Sunday, April 11, 2021

What makes us uncomfortable?

A recent cartoon on the Ragged Soldier blog, to which I gave an inchoate (and in fact largely alcohol-fueled) reply, reminded me of a subject that has always been of some interest to me, and which in fact was one of the topics I had in mind for an early entry when I created the blog. That is, the entire subject of what is considered unacceptable, or at least what we tend to feel less than comfortable with, in our wargaming.

Of course to some outside the wargaming community the hobby itself is often seen as odd at best and positively shameful at worst. I have heard of wargamers being challenged on why they should find this regrettable aspect of human history to be something of interest; to read about war is bad enough, but to play games about war is seen to be celebrating it, almost to relish the horrors that have always ensued when wars are fought.

While I have no qualms about my interest in things military, and while I regard myself as one of the most peaceable of chaps – a regard I extend to every wargamer I have ever met – I am still not exactly sure what defence I would make to such a challenge. War is hideous and always has been. If the military history books we read present an honest account of the wars they describe, complete with all the eye witness accounts of the suffering and the maiming and the misery, then there are grounds for the accusation that we are taking a ghoulish delight in such details; if the accounts are higher level or more academic, then we can be accused of glossing over the gory details and trying to distance ourselves from the realities of our subject. I would certainly have to admit that my interest in war started with an excitement at the spectacle (all those big blocks of brightly coloured soldiers in Waterloo or the row of gleaming white pith helmets lined up along the top of the mealie bags in Zulu!) and a part of that will always remain despite more sobering thoughts of the pity of war. As Thomas Hardy says, ‘War makes rattling good history; but Peace is poor reading’. The fact that I have since those days developed a more cerebral interest in the theory and practice of war both in itself and in its political and social implications hardly seems to make my fascination any the less immature.

The realities of colonial warfare in the movies; war as spectacle

I mentioned in my comment on the Ragged Soldier blog the example of King Philip’s War, a game of colonial warfare in seventeenth century New England, which was published in 2010. Colonial warfare, with its often genocidal results, is always going to be a sensitive subject, and rightly so, so it is no surprise that the game aroused a degree of controversy when it was released. And, as most of the debates I saw were on the internet, it goes without saying that any sense of restraint or civility tended to disappear very quickly. That said, the communications I read between the game designer, John Poniske, and Native American representatives of the Wampanoag people who took part in the rising, were civil and dignified on both sides, and what mostly came through to me was an understandable misunderstanding of the word game. When most people think of games – that are not computer games – they think of the likes of Monopoly or Cluedo, and from that point of view a game about a colonial war might indeed be seen as trivialising the conflict. But for most wargamers that is not how we tend to approach the word. We would tend to regard our games as simulations and studies as much as ‘games’ in the traditional sense, and from that point of view designing a game about a subject such as King Philip’s War is a pretty serious undertaking.

The realities of colonial warfare as represented by King Philip's War; war as study

I would contend that from this point of view a thoughtfully designed wargame like King Philip’s War seems much less a trivialisation of something unpleasant than non-wargames that are set in the past and include contemporary institutions without making any comment upon them. Yet the potential for causing offence of such games never seems to make it onto the radar, presumably because in most cases they are not really intended to closely model any historical reality and most historical details that do appear in the game are more ‘chrome’ than anything.

Within the wargaming community itself there are often questions about whether certain nations or armies are ‘ok’ to play. Many players don’t like to play Second World War Germans or Soviets, or American Civil War Confederates. Again, while all we are doing is pushing around counters on a map, there is a slightly queasy awareness of what the counters represented in real life. Those SS counters we blithely move across the map of Russia were in reality groups of very unpleasant men committing all sorts of hideous atrocities as they went. It has never bothered me personally commanding those armies in games, but that might just be because, without any personal link to the events, I am able to establish a certain distance – my father served in the Merchant Navy during the Second World War, and if you were to invite me to play a game in which I am a German U-Boat commander trying to sink a convoy in the North Atlantic, I am honestly not sure about how comfortable I would feel doing that. I suspect a part of me would envisage my Dad looking over my shoulder and being slightly aghast at what was going on. This unwillingness to play in a role that was in real life something that posed a lethal threat to a parent or grandparent seems not unusual.

That said, here we must acknowledge the nuances of history and the simple fact that nobody is innocent. The glorious Second World War allies of course included Stalin, so when we fight that Barbarossa game we can be sure that those red counters are guilty of just as many horrors as the grey. Similarly, those khaki counters we play with such enthusiasm…well, they were the colonial power of course, often the same khaki-clad chaps who committed such atrocities in peacekeeping operations from Malaya to Kenya after the war ended. Similarly, insisting that we always fight as the Union against the Confederacy perhaps seems politically naïve when one considers the actions of Federal troops against the Plains Indians. There has never been a nation or a tribe wholly innocent of the blood of others, nor an army that has always spared the innocent and harmed only those in arms against it.

There are also those who would argue that certain conflicts should not be gamed. We have seen this in the case of King Philip’s War, and colonial conflicts are always at the top of lists of games that some find unsettling. Others feel that the acceptability of a game is related more to its freshness in time. Is it ok to game a conflict that is still unresolved and in which people are still dying even as we roll the dice? Playing a game about the insurgency in Iraq, for example, when car bombs were going off in the streets of Baghdad with hideous consequences, would certainly seem indecent to some.

How recent does a war have to be to be acceptable as a game...

...and is it ok to put a humorous slant on contemporary atrocities?

I started this post with a distinct idea that I was going to reach a conclusion and I find I have failed to do so. I have just ended up going round a bit rather, which is fine, I often find myself doing that. It is certainly a subject that arouses passions on both sides of the argument. On the BoardGameGeek website it is often the case that even to suggest that playing some sides might make one feel uncomfortable, or that a certain game about colonial conflict in Africa is lacking in conscience because it downplays the role of the native population, quickly gives rise to accusations of being ‘woke’ (hate that damned word! Were previous generations all supposed to have been asleep up to this point?) or being a SJW (pretty much hate that too). People become defensive pretty quickly, this defensiveness often takes the form of lashing out and so is in turn seen as offensive and it is often difficult to get an honest and unimpassioned statement of how people really feel about these things. My own feelings tend to be fairly muddled, predictably; I generally don’t get offended by wargames but I can’t say why, and I can’t but feel some sympathy for those who question some of the games we play. Maybe, as in so many other areas of my life, I am just overthinking things. But it is to me yet another of the interesting aspects of an always interesting hobby.

10 comments:

  1. I enjoyed this very much, David! Excellent thought collecting on the topic.

    While I wargame for the simple pleasure of matching wits against an opponent at the "game" end of the spectrum, my main interest is in gaining insight or knowledge into how the resources at hand, situation presented, and decisions made on the battlefield affected or brought about the historical outcome. Perhaps, I lean more toward the "simulation" end of the wargaming spectrum?

    My approach to wargaming as a hobby is Laissez-faire toward my fellow wargamers. Who am I to critique another's interest in gaming a particular topic? Perhaps, I may find a topic or situation uninteresting or distasteful but who am I to judge? If we stick our heads in the sand before exclaiming something as off limits, how can we ever understand the dynamics at work? Are we in the Age of Reason or The Reign of Terror?

    As wargamers, in particular, overthinking a situation is likely not uncommon. Our hobby and interests have taught us to question and analyze.

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    1. Hi Jonathan. I think I am very much like you. When I play wargames I wear my wargaming hat and keep all my others in a completely separate bag. My main interest is to explore the scenario and consider how well the game seems to model the challenges and outcomes of the historical situation - which is why I am happy to play solo in the absence of opponents. I normally don't consider the politics very much even if it is a game where the wider politics might be problematic, such as a WWII Eastern Front game. That said, if I am honest I do find that when playing WWII games solo I am conscious of a pro-Allied bias. I tell myself that I try to play both sides with the same level of enthusiasm but I don't think that's true really!

      And I would never judge another's playing tastes either, even if I didn't share them. Perhaps one of the problems is that in this age of social media and the state of permanent factionalism and outrage that seems to accompany it we always feel that we have both the need and the right to be flaunting our perceived moral high ground over others.

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  2. Much of what you discuss has been debated in various forums, not least the Society of Daisy.
    The conclusion was that the easiest way to avoid any such moral dilemma is to use Imagi-Nation or imaginary armies as because they never existed don't carry the same baggage (aside from potentially glorifying or trivializing war).
    The late founder, Otto Schmidt went so far as to turn these imaginary armies into Marx Brother skits; his C18th armies included a state ruled by a Valley Girl type Barbie with pink coats and 1930s armies with parodies of Nazi Germany and the USSR. His view was to make it ridiculous so you couldn't take it seriously.
    Neil

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    1. Hi Neil, that is certainly one way of dealing with the issue! Because of my interest in how the game reflects actual history I might feel less inclined to play the imagi-nation games, but I can certainly see the fun behind it and I know others with an interest in playing that way. Some of the stuff I have seen looks very cool - steam-punk games with Victorian gentlemen fighting in balloon-powered floating dreadnoughts, that type of thing, for example. There is a definite attraction to that.

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  3. Like you Dave, I don’t think that there is a hard and fast answer to this. Line a lot of issues in life, my answer is “it depends”. And long May doubt and uncertainty last. The scary people are those who are sure that they are right.

    The Polemarch covered much of this ground on his blog a few years ago and ended up with similar conclusions, or at least didn’t come up with hard and fast rules that he could support to their logical conclusion. ‘Just’ things that did or didn’t feel right.

    Our hobby has a lot of potential to educate, and potential to lead to less healthy outlooks. It depends on the individual going into it, what they pick up along the way.

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    1. I think you're right about the people who are sure they are right, that's what makes the online debates so often horrendous.

      Yes, a lot of this is going to be subjective and each individual will have their own idea of what may or may not seem ok to them.

      It's funny that the question never seems to arise in games that don't strive for any sense of historical accuracy - many Eurogames are happy to have serfs or slaves represented by cubes that get placed here and there but it's never commented on...I guess non-wargamers maybe don't have quite that same tendency towards self-analysis.

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  4. Dave - I am a total pacifist, given the opportunity...

    The only defence (and it isn't really a defence, more an attempt to rescue some credibility for the hobby) is that one way of seeing very clearly how little chance the poor wee men stood in wars is to watch a war game for a while - I think most gamers have a very clear idea of the chances of anything even faintly like glory (except when they are playing against me, of course).

    An awful lot of games - chess, many card games etc have an underlying military theme - I fear the disapproval of games of conflict is sometimes close to extending to a more general dislike of any form of game where someone might win - we can't have that, now - very inappropriate.

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    1. Hi Tony. Well yes, I did think of chess and of course that is seen as somehow very pure even though it is quite clearly modeled on some kind of military encounter. Interesting that chess was seen as an arena of combat in itself during the Cold War, formidable soviet players being richly rewarded for defeating the decadent westerners and all that (I've just been watching Queen's Gambit on Netflix so chess is kind of on my mind at the moment; as is Anya Taylor-Joy but let's not go there. Rowrr). You can't really object to ASL and give chess a free pass.

      And yes, I think that wargamers have a better idea than most of the pity of war, and that because of the hobby rather than despite it.

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  5. Thanks Dave, interesting stuff and we should all be thoughtful about what we are doing, and never entirely comfortable with it.
    One point I am determined on which is that I won't take criticism about enjoying a form of recreation or entertainment that involves the portrayal of violence - after all , what are the most popular and critically-admired forms of TV or film presentations? Police/Crime and murder investigations of course! 'The Bridge', 'The Serpent', 'Peaky Blinders', 'Midsomer Murders', 'Killing Eve'? ( it's even in the title..). The darker places of the human psyche are interesting to everyone, it seems - perhaps the more so as life becomes more 'safe' , global pandemics aside.

    BUT of course we should be thoughtful, as you say, about what we are depicting. Ross MacFarlane made an interesting comment recently, that he had decided not to game aspects of war that he would be ashamed of, such as say awarding VPs for destroying villages. I think I would steer clear of SS Units in WW2- and I would worry about gamers who seemed to admire such units' 'elite' status ( maybe those are also the guys that want only Tiger tanks in unrealistic numbers in their German forces ). In Colonial games, there must surely be scope for making the 'home team' the focus, with the players pitting their wits against the evil ( perhaps automated or umpire-controlled ) Imperialists? It might even be more interesting, and encourage more study of the indigenous military cultures.

    The imagi-nations idea I can understand, and only recently realised that Charles Grant even used it for WW2 period, having 'Black' and 'Red' armies rather than specifically Nazi and Soviet - subtle, but perhaps important for him? This allows the 'simulation' aspect and thinking about the historical/tactical background to be retained, of course. I suppose Fantasy and Sci-Fi takes this to a sort of logical extension, but I admit those have never held any interest for me - perhaps because they are pure 'game' and no history, to my mind? This is not to disrespect anyone who enjoys those games, of course! Regarding gaming current conflicts, it's interesting that it seems that at least some of the players of those games are veterans who have actually 'been there', and I don't think I am going to criticise them. Also of course many of the founding generation of modern wargamers such as Donald Featherstone and Peter Young had indeed fought in WW2, seen the effects in person, and were happy to game them. Perhaps it was even a way of dealing with the memories?

    The biggest question is of course - why do we do this? And I don't really have an answer beyond 'it's interesting and absorbing'. Why is that? I would have to be regressed to a 1970s childhood to find the real answer - perhaps not advisable, unless also allowed a stop at the model shop to stock up on Airfix kits and boxes of troops for 19p each..

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    1. Wise words all, Dave. I did think about the fascination with murder mysteries. If reading and gaming war is seen to endorse it, then reading Agatha Christie and watching Midsomer Murders is presumably endorsing murder. And the taste for True Crime literature with all its grisly details always remains strong so maybe we our hobby can be regarded as a relatively innocent one.

      I'm not sure if that slightly unsettling admiration for the SS as elite units is something that affects many gamers these days, although I read with interest that no less a person than Bruce Quarrie was described by the historian Simon Mackenzie as "partially or wholly seduced by the [Waffen-SS] mystique". Maybe it's a good job I only read his Napoleonic books!

      Your point about the involvement of veterans in gaming is a good one too and one that hadn't occurred to me. It is striking how many US vets comment on modern-era games in BoardGameGeek, I guess for many it may well be a way to help them understand the things they have been through.

      Like you I tend to eschew the fantasy/sci-fi gaming genre for the same reason, too great a fascination with the overarching history that is missing in such games. For similar reasons I get slightly turned off by the simplistic dynastic politics of stuff like Game of Thrones - all good fun but pales in comparison to the twists and turns of the real dynastic politics that history has to offer.

      Yes, interesting and absorbing will do it I think, and there is really no need for anything more. God, yes, to be transported to one of the model shops of our youth for just half an hour and with a few quid...

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