90 See W. Sonntag, Kampfes Lust, Ostfildern: Laufen und Leben, 2002, pp. 592–610 .
91 D. Montoya, Women Boxers: The New Warriors, Houston, TX: Arte Publico, 2006, p. 12 .
92 Missa Merz, The Sweetest Thing: Inside the World of Women’s Boxing, New York: Seven Stories, 2011, p. 108 .
93 Sonntag, Kampfes Lust, pp. 298–324.
94 Mazer, The Doggie Doggie World of Professional Wrestling, pp. 106, 116.
95 Missy Hyatt, First Lady of Wrestling, ECW Press, 2001, p. v .
96 Actors and Extras Job Finder, at: http://actors.pillowtalkjapan.com/acting-jobs/sexy-female-wrestlers-nynnj/.
97 See: www.taipeitimes.com/News/feat/archives/2007/08/19/2003374955.
98 Mishap, “Blondes versus Brunette,” Chess in Translation, April 1, 2011, at: www.chessintranslation.com/2011/04/blondes-versus-brunettes/ .
99 T. Allen-Mills, “‘Soft Pawn’ Row as Chess Discovers Sex,” Sunday Times, December 4, 2005 .
100 A. Lusher, “She Looked into his Eyes, He Made his Move,” Daily Telegraph, March 18, 2007 .
101 Alexandra Kosteniuk’s website, at: www.chessblog.com/2009_06_01_archive.html.
102 Shahade, Chess Bitch, p. 67.
103 D. L. McClain, “Sex and Chess: Is She a Queen or a Pawn?,” New York Times, November 27, 2005 ; “Chess Player Cites Foul over Revealing Rival,” Melbourne Herald Sun, April 1, 1998.
104 The photograph is available at: Google.image under “Eve Babitz.”
105 Lovechess, at: http://centralsdownload.blogspot.com/2011/02/lovechess-greek-era-15.html.
106 See SiN (video game), at: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sin_(video_game).
107 See Elena (Street Fighter), at: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elena_(Street_Fighter).
108 See on this interesting point “Ryan,” “Fantasy Armor and Lady Bits,” December 2011, at: http://madartlab.com/2011/12/14/fantasy-armor-and-lady-bits/. The author introduces himself as an armorer who makes armor for certain kinds of wargames.
109 See on her Lara Croft, at: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lara_Croft.
110 D. Breger, “Digital Digs, or Lara Croft: Replaying Indiana Jones,” Aether, 2, April 2008, pp. 41–60 .
111 See, above all, H. W. Kennedy, “Lara Croft: Feminist Icon or Cyberbimbo?,” International Journal of Computer Games Research, 2, 2, 2002 .
112 1 Samuel 19.7–8.
113 Ovidius, The Art of Love, LCL, 1929, 1.96–100 .
114 Cassius Dio, History of Rome, 60.33.
115 Quoted in Symmachus, Relatio, Oxford University Press, 1973, 2.1095–1101 .
116 Tertullian, De Spectaculis, 22.
117 See, for what follows, Meijer, Gladiators, pp. 68–76.
118 See, for these objects, K. Hopkins, Death and Renewal: Sociological Studies in Roman History, Cambridge University Press, 1983, p. 22 .
119 D. L. Bomgardner, The Story of the Roman Amphitheater, London: Routledge, 2000, p. 17 .
120 Cassius Dio, Roman History, 60.28.2; Pliny Natural History, LCL, 1938− , 10.172; Juvenal, Satires, 6.114–32.
121 Scriptores Historiae Augustae, Marcus Aurelius, 19.7.
122 Juvenal, Satires, 6.103–13.
123 See, for what follows, Bumke, Hoefische Kultur, pp. 366–9.
124 Geoffrey of Monmouth, History of the Kings of Britain, New York: Dulton, 1958, p. 202 .
125 Kaiserchronik, F J. Schmale and I. Schmale-Ott, eds., in Ausgewaehlte Quellen der deutschen geschichte des Mittelalters, vol. XV, Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft, 1972, lines 759–62 .
126 Moriz von der Craon, M. Haupt, ed., Berlin: Weidemannsche Buchhandlung, 1871, p. 15 .
127 Diu Crône, A. Ebenauer, ed., Tuebingen: Niemeyer, 2005, lines 4563–72 .
128 E. von Stauffenberg, “Peter von Stauffenberg,” in M. Lemmer, ed., Der Goldene Rosenbogen: Deutsche Erzaehler des Mittelalters, Cologne: Anaconda, 2007 [1977], p. 321 .
129 Von Lichtenstein, Frauendienst, pp. 17–18 and 295.
130 See above, p. 112.
131 The episode is mentioned in J. Stowe, Survey of London, Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1908 [1603], vol. I, p. 268 . For this and what follows, see also Barker, The Tournament in England, pp. 101–10.
132 The Book of the Knight of La Tour-Landry: Compiled for the Instruction of his Daughters, Nabu Press, 2010 [c. 1450], pp. 29–30 .
133 Huon de Mery, Le tournoiement de l’Antéchrist par Huon de Mery, Reims: Regnier, 1851, pp. 16 , 38, 47.
134 Document quoted in Muhlberger, Jousts and Tournaments, p. 25.
135 H. de Bonet, The Tree of Battles, Liverpool University Press, 1949, pp. 193–4 .
136 Barker, The Tournament in England, pp. 153–4.
137 Jean-Jacques Rousseau, La Nouvelle Héloïse, Amsterdam: Rey, 1765 , part 1, letter 57.
138 Hamilton, The Dueling Handbook, p. 35.
139 G. Weerth, Vergessene Texte, Cologne: Leske, 1976, vol. II, p. 149 .
140 See Frevert, Men of Honor, pp. 186–7.
141 Williams, Dueling in the Old South, pp. 18–19.
142 See McAleer, Dueling, p. 161.
143 See University of Leicester, Department of Sociology, “A Brief History of Female Football Fans,” 2004, at: www.le.ac.uk/so/css/resources/factsheets/fs9.html.
8 Conclusions: The mirrors and the mirrored
Where did wargames come from? What purposes did they serve? Who participated in them, why, and what for? What forms did they take? What factors drove their development, and to what extent did they reflect changes in the art of war itself? What did they simulate, what didn’t they simulate, how, and why? What do they reveal about the conduct of war at the times, and in the places, where they were played? How useful are they in training for war and preparing for it? Why are some so much more popular than others, how do men and women compare in this respect, and what can the way the sexes relate to wargames teach us about their nature and the relationship between them? Finally, what does all this tell us about real war, fake or make-believe war, the interaction between the two, and the human condition in general? These are the sorts of questions the present volume has set out to answer; now that the voyage is almost done and the port is in sight, it is time to try and answer them.
Like all things with a long history behind them, wargames are almost impossible to define. They appear to have their origins in four basic human needs. The first is religion − meaning either the will to appease the gods by shedding blood in their honor or to determine, with the aid of combat of champions and judicial combat, what their wishes might be. The second is the perceived need for some mechanism to enable adversaries to settle certain kinds of disputes while risking all, but without endangering the rest of society, as in the case of single combat, trial by battle, and the duel. The third is the wish to prepare men − rarely women − for wars to come by making them engage in some kind of mock warfare. The fourth is the wish for entertainment pure and simple, as in almost all of them. Needless to say, the four motives have often become inextricably mixed. Did knights tourney because they liked doing so or because, early on at any rate, participation provided training for war? Aren’t the movies, the game-manufacturing industry, the military and the hobbyists starting to converge? Nevertheless the distinctions are useful and I shall stick to them here.
Of the various kinds of games, those rooted in the first of these elementary needs may very well be the oldest. Gladiatorial games and judicial combat in particular originated in religion and have always maintained their ties with it. Either they were held in honor of the gods or else they were supposed to show God’s will. Both forms of wargames, however, seem to be more or less defunct: stamped out by the disappearance of many older religions as well as the rise in many places of secularism. Games whose purpose is to settle disputes between individuals, such as the duel, may still be alive in some places. However, in well-ordered modern societies that have found, or claim to have found, better ways to settle conflicts among their members they have all but disappeared. By contrast, wargam
es grounded in the third and the fourth of the above motives – the need to prepare for war and the desire for entertainment – remain as important, as numerous, as varied, and as popular as they have ever been in history. Tens, perhaps hundreds, of millions of people all over the world either engage in such games or watch them. Not only are billions of dollars being spent on them, but it does not appear that this situation is about to change anytime soon.
As one would expect, the kind of people who engage in wargames not only varies enormously from one society to another but reflects the structure of the societies from which they come or which they represent. As in Kishon’s story, indeed, arguably the kind of (war)games a society allows and does not allow, does and does not engage in, can act as a kind of litmus test for its nature. Let us put aside, at least for the moment, games such as hunting, combat sports, and contact sports which have been included here mainly owing to the long-standing debate over their usefulness in military training on the one hand and what they tell us about the differences between men and women on the other. Starting, then, with great fights/nonsense fights, we discover two things. First, the societies in question were quite egalitarian and, to that extent, democratic. Hence every adult male was able to participate on a fairly equal basis. Second, in the absence of strong government that could either force people to play or prohibit them from participating, entry was based on the individual’s own free will, although, in the long run, tribesmen who stayed away from the games for no good reason would probably be made to feel the consequences of their behavior.
The open-ended character of the games in question made it imperative that certain rules be applied and/or certain weapons blunted so as to limit casualties and prevent escalation into real warfare from taking place. The case of single combat and combat of champions was entirely different. To be sure, participating in them was equally voluntary – nobody compelled either Goliath or David, Paris or Menelaus, Hector or Ajax, or any of the rest to step out of the line, deliver a challenge or respond to it, and fight it out in front of their assembled armies. If anything, people would try to hold them back, as Agamemnon did when Menelaus wanted to fight Hector. Yet doing so was open only to men who were specially selected for their fighting ability, normally though not exclusively members of the social elite. These encounters also differed from great fights/nonsense fights in that no effort was made to render them relatively harmless. On the contrary, both combatants, armed with the very best weapons available at the time, did their best to kill their opponent(s). Any “positive” outcome − positive in the sense that the fight would fulfill its stated purpose and settle the quarrel − depended on the defeat or death of one fighter. Only an explicit agreement to down arms prevented escalation, and then only for as long as the fight lasted; once it was over “real” hostilities were almost always either opened or resumed.
Very different from these two were the gladiatorial games. Though there was always a trickle of volunteers, the great majority of fighters were either convicted criminals or prisoners of war. Indeed the fact that men of the latter kind became scarce from the time of Marcus Aurelius on may well have contributed to what appears to have been a sharp increase in the price of gladiators and thus to the growing reluctance of urban magistrates all over the Empire to hold the games. For these men participation in the shows was not voluntary but compulsory. If necessary, the most brutal available means were used to make them fight: the more brutal the fights, the more the spectators liked them. Furthermore, gladiators, far from being prominent or even ordinary members of society, were outcasts who had been excluded from it for a variety of reasons. They thus reflected the structure of Roman society with its powerful government, rigid class divisions, and above all sharp distinction between free and slave. The fact that the combatants’ lives were forfeit in turn enabled the fights to be waged à outrance, as the medieval phrase was later to go, with the aid of real if often bizarre weapons. Presumably these were introduced to increase variety and maintain interest. Yet escalation was prevented by the status of the combatants, as well as formidable physical obstacles to separate them from the spectators.
Judicial combats and duels resembled gladiatorial games in that the expected outcome was very often death. Considered from this point of view, tournaments were more like modern combat sports. Fatalities did occur and were even expected. But most of the time they grew out of accidents, not design. To prevent accidents special blunt lances were sometimes used and elaborate arrangements to enable combatants to surrender put in place. In so far as few if any men were ever compelled to participate in any of them, all three forms of wargames take us back to the territory of volunteers. Originating in tribal societies, in principle at any rate judicial combat was open to any member of society who had quarreled with a neighbor and wanted to resort to it, though in practice doing so seems to have become more difficult as feudalism established itself and government became more sophisticated. Not so the other two which were only available to members of the elite, either noblemen or the members of the more “respectable” classes who imitated them. To that extent, indeed, duels – some of which were initially fought on horseback – can be seen as a continuation of the tournament. Being voluntary, all three kinds of wargames resembled single combats and combats of champions in that like fought like: commoner was pitted against commoner, nobleman against nobleman. Only in the United States, a relatively classless society with an exceptionally strong egalitarian ideology, did men of very different social standing sometimes confront one another in duels.
Some wargames were rooted in personal enmity, as the one between Paris and Menelaus was. In others the combatants had never had anything to do with one another but represented the hostile groups to which they belonged, and in some – including the gladiatorial ones, which paradoxically were among the most bloody of all – it is probably hard to speak of any enmity at all. A few, notably great fights/nonsense fights and early tournaments, provided more or less valuable military training, but most were designed with entirely different purposes in mind. However that may have been, one must agree with Clifford Geertz when he says that, in all of them, the participants put on an act. That was and is as true of single combat as of gladiatorial games, of trial of battle as of tournaments. It also provided onlookers with a living, and often a very lively demonstration of the structure and values of the societies to which both they and the combatants belonged, thus helping to reaffirm them. If, as often happened, it was also possible to make money out of the show, then so much the better.
It is, however, also necessary to make another point which Geertz seems to have missed. Once they have entered the arena all cocks regardless of who owns them are equal. Victory goes to the stronger bird, not to the one whose owner is rich. Similarly inside the field, or the amphitheater, or the court, or the lists, or the ring, all of the combatants regardless of rank enjoyed equal status. First, equality or a presumption of it was needed in order to enable the games to take place at all – or else a baron would hardly joust with an ordinary knight or a colonel answer a captain’s summons to duel with him. Second, where the protagonists were too unequal the fight between them could neither deliver a valid judgment (if that was the objective) nor be exciting to watch. There were even cases, as with the various kinds of gladiators and when men fought women in judicial combat, when the organizers went out of their way to ensure equality by deliberately handicapping one party. As well as reflecting and reinforcing class differences in prestige, wealth, and power, in other words, wargames of all times and places created their own special kind of equality: in that, in fact, lay a large part of their attraction. Not only did some knights enter tournaments in disguise for precisely that reason, but noble prisoners of war were sometimes allowed to participate in their captors’ games.1 The outcome was agonistic competition. Conversely, when equality could not be imposed, as when a Roman emperor “fought” in the arena, the outcome was not competition but a farce: cruel, foolish, or both.
; Without exception, what all the games discussed so far in this chapter simulated was not war but battle. This was hardly an accident. As late as the middle of the seventeenth century Thomas Hobbes in Leviathan, though admitting that “war consisteth not in battle only,” argued that the intervals between battles were merely “tract[s] of time, wherein the will to contend is sufficiently known.”2 War as opposed to battle, in other words, was seen as a situation, not as an event. This in turn caused strategy − here understood not as a two-sided interaction but in the Clausewitzian sense of the higher conduct of war − operational art, logistics, intelligence, and, in most cases, command and control to be left out. On the other hand, many games did resemble real-life warfare in that they were extremely violent. Combatants − one hesitates to call them players − used the most lethal weapons available in life-to-death fights. Many of them differed from real battles only in being pre-arranged, carefully circumscribed as to space and time, and free from external interference. Some games, notably the gladiatorial ones, may actually have been more deadly than the reality that they tried to capture. In battle those who ran away often stood a chance of saving their lives and fighting another day; by contrast, the arena did not permit any kind of escape.
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