of wargame rules morale is generated as a mathematical model, but it does not behave like that in real life. A person with a clipboard does not pop across to the 25^th line battalion and have a survey of how the lads are feeling.  Morale is a construct of those who report of warfare, perhaps, but it is perhaps more eminently a construct of wargaming. In perhaps over-technical language, we can stand accused of reifying morale, taking a concept which is useful to our games and making it concrete to suit ourselves. It could be argued that morale, at least as it occurs in most wargames, simply does not exist.

Another issue which occurs, which needs a concrete answer which cannot be given, is that of armies and order of battle. I have (remarkably) finished (insofar as any wargame army is finished) my late Persians, all 34 bases of a 20 base army, including two Great Kings in their chariots. Why, you might ask, two Great Kings? Well, firstly, of course, I had the figures. You might object that there was only one Great King at a time, and I would be forced to agree with you. But which Great King is the real Great King? Obviously, the one who wins the next battle…. The reason I had two Great King chariots was because one came with the early Persians and one with the late Persians, and I had never bothered to paint up the one for the earlies because the Great King was not present at Marathon.

Anyway, having now finished the Late Persians, I am now considering moving on to the Classical Indians, the ones who fought Alexander. Here, of course, information runs very thin. Our sources do not say a lot about the Indians, because they were exotic, far away and, by the time anyone got around to writing about them, they had reconquered themselves (as it were) and no-one was really interested in people who were on the far side of a hostile empire (with respect to looking from Rome, anyway).

So, much of what we do know about the Indians is conjectural, inferential and, if you do not mind a bit of sarcasm or rudeness, frankly invented, or at least it has alarmingly little evidence to back it up. Clearly, there is some evidence, contradictory as it is. The Indians had archers, a few swordsmen types, javelinmen, cavalry, chariots and elephants.  They had what usually passes in ancient sources as ‘lots’ of these. At Hydaspes they had somewhere between 200 and 50 elephants, according to Sabin’s reporting of various modern reconstructions.

Here, again, the wargamer has to do some reification (have you ever wished you had not used a word like that?). We cannot do, as historians can, with a hand wavy ‘we don’t really know, does it matter?’ sort of response; nor do we particularly wish to move on to more interesting subjects such as Alexander’s sexuality (at least, I do not; classical scholars might demur). We need some sort of concrete number. Sabin makes a middle of the road estimate of 85 elephants in Porus’ army. He might be right. How do we know?

Now, you might argue, if you had read this far, that my claim of reifying morale in rules and my claim about doing the same for troop numbers in armies are two different things. To some extent I would agree with you, but in fact what we are doing in both cases is making something up to cover over something we cannot measure.

We cannot measure morale, so we make some sort of model up to cover the fact, and use that as the morale of the army, unit or whatever, even though it has no measurable equivalent in real life.

We cannot measure the number of elephants at Hydaspes, because time machines have not been invented so we cannot go and count them, the reports we have (at second or third hand) from people who could have counted them are contradictory. So, essentially, we have to make a reasonable guess.

The problem is, in both cases, unless we make these guesses – a guessed model for morale; a guess at the number of elephants present – we cannot really have a wargame on a historical basis. It simply cannot be done unless we invent these things.

Thus, we have to make concrete these things in a wargame in order to model them. We need a concrete model of morale in order to measure it. We need concrete (or is that lead?) models of elephants to show a given number of pachyderms in real life. These things have to be concretised in order to make the game work at all.

Of course, you could argue that it is only a game anyway and so it does not really matter, and, as a game, of course that is correct. As an imaginary encounter, we can deploy however many elephants we like, and we could, if we so wished, dispense with morale rules entirely, or simply make something outlandish up.

But then I suppose the worry would be that we have cut the final links between reality and human reason and the activities modelled on the wargame table. Even imaginations have some real world logic involved. 

The Problem of Genius

“In a very different subject-matter, Napoleon supplies us with an instance of a parallel genius in reasoning, by which he was enabled to look at things in his own province, and to interpret them truly, apparently without any ratiocinative media. ‘By long experience’, says Alison, ‘joined to great natural quickness and precision of eye, he had acquired the power of judging, with extraordinary accuracy, both of the amount of the enemiy’s force opposed to him in the field, and of the probable result of the movements, even the most complicated, going forward in the opposite armies… He looked around him for a little while with his telescope, and immediately formed a clear conception of the position, forces and intention of the whole hostile array. In this way he could, with surprising accuracy, calculate in a few minutes, according to what he could see of their formation and the extent of the ground which they occupied, the numerical force of armies of 60,000 to 80,000 men; and if their troops were at all scattered, he knew at once how long it would require for them to concentrate, and how many hours must elapse before they could make their attack.’” (Newman, J.H., An Essay in Aid of a Grammar of Assent, (2013 [1870]) Assumption Press, p 219).

I have to confess, that that was a somewhat unexpected paragraph in Newman’s book for me, at least. In the passage in question and its surroundings, Newman is pondering the nature of genius. He observes before it that, for example, Newton had a tendency to simply write down answers to mathematical physical problems without working them out or proving them. It then took several generations for the rest of the academic community to catch up and prove that he was, in fact, right. I believe that someone once claimed (with what accuracy I am unsure) that for every time that the mathematician Carl Freidrich Gauss wrote ‘it is obvious that’ or ‘clearly it follows that’ or similar phrases, someone has obtained a PhD for showing it to be so.

Newman continues after the passage just quoted: “It is difficult to avoid calling such clear presentiments by the name of instinct; and I think they may so be called, if by instinct be understood, not a natural sense, one and the same in all, and incapable of cultivation, but a perception of facts without assignable media of perceiving.”

The problem is this: as ordinary human beings, we have little idea of how geniuses proceed, and, in general, cannot cope when they do. If Napoleon was a genius at warfare, it is little surprise that his opponents, no matter how competent, struggled to cope with his manoeuvers. Even Wellington was humbugged by the Corsican, even though the latter was not at his best during the Hundred Days. The fact that the Allies won and Napoleon lost was due more, perhaps, to Wellington’s planning and positioning of his forces during Waterloo, and the Prussian ability to support him than any military genius on their side.

All through history we can see military geniuses, alongside those in other fields, turning received wisdom upside down and winning battles, or solving problems, in ways that were thought impossible. On the military side was can name, for example, Marlbrough, Alexander, perhaps Caesar, Hannibal, Scipio and so on. Some others might be in the running as well, such as Gustavus Adolphus or Maurice of Nassau, but in general I am sure you can see my point. The geniuses were not coped with by the normal military institutions of the day. Until those institutions adapted to cope, victory went to the genius.

This then is a problem for wargaming. Unfortunately, few of us are geniuses; perhaps fortunately, most of us will never need to get involved in major warfare for real. But the problem is how we, as wargamers and wargame rule writers, can cope with these geniuses who upturn the conventional wisdom of warfare. For a set of wargame rules, almost by definition, must represent the normal, conventional warfare of the time.

There is an additional problem, of course, in that we have a splendid dose of hindsight to add to the mix. When Napoleon is facing the Allied army at Waterloo, we might want to explain to him the fact that most of the enemy army is over the ridge and a grand battery, no matter how grand, just is not going to cut the mustard. We also might like to point out that the army closing in on his right is not reinforcements but an army he thought were thoroughly beaten. Thus there is here a question of epistemology (to give it an overpoweringly posh name). Napoleon may not have known these things; somehow he had lost control of the campaign.

The issue is, in terms of wargame rules, firstly, that of course Napoleon, if he had been aware of these facts, might have taken different action, although the politics might have made this difficult. These are issues beyond a simple set of rules to deal with. But the real problem is, if I may call it such, the ontological one of genius. The being of a military genius on the battlefield cannot, I think, be handled as it is mostly by a ‘+2’ on the command rolls, or some other sort of fudge factor to enable the wargame to come out in a vaguely historical manner. The genius who can just ‘see’ the solution, the Marlbrough who marches half an army across the battlefield to obtain tactical surprise, cannot be subsumed within a simple addition to a command rule or radius. These rules and their fudging simply do not reflect the process of the genius winning the battle.

I do not think that there is in fact, any legislating for such genius. Firstly, even Napoleon had feet of clay, or at least had to odd off day on the battlefield. If we construct rules for military genius, then we would also have to construct rules for the genius not having had his morning coffee. And that way, I think, wargame rule writer’s madness lies. Secondly, genius is, well, genius. It tends to operate outside the box, which would mean, more or less, it might well operate outside the framework of the rules. And I cannot think of a rule set that can allow that.

Conceptual Archetype Wargames

Whenever I start pondering models in wargames, or indeed, start to ponder the idea of models in any sense at all, I often stumble across references to the work of Max Black, who seems to have been one of the first philosophers to have a go at thinking systematically about models and metaphors. Indeed, his main book is entitled ‘Models and Metaphors’ (1962), and I have finally got around to reading a chapter or two.

Of course, given that he was one of the first thinkers in the game, much of what Black says is fairly familiar, so I shall try to focus here on a few pages at the end of chapter 13, where he discusses what he describes as conceptual archetypes. As Black observes, other people give these conceptual archetypes different names such as ultimate frames of reference or ultimate presuppositions, but I will stick with archetypes, as Black does.

By an archetype Black means a set of ideas which a person uses to describe another situation to which those ideas do not immediately apply. Thus the thinker is engaging in some sort of extension by analogy. We have a framework of ideas about how, say, the solar system works and we project that on to another system, say that of an atom. There are analogies here – a central massive body, lighter objects orbiting it in an inverse square law, and so on. But we are also aware of the limitations of the analogy; fortunately for human life planets do not jump from one orbit to another. The archetype helps us to think about a new situation, but is not the new situation itself, nor is it anything except a sketchy model of what is going on.

The analogy is drawn, however, to help us to think. Hopefully we understand the domain from which the analogy is taken tolerably well, and thus the analogy can give us some ideas about how (in my example) the atom might ‘work’.  Thus the analogy, the projection from the original realm of understanding, is used to help start thinking about how the objects in the newer realm of thinking might be understood.

There are dangers with this approach, and from time to time many people fall into them. We can, for example, mistake the analogue for the reality, and forget that the analogue actually started off life in a different domain. While the Bohr model of the atom can be used to solve many problems in atomic physics, it must always be borne in mind that atoms do not work like it suggests, and, in fact, it is an incomplete model.

A similar problem can be found in our fundamental frames of reference. The framework can become the only way of thinking, so that the consequences of the use of the framework is to remove from consideration any challenges to that framework. Thus, in my encounters with Creationists I quickly lose any credibility because I am not a Creationist myself.  Only someone within the Creationist framework has sufficient credibility to comment on that framework, at least for those whose world view is built upon it. The response of a Creationist to anyone commenting on creation (theist or not) is, in my experience ‘are they 7 day creationists?’ If not, they can be ignored.

What has this got to do with wargaming?

Well, I think that, with wargames we do have archetypes to work within, and it is very difficult to think outside them. With historical wargames, we have, broadly speaking, a set of periods, a set of troop categories, and a set of models which go together, one way or another, to make a wargame. We might differ on exactly which category a specific historical solider fits into, or exactly how we use morale rules, but more or less we have a wargame archetype and we stick within it.

It is actually quite interesting to note that some of us struggle with concepts which do not fall exactly in our archetypical expectations of wargame rules. The Polemos: SPQR orders system is not, in my view (but then, I did write it) all that difficult to grasp – you give orders to units to advance, hold or skirmish and if you want to change them it costs you Tempo Points. However, a number of people have commented or complained that it is complex; I suspect that they mean that it is outside the ball park.

Similarly, there are negative reactions to card driven rule sets. While they are becoming more widespread, they do seem to come in for a lot of flak. Often this is put in terms of either playability, where I suspect the gripe, deep down, is a loss of the wargamer’s control over his toys, or inflexibility, because other stuff could happen than what is on the cards. But I think that the basic problem is that a card driven game does not fit in with the basic paradigms of how we expect a wargame, or a set of wargame rules, to be.

I have commented, in passing, before that often,  it seems to me, what we mean by an ‘accurate’ wargame is one which chimes in with our prejudices and / or expectations. This often means that the game proceeds to a similar outcome as it would do with our favourite set of rules, and that favourite set of rules is often the set which we first encountered in the period of interest. This sort of thing, therefore, set up the archetypes of wargaming which we come to expect. The problem here is that the archetype can become a self-authenticating myth. We can start to exclude views and information which challenge our archetype of wargaming.

The upshot of this is that as responsible wargamers, we should not stop trying out the new. I know that there are many gamers out there who do, but equally there are lots who, it seems to me, just want to keep on plodding on with 350 point pick-up games with the same rule sets (or at most, very similar rule sets). There are even some who want the same basic rule set for all periods, and just add a bit of chrome (muskets or bows) to specify the period. That, I think, is a really solid and unfortunate archetype.

Verfiying Wargame Models

I think I have written sufficient so far so as to suggest, quite strongly that a wargame is a collection of models which all, more or less, fit together to produce something approximating to a real, historical, human situation, a battle. Now, of course, we are aware of the limitations associated with the modelling of a battle. While the models, for example, might acknowledge the flow of human emotions that exist within a battle, through the morale rules, they do not attempt to actually portray these directly, but merely to suggest them through abstract and collectively applied rules.

Modern day models are found, most frequently, in the sciences, and so it might be a useful tack to try to identify the sorts of things models are used for, and the sorts of limitations we find with them. Here, however, is the first of the warnings which must be placed in front of this exercise. Science is often flagged as being the exemplar of truth in our current culture and society. Whole fields of human activity, such as sociology and economics, attempt to grab the ‘science’ label, to give a fig leaf of respectability to what is, in the case of economics, at least, usually a waffle of unverifiable opinion. Anyone who disagrees can point to three examples of independent economic forecasts which have been right in the last ten years or so.

Caveat at the ready, the way science proceeds is to take a set of observations and attempt to understand them. However, as with a historical battle, the real physical world is a complex sort of place and does not easily lend itself to being understood in any reasonable, intelligible and predictable manner. I do not mean here, of course, the normal world humanity moves in, although that is a lot more complex and difficult than we usually give it credit for. What I do mean is, in physics, the scale of the very small or the very large, the very fast or the very slow. As a colleague of mine once remarked ‘If in quantum mechanics you get a counter-intuitive answer, it is probably right.’

However, as scientists we still want to understand and predict the sorts of things that might happen. Thus, we need to construct a model and the model we construct has to have, broadly speaking, two criteria. Firstly, it must be intelligible. A model which is not intelligible is not going to help. Secondly, the model must bear some resemblance to reality, hopefully in ways we can at least be aware of or, better, be able to define.

As an example, consider spectral line broadening in the solar spectrum. We know that the normal spectral lines of hydrogen are to be found – the Ryman, Balmer series, and so on. But we also find that they are broadened out, are wider than we would expect from the Bohr model of the atom (which has them as spikes) or from the Doppler effect. So we try to model, mathematically, what is going on.

To this end we can write down the Schrödinger equation for an atom in a fluctuating electric field, for that is what the environment of an atom in the sun is. And we can also write down an equation for the distribution of energy of the electrons passing by which set up part of the electric field, and another for the much slower moving ions which add extra electric field. But there we stop.

There is a joke in the physics community: in classical mechanics you cannot solve the three body problem, in quantum mechanics you cannot solve the two body problem, in quantum field theory you cannot solve the one body problem and in quantum chromodynamics you cannot solve the vacuum. And we have hit precisely the second issue here; we cannot solve Schrodinger’s equation for the situation we have at hand.

The way this problem is tackled is to make approximations. We can approximate the ion electric field as something that is static, while we calculate the effects of the electrons, and then we can calculate the averaged values of the ion fields over all the possible configurations of ions and then we can (effectively) add the two lots up. Admittedly, this is a lot more complex than it sounds (a proper explanation takes a decent sized text book) but it can be done.

However, we now need to verify our models, and so it is back to the experimental apparatus to check that our calculations, with our approximations, are correct, and, if they are not correct, by how much and in what way they are incorrect. For example, even by my simple explanation above, you might have thought ‘what if the ions are not that static?’ and, indeed, that is a good point, which has to be addressed by an extension to the model called ion dynamics. The point is that the whole model complex has to be verified by contact with the real world and, occasionally, the fit is not that good and further work is entailed.

So, the analogy with a wargame should be obvious. A set of wargame rules and other models should be capable of being verified against real world activity. A French column advancing against a British battalion in line should, on the whole, be forced to stop and be driven off by a bayonet charge. If it is not, then perhaps the model needs tweaking.

Of course, in the real world both the scientific process and the wargaming one I have described is unattainable. Experimental difficulties abound, as do questions of the interpretation of historical events. But the process, while hard, is not impossible; however, the temptation is to take short cuts.

Finally, a scientific model usually asks further questions. I hinted at one above – what if the ions are not static? What happens in this case, or at that limit which we excluded from our model because we could not incorporate it? Most wargame rules that I have seen in use, however, are treated as some sort of holy grail, some untouchable mechanism. I know there are notable counter examples, but do you think that on the whole we treat rules with too much respect?

An Analogy for Wargaming

One of the things that makes wargaming a bit tricky to think about is that fact that, so far as I can see, it is fairly well unlike any other occupation or hobby. For example, football (soccer) is a game of skill (and absurdly high pay) and the element of luck, while present, is not really part of the discourse of the game. While there is an unfolding narrative, and certain points might be determined as crucial in hindsight, the result is the important thing; few people remember that particular goal at the end of the season.

The thing about most other hobbies is that they are focussed on some sort of output. Sewing, for example, is aimed at the output of a garment or decoration. Picture painting is aimed at the output of a picture (no, really?), fishing the catching of fish. I know there are noble examples to this, where, in fact, the point of fishing is the process of fishing, not the end result, but without the possibility of catching fish, fishing is not fishing, but sitting by the river (or whatever; I’m trying not to get hung up on the details).

The point is that wargaming, while narrative driven, is dynamic, and involves a significant degree of acknowledged chance. The situation in a wargame a few minutes ago is not the same as the one now. The game moves forward, develops, and the prospects for each side vary as it does. Therefore, an analogy of a wargame, something to aid thinking about it, needs to be dynamic as well, and the outcome needs to be, in the main, not foreseen.

The closest I can think of at the moment as an analogy for a wargame is a film. If you consider the audience, the file is a dynamic medium, full of tensions and conflicts, without a known outcome. The plot twists and turns; random events, chance meetings and so on can influence the outcome, and on the whole it resolves nicely. A film, in general, has a beginning, a middle, and an end, and proceeds, fairly logically in general, from one to the next.

Along the way, the film presents its heroes with challenges, inversions of fortune, puzzles and problems to resolve and so on. There is also, as I mentioned, conflict either between the heroes themselves, or between the heroes and the others (the bad guys, the apparent bad guys, fortune in general, etc). There is tension – will Harrison Ford get the amulet before the bad guys do – and so on.

Not only this, but there is the possibility of catharsis, the emotional cleansing we feel having suspended our disbelief and engaged in the fictional world of the film. The film (if it is a decent one) can mirror, in some way, our this-worldly stresses and strains, concerns and fears, and in doing so can help us in understanding our concerns, in contextualising them and reducing our fear of them, even if only temporarily. Aristotle thought this was the function of Greek tragedy, at least.

So a film and a wargame have, at least, some parallels. As audience, a film watcher does not know the outcome and can get concerned about the fictional characters (a friend of mine once bit through her T-shirt while watching Aliens, do deep was her tension over the action). This is, obviously, similar to the position of the wargamer. The film proceeds by scenes as the story develops and a wargame does so by turns (or similar mechanisms). Hopefully, both come to a satisfactory, or at least intelligible, conclusion.

Of course, films and wargames are different. A film, if watched again, will have exactly the same outcome. Wargames will not, because of the increased use of chance. In this sense, therefore, wargames are more flexible. Additionally, the authors of the film will know the outcome of the story; it is usually pre-defined and the scriptwriters have to work out how to get from the beginning to the end. In a wargame that aspect unfolds as the wargame proceeds, much as it does to the audience of the first showing of the film.

However, I think the analogy of the film to a wargame can help us think a little more about the meanings that might be associated with wargaming. There is the unfolding of an unknown narrative in both, in wargaming because it is unknowable in advance, the film because it is not known. Both can have tension and emotional swings to and fro, and both have plots which have to be (saving some avant guarde film) in some way, at least in principle, intelligible. A bad film is one where the outcome, or rather how it is achieved, is disappointing. A bad wargame might be one where one side deploys a superweapon and simply blows everyone else away.

Another way of looking at film is that a film represents to us some aspect of our culture, and therefore is material for reflection on that culture. I think I mentioned before the making of a film about The Eagle of the Ninth where the legionaries in Scotland were portrayed in a similar fashion to US troops in Afghanistan. Similarly, the wartime film of Shakespeare’s Henry V carefully excluded the Southampton plot, because talking and showing treason was not a good idea in the culture and society of the day.

How about wargames as cultural items? Do our games reflect something of the surrounding society?

In a sense, given that rules are written and games played by members of the society, it would be a surprise if they were not reflections of that society.  I think we can see, for example, creeping scientism (science is the only true knowledge) in some of the models of wargaming we have, mostly in some of the earlier ‘plus one if English sea=dog’ type of rule. But that does not absolve ‘modern’ wargaming of such influences, they might just be harder to spot. But Old School wargaming is, I think, an expression of nostalgia for a lost age of innocence, and some of the simpler rule sets written in the last twenty years or so could also be a craving for simplicity. Alternatively, they could just be a turn away from our increasingly complex real lives to a world where the decisions are easier. Catharsis again, perhaps.