Fangorning It

I’VE BEEN THINKING about an idea for a game for a little while, and it’ll probably need to cook a little while more before anything resembling flavor jumps out of it, but here it goes: a wargame in which the agency of the player is enacted primarily through the terrain (and weather effects) and not the people.

Non-anthropocentric wargaming, or wargaming that doesn’t focus primarily on the human actors of a battle, has wider and narrower potential applications as a mode of rethinking wargame development, so I won’t pretend to be carving out some special or radical position somewhere in the discursive mess.

On the narrower ends, one might consider wargaming as a function of machine use—a game primarily “about” the guns, tanks, jeeps, jet engines, &c. rather than the people using them—or possibly recast available rules to speak more clearly to nonhuman factions in sci-fi and fantasy games. After all, WHFB is a game designed with the main human faction as the default. Modern 40k assumes that the Space Marine Intercessor, or Tactical Marine before it, is the starting point for balance. Most players have that empathetic urge to seek out the human, and thus familiar, whenever they start a new game, and this is largely true for virtually all categories of games rather than just being a stereotype of wargaming specifically. However, we might ask what WHFB looks like if the assumption was that everyone was going to start off as the Vampire Counts or the Skaven. What rules move between “special rules” and “core rules,” between what the designer will try as hard as humanly possible to not change too much versus what faction-specific rules they already know they 1) have flexibility in how they’re written and 2) will be expected to creatively iterate many different versions of?

In this narrower end, we see the abstractions of psychology entirely change. The undead aren’t motivated by psychology as humans are, with most of the army lacking the capacity for psychology at all. A sea of rats? Yes-yes, that one would be a shift! We see then a game built on the assumption of relative cowardice (compared to humans), an insistence on group attacks, desperate attempts to assassinate enemy officers rather than engage in glorious duels, ambush and skirmishing actions being as important as massive flank charges, &c. This is not arguing for faction rules or a sandbox, but considering how the core rules of the game might be bent in the direction of better representing this nonhuman type of warfare.

And a wider interpretation of non-anthropocentric wargaming? As said earlier, the battlefield itself becomes the point of agency. The bacteria become the point of agency. The campsite, the muster point, the road itself all become points of agency.

Why do this? What’s the point? As with most projects to remove humanity from the oft-defaulted center of the critical frame, the answer is one of returning to the material objectivity of the world in whatever strained and insufficient ways we can endeavor to do so. Humans are important to Earth, yes, but so are ants, mushrooms, water, our moon, our machines and inventions, beavers, possums, yeast, &c., &c., &c. We live in interconnected ecosystems, where no single change goes fully unnoticed by some other part of the overall. But when we play games about conflict? We assume all these smaller interactions are secondary at best and write off anything short of terrain and weather effects as too insignificant to pleasurably affect the proposed simulation. But anyone who has watched a sparrow on their back porch or a chipmunk cross their path on a trail knows: there is immense pleasure in noticing the thing you’d otherwise miss because it’s too “small” in whatever way that normally elides its perception.

We don’t typically think of ourselves as creatures that yearn to be alienated. I mean, we are alienated so deeply from normal human rhythms and work that most associate the idea with something nefarious. But it isn’t! Alienation as an affect reminds us in fresh terms what the world really is. Alienation—done right and not as a coercive tool of the economy and state—can, as Viktor Shklovsky would say, “make the stone stony again.” And so we can do this same thing with wargaming. We can stare at the little worlds on our tables and think beyond the (in)humanity of our scenarios to the effects of this otherwise human activity on the wider world around it. And this is where it becomes enjoyable, where the pleasure comes out of this kind of play. We yearn for alienation because we yearn to slough off some measure of a modern life that is, in its own way, an affixed alienation enforced by powers beyond our highly atomized ken. We yearn for alienation because yearn to stop asking what others have in common with us—and to assume that difference and difficulty is incompatibility—and instead to ask what we have in common with others, to see ourselves as members of a great community. Does it mean more that I’m an American or an Earthling, and how much have I (and anyone else) lost by assuming the former over the latter?

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P.S.
I PUT A POSTSCRIPT ON THIS ONE TOO? Yes. Sure. Some people have a Kit-Kat to feel indulgent. I mean to undercut the common logic, and the postscript felt an appropriate place.

A commonly levied complaint whenever theory pushes art is that the result is absurd navel-gazing, despite critical acceptance. When theory pushes games, it’s actually often quite successful locally but foregoes the reach and natural audiences of the road-much-traveled inverse. This leads to adoption only in pieces—in wargaming terms, leaving one with the problem of having no one else to play with. So wargames development is mired in this issue: we absolve ourselves of more radical ideas to affix our work towards the middle-palatable, because the ghost haunting us is an alternative where no one ever plays our games. I think, if we are clear-minded on the issue of games and art being intertwined, we owe it to ourselves to permit more radicalism in our games—as an expression of art.