NOTES ON A SYSTEM



Presentation at AHVS 311e: History of Video Games

University of Victoria

13 October 2016

Good afternoon everyone.

My name is Brian Train.

Today I’m going to talk about board wargames, also called tabletop or manual wargames, and their uses with respect to historical learning and exploration.

Specifically, I will talk about the small number of games that concern themselves with the default mode of post-World War Two armed conflict - modern irregular warfare and counterinsurgency, or COIN.

I want to talk about their poor reception by hobby gamers, and their capability to act as subversive and critical objects with respect both to the mainstream media portrayals of the conflicts they model, and to the larger body of wargames themselves.

As an example of this type of object, I will be making special mention of A Distant Plain, a game I co-designed on the most recent war in Afghanistan.

Personal note: I am a practitioner, not an academic.

I have been designing board wargames for the civilian market for about 25 years, with about 45 titles published so far.

The majority of my work has been dedicated to topics in political-military gaming and irregular warfare.

Board wargames

The hobby of civilian wargaming emerged in the mid to late 1960s as an imitation of professional military gaming, which started 200 years ago as a training aid for officers.

It peaked in the early 1980s, and then declined due to a variety of factors - basically, the market corrected itself, people got kids, and the arrival of personal computers.

Board wargames are still being produced today.

They are examples of some of the most complex cultural artifacts we have, in terms of the topics addressed and the sophistication of their components.

Superficially, the elements of a board or tabletop wargame are similar to most board games.

(slide with game components)

There is a playing surface, usually rendered as a semi-realistic map of part of the real world.

The map is often subdivided into cells called “hexes”.

This was originally done in imitation of the look of the professional wargames that the RAND Corporation designed for the US military in the 1950s and 60s.

[slide of RAND Baltic game map]

In fact, RAND is still doing this sort of thing – this map is from a game they played earlier this year, about a hypothetical Russian invasion of the Baltic region.

The map is the largest part of the game physically.

The spatial arrangements and graphics used in its presentation are an important clue to what assumptions and priorities the game has –

that is, how the designer intends the game to be played.

[slide of counter images]

There are pieces, called units or generically counters, that usually represent a military formation of some kind.

These are the smallest parts of the game physically, and each component contains at least several discrete pieces of information used for play of the game.

Note that this information is displayed on the object itself,

unlike the undifferentiated checker or pawn found in an abstract strategy game,

still less the avatar in a digital game that has an array of readouts, meters and bars shown off to the side of the screen.

[slide of rulebooks]

Finally, there are rules.

Oh boy, are there rules.

The rules are the richest and most complex part of the game, since they supply the main elements of the game’s semantic architecture:

That is, the game’s narrative premise, the goals, the actions and choices permitted the players, the rules for interaction with other players and the game’s environment, and so on.

They are also the clearest reflection of the designer’s intent, research and assumptions about the game’s topic.

[slide of Simulating War cover]

Philip Sabin is Professor of Strategic Studies at Kings College London.

He has written extensively on analysis of historical conflict through modelling and simulation.

He regularly uses manual wargames in his classes.

He also runs an MA course in conflict simulation, during which his students not only play a number of games, they are required to design some of their own

(and of course write reflective essays on them too!).

In his 2012 book Simulating War, he sets out six contributions that historical wargames can make towards research and education on historical conflicts:

1. Wargames are living and evolving systems that can provide feedback to highlight deficiencies in the designer’s current level of understanding.

Even, or especially, when a model of reality fails to reproduce that reality, it points the way to go for its further refinement.

2. Wargaming allows for comparative dynamic modelling - these living and evolving systems can be used in extending historians’ understanding of poorly or inconsistently documented events.

Sabin wrote an earlier book called Lost Battles, in which he used evidence from his research on classical period battles to create a unified comparative model of ancient land battle.

The difference between this and other textbooks was that the book included maps and pieces to allow readers to play through each of 35 historical engagements, under a set of consistent rules.

3. Wargaming encourages historical researchers to be more logical and rigorous in their analyses of combat dynamics.

Sabin illustrates this by pointing out that in the past, accounts of how battles unwound implied that the forces involved were continuously engaged in active sword-fighting, shooting or what have you.

But modelling this at anything beyond a rudimentary level shows that the antagonists would have been physically exhausted, or fired off all their ammunition, within a matter of minutes; yet we know that these engagements lasted hours or days.

4. Wargaming serves as a constant reminder that warfare is a dynamic and interactive contest, rather than a unilateral “they went there and they did that” account.

Playing through a wargame forces a player to think constantly about the other side’s reactions to one side’s moves, and the actions they undertake by themselves.

What else went into the thinking behind the decisions that were made in history?

What military and non-military factors were at play?

5. Wargames offer a much more structured exploration of causality, contingency and counterfactual possibilities.

Once you make the model, and get the engine to turn over and do at least a passable job of recreating the event, you can begin to tweak it and get further insights from it.

The Jamie Taylor piece you were given to read covers this point well.

6. The models contained in wargames can serve as a useful foundation for exploration and predictive simulation of current and potential future conflicts.

This is the main motivation for the professional wargaming done by the military and the think-tanks like RAND that support the military.

Just as the profession of arms is are acutely aware of where it came from, it is also acutely concerned with where it’s going next.

I think this point is crucial for the civilian world too, and I will come back to it in a moment.

Even if you reject the above six notions, you cannot deny that wargames offer a highly thought-provoking and inspirational way of studying war and history.

An historical text is in its own way a model or abstracted understanding of what actually happened

But it offers its sole narrative passively, through people reading it.

An historical game constructs a primary narrative, and multiple secondary or alternate narratives, actively through people playing it.

The quality and acceptability of these multiple narratives, depends on several things, I think.

One is validation through research and comparison of available information.

There are many examples of meticulously researched games, and I’ve found, in doing the research for a number of games on historical campaigns, that the particular kind of information needed for the design is not found in mostly commonly available works, which are usually secondary sources.

One source places the 27th Panzer Regiment in Kiev on May 5, 1943, another one says it was elsewhere on that day, a third says it was there but it consisted of only five tanks and a Dachshund named Benno…

[slide of Benno in helmet]

What is a designer to do with this?

They have to do some kind of triangulation or assessment of these conflicting truths, and they should be willing to show their work in doing so.

Consequently many board wargames include extensive designer’s notes, annotated bibliographies, and even complete historical articles in the package, to both justify the designer’s choices and fortify the player’s knowledge.

[slide of my ludography]

Another is consistency - as Sabin notes, a designer derives general principles from multiple examples, to build a model that contains internally logical structures that can be applied to similar situations.

Again, a designer has to exercise judgement on just how similar certain situations are, and make adjustments to the system accordingly.

I’ve designed about 50 games, and about 20 of them belong to one or another of five systems I’ve developed to cover specific kinds of conflicts.

Each one of them is at least slightly different in structure from the others, and the changes were informed by my research.

However, another 25 of them use one-off systems I never used before or since, so perhaps I am consistent in my inconsistency as well.

A third aspect affecting believability of these alternate narratives is something that a designer cannot fully control or anticipate.

That is a player’s prior beliefs.

A designer can safely assume a certain suspension of disbelief on the part of the player since this is required to get someone to play a game at all, but that suspension may have sharp limits.

These boundaries of believability are set by a player’s prior knowledge of, or beliefs about, the historical background.

Some gamers are massive history nerds, with detailed prior knowledge of the historical period or incident, and seek that level of verisimilitude in the game.

Some gamers are attached to a particular image or bit of trivia.

They’re searching for Benno the Dachshund, and are disappointed to find him missing.

More typically, they will have experience of other games on the same subject.

There are dozens of games on certain famous battles like Waterloo, Gettysburg or the Battle of the Bulge, and inevitably each new one gets compared to every other one that came before it.

This works at the other end of the scale as well.

It’s also possible, and even probable in this day and age, that a player has little advance knowledge or discrimination about a certain historical period.

And will be satisfied with a veneer of “historyness” (which is like “truthiness” but past its best-before date) sprayed on top of an existing and familiar game engine or system.

As long as that veneer coincides with the generally accepted perception of the conflict, often as mediated by television and movies, it will pass.

I think we see this in games like Call of Duty.

The players play something that has nothing at all to do with infantry tactics of any historical period, but the appearance of the uniforms and weapons are accurate enough to aid in the illusion they are, because it’s so much like a movie.

There are video games about World War Two set at the strategic scale, with icons of men, tanks and planes shoved around on a large map (again, recalling scenes from war movies).

[slide with Forrest Gump]

But there are no such portrayals in video games covering the Vietnam War – which are generally at the level of Forrest Gump’s description of the war: “We was always taking long walks and we was always looking for a guy named ‘Charlie.’”

In my darker hours I entertain the belief that this last aspect may be the most important one.

It can seem that the counterfactual narratives generated by a wargame are often given weight and authority through nothing more than their fulfilment – or rather confirmation - of prior expectations.

This brings us up slap against the tensions between academic history and public understanding of that history.

This is also salted down generously by the requirement to address issues of balance and competition, in the name of making the game “fun”.

If any historical battle could be said to be balanced, you can be sure that the actual participants did not want it to be that way.

True warfare was never fair war.

The grimy corners of history

[slide of game box covers: WW 3, Liberia]

This brings me to current events, and efforts to portray them in games.

About 5,000 civilian board wargames have been published in the last 50 years, covering conflicts from the Stone Age to fantasy and science fiction.

But there is an embarrassingly large gap in coverage of what has actually been going on in the real world in those last 50 years.

The true predominant mode of armed conflict since the end of World War Two has not been formal inter-state warfare.

The Third World War never happened, though it was wargamed often enough.

Instead, it has been a range of activity captured by the general term of “irregular warfare”, especially counterinsurgency (COIN).

And as relevant as these contemporary conflicts may be to us now, civilian market wargames devoted to exploring and understanding them are not common.

My research identifies out of those 5,000 titles, fewer than 100 that deal primarily and seriously with post-1945 counterinsurgency topics at a level higher than the board wargame equivalent of a “first-person shooter”.

Fewer than 15 of these deal with insurgencies of the last 25 years.

And I have personally designed, worked on or influenced the design of half of them.

[A Distant Plain, Andean Abyss, BCT Command Kandahar, Battle for Baghdad, Decision: Iraq, Fallujah 2004, Kandahar, Labyrinth, Liberia – Descent Into Hell, Operation Anaconda, Somali Pirates, Shining Path, Somalia Interventions]

[slide with three points]

Why is this?

Obviously there are the effects of mere numbers and personal disinterest.

Relatively speaking only a small number of people play manual wargames now.

And my impression is that while every board wargamer may have a deep interest in one or more particular periods of history, they are often no more interested in current affairs than non-gamers.

Even after 9/11, with the explosion of books, magazine articles, blogs and websites devoted to counterterrorism and counterinsurgency, there has been no great increase in publication of intellectually demanding commercial games on the subject.

I think there are three other, deeper reasons for this scarcity:

• the sensitivity and relative recency of the subject matter.

• The position of these games as critical of the portrayals of these contemporary conflicts by mainstream media: accounts which are at best simplified, and at worst sanitized and dishonest.

• The position of these games, in their attempts to model complex conflicts, as subversive of many of the design traditions of “conventional” wargames.

And therein lies their value.

[slide with Gahan Wilson cartoon – read the caption:

“Then, after you’ve starved the villagers into submission, you can bring in your interrogation team…”]

The sensitivity and recency of the subject

Games on modern insurgency often feature morally objectionable and upsetting aspects as terrorism and violence against non-combatants.

They have to; as they say, it’s not a bug, it’s a feature of this kind of warfare.

Understandably, even as the very concept of treating war as a game upsets some people, games on current affairs often excite comment, condemnation, and resistance among wargame players….

When A Distant Plain was first announced in mid-2012 on Boardgamegeek, the co-designer and I went through an extended discussion thread that sometimes verged on hysteria.

Some thought it would be a regurgitation of neoliberal talking points and spin, others a neoconservative conquest fantasy, others thought it would be all-too-limp condemnation of American imperialism, others... ahh, everyone had an opinion, and sometimes two or three.

The main problem was, the Afghan war wasn’t over yet.

Geographical, chronological and psychic distance help with the acceptability of a topic.

Frankly, the hobby appears more comfortable with players, who are mostly Americans, taking the roles of Hitler or Stalin in wargames, due to the distance now separating them from World War Two and its cultural status in American culture as the “last good war”.

So, what arises from this is what I call the “indecency of recency”.

Insurgency game as critical object

While board wargames on contemporary irregular warfare may be scarce, unpopular and downright indecent, that does not mean that they are irrelevant or useless.

A great deal of their potential power rests in the volume of information contained within them.

A properly researched board wargame is a distillation of a great deal of information, placed in context and worked into the game in such a way that players discover it and absorb it as they go along.

A board game intrinsically demands more physical “doing” than a video game.

To experience it and interact with it, a player has to read, understand and consciously apply the written rules, manipulate its various bits, and repeat these actions cyclically throughout the game.

I think this focuses players’ attention on what they are actually doing, what it represents, and what is the context of both the information provided and the process by which it is provided.

[slide: ADP Event Cards]

For example, in A Distant Plain, the Event Cards which are used in each turn of the game have a small amount of flavour text printed on them.

The Event Cards come up randomly, but each one is based on one or more actual historical events, tactics, or tendencies that affected the conflict.

Full descriptions of what is represented by that card in history are supplied in the game’s playbook, with a reference to the game’s bibliography.

Yes, this is a game with citations and a reading list.

When you compare the information contained in this game and how it’s presented to the firehose of disjointed, contextless words and images that came out of coverage of the war in Afghanistan, you can see the potential contained within one of these games for someone to educate themselves on the complexities and nuances of this conflict.

This was the principal theme I perceived in reading reviews and commentary by players on the game.

Players said they had discovered not only that the war was much more complex than they had been led to believe, but also the different and interpenetrating ways in which it was complex… leading them to an entirely new understanding of why and how the war was fought.

I think to offer people a game that organizes “the rest of the story”, and presents information not just in context, but also shows the origins and development of the conflict, is to give them a powerful tool.

It is an act both critical and subversive of the fragmented, edited and oversimplified mainstream media narrative.

When players ask themselves first, “Why was the card written to behave that way?”

They then ask themselves, “What’s the real story here?”

That’s important.

I’m actually happy when players tell me a game bugged them enough to lead them to explore that reading list...

Or even better, that they did some work of their own to add to or adapt an existing game, or even create their own.

Subversive of “standard” wargame play

[slide – ADP map]

Mary Flanagan, in her 2009 book Critical Play, examines classical board games and how they have been re-interpreted by artists and activists to critique the origins and direction of their contemporary society and culture.

She presents many examples of contemporary computer games that do the same thing, and concludes her book with a call for a change in how games of either type are designed – that they include multiple viewpoints and multiply valid methods of play that offer alternatives to the “norms” of how a game is put together.

Like other writers such as Ian Bogost, she is advocating for development of simulation literacy: the need to interrogate where a game is “coming from”, to be aware and critical of its origins and assumptions.

The great majority of board wargames focus on episodes of conventional war, and so have created a common lexicon of mechanics, traditions, structures and assumptions among them… a set of norms of how a game is put together, what concepts it holds in its basic structure, and how it is expected to be played.

Wargames that focus on irregular warfare and counterinsurgency, in their quest to model a form of complex and indeterminate conflict, only partly share that language.

Inevitably they end up questioning those norms.

I find this approach not only the more satisfying in modelling the contemporary world, but also the more realistic one in describing and modelling warfare generally.

I think I’ve tried to adopt the same critical principles with board wargames on irregular warfare.

And I think they have a use in subverting the design and play of the greater body of games.

I’d like to illustrate some basic “lines of attack” on aspects of conventional board wargames by contrasting the practices of their structure and play with those found in A Distant Plain.

[slide with 6 points]

1. Binary, zero-sum opposition vs. multiple, frictional points of view.

Most board wargames on conventional topics are binary contests which rarely deal with the problems caused by the inevitably divided aims of the people and organizations on each side, or the unreliability of coalition partners.

Practically all irregular war situations feature shifting loyalties and utility of civilian government agencies, tribes, classes, foreign powers, social organizations and military formations.

A good way to treat factionalism is simply to have more than two players, who supply a lot of randomness and complexity in a game just through natural human obstinacy, deviousness and lust for revenge.

So in A Distant Plain we have four factions, each with very different composition, methods and aims:

The Coalition - Represents the International Security Assistance Force, mainly combatant troops from the US and NATO countries.

The Government of Afghanistan – This is what passes for a leader of a domestic coalition of groups, as well as the Afghan National Security Forces.

The Taliban - This faction represents three major sub-factions within the Taliban movement, which is dominated by the Pashtun nationality, plus an indeterminate number of smaller groups and “accidental guerrillas” who may temporarily join with them.

The Warlords -These represent an even greater abstraction than the Taliban – they represent organized crime groups and dissident Pashtun tribes, as well as non-Pashtun ethnic groups.

What they have in common is opposition to both the Taliban and the national government, both of whom represent a centralizing authority.

Carl von Clausewitz, one of the first theorists of modern war, said "Everything in war is very simple, but the simplest thing is difficult."

We call this friction, and it takes many forms.

In A Distant Plain, such friction is precisely the point of including multiple player roles. An example is the complex and ambiguous relationship in the game between the Coalition and as the Government of Afghanistan, who must manage a joint account of resources toward their divergent needs.

Players have described this as “like a bad marriage” or “two scorpions hitched to a wagon”.

2. Ordered situations vs. chaotic and nonlinear game states

Many standard board wargames are relatively “ordered” games.

That is, the parameters of the conflict are set and the battle or war will be fought out more or less as it was historically, with only a few variations supplied by individual engagements, and all in pursuit of set goals in set ways.

I already showed you some of the Event Cards used in A Distant Plain.

The astronomical number of combinations possible gives the game a great deal of chaos and replayability.

The combinations of cards introduce chains of “cascading effects” or “second-order effects”, as rules are partly modified or suspended.

Insurgencies are primarily contests of political will and psychology.

The effect of actions and reactions in an actual conflict may have ultimate political and psychological effects far greater than their physical impact.

For example, in A Distant Plain the “Terror” activity is available to both the Taliban and Warlord factions.

This does not directly affect the counterinsurgent forces but it does erode popular support for the government and, through sabotaging economic lines of communication, its ability to operate against insurgents.

3. Rigid treatments of time, space and force vs. flexible ones

Most wargames have a rigid assumption of the amount of time a game turn encompasses, and the amount of activity a player can complete during each turn.

Insurgencies tend to last longer, sometimes much longer, than conventional wars, and there are long periods of inactivity.

Consequently this game has a relaxed attitude to the amount of time a game turn encompasses, and the amount of activity a player can complete during each turn is quite abstracted.

It refines it further with the concept of periodic Propaganda Rounds.

These represent an inevitable break in the action as the combatants regroup, adjust their positions, and take into account some longer-term effects of sustained fighting.

In a conventional war game, often a given game piece is congruent with one identifiable military unit or force.

But in A Distant Plain, all player force pools are abstracted.

Instead of small cardboard counters crowded with information, there are only wooden cubes, cylinders and discs.

Players need to keep in mind that the pieces in the games do not represent exact discrete combat units, or even any fixed ratio of troops.

Rather, what’s being shown is the “effective” portions of the manpower assumed to be present in or deployed to a particular space.

4. Asymmetry of information

Asymmetry of information is a marked aspect of war generally, and insurgencies specifically.

An essential problem with many conventional wargames - I would argue perhaps THE essential problem with them - is that they are perfect-information exercises.

This is their greatest departure from the professional wargames played by the military, and the greatest criticism that can be lodged against them in their claim to simulate anything like actual warfare.

In the game there is no hidden information, but there is a respectable information gap, or rather a gap in the ability to react to information, through the semi-randomized turn orders set and reset each turn by the Event Cards and prior player choices.

5. Asymmetry of methods

The antagonists in an insurgency are quite unlike each other in terms of resources, structure and capabilities, much more so than in a conventional war setting.

The main way this is done in the game is through different operations menus for each player.

Only some of the choices can be recognized as different flavors of basic activities such as building forces, maneuvering, and striking at the enemy.

Even these flavors are quite distinct in mechanics, however, and many other activities—eradicating drug crops, suborning local officials, and so on—are unique, and definitely not found in “conventional” wargames.

6. Asymmetry of objectives

[slide showing table of victory conditions]

Who wins an insurgency?

More to the point when you’re playing a game about an insurgency, how do you win, and when?

Insurgencies only rarely have the rapid and complete conclusions normally found in conventional wars.

A Taliban fighter is supposed to have said to his interrogator once, “you may have the watches, but we have the time.”

A Distant Plain uses a different combination of victory conditions for each player, to put a point on the different agendas of the multiple factions in the game.

Each faction pursues a set of two objectives: one in direct opposition to an objective of another faction; a second objective independent of the other factions, though always opposable somehow.

|Faction |Opposed incentive |Independent incentive |

|Taliban |Raise opposition to the government |Build insurgent infrastructure |

|Coalition |Raise support for the government |Minimal presence in Afghanistan |

|Government |Consolidate military control |Strengthen patronage network |

|Warlords |Keep military control divided |Amass wealth |

Conclusion

[slide with ADP map again]

To some, these games may seem quaint, superseded by technology, or ludicrously complex and fiddly.

But to me, they are objects rich in information and with great potential to both help players make sense of recent history and current events.

They offer them the ability to explore past and present alternatives through play, and maybe to bring the state of board wargaming a bit closer to what it is supposed to model.

I think that A Distant Plain is a worthy example of an attempt to make this episode of current history playable, and therefore susceptible to further inquiry and criticism.

Its research, rules and structure place certain limits on the agency of players.

But within that “box” players can experience and experiment with the choices made, and just as importantly not made, by the actual players – remembering that it’s all taking place at a very high level of abstraction, of course.

There’s the validation and the consistency I spoke of earlier.

That this game also works on the subjective, emotional level was brought home to me by an online comment made to me by someone who said that he couldn’t enjoy the game because it was “too much like work”.

He had been a Marine in Helmand Province in Afghanistan, and thought the game did much too good a job of capturing the frustration and futility he had felt there.

I knew then that the game had succeeded.

In my reply to him, I said that other, non-military players had found the game not-fun, and they couldn’t figure out what they were supposed to do, so they quit trying.

I said I wanted to think that the direct lesson they learned from this is that wars are not meant to be fun, nor are they susceptible to solution by an hour or two of play…

And the indirect lesson they may have learned is that, as gamers, they had the option of walking away from the table, something the real participants didn’t have.

So be it for all of us.

[concluding slide with contact information and URLs for sources]

Thank you.

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