Wargaming Leisure

For most of us, wargaming is a leisure activity, a hobby, something which is chosen to indulge in, rather than being something required, ordained or made necessary.  There is a distinction here between what is necessary and what is chosen. It is (sadly) necessary for me to get out of bed from time to time and go to work. Not to do so would, eventually, have undesirable consequences, such as my work not being done, being rendered unemployed, unable to feed my family and so on.  However, I choose to get out of bed. There may be some constraints to persuade me that getting out of bed is a good idea, but (assuming that humans do have some sort of free will) I do choose a particular course of action.

What, however, do we make of leisure activities? I am not constrained to do them, by definition. A leisure activity is something which we choose to indulge in. if this were not the case, it becomes work, possibly drudgery. But a freely chosen leisure activity is, almost by consequence of that set up, something that we choose which, we think and believe, is a good for us. Our leisure activity might not, of course, ultimately turn out to be good for us. Our whiter water raft might capsize and we might drown, or a mountain yak might push us off a Himalaya to our detriment, but nevertheless, we chose that activity because we believe in its good for us.

Given that we are not all the same, our choices of leisure activity vary. Some people seem to find riding bicycles up hills with gritted teeth and sweat by the bucket load a pleasurable activity. I can only imagine that the pleasure here is in looking back and thinking ‘I’ve done it’, but who am I to criticise someone else’s leisure activity? I can only, by definition of the term leisure activity, assume that they enjoy it somehow.

Nevertheless, humans are fairly practical people. In our work we are often presented with practical problems which we respond to with a plan, a course of action, and some activity such as laying bricks or writing computer programs. One of the hall-marks of this sort of activity is a certain degree of efficiency. My line manager is perfectly happy to see some scrawl on my desk which does contain a plan, the kernel of an idea or something of that sort, even though a doodle would probably make them suspicious that I am not really doing anything.

But the project, the plan, the efficient execution is not really a part of leisure activity as leisure. It might, indeed, be part so such an activity, but it is not the point of it. Leisure activity is a point in its own content. There is (or, perhaps should be) no point to the leisure activity except that it is an leisure activity. It is an end in itself.

Thus, I might have (and, in fact, do have) a plan for my wargaming in the short, medium and / or long term. I am painting armies. I plan to have wargames. The armies are of such a type, the wargames are between such forces, and so on. The point here, surely, is that as these plans refer solely to my leisure activity, no-one is going to get hurt, grumble or throw a wobbly at me if they are not done. The plan is a plan but it is not a serious plan. The fate of millions (no matter what my wargaming megalomania might suggest otherwise) is not in the balance according to whether I complete this next base of Thracians or not. Which is just as well, as work on the Thracians has stalled a bit.

Wargaming, however, is something of a creative activity. Something is created by our efforts in our leisure. If we have a wargame, the creation is a wargame, a narrative, a series of connected events. The events are connected, and connected to us, by our decision making processes. This process might depend on plans (formal or informal) but is also completed in the concrete, the wargame itself. A wargame throws at us a series of decisions we have to make to move it forward. That move, of course, might well (and probably is) driven by a pre-existing context. For example, a mile wide cavalry unit belonging to my enemy might just have appeared over the hill. This context drives my decision to, say, concede that the game is lost.

In some senses, that decision making context is the same as my need to remove myself from my slumbers and do some commuting, but in another sense it would be different, because the drivers for making the decision are different.  In leisure activity, no-one would mind too much if I failed to make a decision, or, indeed, made the wrong one to the detriment of my army. In real life it might matter rather more, unless you are a highly paid bank executive in which case they simply increase you bonus the more bad decisions you make.

We can, of course, in a leisure context, simply make a decision arbitrarily. I can attempt to turn my grand battery to pound those horsemen, just to see what happened. I might even get away with it and blow them away while the rest of my army is busy winning the battle elsewhere. The point here is surely that my decision does not have that great an impact on the real world; it can be treated as something of a thought-experiment. No people or horses were, in fact, hurt in the preparation of this post.

So wargaming as a leisure activity actually has no point at all. And that is the point of it. If everything humans did had a point we would all be workaholics and very, very, boring. But perhaps we do need other activities as well. After all, someone who had an infinite quantity of leisure time and spent it wargaming might, in due course, be regarded even by fellow wargamers as being a bit dull.

Intellectual History

It is possible that I am simply going to repeat myself, or at least state things which most people would say ‘Of course’ to. On the other hand, sometimes stating the blinking obvious is a good thing to do.

I suppose the first thing I want to suggest is that things, generally, go in fashions. There might be, for example, a fashion dressing your soldiers up in fancy red uniforms to march into battle. There might not, in fact, be any particularly good or bad reason for doing this. It might be that red is a martial colour in your culture, and thus seems to be a good option for trying to instil some valour, ardour or some such into the troops. Your enemy might have a different culture, wherein, say, red is the colour of cowardice and blue is that of valour. They might, thus, be very willing to attack your red clad troops, but flee from the odd blue bedecked regiment of cavalry that you have permitted just for a spot of variation.

Fashions, however, change. These changes can be brought about by a variety of causes. For example, a fair bit of European army kit changed when those armies were fighting in places that were not Europe. Light infantry, irregulars, and different sorts of swords and so on were all incorporated into military equipment and tactics as a result of experience beyond the home shores of the culture.  This is, of course, not unique. The Romans pinched their sword from the Spanish, after all.

Fashions are more than simply in dress, equipment or tactics. I have very briefly tried to suggest that ideas have an impact on how warfare is conducted. The particular example I had in mind was the ‘star’ fortress style, particularly associated with Vauban but used extensively before then. The idea is of course usually explained fairly simply as a response to the increased firepower of cannon in besieging armies. The instrumental requirements of a form of fortification which could resist cannon fire more effectively led designers to build lower walls, packed with earth, and with open fields of fire. A round tower simply could not match the modern fortress in ability to block the attackers and blunt their force.

Except, of course, that often old style castles could, and did, resist modern siege weapons. One problem, at least, facing would be besiegers, was that of actually getting the siege weapons into place. This was a huge logistical problem. Once arrived, there was the problem of siting the weapons so they could be effective and, of course, of ensuring the supply of the besiegers, in terms of food, water, weapons and men. A siege of even a simply medieval style castle was no joke, as some of the problems encountered in the English Civil war demonstrate.

But another issue in the design of castles must have been that of the intellectual changes brought about by the renaissance. While medieval castle builders did, indeed, use mathematics to calculate, for example, how many steps were needed in a spiral staircase, star style fortresses needed some more advanced ideas about geometry. Indeed, if these were not forthcoming, there arose some slightly odd shapes. For example, the defences of Berwick on Tweed are irregular. This might be due to the lie of the land, to the inadequacy of surveying or to someone who was a bit dangerous to let loose with a compass and set square. Of course, one might suggest to Her Majesty that that was how it was meant to be all along, and it is perhaps fortunate that the defences were never seriously tested, but the idea was there of something pleasingly geometric in shape, and that comes from the interest in mathematics of the renaissance.

Of course, warfare is not the only place where one sees this. Galileo was interested in geometry, and there is evidence that his concepts were based on the idea of geometry. Spinoza, too, thought geometrically, as least, insofar as his Ethics is written like a geometry text book. Euclid was viewed as the ultimate in comprehensive proof, and people attempted to emulate him. The idea of geometry, thus, permeates a fair bit of intellectual culture in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, and it would be a rash historian indeed who suggested that it did not affect military theory and practice.

We can possibly push on a little further with this notion. The military text books of the day were rather obsessed with order and geometry, with nice diagrams explaining how to array a certain number of men in blocks so many deep and thus how wide they should be. Montecuccoli, for example, suggests an octagonal infantry battalion at one point, for battalions at the ends of the battle line. This is a sophisticated sort of formation, and it indicates, from the text, that he is interested in geometry, and would seem to me to need seriously trained soldiers to carry it out without getting into severe disarray.

The point is that Montecuccoli, as a theoretician as well as a general, we thinking geometrically, as part of the culture in which he was educated. To think geometrically is simply to be part of the intellectual culture of the day. That is not to say it was used uncritically, although that accusation could be aimed at some of the text books. It was simply part of how things were thought about.

There were reverse influences, as well. Asking a theoretician to design a fortress could have impact on the development of mathematics, geometry and architecture. I seem to recall that Durer was one such, although I think he pre-dated the star style fortress. Nevertheless, he can be seen as a transitional figure, designing shorter, stubby towers packed with earth to resist cannon fire, an idea taken up by Henry VIII in the defence of English shores.

I was going to start talking about the influence of ideas on tactics, such as the caracole, but I am starting to think that this piece is both long enough and both arguable enough and not radical enough, so I shall have to leave it there and return to the Curious Case of the Caracole another time.

Worlds of Imagination and History

I have finally found my Flashing Blades rules and, more to the point, perhaps, reunited them with the scenario books and some very old character sheets. Part of the interest of this, of course, is to marvel at the time we all had to play role playing games twenty odd years ago. Another part, however, is the interest of what, exactly, is going on in the game.

As you probably know by now, Flashing Blades is set in seventeenth century France, where the musketeers battle it out with the Cardinal’s Guards, duels are fought and desperate deeds of daring do are attempted, and sometimes succeed. The rules and scenarios actually often follow more closely the novels of Alexander Dumas than real history. And this is where things get a little bit interesting for my purposes here.

In the introduction to the rule set, the author, Mark Pettigrew, note that the players might prefer to view the game as one set in the ‘France that might have been’ rather than the ‘France that was’. Flashing Blades, he says, requires a creative imagination like all other role playing games. Given that the date on the rule book is 1984, this suggests that the comparisons are with the likes of Dungeons and Dragons and Runequest.

Reading the rules and one or two of the scenarios, I am struck that, in fact, the rules are very much a work of imagination. While some maps are correct (for example, maps of Paris and London seem to be reasonably authentic), others are, to all intents and purposes, made up. They have to be. I am not aware of a detailed seventeenth century map of, say, Bologna. We have to make it up.

The politics of the day are also simplified. While player characters can be students of theology, even members of the clergy, the conflict between Protestant and Catholic, both within and outwith France, is seen in terms of the Huguenot and Roman worlds. The English are Protestant and thus the enemy. The Pope is catholic, and therefore a rather dubious ally. And so on. As a broad brush stroke, this is accurate enough, but there were, to say the least, historical nuances.

This is not to say, of course, that the game is not a huge amount of fun, but it does indicate, perhaps more directly (or even, perhaps, honestly) what is happening in any sort of historical wargame. It seems to me, at least, likely that any wargame set in a specific period, is in fact set in a world of our imagination, which only slightly has connections with the real historical world.

I think, actually, that what might be true of wargaming is possibly true of history, or rather, historiography, itself. I have noted before that history is necessarily partial. We cannot know fully what was going on. We have to select even from that information we do have in order to make a coherent, intelligible narrative, something from which we can start to understand. Thus, for example, Dumas might have taken his cue from his understanding of seventeenth century France, but what he created was something slightly different. Perhaps we could classify this as a nineteenth century understanding of the original, dressed up as a novel’s background.

Historiography, of course, changes. Our view of seventeenth century France is, probably, no longer that of Dumas. The rule of Louis XIV and XV may well no longer be portrayed as a golden age of culture, elegance and, of course, world power. Perhaps today we have a stronger sense of poverty and injustice, of waste and corruption than earlier historians and novelists. Does this, then, make our perception of seventeenth century France more accurate than theirs?

I suppose that the answer to that (slightly rhetorical) question has to be ‘no’. Our view, our construction of the original historical object, is no more valid in principle than theirs. At least, if it is more valid, that is only because there are more archives available, more documents about events known that there were when Dumas wrote. But more to the point, our world, the world from which we interrogate the past, is different.

This relates back, somewhat, to some things that were noted here about books. A wargames rule author was noted as having eight hundred books on the subject, and access to a research library and a major city library. That is fair enough, but what is important is what those books are and what the author does with them. Historiography changes, as I have noted. The view of seventeenth century warfare is different now than it was in, say, the 1960’s, and distinctly so from that of the 1920’s or 1900’s, when Oman and Delbruck were writing. Yet these are, often, the authors upon which wargamers rely to create their worlds.

The second issue is what the author does with the works available. We can just read a paper, put it away and ignore it. We can read it, mark it and inwardly digest it. But we have to be able to tell the difference between those which should be laid aside and those worth engaging with. Simply having a range of material available is not sufficient. We need to read critically.

The aim of all this is, hopefully, to obtain a rather more accurate picture of the world we are trying to recreate. We can, of course, simply try to read the battle reports and books of tactics, and I suspect that is what most wargamers, anyway, do. We are less interested in, say, the social and intellectual history of the period than we are with the military and political. But here, too, we have to be careful, as all of these interacted, inevitable. For example, it is possible that we would not have Vauban forts without the revival of interest in geometry and mathematics of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Of course, the shape of the fort was dictated to some extent by the arrival of effective artillery which could demolish castle walls, but would the shape of the star fort have been as it is without the historical contingence of geometry and Cartesian mathematics. I doubt it, somehow, although, of course, things would have been different.

The Dreaded Drift

As I potter around the electronic environment, observing the lipid prose of my wargaming colleagues, I sometimes stumble upon a post which outlines plans, or an avowal to reduce the number of projects and periods that a given wargamer is interested in, or building armies for, or some such most wargamers, most of the time, seem to be working on at least one project, planning another and thinking about the one after that.

I find myself not immune from this drifting and multiplication of projects. As you might be aware, I have spent a fair bit of the last few years painting ancient armies. Indeed, the very address of this blog suggests as such. The aim of these armies was to test the rules I am writing. The aim of the blog was to document the development, note important things that I read which needed to be incorporated within the rules, and so on. We can note, in passing, that this has not really happened.

In pursuit of my overall aim, however, I have painted a fair number of armies: Romans, of various hues, Gauls, ancient Britons, Germans, Parthians, Pontic, Spanish and probably a few others I cannot remember. From there I shifted to the classical Greek and Alexandrian age. Here, as has been documented on this blog, I have painted a double dose of Greeks, early Persians, later Persians, Macedonians, Indians and now, at my last gasp, Seleucids. And here I hit the problem of wargamer’s drift.

On the face of it, there is no problem. All I need to do is finish off the Seleucids and have a few wargames to test the rules, and then they can be published for the discerning wargamer to enjoy while I rest upon my laurels. But those niggles still seem to come along. It seems to me there are so many ways of drifting into another project.

Firstly, of course, there is the discovery. My first wobble in this saga came about when I discovered serried ranks of Spanish Succession and Great Northern War armies. These spring, of course, from an earlier project (which was published in Miniature Wargamer, I think, and might have sold Mr Berry two boxes of soldiers). My painting technique was not what it is today, but, nevertheless, they are nicely, reasonably painted by my (admittedly low) standards. The bases, however, are plain cardboard. So I consulted my wargame guru, the estimable Mrs P., as to whether I should undertake to rebase them. ‘What else are you doing?’ she enquired. I listed the other projects. ‘I think you have enough on.’ And there the matter rests; the armies are in a separate box, occasionally whispering ‘how about us’, but otherwise the drift in that direction is stalled.

Secondly, there is the desire to extend. An army is not (in spite of our army lists and neat categorizations) a static thing. It evolvers, and this can be quite rapid. So I have been reading up a little about Seleucids, and painting an army to represent early Seleucids. The army was part of a nice pack, which included troop types to make the army a later Seleucid one. So now I have the dilemma of whether I should paint up another batch of imitation legionaries and develop the army to cover all ages. Of course, I would then need to do the same for the rest, and then add in Roman and Carthaginian armies and suddenly I have drifted into another era, another project (and, knowing Mr Berry and his ability to persuade, another set of rules). This drift is unresolved. I like to paint the stuff I buy (ha, ha, says to Polish GNW army still in its box) and imitations legionaries are not that difficult….

The third cause of drift is the book. I have been very good, even if I say so myself. My unread book shelf is down to about 25. I have almost sworn off buying books until it is below twenty (I say almost because I cannot break the addiction of a lifetime; on the other hand my car would appear to need a new gearbox, which will put a dent in the book / soldier budget anyway). But I have brought some books recently on my original wargaming period, the seventeenth century. And as I read these I can see interesting wargaming projects looming. How did Lambert prevent the Scots crossing the Pennines in 1648? How did the Spanish form their empire? And so on. At present, I am holding out against this, but it is becoming a close run thing, particularly with the rediscovery of Flashing Blades and my Musketeer figures.

I am quite sure that there innumerable other factors in causing us to drift from one project to another. I can think, for example, of wargaming ‘friends’ who say ‘I have this half army of Confederated Nrudles; would you like them? I know you are interested in the period.’ And so we accept, go online, buy the other half of the army, and their opponents, just for good measure, and so another project is born which will compete for our attention until we give up on it in frustration and despair.

Another factor in this is the wargame show, or magazine. Often these are trying to push a ‘new’ period, that is, one ignored by most of the wargaming fraternity for a decade or two, or deemed to be too uninteresting or lacking in decent information. Thus there is a plethora of World War One games, figures, rules and articles at present, where, when I was a lad, it was all deemed to be too difficult or uninteresting, except perhaps the Middle East campaigns. To some extent, of course, wagamers who drift into these eras are fashion victims. Perhaps we should have sympathy with them, rather than gallop off down the same route.

I dare say we all have our own drift factors. I have tried to describe some of mine. Only time will tell if this blog evolves into a seventeenth century one, World War one or even becomes about the Confederated Nrudles.

Battles and Sieges

I want to return to something that I wrote about a fair while ago, but which still intrigues me. The argument I put forward then was that wargaming, as a hobby, is unbalanced, because far more sieges were conducted than open battles and, as a consequence, many battles were, in fact, fought as a consequence of sieges.

Now, of course, I am not quite so naive as to think that I can get away with such a sweeping statement as that in the company of blog readers here gathered, but I do think it does stand some further examination. That examination is probably more to do with strategy than tactics and politics than wargames, but it still might just give us pause for a little though.

If we consider a war, then, mostly, wars are not about creating battles. One side or the other might consider a battle to be advantageous in its present situation. Thus Edward III tried to provoke the French to battle when it was certainly to his tactical advantage. Winning a battle can change the whole course of a war, as both Edward and Henry V found. Similarly, losing a battle can alter the complexion of a war, as the Swedes found at Poltava. This does not necessarily mean that the war is won and lost, but the whole, so to speak, momentum of the campaign. The war, the political situation is changed.

It is a fairly similar situation with sieges. The successful conclusion of a siege means that a general can point to a concrete success. Rather like a soccer manager who can indicate to the club owner some silverware, a successful siege-winning general can be fairly sure of keeping his job. Additionally, if we consider strategy, then most places that are besieged, at least in any considerable strength and with any significant tenacity, tend to be strategically important. Or at least, they become so; besieged cities can become political symbols as well as physical locations. Think of Stalingrad or Magdeburg. Would Stalingrad have been quite so important if it had been called, say, the Russian equivalent of ‘Smithville’?

The winning or losing of a siege, then, can have important military, political and symbolic consequences. For Magdeburg, even though the siege was lost and the place pillaged and burnt, that very fact was used as a rallying call for the Protestant cause, and played a part in bringing the Swedish state into the Thirty Years War. Of course, it is arguable that Gustavus would have got involved anyway, but even if the siege was not a proximate cause of it, it certainly was used for propaganda. The most important outcome of a military action is not necessarily in the strategic context.

Now, one of the things I wanted to claim (and which must be, of course, nuanced) is that battles and sieges often go together. In the English Civil War, for example, both battles of Newbury were related to sieges (Gloucester and Donnington Castle, respectively). A lot of the manoeuvring before Naseby was also to do with sieges, threats of sieges and the storming of cities (Chester, Oxford and Leicester). In fact, it is arguable that only when the New Model Army was freed from the responsibility of undertaking and relieving sieges that a decisive battle could be fought and the endless local actions, aimed at and around local garrisons could be bought to an end.

The point about garrisons is, of course, that they can control the local countryside and passing major routes. Armies tend to stick to roads. While they could, in theory, strike off across country, the progress they would make, let alone the loss of heavy equipment, supplies and the chance of getting lost mitigate against doing so, at least until a battlefield is chosen. Thus a garrison on a major route can cause all sorts of problems to the other side. Thus, while Basing House had a relatively small garrison of, I think, around 300 men, its capture was a major prize of the 1645 campaign because it opened up a major road to the west from London. If we consider that trade was important for raising taxes, and it was the taxes that paid the New Model Army, then we can start to see that even fairly modest forces could make a fair sized difference.

Of course, it could be argued that the ECW, being a civil war, was a special case. To some extent that is true, but you only have to look a t, say, Belgium and the Franco-German border to see the same sort of issues at stake. The fortresses at least could provide early warning of attack, and, by careful positioning, provide delay to any invader and a magazine to the defending forces. Again, while these places could be avoided or masked, they did control the flow of the campaign and proved to be, in some cases, important symbols for success of failure.

Sieges, however, from a wargaming perspective, are simply overlooked. They lack the glamour, the heroism, the pageantry of battles. We prefer to see our armies lined up ready to fearlessly pursue desperate deeds of derring do. We do not, usually, accept that our infantry, at least, tended to spend most of their time digging trenches and up to their knees in mud. A siege is not, in a word, romantic, not matter how important it is, nor how interesting or exciting the activities within a siege might be.

Perhaps one reason for this is that we often ignore the campaign context of our games. We might play single battles. We might run a narrative campaign, but our narrative still tends towards the romantic battle rather than the dour and pragmatic siege. Perhaps, too, we do not have rule sets for sieges which enable them to be concluded in a reasonable time. The Hyboria campaign abstracted them into a dice roll or two. This may be the only sensible way of proceeding, but it does seem to me to be a shame, given the importance of sieges to history.

(War)Game Theory

Every once in a while I flick through my big book of philosophical terms looking for something that might be interesting to write about. This usually occurs, of course, when I have not thought of or found anything else, so it is sort of my ‘scraping the bottom of the barrel’ or desperation activity. And so this time I came across an article about ‘game theory’, and the thing that caught my eye was the assumption it makes about the other players all being rational.

Game theory is not, of course, about game, or at least wargames as we would like to know them as an interesting and enjoyable pastime. Game theory is actually a bit of mathematical logic about outcomes. A paradigm case would be of two soldiers, Dan and Tom. They are ordered to stay at their posts. However, they also know that if both run away, then the enemy will break through and their chances of survival will be minimal. If one stays at the post, their chance of survival will be small, but the other, who will run away, will have a good chance. If they both stay, they both have a reasonable chance of survival.

If the two soldiers are in ignorance of the choices of the other, and assuming that both parties are acting rationally, they will, of course, both run away. The way the mathematics works is that given the symmetry of the situation, the biggest payoff is by running.  If the other runs, then I will not survive. If the other stays and I stay, I will not survive. Therefore, the best is to run and hope that the other stays. The scenario where both decide to stay on the off chance that the other will too is not strictly rational, for if the other stays, I will have a better chance of survival if I run. This is, of course, a form of the prisoner’s dilemma.

The scenario assumes, of course, that both Tom and Dan make rational choices and they do not enter an agreement about staying. If they do enter such an agreement, the dilemma then becomes one about trust, virtue and ethical morality, and moves a little way outside strict game theory, although the logic can be modified to account for the collusion between the players.

What game theory does not account for, of course, is the hero. The hero would stay whatever the circumstances, holding the post for his colleagues to run away. The hero, for whatever reasons, breaks the strictly rational assumption of game theory: he does not behave in a rational manner. A normal solution to a game theory scenario is that each (rational) agency will maximise the utility of the situation given other rational agent’s strategies. The hero breaks that; he is not out to maximise his own utility, or at least, his calculation of utility differs from the other rational agents. The hero is thinking, perhaps, more in terms of fame, glory or honour, while his colleagues (who presumably gratefully run away) are thinking in terms of utility being saving their lives.

The hero’s course of action is, in some world views, entirely logical. If returning from a battle with your life intact but your reputation in shreds is, for you and your world view, an unbearable stain on you and your family, then it is likely at your rational utility calculation will be different from Tom and Dan’s. Or at least, if you do run away, you might make sure you are the first into combat in the next battle, to try to regain your reputation.

The point of all this is to suggest two things. Firstly, that our own sense of rationality might not be that of our toy soldiers. Often, as wargamers, we make decisions for them which accord with our own, modern Western rationality. This rationality usually (although not always) argues for the preservation of my life. Thus, for example, various rules of engagement assess the threat to the participants before permitting using lethal force. We can, therefore, force our little lead warriors to act outside their own world-view. It might be rational for the Spartans to retire, but would they really do it? History suggests that the answer is ‘no’.

Secondly, of course, is that the ‘cold’ rationality of game theory is not actually how we, as humans, think, at least, not all of the time. We can set up our soldiers with all due knowledge of history, the capability of the forces, the enemy, the terrain, and the rules and so on. No one, however, can make us do so. We do this because this is how the rules, history, the nature of wargaming and so on have conditioned us. We could simply grab a unit and plonk it onto the table in any order. But we do not. We impose an order, a rationality upon it.

We assume, furthermore, that our opponent is equally rational. He, too, is placing units on the table with due regard to all the constraints and opportunities available to him in the circumstances. During the wargame, we move our forces, open fire and so on, again, with due consideration and rationality, assuming that our opponent is doing the same. In fact, in many rule sets, there are special rules to ensure that our soldiers, or at least their officers, are not acing with such rationality. Thus in DBM, I seem to recall, there were irregular knights whom, at the throw of a dice (I think it was something to do with not issuing a command a turn to stay in place) zipped off to charge the nearest enemy unit. Similarly in Tercio and the old WRG Gush Renaissance Rules there were ‘A’ class troops (or, in Tercio, M1 troops) whose main activity was to charge the nearest foe. Somehow, we have rationalised the irrational decisions of our troops.

Nevertheless, I suppose that our assumption that our opponent is rational is, um, rational. But it is not necessarily so. And, of course, an apparently irrational move could make perfect sense to our opponent. It turns out, for example, that the impetuous charge of Royalist cavalry in some actions of the ECW was perfectly rational: it was designed to sweep the enemy away as they (the enemy) were often present in greater numbers. In this case, the troops simply need to be classified as rational, not A class impetuous upper class twits.

Deconstructing Wargaming

In even asking some of the questions I pose here, I run the risk of being classified as a postmodernist wargamer, even though I have no idea what one might look like. Even if we reject postmodernism in many of its forms (mostly because such pronouncements as ‘it is all relative’ are self-stultifying) , we have to acknowledge that there is something in some of the questions which are asked by it. For example, the hermeneutic of suspicion encourages us to question the texts which we read and, in a sense, turn them against themselves. This has, of course, significantly been done against religious texts, but most texts are open to this form of deconstruction. Of course, what the users of these techniques often have failed to recognise is that the same technique can be applied to their own texts. Again, we run into the issue of self-stultification. If the author vanishes, then that means that the author of any text, including deconstructionist text vanishes as well.

Nevertheless, it is useful to make some use of these ideas. The questions that are asked, about the limits and meanings of text, are important ones, even if we do not necessarily agree with the answers given (or, in some cases, even understand them). Some typical deconstructionist questions would be ‘where did these ideas come from?’, ‘whose interests do they serve?’, ‘what voices are silenced here?’ A text, as I have recently noted with respect to history, is selective and selected. We cannot know the full meaning, the intention of the author. We can only work out some of what they might have meant, some of what they left out and some ideas of why that might have been so.

As an example I will take a set of wargame rules and ask these sorts of questions. To be specific, I will use De Bellis Renationis, by Phil Barker and Richard Bodley Scott. This is not particularly because I have anything against (or, indeed, in favour of) these rules or the authors. I just want to ask the questions of the text as I bought it.

First, then, ‘where did these ideas come from?’ Well, clearly, DBR is a cousin, at least, of the DBM and DBA nexus. The authors are the same and many of the mechanics carry over. The authors also claim in the introduction (it is always worth reading the preface and/or introduction or author’s notes; we so often let slip what we are really doing in them) that they will bring to player’s attention the largely unknown campaigns of the later seventeenth century in Europe (Turenne, Montecuculi and so on). So there is a claim here also of input from history.

This is, of course, not beyond criticism. The rules, as presented, are, perhaps, more conventional, or at least more stereotypical of a certain view of the ‘Renaissance’ wargaming period that might at first appear. Recent research, so far as I know, does not support the claim that command systems were inadequate (or at least, more inadequate than earlier systems) nor that clumsy deep formations were the norm, or had slowed the style of warfare down. In short, the ideas seem to have come from an earlier period of the historiography of warfare.

Secondly, we can ask ‘whose interests do these ideas serve?’ here, I think there are multiple answers. Firstly, of course, the ideas might serve the author’s interests. Authors are usually interested in people reading what they have produced. I guess it is true to say that most wargame rules are written for love and not money (except GW products), and so the interest of the author is in having their ideas out there. Of course, the danger for the author is that they then get roundly criticised, but in part that is the idea. The ideas are also, almost certainly aimed at serving the interest of the wargaming hobby as community. They do enable us to play games, after all, and hopefully enjoy them. They give us a common language and experience to discuss and critique. We might also note that the rules might serve the interests of the publishers of older historiography, such as Oman.

The third question was , ‘what voices are silenced here?’ this is possibly a bit more interesting and less obvious, and also slightly contradictory to the answers to the second question. Explicitly in the Introduction it says ‘The simple mechanisms produce effects much more subtle than may be apparent at first reading and should not be tampered with.’ With this simple rhetorical device the voices of any other wargamer apart from the authors is effectively silenced, at least with respect to this precise rule set. Potentially, the answer to any question about why the rules are doing this and not doing that are ruled out by the simply expedient of claiming that the rules are too subtle for the questioner to comprehend. This is a pre-emptive strike against any critic of the rules.

This might be construed as working against the implied claim of the rules (and every rule set) that they are serving the wargaming community. Indeed, one of the criticisms of rule sets commercially produced is that they stile the individual wargamer’s ideas and creativity. Perhaps this is so, but of course many wargamers have neither the time or space to undertake the scholarship required to write rules, and simply want to enjoy a quick battle with low set up costs.

Nevertheless, there is a tension emerging between the statement silencing wargamers and the rule set in the communitarian context. We can, of course, ignore the authors, particularly as the next sentence, claiming that scouting, forced marches and so on will arise naturally in the game seems to me to be entirely wrong. But in doing so, are we not simply being postmodern enough to remove the authorial voice?

I suppose that the final point is that to most wargamers, the ‘do not tamper’ declaration would be a red rag to a bull. Most of us, I suspect are inveterate tinkerers; we would not be wargamers, to some extent, if we were not. Most of us like to push the boundaries set by the rules. Someone remarked once that you could play a perfectly good hoplite battle with Polemos: SPQR. I have never tried it, but I suspect it is correct, even though the rules do not cover the period.

So, DBR now lies before us, dismembered. Does it matter? Probably not that much, but it is interesting to consider what the authors are up to.