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.