Unfair Bias Against Wargamers?

As both an amateur historian and a wargamer, I get the feeling sometimes that academia and other amateur historians sometimes look down their noses at anyone who plays wargames. With this in mind, I sent out an email to several prominent people in the Civil War wargaming community. The email follows in its entirety below:

I decided to contact you because you are all involved heavily with wargaming, but I also know you to be avid readers and in some cases authors of Civil War history. I’d be interested to hear about your personal experiences with regard to the above question, and if you don’t mind I’d like to use your replies in my proposed blog
entry. Let me know what you think. To get the ball rolling, it has been my personal experience that some people reply with thinly disguised
condescension when I mention I’m not only a Civil War buff, but that I also play Civil War board and computer games. They don’t believe I can be “serious” about studying the war if I’m playing games. I may be off the mark, but that is just the feeling I get.

The recipients of this email included:

Scott Mingus, publisher of the Johnny Reb III Charge! newsletter, author of several scenario books on Gettysburg and Antietam, and award-winning Johnny Reb III scenario designer.

Drew Wagenhoffer, game designer for HPS Simulations, and the creator of Campaign Corinth, Campaign Ozark, and Campaign Peninsula.

Dave Powell, game designer for Multiman Publishing (formerly for the Gamers), and creator of some games in both the Civil War Brigade Series and the Regimental Sub-Series of Civil War games.

Eddy Sterckx, long-time poster on the comp.sys.ibm.pc.games.war-historical Usenet group.

Below, you will find their candid replies to this topic.

Eddy Sterckx:

It’s not an impression – that’s exactly how the majority of professional
and amateur historians *is* reacting.

Now, and this is just a personal observation : the best historians are
the open-minded ones. After lurking in several historical ng’s over the
past decade I’ve come to regard the guys in soc.history.what-if as the
“best”. Inquisitive minds and able to make an intellectual leap over
little chasms of lack of primary sources. By and large this isn’t the
case in the more “serious” historical ng’s. Oh, sure – the guys in these
have read/written more books on a particular subject, but fail to see an
inch beyond those books. History for me is not a collection of absolute
facts, but a comprehensive overall view of a society at a certain point
in time.

Arcing back to wargames : if the above observation is correct, only the
best and the brighest will have a look at this “wargaming” thing and
when introduced to the right wargame will see that it’s a valid path to
historical (battlefield) knowledge. For the rest … don’t bother with
the mediocres. Aquila non captat muscas 🙂

Greetz,

Eddy Sterckx

Scott Mingus, Sr.:

Brett,

I present a lot of miniature wargames in the Gettysburg area, including at gatherings / musters of serious Civil war enthusiasts and historians. I’ve rarely run into any kind of prejudice or condescension in years of doing games at libraries, reenactments, and at Civil war museums. Doug Rogers and I were special guests of the Western Reserve Historical Society (Cleveland’s premier historical museum) to present Johnny Reb 3 games based upon my Gettysburg scenario books. We got a lot of positive feedback from the historians on staff. During my Gettysburg gaming, many noted authors have positively commented on the miniature gaming as adding depth and interest to the study of battlefield tactics. Authors such as Phil Cole, Charles Teague, Eric J. Wittenberg, J. D. Petruzzi, Brent Nosworthy, etc. have in fact proof-read my scenarios or watched live gaming and added comments and suggestions.

Certainly t! here is an element that thinks we are “merely playing with toy soldiers.” However, the more enlightened folks realize that we are intensely studying history and simply presenting it in other formats beyond traditional books. In my case, wargaming opened the doors for regularly publishing.

Scott

Drew Wagenhoffer:

Brett,

I don’t know if prejudice or condescension is the right word for it, probably more like ignorance or indifference to the value of gaming in general. For every guy I’ve run into who was helpful or encouraging to some degree or another (Timothy Smith, Ed Frank, the late Doug Keller) there are others who bluntly say they are not interested in wargames or know nothing about it. I guess I’m not terribly surprised that historians should be much different than the general population of adults, many of whom have no interest whatsoever in “games”. One organization I was really disappointed in was a group of researchers and historians at Corinth, who bluntly refused any help at all and were all around rude. Strange behavior for a battlefield that was at the time laboring under the considerable shadow of nearby Shiloh (they are both combined now I think into a single national battlefield park entity).

I agree with Scott’s last paragraph. With the best researched wargames, features like maps, OBs, and unit placement at particular moments in campaigns/battles can often exceed in detail and accuracy what you’ll find in even the best book studies. The mapmaking skills of wargame designers can be highly underrated. I think I can be justifiably proud of many of the 3D isometric maps I’ve created, most particularly my expansive Corinth, Richmond, and Memphis maps. Doug Strickler has created an immensely valuable series of maps for his Gettysburg campaign design. I continually marvel at what he has accomplished.

Drew

Dave Powell:

Brett,

I have found that most know very little about wargames. I don’t run into prejudice as much as a lack of any knowledge about what wargames are. They have more familiarity with the comp gaming side of things, (Sid Meier, for example) but only slightly more.

However, when I started my research into Chickamauga, the park historian down there was extremely helpful. I got back into the library with little problem, and was given free access to their maps and files, just as if I were a working historian. I was primarily working on numbers and maps, and Jim Ogden was very helpful.

Of course, that work also translated into a couple of still ongoing non-game projects. When I showed him my research into strengths and losses, it was fully documented and sourced, so that he could judge it more realistically from a historians point of view.

I joined the “Historians of the Western Theater” group last year, and most of them are academics who are vary unfamiliar with wargames, so we don’t discuss it much, I confess. I mention that I have done those games (something like 14 ACW titles now) in passing. Perhaps I am a bit reluctant to push it too much for fear of encountering exactly the kind of prejudice you mention. I haven’t really discussed it much, but I do know that I don’t try to describe our kind of gaming to non-gamers: I find that much of what we do (especially with the paper monstergames) to be inexplicable to the layman. Maybe my descriptive powers are not up to snuff…

I have thought a lot about what kind of history games are, however. First, I think that since games are essentially games first, history second, and done mostly by part-timers, that the history can be quite spotty from time to time. A game with a couple of basic historical errors can really kill historical interest in the genre.

Second, I consider games to be Tertiary sources. Since designers distill so much information, and things like set-ups are not footnoted, you never know what is fact and what might be guesswork, etc. Where games excel is in the playing, which allows you to explore outcomes (Could Pickett’s Charge have worked? Would a different deployment for the Rebs at Shiloh made a difference?) and as living maps. I agree with Drew that the map work we do is often far above what most historians see, and that should be emphasized more. Terrain is important to history, and needs to be highlighted. I also like the idea that wargames force the player to think globally, as it were. When a Historian writes a book on Pickett’s Charge, he focuses on the units that were involved. He doesn’t add in a lot of stuff about Neill’s Brigade of the 6th Corps, for example, because they weren’t involved.

But a Wargame designer has to think about them. He has to find a set up hex for them. He has to know what strength they had, and if they had suffered losses. Replicate this for each army, and a wargame designer likely has a much better grasp of the actual military situation at that moment in time than a professional historian – because he has IDed the position and status of every command in the game. He now knows what reserves are available, and where they are. He realizes very quickly, for example, that Meade has not reconstituted a large reserve on July 3rd, as the 6th Corps is still scattered to the flanks, and this fact limits Meade’s options quite a bit. Historians might debate about a Union follow-up, but wargamers will tend to know, as they play the game, that the follow-up was unlikely because of what Meade did or did not do on the morning of the 3rd.

I also like games for the “living map” aspect. You can trace a unit’s (or every unit’s) movements on the map in a way quite unlike in a book. You could, if you were crazy enough, play through each turn trying to replicate the actual movements of each unit to see what the overall situation looked like at any given moment in time – something no historian without a wargame can do.

Overall, if done right, wargames allow authors, designers, and historians of all stripes to develop a superior situational awareness of the event they are studying. Of course, most people just play the game, instead, but even that can really help.

I confess that I am not doing so many games these days, as the writing is moving more to the forefront, but I recognize the different perspective wargaming has brought to my study of history.

Dave Powell

And lastly, Drew Wagenhoffer followed up with one more email:

Dave,

I am so glad you brought this up as it one of the best points to be made and you’ve illustrated it very well. Along the same line as your Neill comment, in the retreat from Corinth writers pretty much ignore the actions of the Confederate cavalry and concentrate on the important fight at Davis Bridge between the infantry, but I have a huge map to work with and have to place those units on the map.

And you make the further excellent point of wargamers, through repetitive play, are able to develop a keen sense of what is possible and what is not (or what is highly unlikely) given a particular situation.

Drew

As you can plainly see, experiences do differ depending on your experiences. I guess I probably shouldn’t be too surprised at the varying answers to this one. As with any question, the diverse background of those polled makes for some interesting, and sometimes surprising results.

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