Wargaming – A Liberation View

For my sins, I have been reading a bit about liberation theology. Now, before you all rush off in despair about the ‘t’ word, I just want to use some of the ideas (as I understand them) to try to critique some bits of wargaming. It probably will not work, but I might get a medal for trying. I did, in fact, ask a local radical feminist theologian to comment, but she just muttered something about even asking the question being patriarchal and then flounced off to wash her hair in a mass of contradictions.

The last sentence above is, of course, a feeble attempt at a joke, but does raise a more serious point. Liberation theology (or politics, for that matter) is something that looks very different from the global south than it does from the global north, and so my witterings here will be form the comfort of my middle class armchair, rather than a place where I cannot afford an armchair at all.

Be that as it may, it is possible to argue that wargaming and wargamers are attempting to live in a world dominated by the male and by aggression. This, of course, also includes science fiction and fantasy wargames, even if female characters are included in the games, the violence is still male generated. As wargamers, it could be said, we live in a fantasy where male violence is normative, and an acceptable way of resolving disputes.

Now, of course, historical gamers (and, I suspect, everyone else) can say ‘yes, agreed, but that is just the way it is’. At, to an extent, they would be correct in that. Warfare has been overwhelmingly the province of males, usually, in its organised form, ordered and undertaken by males, and the results of the wars have been related to male-dominated hierarchies of power. A historical wargame, therefore, is simply representing a past which was male dominated.

The problem with that (and I’m not convinced it is a real problem, but it is a possible argument) is that by re-enacting, in whatever form, such activities, we are attempting to relocate them into our worlds where, perhaps, the (post)modern male has much less power, much less of a monopoly of the means of violence. The reproduction of power dominant behaviour of the past is an attempt to legitimize similar efforts in the present.

On a similar line, it could be argued that colonial games are an effort by some citizens of a failed Empire (or a failing one, if one views the USA as such) to reclaim domination over the world. A colonial wargame is an attempt by a reactionary faction of the metropolitan state to recapture the days of power and glory, at the expense of the colonised, defeated and enslaved peoples of the world. In a colonial wargame, the argument might run, the aim is to re-enslave the native peoples of the land, to re-exploit their legacy.

Now, of course, I am not claiming that these arguments are valid, true or even useful, but I do think they might make us pause a little and consider what we are actually doing when we wargame. Naturally, the overriding activity is one of recreation. Wargaming is a hobby (at least, I guess, for more or less everyone who reads this blog). We play wargames for fun, for entertainment and for interest. There might be a few misguided wargamers out there who think that by winning a game they have humiliated their opponent, for example. I have heard of this sort of thing, but it is rare (fortunately).

But, despite this, there is a little nagging doubt as to our motivations. Our choice of wargame could be a political one, in the sense that our choice of, say, a British Expeditionary Force dispatched to Darkest Africa could be because we do, perhaps subconsciously, hark back to days of glory and daring do. Our interpretation of history might be something along the lines of ‘white rule was good for Africa’ and an attempt to justify that by re-enacting some aspect of it.

I do not think that this is the case, but I do think we, as a hobby, might need to be aware of it. By extension, the argument could be made, in a similar way, about those who insist on wargaming the Axis powers in World War Two and, if proven, the implications of that could be more unsettling yet.

From, as I said above, a global north perspective, this all seems fine and dandy. There are few issues, ethical, moral or political, about fighting colonial wargames or World War Two. From a global south view, however, things may not seem quite the same. World War Two could quite happily be dismissed as a European Civil War with unfortunate consequences for the rest of the world. A wargame based around the Warsaw Ghetto could be quite acceptable. A wargame based around, say, the Ashanti campaigns could be viewed very differently, however. For us, it is just another Victorian small war. For someone who is an Ashanti, it is likely to be much more than that.

It has been noted here occasionally that, for example, there are some bits of English history that do not tend to be wargamed. The bit of the Hundred Years War after the death of Edward II, for example, when the English lost decisively, is largely ignored. Similarly, the rest of the HYW after, say, the Siege of Orleans tends to be passed over in silence, at least until the glorious failures of the last couple of battles. Again, viewed from a global south (or even, in this instance, French) perspective, these eras of operation might be entirely acceptable and interesting.

Perhaps, then, it is just a matter of where you sit. If we accept that in principle anything is possibly wargamable, then it is only our perspective, our horizon, our prejudices and biases which limit the possibilities. This might suggest that, in fact, we should game those things that make us slightly uncomfortable. 

The Authentic Wargame

I mentioned a week or two ago the idea of the authentic and the kitsch in art. Real art, I claimed (or at least, quoted Roger Scruton as claiming) represents reality to us. Kitsch invited sentimentality, the turn inwards to observe and admire our own emotions and enjoy ourselves as being civilised, sensitive people.

I also noted, in passing, that modern art, in its many forms, simply seems to set out to shock. In fact, some art bureaucrats often seem to think that something is art if the general public do not like it. It can then be sold at a vastly inflated price for someone to put on a gallery wall (no one in their right mind would actually want these things in their own living room, would they?). Shock, the public outcry garners attention, if nothing else.

Now, harking back to vaguely remembered bits of Gadamer, I think we could claim that, in some senses, wargaming is art, or at least has some features in common with some art forms. The art form in particular that I have in mind is theatre. Now, of course, there are clear differences. A play has a set script which, except in some more modern plays, the actors tend to follow. But there are some helpful resonances as well, I think.

Firstly, a play is repeated a number of times, both in its current production and in revivals, and also in different productions, with different casts, directors and so on. Furthermore, a play, as the instance of this particular performance, is unique. This set of actors, this room, this audience is specific to this one off event of a play. As with teaching, this version is a singular event.

Wargames, too, can and are played and played again. Again, each event is different. The wargamers might be different; they might swap sides and be informed by what happened last time, and so on. The rules might be known more or less well, the terrain set out slightly different. The details, which do actually matter in a game as well as a play, vary.

Now, the point to which I am painfully iterating is something like this. Some plays are done well, some poorly. Some are shut down by mobs or the secret police. Some mock the establishment and some the population, and so on. Good theatre, then, brings us face to face with reality, or at least a recognisable depiction thereof. In some sense, we could argue, a good wargame should do the same.

Consider a fairly simple case of a classic role playing game such as Runequest or D & D. Good and evil are fairly explicit in the rules. A character in D & D can be evil, good or neutrally aligned. In RQ chaos is everyone’s enemy and the Lunar Empire is suspicious because of its ambivalent attitude to it. Thus, most of the time, there is no moral question which arises. The baddies must be defeated. Perhaps the nearest theatrical equivalent would be a modern pantomime, where we can safely Boo the baddies because, well, they are baddies and because we know they will be defeated in the end.

At the other extreme there are some theatre productions which do simply set out to shock. I vaguely remember a controversial production, I think of ‘The Romans in Britain’ which featured a scene of homosexual rape. For its time this was outrageous and widely condemned. What it had to do with the plot or what the play was trying to say I am not sure (I’ve not seen it, nor can really be bothered to find out more about it), but the fact is the outraged a lot of people (who probably had not bothered to see it either; outrage is like that).

The wargaming equivalent of this is, well, what? Would a wargame of an uprising in a concentration camp do it, or of the Warsaw uprising? The Princess Diana demolition derby, where the players as photographers chase a car until it crashes (bonus points for pictures of the maimed occupants)? These are certainly tasteless, but would they produce the outrage?

I think what I am trying to get at is that an authentic wargame is one where we can see, or feel the emotion, the reality, reaching out towards us. If we did have a Warsaw Ghetto game, it would be only authentic is we could find in it the desperation of the fighters in launching such a desperate battle, and the destruction which befell the city. Anything else, perhaps, would be less authentic, less respectful to the original situation and battle.

Given the difficulty inherent in constructing wargames with even a slight degree of the real historical outcomes, are we therefore condemned to inauthentic wargames, ones with little or no contact with any real historical world? And if we are, are we not more comfortable with the idea that they do not correspond to any sort of reality? After all, a wargame which does confront us with reality would, in many cases, hardly be a recreation.

So, finally, what of wargaming the ultra-modern, the Taliban, IS or conflict in Ukraine? Are these merely shocking and tasteless, or are there deeper currents moving? Given the general inaction of politicians and widespread near to apathy of populations not directly involved, would a tasteless, provocative wargame of Kaderia, Donetsk or a border post in Sinai at least get people talking about it. Could a wargame, like art, hold up a mirror to the world and attempt to get us to stop ignoring it?

I think to suggest it would is, probably, yielding far too much to the idea of a wargame as in any sense powerful, politically or morally, whereas a play might be. I am as much against the idea of painting toy soldiers in the form of IS and wargaming with them as the next wargamer in the street.

But I do wonder. Could a wargame of the British NW Frontier of India, or Alexander’s problems in Bactria hold up a mirror to the times? Or, like science fiction, a non-historical wargame actually be ‘about’ today? But, maybe, I am starting to take the whole idea of wargaming way too seriously.

Performative Wargames

It is possibly because I have just read a book on speech-acts, but I am coming around to the view, slowly as befits a bear of very little brain, that most wargaming is performative. By this I mean that, in part, the words we say are both descriptive and determinative of what happens, but also the wargame as wargame is a performance.

I suppose the second item above comes from my reading of Gadamer. He considers, as I might have mentioned, art and the aesthetic. As with most considerations of art, ultimately he means pictures, but along the way he considers other art, including the plastic arts and plays.

A play is, when you think about it, an odd sort of thing. The actors have a script, which they follow (OK, some avant-guard plays might be improvisation, but let’s ignore them for the moment). However, the play, as presented, is much more than just the words in the script. Different actors might present different characters in different ways.  The script itself, while not obviously malleable, can be edited, cut down and, to some extent, reworked. The environment of the play, the scenery can be changed. For example, some Macbeths have got heavy duty medieval scenery. Some have been performed on an empty stage with just a crown hanging above it and black hangings around it.

The upshot of all of this is that even though the script is (relatively) fixed, the surroundings make a difference, as do the cast and their interactions with each other and the director, stage manager and scenery people, and so on. To say that there is ‘a’ play, as in a single, unalterable object of culture, is a mistake. There is a script as an object, and there are performances of it.

The point is that each performance of a play, even if the cast, director, scenery and editing of it are the same, is different. For one thing, the audience is different. As with teaching, you might be covering (or trying to cover) the same material in a class, but each time your audience is different. Even if they were the same, their location, immediate experience, reflections and so on would be difference. Even if the same audience went to the same play with the same cast again, they would have already seen the play and their reactions would, at least in part, be different.

A performance, then, is a single, unrepeatable act. Macbeth might die at each performance, but the manner of his arriving at that point is likely to be different, at least in the minds of the actors and the audience. These differences might be very minor or trivial, but they will exist. A performance cannot be repeated.

Now, consider a wargame of a historical battle. We have, if I have to labour the analogy, a cast list, which are the orders of battle of the different sides and armies present. We have some scenery, given in some sorts of stage directions, and we have a script of sorts, which describes how the battle went in its, for want of a better term, ‘real life’ performance.

So we settle down for a wargame, and various things happen during the performance of it. Perhaps the left wing which historically fought on runs away after the first move. Perhaps the rest of the army, which was a bit pathetic in the original, perform heroically and save the day. Maybe we arrive at a vaguely historical outcome, albeit by a different route. What, if anything, can we say about the performance?

Obviously, there are a few things. Firstly, we can consider the rule by which we have arrived at the outcome of the performance which we have. Perhaps the rules were inaccurate on some grounds. Well, in principle we could correct that and re-wargame, but this would lead to a different performance.

Secondly, we can analyse the distribution of luck. Some people, of course, are obsessed by rolling ones or sixes. They might believe, against all the evidence that the dice conspire against them. His is simply the usual function of the human mind. It is pattern seeking, and finds them even where we know they do not exist. As evidence, try listening to a detuned radio on headphones. Is there not someone singing in the background?

The point is, though, that the wargame is also a one off performance. You can refight the battle, but the outcome will, in some way, vary. Perhaps, having fought it once, you have learnt that masking off that portion of the other side’s army with skirmishers might be a better plan than ploughing into then with cataphracts. Even if you do not try a different plan, the die rolls are inevitably going to be different. Similarly, the set up might be subtly different; those two hills might be half a base closer together.

The thing is here that no two wargames are going to be the same, as no two performances of a play are. There are, in both activities, a wide range of variables to juggle with. Not all of these are, at least, within our conscious control. The audience and their reactions is beyond the control of playwright, cast or director. The dice rolls are (we hope) beyond the control of the wargamers. While both might have a script, subtle deviations from it (or, in wargaming, wholesale variations) can cause major differences in outcomes for the performance.

This, of course, reflects back to what I said a bit ago about history and horizons. Macbeth can be almost infinitely re-interpreted, ‘bought up to date’ by directors with a different horizon and view than Shakespeare. Macbeth can be presented as an oppressor, and man with a mission to be king, a dupe of forces beyond his control or simply as a flawed human put in impossible positions by others. But this depends on how the play is read.

And for wargaming? Do we wargame things which are appropriate to our own horizons? Is this what makes wargaming the Roman invasion of Britain acceptable, but wargaming current middle east crises tasteless?

Tasteful Wargaming

I have written extensively (well, extensively for me, anyway) about the ethics of wargaming. As it turns out, there is no particular deep seated ethical issue underlying wargaming per se. What we find acceptable in wargaming or not, or whether we simply treat the whole idea as ‘yuk’ is a distinctly personal thing. The whole issue turns on taste and, I suppose, on the possibility of giving and taking offence.

Now taste is a rather funny thing. In the first place, taste is personal, subjective. As someone (W. C. Fields, possibly) once said ‘don’t do to others what you might want them to do to you; your tastes may not be the same.’ Thus, for example, most people seem to be perfectly happy to wargame World war One or Two, even though the cruelty of the warfare is extreme. Similarly, most people do not seem to have a problem with, say, Vietnam, although some might draw the line at a game which entailed firing ballistic missiles at each other (there was indeed such a game).

As personal and subjective, then, it is hard to be at all prescriptive about our taste. It varies. So too does the threshold at which we deem something offensive. Some people think that a piece of sculpture consisting of a crucifix pickled in urine is offensive and some people think it is the ultimate in modern art. In fact, some people seem to think that the more offensive a piece is, the more it must be art, even though they might not want to actually hang it in their living room.

When it comes to wargaming, however, the issues are a bit more complex. What we represent, no matter how abstractly, is going to wander close to the average taste barrier. The question is surely, then, how we approach this barrier, and how do we make a particular instance of wargaming tasteful, or at least, capable of generating the least offence (I suppose it is a different question as to whether we should do this).

As an example, I saw on a blog recently someone (quite rightly) complaining about a new range of figures released which, from the picture, were about ten 28 mm figures sold under the name ‘ISIS Fighters’. This, they argued, was tasteless, and as I recall all the comments agreed. Someone noted, however, that if they had been marketed as’ Modern Middle-Eastern Irregulars’ that would have been acceptable. And I could not help but wonder why.

Now, speaking as someone who has not fought a wargame after 1715 for about two decades, I might not be the best person to answer the question, but I do think it is an interesting one. ISIS (or ISIL, or IS, or Al-Qaeda, or whoever the terrorist monsters of the moment might badge themselves at the moment) are nothing if not tasteless (apart from anything else they might be). Beheading people and videoing it, or putting other human beings in a cage and setting fire to them are ideas that most pubescent role-playing gamers would recoil from, even in an extreme game situation. Of course, that is part of the point, but it does not remove the nastiness of these evil actions.

But does anyone really want to create a wargame based around these people as a recreation?

Now I might be guilty here of creating an ‘other’, some abstract person (an Islamist terrorist, in this case) to project all my fears and hatred onto. But I am not sure that this is the case here; I have no intention of buying the figures nor of wargaming the present atrocities in Syria, Iraq and Libya. I do think that the production of the figures has crossed a line of taste and offence, however.

I have recently listened to a series of three short talks by Roger Scruton (‘A Point of View’ on BBC Radio 4) where he has questioned the value of modern art. In fact, bits of the above were pinched from his talk. He argues (as I understand it) that the difference between art and a fake is that art means it, and a fake just tries to grab our emotions (and make a quick buck). Art is hard, kitsch is easy. Modern art, in its efforts to shock, goes beyond kitsch.

Now, the danger is with kitsch is that we think two things (Scruton quotes Milan Kundera): first, we think ‘isn’t it nice to watch children playing on the grass’. Second, we think ‘isn’t it nice to be watching ourselves thinking isn’t it nice to watch children playing on the grass’. Our aesthetic experience is turned in towards ourselves, our emotions, our subjectivity. Real art, Scruton argues, represents reality, objectivity to us.

I suspect that something similar is going on here. We can be offended, condemn as tasteless the production of ISIS figures. But the danger is that they become like a piece of offensive modern art. We start to enjoy being offended by them, or, possibly, we find that some part of the wargaming community enjoys giving the offence to everyone else, in the same way that Scruton accuses the art critics of assuming that real modern art is simply that which the public does not like.

In short, there is something about the human race that enjoys being offended. My grandmother, for example, was a rather straight laced lady whom I never heard swear. One Christmas she picked up ‘Puckoon’ by Spike Milligan. Half-way through the afternoon she announced to the gathered family “There are fourteen ‘buggers’ on this page!” She was rather enjoying the book, I think.

So perhaps we should be a little careful about gleefully condemning the figure line. I find it tasteless and offensive, as, so far as I can tell, most people do. My motives for doing so, however, seem to be subjective. There might be some people in the world who simply do not see a problem with using them in a wargame. But the question for both them and me has to be ‘why?’ There seems to be no simply answer to that, except that it is way beyond my own taste threshold.

Two Piles of Wargaming

Having, as I have, perused wargaming blogs and websites for a while, I can see that there are, usually two piles of things that wargamers suffer from, usually gladly.

The first pile of things is what the estimable Mrs P. refers to as ‘grey armies’. We have, I imagine, all got them. Ghostly ranks of unpainted toy soldiers crammed into cupboards, drawers and other nooks and crannies in our wargame dens, whatever form they make take. It seems to be a natural part of being a wargamer, this hording tendency. Perhaps we are concerned that our favourite figures will go out of production, although that seems unlikely. Perhaps we simply decide that a new period of wargaming is nigh, and buy figures for that, forgetting all the previous projects which have remained unfinished and now languish in a box somewhere. Perhaps we do not make any sort of conscious decision, but simply buy because we live is an acquisitive society.

In my case, of course, I Have boxes of unpainted figures. In part, it is because I am a very slow painter. Again, it is much easier to buy figures than to paint them. Hence grey armies accumulate. I dread moving house because then my indolence is exposed. I suspect that, to use an old adage, a wargamer’s eyes are bigger than his mouth; we always tend to bite off more than we can chew. A forty base wargame army sounds simple in principal, but in the actual lead is much bigger than we might have thought. And, of course, any army is infinitely expandable. I mean, I know the Romans only had one lot of camel mounted cavalry, but I have bought enough to mount the whole twenty something legions. Or maybe I just like camels.

On that subject, of course, there is the issue of personal preference. For my English Civil war armies (in whichever scale) I have vast quantities of artillery, so much so, in fact, that they would put Napoleon’s grand batteries to shame. They all have crews, limbers and, if deployed properly, would leave no room at all on the table for any other troop type. The fact is that ECW generals happily abandoned their guns when they needed to move a bit more quickly. Artillery was not very effective or efficient and had little influence on any battle that I can think of. But I like it, and I have bought the guns, so there.

To some extent this is just a factor in our hobby. I can do what I like. If I want to deploy a tableful of guns and call it the Covenanter army of 1644 I can. I am not hurting anyone by doing so. It would not be a practical army, or a good representation of the original, but aside from the damage done to historical repetition I am not harming anyone. I could also deploy Tiger tanks against the Roman legions. I am not sure what I could achieve by so doing, but I could.

The point is that while I do feel guilty about my grey army masses, I am not hurting anyone by having them, except, perhaps, the foundations of the house. Nevertheless, I suppose that the guilt spurs me on to do a bit more painting.

The other pile wargamers seem to encounter a lot is a pile of books. I was encouraged recently by a fellow blogger and wargamer who confessed that he was having a book buying pause, while he got his unread book pile back under the one hundred mark. And I thought I had a problem.

My ambition for this year is to get and keep my unread book pile under forty. That said, of course, my ambition last year was to get the said pile under thirty, something which is singularly failed to do. Add to this the fact that the said pile only in fact relates to the unread books on the top shelf of my bookcase. Other unread books lurk on other bookcases, and are strategically placed around the room and around the house to deflect attention from their quantity.

Now, of course, I intend to read them all. They were all acquired expressly to be read. Books are not just decoration, they are there to be used. As with toy soldiers, however, so with books. I suspect that I will never manage to conquer this pile, as I will probably never get around to painting every toy solider I possess. The human mind is restless and moves onto the next project before the present one is finished.

Put another way, we are all, at heart, flibbertigibbets.  A new range of soldiers is produced and we all cry ‘Ooh! Shiny’, spend our money on them and, a week or two later, cram them into a cupboard (unpainted) along with all the other projects, while we flit on to the next interest. So it is with books. We are happily reading something when we notice that another volume of interest has appeared, so we move on. The pile of unread and semi-unread books simply increases.

I am not entirely sure that this behaviour is unhealthy, but often, I think, we feel that it is. I have finished a number of armies, over the years, and I have spare soldiers. Is there a law which states that I have to paint them all? If not, why do I feel guilty about them? Do they represent failed hopes, dreams unrealised, or simply over consumption? I am not sure. But however much I might feel bad about them, they are not in fact hurting anyone.

As with toy soldiers, so with books. I am interested in the subjects. If I could just find a few more hours a day (about 24 would be fine) I would read them all. I intend to do so. I just do not, and buy another one, perhaps to cover over the original guilt.

But then, if I did not, perhaps the world economy would grind to halt, and that would probably be a bad thing.

Wargaming as a Social Science

I have been reading (for no good wargaming reason, of course) Peter Winch’s ‘The Idea of a Social Science’ (London: Routledge, Keegan & Paul (1958)). Given that it is still in print, I assume that it is still regarded as a significant discussion of the philosophy of the social sciences, even if some of the detail or arguments might have been superseded.

My idea here, as a result of reading Winch, is that wargaming is based on something which is analysable by the social sciences, to wit, war itself. And war, by whatever measure you consider it, is a social thing; it is something that humans do in groups. Not only that, but warfare is often heavily influenced by tradition. This is why, of course, most armed forces, which consistently reinforce their traditions, struggle somewhat (at least initially) against ‘unconventional’ warfare, such as insurgency.

To examine this a bit more closely, Winch argues that epistemology is key. Our ideas about reality are permeated by our social relations. Indeed, I think I would go a bit further and argue that, given that most of our knowledge is held in common with our fellow humans, our ideas about reality are, more or less, coincident with our social relations, so long as by ‘social relations’ we include such things as reading a book. My idea of the social sciences and their relation to philosophy comes, mainly, from reading Winch’s book; that, in my definition, needs to be a social relationship.

Given that, of course, our epistemology and behaviour are closely linked. I expect certain things to happen. For example, in the UK we drive on a certain side of the road. In Europe, I expect that to be different. My reality is different in different parts of the world. That does not mean that reality per se is different, just that the world varies as we move geographically, as indeed it changes over time.

In terms of the military and warfare, there are some expectations. In the western military tradition, according to some accounts anyway, there is an expectation of a stand up, knock down battle. This, the argument goes, originates with the Greek city states, who could not afford to waste good agricultural time posturing at each other in the hills, so they found a bit of flat ground and sorted the business in a day.

However tendentious this account might be, it does seem to be the case that some military traditions have the expectation that the enemy will stand and fight. Through history, often this has been the case, of course.  Wellington fought Napoleon at the battle of Waterloo. Both sides had to, in some sense, agree to meet there. Neither general, I imagine, thought that not having a battle was the solution to the problem of winning the war. It probably was not even a question that could have been asked at the time. The situation was to be resolved by fighting, and there was an end to it.

Naturally, these decisions are not, within their context, blind. Campaigns are not conducted usually with the sole aim of the destruction of the enemy forces, but with the intention of achieving some strategic outcome, such as the capture of a city or the withdrawal of a nation from the war.  The fact that battles occur are, at least in part, a consequence of this activity, not a part and parcel of it.

Nevertheless, there is a tradition of battles. Even now, with more or less continuous front lines in the two world wars, we still focus on particular sets of events and call them battles. Conceptually, an attempt to change the position of the front lines seems to indicate a battle, a specific effort in a limited region of warfare.

In wargaming, we buy completely (or nearly so) into this concept. We fight wargames and a wargame is usually a battle. I have, for reasons of developing rules, fought Marathon several times. It is a distinguishable battle, reproduced on the wargame table. When we agree to have a wargame, we are bringing a set of conceptual and social expectations with us. We expect the enemy to stand and fight.

Conventional military systems, as I mentioned above, can have difficulties when their expectation of the enemy is not met. The seventeenth century Europeans in North America complained that the natives undertook a ‘skulking way of war’, which was not fair. By this they mean that the locals hid in ambush, aimed shots at specific individuals and did not hang around to be chopped to pieces by metal weapons. This did not reflect European norms of warfare at the time, and, for a bit, the Europeans struggled (we could argue that European diseases had more impact on the native population, of course.

The military imagination, therefore, expected certain behaviour from its enemy. Often, this was to be found. European armies operated within a given set of social expectations. Non-European armies might have done, to a greater or lesser extent and, of course, given that non-European generals were not stupid, they may well have decided to adopt certain tactics to avoid the strengths of their enemies. But sooner or later, they might be ‘bought to battle’, a potentially western (or Greek) idea of a decisive encounter.

As wargamers we enthusiastically buy into this idea. Wars are about battles, and wargaming reproduces these battles on the table. We expect, as I said, the ‘enemy’ to stand and fight and, if they will not, it is not a wargame. This is a convention, not something which is discussed or negotiated before a wargame is agreed. As generals ‘offer battle’ in a conventional scenario, so too do wargamers. We do not consider whether we want to fight a wargame, but only the nature of the wargame to be fought.

This is, of course, a social convention. Our reality is one of toy soldiers, dice and tables, but the agreement to wargame is a traditional, social and epistemological given and, to some extent, I imagine, derives from military social conventions.

Why We Cannot Wargame

I am sitting here by the woodburner with a head full of cold feeling a bit nihilistic. There must be a reason for this, so I shall turn my firepower, such as it is, on my hobby and see if anything remains after my feeble efforts.

Firstly, of course, we cannot wargame because that is not what nice, modern liberals do. We like to think that all our problems can be sorted out by sitting around a table, perhaps with a few bottles of nice pino grigio (for some values of the term ‘nice’, of course) and we can all be friends and find a way forward. I am sure the Napoleon and Wellington would have done better to have sat down with a few beers at La Haye Saint (or whichever one the pub was) and sorted things out. The worst of the arguments might have been over who was going to pay the bar tab, although, of course, then as now, the Germans would probably have landed up with it.

So nice woolly liberals do not like talking about violence and warfare, and, hence, as members of nice woolly liberal societies, nor should we. It does go rather further than that, of course. As nice non-violent types, we are, in fact fascinated by what some sociologist types call the ‘pornography of violence’. A society which has become much less violent is, in fact, deeply fascinated by that violence. Our news channels are full of it. Much of our entertainment consists of it and we have a deeply ambivalent attitude to this, let alone the violence we see, even vicariously and fictionally.

Of course, wargaming, by abstracting away all the nasty bits, attempts to make itself socially acceptable, but it can never really do that until any talk of death or destruction is removed from its discourse. Then, of course, it would be totally acceptable, but would no longer be wargaming.

Secondly, there is the issue of power. I have commented before that (from a certain perspective, of course) colonial wargaming could be construed as a re-enactment of the domination of the western powers over their less technologically advanced brothers in Africa and Asia. The exploitation is pure imperialism, the exertion of domination over others in the name of peace but by using violence and subjugation. Hence, colonial wargaming is simply an extension of that imperialist mind set, and so we cannot wargame.

Of course, bleeding heart liberals might argue that, say, the Roman invasion of Britain was much the same. To which the response might well be, fair enough. Any sort of invasion of one country by another is unspeakably awful, and therefore should not be wargamed. So kindly stop all ancient warfare, all medieval warfare and certainly any conflict after the end of the middle ages, where nice Enlightenment values should have permeated the body politic and rational thought have caused the avoidance of war.

A further argument against the wargame is that, usually, one side wins and the other does not. We are not, I think, permitted to talk about ‘losers’ in modern society. The top 0.1% of filthy rich are not to be envied or despised simply because they have won and we have not. They are to be welcomed as brothers (although they can buy the drinks). We have not lost, they have not won. Winning and losing is not politically correct. Children should be taught to collaborate not to be in conflict. Therefore, on the basis of not doing the ‘w’ thing, we may not wargame, as we may perpetrate inappropriate activity and cause psychological damage by branding someone a loser.

Next up, wargaming cannot happen in a conceptual sense. We cannot, on a table, represent the experience of warfare (nor should we try, see above). The wargame, therefore, does not represent anything in real life or in history. Thus it cannot inform us about anything, and therefore it is not educational and should be discontinued immediately. After all, our children now have to be educated 24 hours a day, except probably when they are asleep.  Any activity should, therefore, be an educational one, and hence wargaming, as not being educational, cannot be undertaken.

Furthermore, as not being able to represent battles (however regrettable the battle might be) a wargame is thus not real life and should be relegated to some sort of minority fantasy interest. We need, in this day and age, gritty reality in our austerity obsessed age. The Greeks would never have voted for a left wing party that promised jobs and an end to a dismal litany of cuts if they had watched our soap operas for long enough. Gritty reality, like those Scandinavian murder mystery films that are so rife these days, should make us happy to live in such an age. Wargaming is for fantasists who prefer the world as it used to be.

Finally, of course, wargaming is incoherent. If it were not, then they would not be these assorted rules for each period which give different results. The arguments about what happened in a particular battle would not occur as everyone would agree. The different sizes of the toy soldiers would not exist. Wargamers would agree and everyone would be happy. The apparent lack of coherence and agreement amongst wargamers must indicate a significant problem with the hobby. After all, most of society is happy to exist with a single set of rules (we call then ‘laws’) and professional people to discuss and describe the finer points thereof. The incoherence of wargaming must point to a significant immaturity, at least, of the wargaming fraternity.

And with that, ladies and gentlemen, I’m going to have a lie down.