Wargaming in higher education: Contributions and challenges

What wargames can offer?

One problem when addressing this whole issue is the lack of clear and agreed definitions. Some scholars see ‘simulations’ and ‘games’ as entirely different things, whereas others (including myself) champion the hybrid concept of ‘simulation games’ (Klabbers, 2009). The term ‘wargame’ likewise means different things to different people. At its broadest, the term can cover seminar discussions or role-playing exercises about a particular conflict, with little formal structure except that imposed by the fiat of the facilitator. Such ‘pol-mil’ games are by far the most common form of ‘wargaming’ used in academia, since their focus on familiar techniques of discussion, negotiation and presentations increases their accessibility and makes it possible for organisers and participants to handle even such daunting endeavours as Professor Rex Brynen’s highly intensive week-long peacebuilding simulation involving over 100 students (Brynen, 2010; http://paxsims.wordpress.com/). Professor Mark Carnes (2014) has described the inspirational success of his ‘Reacting to the Past’ role-immersion game techniques on hundreds of campuses around the world (https://reacting.barnard.edu/).

In this article, I will concentrate instead on wargames which model military strategy and tactics more than politics and diplomacy, and whose structure and progression are shaped more by formal rules laid down by designers in advance than by the ad hoc judgements of an active umpire. Such wargames may use a variety of representational media ranging from counters on a map to pixels on a computer screen, but they all share the following two fundamental components (Sabin, 2012: 3–5):

– An underlying mathematical model of reality, which seeks to simulate the terrain of the battle area, the deployment and capabilities of the military forces, and the passage of time during the engagement, thereby providing a synthetic experimental environment that mirrors in certain key respects the real range of potential courses and outcomes associated with the armed conflict concerned;

Academics who study conflict do commonly employ methodologies related in various ways to wargame modelling. These related methodologies include operational analysis and mathematical modelling which seek to capture conflict dynamics using numbers and formulae, and game theory which analyses the antagonists’ choices and decisions with reference to simpler analogical situations such as the ‘prisoners’ dilemma’ (Biddle, 2004; Schelling, 1960). However, as the Venn diagram in Figure 1 makes clear, wargames themselves, with their characteristic combination of mathematical modelling and active decision inputs, are designed and played much less by scholars than by two other groups with an equal or even greater interest in the dynamics of armed conflict. OPEN IN VIEWER

The first group consists of military officers and defence analysts. Ever since the Prussian army embraced von Reisswitz’s Kriegsspiel system two centuries ago, wargames of various forms have played a key role in military training and war planning (Allen, 1987; Perla, 1990). Today, interactive computer simulations are an indispensable and cost-effective complement to live military exercises (Smith, 2009), and even traditional manual wargaming retains a role in military education and defence analysis. The second group which champions wargaming techniques is drawn from the mass of private enthusiasts who find war and conflict fascinating out of sheer personal interest. Many such enthusiasts are not content simply to read about war and military history; they seek to bring selected aspects of the experience to life through wargame modelling. Such hobby wargaming has been popular for over half a century, and it has given rise to over 10,000 different wargame designs played with computers, cardboard counters or model figures, covering between them almost every conflict in military history (Dunnigan, 1992; Halter, 2006; Hyde, 2013; Sabin, 2002).

War and games have shared a close and interactive relationship ever since the days of medieval tournaments and the gladiatorial contests of ancient Rome (Cornell and Allen, 2002; van Creveld, 2013). Johan Huizinga’s (1949) classic study Homo Ludens shows how ‘play’ pervades even the most serious parts of human life, war above all. I opened this article with renowned military theorist Karl von Clausewitz’s surprising claim two centuries ago that the closest available analogue to war (prior to the embrace of Kriegsspiel) lay in a game of cards. The point is that such games generate artificially the kind of dynamic contest which is inherent in war, and which gives rise to all sorts of ‘paradoxical’ behaviour such as deliberately choosing to attack through poor terrain like the Ardennes forest in 1940 and 1944 so as to catch one’s opponent off guard (Luttwak, 1987). It is this ability of games to mirror some of the characteristic action–reaction dynamics of real war which gives wargames their greatest utility as a means of studying and understanding war itself.

Wargames of the kind discussed here offer a safe vicarious reflection of some of the situational and decisional dynamics associated with armed conflict. In this they are actually no different from books and films, which also vicariously reflect selected aspects of the horrendous experience of real war through the safe media of words and images. Where wargames differ from books and films on war is that they focus on systematic interactive modelling of the hypothetical possibilities inherent in a limited set of conflict dynamics. Books and films, by contrast, concentrate much more on what actually happened rather than what might have been, but they can afford to be much more eclectic and broad-ranging in their coverage, selecting vignettes of experience all the way from the individual combatant to the cabinet room, but with much less need to cover any single perspective thoroughly in order to ‘complete the picture’. Wargames model a conflict as an endlessly replayable game of ‘glorified chess’ (Dunnigan, 1992: 13), whereas books and films zoom in to highlight sporadic experiences of selected ‘pieces’ from pawns to kings on the one occasion that the contest took place for real.

These two approaches to the study of conflict complement one another very well. Wargames force their users to engage systematically with questions that are all too easy to neglect when using only the more selective and linear approach of conventional scholarship. What were the fundamental factors shaping the course of the conflict, and what was the relative importance of influences such as numbers, quality, leadership, intelligence, logistics, terrain, weather and time? What practical alternatives were there to the decisions actually taken? How plausible is it that the conflict might have gone differently, and what changes might have triggered such divergence? Such questions are by no means easy to answer with any degree of certainty from the evidence available, but if one avoids them too single-mindedly on the grounds that ‘all we can really study is what actually happened’, then ‘history’ is at risk of becoming mere ‘chronicle’. As soon as one transcends simple narrative by asking ‘why’, one is forced to address issues of contingency and underlying dynamics which are the bedrock on which wargame modelling is founded (Black, 2008; Lebow, 2010).

A second key contribution of wargames is to convey a vicarious understanding of some of the strategic and tactical dynamics associated with real military operations. Besides learning about the force, space and time relationships in the specific battle or campaign being simulated, players soon acquire an intuitive feel for more generic interactive dynamics associated with warfare as a whole. Defence is usually stronger than attack, but an unduly passive defence risks having the enemy concentrate his assault on just part of the force and defeat it in detail. Terrain may make certain sectors of the front more secure, but not if players choose to garrison them too thinly (as in the Ardennes examples which I mentioned earlier). As variation in combat outcomes during the game creates unexpected threats and opportunities, players will be faced with other classic real world dilemmas such as whether to reinforce success or salvage failure. Actually grappling with such dilemmas at first hand rather than simply reading or hearing about them has enormous educational potential.

This leads on to a further key advantage of wargames from a scholarly perspective, namely their inherent potential for ‘active learning’, including on the part of designers themselves. Traditional didactic means such as books, films and lectures focus on the one-way transmission of information and ideas to a more or less receptive audience. Wargames, by contrast, require players to engage with and master the simulation system sufficiently to make sensible command decisions. Mistakes in rules interpretation or tactical judgement will be clearly apparent to the facilitator, who will be able to give tailored corrective advice accordingly. This process of iterative correction applies equally to wargame designers themselves. When their initial draft is deficient, this deficiency should become glaringly apparent when players misunderstand the rules or adopt tactics which diverge radically from those followed in reality. Designers hence benefit from an automatic mechanism for identifying problems and flawed initial assumptions, which is not as readily available to authors who simply present their interpretations in the form of text, battle maps or complex formulae for passive consumption rather than interactive testing and employment (Berg et al., 1977: 44, 52; McCarty, 2004: 256).

I will discuss in the next section some of the many ways in which I have used wargames to help my BA students to obtain a better intuitive grasp of the tactical and strategic dynamics of the conflicts they are studying. Before that, I will offer a necessarily brief survey of my most ambitious educational use of wargames, namely my MA option module which for over a decade has allowed students to design their own simple board wargames modelling a conflict of their choice. This flexibility of topic allows military historians to focus on whichever period from antiquity onwards is of particular interest to each individual, while also allowing students with a more contemporary focus to model more recent conflicts such as the wars in Iraq and Lebanon over the past decade. The aim throughout is to allow the students to gain a more dynamic understanding of their chosen conflict than they would obtain by writing a conventional essay, while also helping them to develop the wide range of intellectual skills (from focused research and analytical creativity to legalistic clarity and graphic design) which are needed to produce effective wargame systems.

Students tend to become enthused and spend longer on their projects for this course than they do on their other modules, and this is an advantage in view of research which suggests that average study time in the UK is significantly lower than it should be (Acton, 2013). The minority of students who have played wargames before do have a head start, but this can also be a double-edged sword, since such students often produce over-ambitious initial drafts which try to retain too much of the complexity of published wargames. It is sometimes the neophytes who are better at focusing on the essentials and abstracting peripheral details so that their designs are intelligible to their colleagues and playable within the prescribed time constraints. Although creating the rules system is in principle the biggest intellectual challenge, some students find it equally hard to master more practical matters such as understanding the difference between battalions and divisions, making sense of basic statistics and probability, or using graphics software to create the map and counters.

The learning curve is steep, and students are definitely torn out of their ‘comfort zone’. Many find it a real challenge even to play simple wargames at the start of the course, but hands-on collaborative experience in teams as shown in Figure 2 soon lets them come to grips with published microgames, and after a few more months of step by step advice and iterative testing and improvement within the same teams, the students are amazed to find that they have been able to design their own wargames from scratch. Although wargaming is often perceived as an almost exclusively male activity (van Creveld, 2013: ch. 7), as Figure 2 shows, no fewer than 7 of the 15 students on my last MA course were female. OPEN IN VIEWER

Figure 3, which shows four maps from recent student projects, gives some sense of what the students achieve, and demonstrates the force of veteran wargame expert Jim Dunnigan’s claim that, ‘If you can play them, you can design them’ (Dunnigan, 1992: 252–253). Some former students return to attend guest sessions in future years to help and advice their successors, and electronic versions of many of the projects are posted on the course website where they provide a growing reservoir of past experience (just Google ‘Sabin consim’). Students must provide historical analyses and design notes to underpin their wargame itself, and they must also include a reflective essay in the final submission. The following extracts from these reflective essays give a flavour of the learning experiences involved.

– ‘Rather than simply learning about what happened, I started to better understand the give-and-take dynamics of what happened. The key lesson learned in developing this simulation was learning about balance.’

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Figure 3.

Some of the wargame maps designed by my MA students.

Practical constraints

Even the specifically military-focused wargames with pre-defined rules on which I focus in this article come in a wide variety of forms. Most wargames can be played solitaire by a single player, with the opposing force either being run automatically by the game system or being handled by the player constantly ‘swapping hats’ to study the interactive choices facing each side (Dunnigan, 1992: 59–60, 225). However, the ‘classic’ wargame is a two player contest like a game of chess, and some wargames involve multiple players, perhaps in teams with other individuals acting as umpires as in the original Kriegsspiel (Lewin, 2012; von Hilgers, 2012). The size and complexity of wargames can vary all the way from incredibly involved endeavours which take hundreds of hours to learn and play, to games whose rules and components literally fit on a postcard (Nordling, 2009). The other key variable in wargames is the representational medium which they employ. The classic approach is to use a printed rulebook which governs the manual handling of counters or blocks on a map or miniature figures on model terrain (Dunnigan, 1992; Hyde, 2013). However, computers and consoles now offer a radical alternative in which the rules may be programmed into the software and the forces and terrain represented as pixels on the screen (Halter, 2006; Smith, 2009).

The use of wargames in higher education is affected by three main practical constraints – time, expertise and resources. The interaction of these three constraints limits what it is practical to achieve, and requires some difficult trade-offs to be made. I will now discuss each constraint in turn, and then illustrate the key trade-offs with reference to my own academic employment of wargames over the past decade and more.

Time is a problem because the great majority of published wargames (including computer strategy games) take much longer to play than the 2 hours available for a typical class or conference session. Military wargames may last for days, and enthusiasts are happy to spend entire weekends on an individual game, but academic simulations tend to occupy such extended periods only when they are made the centrepiece of the module or conference concerned (Brynen, 2010; Carnes, 2014). Where wargames are just one complementary means of studying a subject alongside traditional approaches such as debates and seminar discussions, and especially where it is desirable to employ not just one big wargame but multiple different wargames to bring out diverse perspectives and to avoid encountering diminishing returns, then minimising the time required for individual games becomes a key consideration.

Expertise is an equally important constraint because wargames are very hard for most people to comprehend. Dunnigan (1992) claimed that, ‘Probably no more than a few percent of the population can grasp the internal concepts of wargames’ (pp. 252–253), and my own experience amply confirms how difficult non-gamers find it to understand even simple wargames just by reading the rules rather than by practical hands-on instruction. Humanities students and scholars find it even harder to follow the explicit mathematical formulae used by analysts such as Biddle (2004), but at least they can grasp the conclusions which such authors draw; wargames offer a rich experience of active learning, but the ‘entry price’ to gain access to this experience by playing the game is much higher than for superficial browsing of traditional books and articles. Computer wargames have a decidedly double-edged impact on this issue of required expertise. On the one hand, some such games (especially those with first person avatars) can be ‘picked up and played’ with hardly any reference to the embedded rules, but on the other hand, higher level computer wargames often contain even more detailed and complex rules than manual games, and creating or modifying the associated algorithms requires specialist computer programming skills possessed by very few humanities students and academics (Sabin, 2011).

Resources constrain academic wargaming in several ways. Although there are many thousands of different published wargames, and thousands more issues of specialist magazines reviewing and commenting on this massive and ever-growing corpus of material (new manual wargames are being published today at a faster rate than ever before), it is almost unknown for scholarly libraries and archives to hold any of them. Computer wargames can be even more difficult for students and scholars to access than manual games with their separate maps and counters, since they require costly high specification hardware when first released, and often become entirely unplayable in a few years as operating systems evolve and leave them behind. The other big resource constraint affecting academic use of wargaming is staff time. It takes a lot longer to design a tailored wargame than to write a lecture or conference presentation, and it takes more staff to run a wargame session effectively for anything beyond a very small group than to give a lecture or conference talk to the same audience. Not only that, but the staff concerned need considerable specialist expertise to be able to design and run a wargame at all, showing how perniciously the three constraints can interact.

The central trade-off which these various constraints create is between the desire to give each individual player a rich and realistic decision experience, and the need to have wargames which are quick, simple and deliverable with the staff and facilities available. If simulation was not an issue and all that mattered was to run a challenging abstract game, then the trade-off would be much easier to resolve – all that one would need to do is to distribute a number of cheap chess sets and have everyone play one another while the single non-expert facilitator wandered around resolving the occasional rules query. The trouble is that real war is a very complex phenomenon, so capturing its dynamics in a game is very difficult without unmanageable levels of detail and complexity on the one hand, or a misleadingly simplistic and artificial model on the other. It is especially hard to capture authentic and balanced decision dilemmas within a simple game model, rather than making the historical choices so clearly preferable that the game ‘runs on rails’ and players feel that they are just along for the ride, or (even worse) including choices which diverge from reality but which are clearly preferable from a purely game-playing perspective (Frank, 2012; Sabin, 2012: 117–124). I will now discuss several different ways in which I have tried to strike the balance between player involvement and practicality over the years.

One way, as I outlined in the previous section, is to make a virtue of the difficulties by challenging my MA students to resolve them through their own simulation designs. These designs must perforce be manual wargames, since most of my students have even fewer programming skills than I do myself. As shown in Figure 4, I have amassed my own personal library of over a thousand published board wargames over the years, and I lend a few of these to each student as examples to help them create their own radically simpler designs on the same or a related historical conflict. As shown in Figure 2, I divide the students into three or four teams of four or five people working on broadly similar topics, and I get each of these teams first to play a couple of simple published wargames and then to playtest one another’s draft game designs in turn, in successive weeks of the two term course. Key to their ability to cope with this challenge are my own lectures and individual tutorials on wargame design, as well as the contribution of the few students per year who are familiar with hobby wargames and so can help their colleagues. I build on these students’ expertise in another way by enlisting some of them as teaching assistants to help me to run wargames in my various BA modules. (Some of these teaching assistants played the games as BA students a year or two earlier, thereby closing the circle in a most satisfactory manner.) OPEN IN VIEWER

This leads me to my second way of resolving the trade-off which I discussed, namely by spending some individual 2 hour BA classes playing manual wargames covering conflicts ranging from specific bombing raids or armoured battles in the Second World War to the entire Second Punic or Second World Wars, all with a view to reinforcing student understanding of the operational and strategic dynamics involved (as covered also in my lectures and in the students’ own debates and presentations). Although there are plenty of published manual and computer wargames on these topics, they are almost all too complex and time-consuming to use directly in class. Hence, over the years I have designed my own smaller and simpler board wargames, focusing expressly on the concepts which I wish to elucidate (Sabin, 2012). One game on Hannibal’s campaigns is even a joint design which started life as an MA student project, illustrating the wonderful synergies which may be achieved. Because my BA students are almost all non-gamers for whom the wargames are only a means to the end of enhanced military understanding, I do not expect them to grasp all the nuances of the rules – instead, I use the principle of ‘guided competition’ in which groups of six or so students command opposing sides in multiple simultaneous games run by myself or one of my teaching assistants, as shown in Figure 5. The role of the facilitators is to apply the detailed rules, to advise the students against egregious tactical errors, to keep the games moving, and to lead discussion of how far the simulation reflects the real conflict dynamics. Although the BA students do not all get individual decision experience, being in small teams of two or three allows them to discuss decisions collectively, which has considerable educational value. At the end of each class, we share experiences from the multiple games, and discuss the strengths and weaknesses of the game system as a model of reality. OPEN IN VIEWER

My third way of balancing practicality and player involvement is by devising some manual wargames so simple and quick that players may be left to apply the rules for themselves and to play one another in multiple simultaneous contests like those in my chess example, without the need for routine guidance and facilitation. I have trialled this approach with large groups of military and civilian students over the years. The rules need to be really simple, and it is necessary to spend significant time at the start of the session explaining them and running through an illustrated example for the group as a whole. For the effort to be worthwhile, the students then need to play two or more contests with one another to get maximum benefit from their investment in the instrumental skill of learning the game rules. I applied this technique in 2014 by designing a ruthlessly simplified variant of my centenary 1914 kriegsspiel with just one page of rules, and then having several groups of up to a hundred military and civilian individuals play it in multiple one-on-one contests as illustrated in Figure 6. OPEN IN VIEWER

The final main way in which I have tried to resolve the practical constraints on academic use of wargaming is by using computer games. As I said, serious computer wargames tend to take just as long to play as manual wargames, and without programming skills it is very difficult to develop ‘lite’ versions for use in class. However, first person real time computer simulators are much quicker to pick up and play, and (like some war movies) they can give a flavour of the pace and confusion of combat which manual games find it harder to reflect. Hence, in my BA module on the history of air fighting, I have used some carefully selected computer flight simulation games to give students a sense of the changing face of aerial dogfights from the First World War to the supersonic era. Our computer resources allow only one student at a time to take the controls, while the rest watch. I have also used top down computer simulations showing operational air engagements progressing in real time, but these simply run automatically in the background while we discuss the issues raised.

It is far from easy to use wargames in academia, in the face of the interacting constraints which I have outlined. Despite what some might expect, computer games do not offer a universal panacea, and it is often better to focus on simple tailored manual games instead of off the shelf computer products. However, with ingenuity and commitment, it is possible to overcome the challenges and exploit wargaming techniques in a variety of ways. The real problem underlying the limited use of wargaming in academia is less that it is impractical and more that it is poorly understood and viewed with real disdain. I will now explore the many factors which contribute to this state of affairs.

The stigma of wargaming

One reason why wargames of the kind that I have described are used so rarely in academia is, of course, that scholars are simply less preoccupied than are officers, defence analysts and military enthusiasts with the practical conduct of warfare. Politics, diplomacy, international relations and sociology loom larger in academic studies than do the strategy and tactics of armed conflict, and some scholars still have the same disdain for narrow ‘military history’ as musicians display for ‘military music’. That said, there are plenty of scholarly books and articles, and plenty of university modules, which focus squarely on the history of particular wars, but they very rarely even mention the existence of detailed wargame simulations of the conflicts concerned. Martin van Creveld is one of the few academics who has written about the various forms of wargames, and he admits that ‘historians, a notoriously conservative lot, hardly ever use them’ (van Creveld, 2008: 82, 2013). Why should this be?

One reason is the stigma of the terminology. Jane McGonigal, who has championed the wider potential of gaming methods, wrote that, ‘We are all biased against games today – even gamers. We can’t help it. It is part of our culture, part of our language, and it’s even woven into the way we use the words “game” and “player” in everyday conversation’ (McGonigal, 2011: 19). The term ‘serious games’ has gained some currency in professional circles, precisely to try to counter the negative connotations of the word ‘game’ (Abt, 1970; Smith, 2009). Wargamers suffer more than most from this stigma, because it seems especially inappropriate to reduce the tragic sacrifices of armed conflict to a mere ‘game’. Hence, wargamers tend to resort to embarrassed reticence and euphemism to hide their ‘guilty secret’. As Dunnigan wrote, ‘A wargame is a playable simulation. A conflict simulation is another name for wargame, one that leaves out the two unsavoury terms “war” and “game”’ (Dunnigan, 1992: 236).

Since hobby wargames are sold by specialist outlets and discussed in specialist magazines rather than in wider fora, and since military and defence wargames are also concealed from wider view by the sensitivity and classification which surrounds them, it is not surprising that most scholars know little or nothing about them. Air historian Dr Alfred Price wrote that, ‘I had a rather fuzzy pre-conceived notion that wargamers were grown-ups who played around with kids’ toys, and tried to make out that they were making some serious contribution to military understanding in the process’ (Spick, 1978: 7). This image of wargamers as childish ‘nerds’ has become deeply engrained in popular culture, and even wargamers themselves are sometimes embarrassed by their fellow devotees – Michael McGuire (1976) wrote that, ‘There is an inordinate number of over-age adolescent types playing wargames; some are middle-aged adults who ought to know better’ (p. 22). There is also often a more sinister suspicion that some wargamers are closet militarists with an unhealthy admiration for Nazi military prowess (Smelser and Davies, 2008: ch.7).

Far from being an asset, the popularity of wargaming as a hobby among private enthusiasts leads many scholars and analysts to emphasise the distinctness of their own more ‘professional’ approach (Allen, 1987: 111; Overy, 2010). Academics pride themselves on their objectivity and specialist knowledge, and they are often uncomfortable engaging with ‘popular’ studies by spare time enthusiasts. The fact that unclassified wargames are entertainment products rather than rigorous scholarly endeavours does indeed often justify this suspicion. Although some hobby wargames are intensively researched and can highlight mistakes even in academic books, many others are superficial and inaccurate (Sabin, 2012: 50–52). This applies especially to simple manual wargames and mass market computer games, which might otherwise be well suited to overcoming the practical constraints outlined in the previous section, but which are prone to gross distortions of reality because they prioritise the creation of a simple and entertaining game over accurate simulation of real events.

Professor Robert Rubel of the US Naval War College wrote that, ‘Valid knowledge can emerge from war games, but only if due diligence is applied. This diligence is considerably hampered today because war gaming is a craft or an art, not a true profession, a discipline’ (Rubel, 2006: 127). However, any hope that wargames can approach the attempted ‘scientific’ rigour of works of operational analysis like those by Biddle (2004) and Rowland (2006) seems doomed to failure. Even if they exploit every scrap of available real world data, wargames contain so many subjective choices in their mechanisms and structure that sceptics will always be able to challenge their assumptions and dismiss them as guesswork and invention. Veteran US wargames professional Dr Peter Perla is very clear that ‘designing a wargame is an art, not a science’, and he suggests that ‘game design has no real formalisms. Instead it is dominated by individual style and by fashion, and in that respect is more like painting than other arts’ (Perla, 1990: 183–184).

Variability of outcomes is a further reason why wargames attract such stigma. Although many prominent scholars do now champion counterfactual methodologies as a means of exploring the dynamics of past events, most historians remain sceptical and prefer to concentrate on what actually occurred rather than ‘what might have been’ (Black, 2008; Collins, 2007; Evans, 2014; Lebow, 2010; Showalter and Deutsch, 2010). Wargames take counterfactual speculation to its logical extreme, so it is not surprising that some view them as idle fantasy. The problem is compounded by the fact that, unlike automatic simulations which can be run on computers thousands of times to explore statistical variation in outcomes, wargames with human players are much more time-consuming to play over and over again. Just as there are understandable concerns about the feasibility of constructing an entire wargame model on the basis of a single historical experience, so there is always a suspicion that things might have gone very differently in other trials of the game and hence that it is dangerous to base any conclusions on such a small sample (Sabin, 2012: 54–57).

One mechanism of variation is particularly uncomfortable, namely random chance. Although few would argue that it would be realistic to give wargame players perfect knowledge (as they have in chess) of everything except their opponent’s next move, the introduction of die rolls as in hobby wargames to give a quick and simple abstract reflection of the unpredictability of individual combat outcomes raises problems of its own. In real war, bad luck such as orders going astray is impossible to challenge and clearly attributable in hindsight to a specific causal chain, whereas an unlucky die roll in a wargame seems abstract and arbitrary by comparison. However realistic it may be, introducing random chance can make wargames seem less worthwhile as a serious vehicle for studying conflict, and Professor Rubel went so far as to say that, ‘it is not valid to substitute dice rolls for unmodeled aspects of reality’ (Rubel, 2006: 119–120). Alternative approaches such as computer randomisation or player guesswork can make chance elements less visible (as in my 1914 games which use the fog of war instead of dice rolls), but since it is clearly impractical to try to model every tiny variable in a conflict directly, arranging plausible statistical variation will remain a difficult and sensitive issue (Sabin, 2012: 117–120).

All these factors help to explain why most scholars (especially historians) ignore wargaming and consider it of little academic value. Only a minority of scholars play recreational wargames themselves, and even they are usually very reticent about admitting the fact in their publications, lest they fall victim to the stigma I have mentioned and are suspected of ‘bringing their hobby to work’. Peer review is a particular challenge, given the likelihood that at least one reviewer will be a sceptic. This happened to me when a major joint grant application to model ancient naval warfare, building on the hard performance data from the reconstructed trireme Olympias, was dismissed by one reviewer as ‘just wargaming’. It has not been judged prudent to submit my books and articles on wargaming to national research assessment exercises, lest they evoke a similar reaction. As Dr Pierre Corbeil (2011) put it recently, ‘the power of the game as a tool for the study of possibilities has not been adopted by the historical profession as it exists in the universities of the world’ (p. 419).

The way ahead

Wargame modelling is an incredibly ambitious enterprise. In theory, a completely accurate wargame would allow players to experiment with different strategies and contingencies and obtain reliable insights into the workings of the real past or future conflict represented. The trouble is that such accuracy would require encyclopaedic research not only into the military factors involved but also into the wider political, cultural, social and economic factors which are so crucial in shaping human conflicts. Even if such daunting levels of knowledge and understanding could be gained in the first place, incorporating all this detail into the game would make it unplayably complex and time-consuming, and hence unworkable as an experimental tool after all (Sabin, 2012, chs.2, 4).

The key to wider acceptance of wargames within academia is to realise that they are not unique in facing this pernicious trade-off between accuracy and simplicity. There are certainly plenty of poorly researched and simplistic wargames, but the same applies to the majority of student essays and to many scholarly books and articles. Wargaming is simply one more technique, one more complementary perspective, with which to try to come to grips with the intractable problem of understanding the dynamics of human conflict. Rather than providing reliable answers, it is best at highlighting neglected questions. Rather than offering secure predictions, it is most helpful when it produces flawed or unexpected outcomes, since these force users to re-examine the assumptions programmed into the model and think about how it could be improved.

Whatever reservations there may be about how ‘serious’ wargames are as a scholarly technique, they certainly derive considerable benefit from being ‘fun’. My students cheered last week when I announced that our next class would be a simulation rather than the standard lecture and seminar discussion. My two latest books have sold far more copies than standard academic monographs, and separate deluxe editions of the included wargames (as shown in Figure 7) have also sold very well. Both books have spawned ongoing and flourishing Yahoo discussion groups with hundreds of members and thousands of posts, amounting in all to considerably more words than there are in the books themselves. My increasing involvement in professional defence wargaming shows that the technique does have a very real educational and analytical role, quite apart from the rather double-edged enthusiasm which wargames elicit. OPEN IN VIEWER

I do not really expect academic use of wargames to spread by non-gamers reading my books and ‘seeing the light’. As I already mentioned, it is very hard for such individuals to grasp the mechanics just by reading theoretical rules, and a classics scholar in Budapest who tried to do so with his students found it very difficult until I visited myself to demonstrate how my Lost Battles system worked. Most non-gaming academics have not even tried to engage with the ideas in my recent books, instead probably dismissing them as some strange enthusiast aberration unworthy of scholarly attention. The books are intended more to inspire and encourage those individuals who do already have a gaming background, but who have been hiding their light under a bushel hitherto for fear of ridicule. Seeing how successful and multi-faceted my own academic use of wargames has been should hopefully encourage such individuals to ‘come out of the closet’ and experiment for themselves. I receive a steady trickle of messages from scholars who have been inspired in exactly this manner, and the forthcoming publication of other academic works on wargaming should have a similarly galvanising effect (Harrigan and Kirschenbaum, in press).

The most effective way of persuading people of the value of wargames is through direct hands-on experience. That was how the initially sceptical Prussian Chief of Staff became so convinced of the value of Kriegsspiel that he famously exclaimed, ‘This is not a game! This is training for war! I must recommend it to the whole army’ (Perla, 1990: 26). A consistent request of my MA students over the years has been for more time playing games, since only through such practical experience does the abstract theory start to make sense. I have now introduced several hundred students and other individuals at all levels to the academic insights which wargames can provide. The more people who are directly exposed to serious but accessible wargames, the less pervasive will be their image as trivial and childish diversions or impossibly complex and time-consuming pastimes for obsessive nerds. Playing wargames more widely offers the best chance of inspiring more use of this currently neglected approach to the study and understanding of war.