Just Asking Questions

THE TENSION at the heart of historical wargaming, as it’s currently construed, is akin to that of historical reenactment: what is the balance between contemporary intelligibility—accessibility among laypeople—and the manifold interpretations of authenticity through position-taking expertise. The benefit from the former is optimistically the expansion of the hobby, especially to those already playing 40k, WHFB, or AoS, or pessimistically its survival and perpetuation into the next generation. Among the latter might be found wargaming academics hoping for a more detailed simulation-like experience and derisively nicknamed grognards—“button counters”—insistent on staking out their position of authority within the discourse field.

However, this core tension betrays the historical circumstances that brought wargaming to its current discourse field. Wargaming was imagined as and still is a mechanism of military planning and officer training, inheriting this mantle from its early Kriegsspiel days. This has led to something of a Prussian (or perhaps American for contemporaries) sickness at the heart of historical wargaming and design, which is to say that historical wargaming functions as a military exercise—its markers of authenticity being overwhelmingly ones of military discourse—among civilians instead of a philosophical, aesthetic, or historical one. As Kriegsspiel wargaming was the appropriation of play for military applications, so too have modern historical wargames maintained their discourse fields along primarily military lines.

This leads to the evaluation of game mechanics, an extension of the larger discourse field, to collapse into discussions of tactics, strategy, and heavy abstractions of historical “feel” for time periods and belligerents. To those accustomed to historical wargaming’s discourse, a rules lite system’s abstraction of “+1 to melee rolls” for Napoleonic French infantry in an attack column might seem reasonable. But one has to ask why. From a myopic perspective, the simulation is purely within military discourse, so it has no need to escape its historical point of origin. A modern historical wargame is, by definition provided by its invention, one fully invested in the basic formula of “military history + play = historical wargame.” Is this where emphasis should be placed within the field of discourse? Inertia is an insufficient answer for game developers looking to push their art, so is there any reason not to relocate emphasis?

What can we imagine historical wargaming could be? If we decouple the field of discourse contemporary rulesets are immersed in—to remove the assumption that the positive value a ruleset generates for players is inherently related to its ability to hang a hat of questionable size on its authoritative interpretation of a specific era of historical warfare—we find an immediate and obvious first variable to play with. That is to say: history as an academic discourse has undergone nothing short of a revolution in the past half-century, blossoming into wide-ranging field that entertains questions of ecology, sociology, psychology, diet, &c. And yet, the connection is left largely unmade within the field of discourse. (“Well, how would one…” isn’t the point of this note; the point is to consider, experiment, and develop along the lines of discourse you find interesting, capable, and sufficiently playful.)

When I was completing my graduate studies, I started to get a better idea of how literary and historical research actually worked and what the most exciting branches of discourse were in various related fields. The simple summation of those realizations was that the most exciting discourse was tied to interdisciplinary research and, in direct relation and service, investigating the materiality of the topic. I was still operating under the delusion of becoming an academic professionally, but I was enamored at the concept of “fecopoetics,” or the literary-historical study of shit. How do historical people conceptualize of their own waste, human excrement compared to other bodily effluvia, human versus animal versus manufactured waste, &c., &c. What feels ridiculous to posit at first becomes obviously important. (In contemporary English, batshit, dogshit, and horseshit all have different meanings beyond solely describing the source of the shit—and are all semantically different from generic “shit.” For that matter, “shit” is considered a curse word, unlike “poop” or “dung.” Would it sound weird if I made a reference to the “Loathsome Poop Eater” instead of the “Dung Eater” appellation? Yes! It would! Because waste matters!)

It should be very little surprise that much is made of the figure of the soldier on the battlefield in a wargame. Historical wargaming, as a discourse field, loves to lionize its ideologically acceptable figures, typically far beyond their real, human dimensions. A heroic last stand lets you instrumentalize the abstracted game pieces—they passed their morale test, after all—into an extension of the military-state, which the player acts through the guise of. Most soldiers in most wars are severely underpaid, usually underfed, disinterested, economically impoverished masses given limited training and armed with whatever solution fell between the (almost always) contradictory goalposts of financially efficient and personally suitable to the ruling class. These soldiers are not brave warriors keen on recreating Thermopylae so much as militarized worker-peasants terrified of the consequences of seeking an alternative to fighting. What is their history? What does the battlefield look like to them? How do we abstract the things that matter to them on the battlefield, not just the extensions of experiential recollection provided by generals and historians?

We might similarly ask, how does one conceptualize of death in a different era—how does food, medicine, sanitation, and religion affect this? How does one conceptualize of historical wargaming as the crossroads of a greater field of historical and gaming discourse? What does art history teach us about wargaming?

The questions go on and in directions productive and playful alike. And this is the point. Nothing in the field of discourse has to be a fixed starting point and set according to past interpretation. No assumptions here have to be granted. What does it look like to push away from a mode of historical development—and, perhaps one step father, from realistic representational abstractions in game design? What if the damn thing makes you feel the warfare of a time period from a different perspective or direction? There are no hard rules, there are no hard promises to what formal assumptions play needs to take—that’s the mercurial brilliance of play as a human activity.

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P.S.
BY EXTENSION one may and should consider the discursive assumptions around miniatures themselves. Every miniature is a metaphor. Perhaps they should all have “ceci n’est pas une pipe” stamped on the bottom of their bases. Realism is not the only mode of art! (If you get the previous reference, you know that!) What would Breton’s automatic writing/painting of miniature wargaming look like? What is postmodern wargaming? What can a miniature represent, and what does the color they’re painted with represent—or does it? Are there more interesting stories to be told about the past once we let go of our monolingual discourse and turn towards the playful?