A much more radical departure was presented by games of the second type, broadly known as simulators or shooters. Simulators replaced the hardware of war – troops, vehicles, and so on – with blips on a screen. Early versions tended to be somewhat primitive. Later the combined efforts of wargame manufacturers, the movie industry, and the military enabled much greater verisimilitude to be achieved. Quite often this was done at a price even individual hobbyists could afford. Above all, the need for taking turns, so characteristic of almost all wargames, many forms of the duel included, from the demise of the tournament on, was finally eliminated. With the computer doing the necessary calculations at lightning speed, so was the need for umpires.
In the military, trainees could “fight” either the computer or each other, in pairs or in groups, even if they were located geographically far apart. Outside the military countless people did the same, enjoying themselves as they “fought” all kinds of opponents from the most “real” to the most “imaginary.” The more electronics went into both real-life weapons systems and the machines that simulated them and their opponents and the environments in which they operated, the more they converged, until in some cases they became all but indistinguishable. Generally the further down we go from strategy towards tactics, and the more important the role of machines as opposed to flesh and blood humans, the more true this is. To speak with the French cultural critic Jean Baudrillard, the simulation is taking over from the simulacra. Being completely man-designed and manufactured, the latter is better controlled, less mixed up with other things, and in this sense more “authentic,” than the original.4 Whether this is a good thing, as those who use the games to prepare for wars to come claim, or a bad thing, as those worried about the Dr. Strangeloves of this world fear, is moot.
Like their cousin, war, wargames have always been driven by technological, social, and military forces. Technology helped to govern which factors should be simulated and how, as well as the weapons that were and were not used. Especially after 1800, no sooner was some new technology invented than attempts started being made to introduce it into wargames as well. Social factors dictated the purpose of the games as well as who would and would not engage in them, whereas military ones usually resulted in efforts to make the games as much like war as possible. Quite often these factors pulled in opposite directions. For example, the deadly power of firearms prevented them from being used in maneuvers, which meant that, until the advent of paintball and the National Training Center, the latter always carried a strong element of make-believe. Miniatures may in some respects give a better impression of war than cardboard counters, but only if the scale of the simulated engagements is small.
Some games are too structured by their rules to give a good approximation of war. Others are so unstructured as to appear completely arbitrary and even senseless. A game that successfully navigates between these extremes and incorporates all aspects of war has yet to be devised. This gap between the two is precisely why, in military games, postmortem analysis is critically important. But for this, a game may do more harm than good, imparting the wrong lessons and convincing players that they know more than they do. Such analysis can and should make use of the entire toolbox available to military historians. Even so, there are always limits. First, it is important to remember that games and real warfare are not the same and that, for better or for worse, a person may perform very differently in the dangerous environment created by the latter than in the benign one presented by the former. At a more fundamental level still, the quest for realism is limited by the fact that war is essentially a zero-sum activity. That is not true of many wargames. They can take place only if the two parties agree to hold them at a certain time and place − and then only if the rules are observed.
In respect to wargames, even more than war itself, men and women seem to come from different planets. That fact sheds a fascinating and occasionally lurid light both on the games’ nature and on the character of those who do or do not play, do or do not watch. First, starting with great fights/nonsense fights all the way to the most advanced computer games, far fewer women play at war than men. As the case of chess seems to show, those who do so are on the average less motivated. The great majority seem to prefer socializing to fighting. Indeed it has been suggested that for women Facebook-based games such as Bejeweled and Insaniquarium are what wargames are for men.5 Some feminists attribute the difference to society, claiming that it “steers” woman away from the games in question. However, the fact that the situation among primates is similar strongly suggests that different factors are at work. Part of the explanation may be men’s greater physical strength. Unless there is some redeeming factor, such as aesthetics, playing games where one is forever doomed to be second-best is foolish. Many men who play wargames, especially the more violent ones or those that involve shooting, find them highly erotic. Few women do so.
Second, when women do participate in wargames of all sorts their performances, real or virtual, regularly have more to do with sexual display than with combat. Perhaps, too, it is their ability to use sex in order to get ahead that accounts for their lack of motivation. Whether in games such as mud wrestling or naked wrestling or lingerie football (said to be broadcast in eighty-five countries, no less), and the like it is men who “exploit” women or the other way around is moot. Most likely people of both sexes use them each for their own purposes. Men, it appears, can never have enough of half-naked female flesh displayed in various exciting positions and movements, whereas women seek money and perhaps a certain kind of fame.
Third, whether acting on the initiative of men or acting on their own, women have often helped to spice up wargames of every sort. They have instigated them, encouraged the male players, rewarded the victors, and served or offered themselves as prizes – again, acting either on the initiative of men or on their own. Nor is the relationship between the sexes on the one hand and wargames on the other one-sided. If men find women’s wrestling sexually arousing, many women enjoy watching men as they fight and even kill each other. To speak with Plato, men and women are alike in some ways but differ in others.6 Precisely because participation is largely voluntary, perhaps nowhere can the truth of this proposition be better observed than in wargames.
War is by far the most horrendous of all activities we humans engage in. So why is it, as Josephus noted two millennia ago, that the business of war so often turns into the pleasure of peace?7 And how come grown men – much less often grown women – so often abandon their families, forget their worldly obligations, and put their all into playing and watching the games? To be sure, the role of the intellect in the conduct of both war and wargames cannot be overestimated. It is also true that this aspect of the matter finds an echo in the minds of those who design the games, play them, watch them, and try to understand them. In particular, the challenge involved in coping with an equal opponent fully capable of countering one’s own moves has great appeal. It demands sharp observation, deep understanding, creativity, and a certain kind of craftiness: hence the attraction of countless games of strategy from chess up, or down.
Nevertheless, when Marcel Duchamp, who devoted the second half of his life almost exclusively to chess, said it was a sport whose inherent violence detracted from its appeal he could not have been more wrong.8 To the contrary: if chess is not exactly the most popular sport in the world, then that is precisely because it is not violent enough. It is the open, extroverted, often unrestrained, display of passion made possible by the creation of an artificial world, the temporary escape from one kind of reality into another, which turns the most violent wargames, independently of any other value they may or not have, into what they are. If violence can be mixed with sex, as it invariably is when women play or display or are involved in any other way, then so much the better. Mirror, mirror on the wall, why were the deadliest games in history also the most popular of all?
1 Barker, The Tournament in England, pp. 36, 132.
2 T. Hobbes, Levi
athan, Oxford: Blackwell, 1946 [1652], p. 82.
3 Wells, Little Wars, p. 26.
4 J. Baudrillard, Simulacra and Simulation, Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2004, pp. 2, 11, 35.
5 M. Ingram, “Average Social Gamer Is a 43-Year-Old Woman,” Gigaom, February 17, 2010 , at: http://gigaom.com/2010/02/17/average-social-gamer-is-a-43-year-old-woman/.
6 Plato Republic, LCL, 1959 , 5.454.D.
7 Josephus, Jewish Antiquities, 19.335–7.
8 Quoted in D. Hooper and K. Whyld, The Oxford Companion to Chess, Oxford University Press, 1992, p. 116.
Index
Abner 42
Achilles 216
Aegod’s American Civil War 251
Aemilius Paulus, Lucius 57, 71, 80
Aeneas 46, 47
Africanus, Scipio Cornelius 75, 80, 98
Agamemnon 44
Agobard, Archbishop of Lyon 107
Agon 16
Agrippa, Marcus Vipsanius 56
Agrippina 298
Airland Battle 186
airsoft 205, 206
Ajax 309
in single combat 44, 45, 55
Al Qaeda 38
Alaric 91
Alberonis, Archbishop of Trier 117
Alexander, son of Amyntas 25
Alexander I, of Russia
and dueling 132
Alexander III, Pope 107
Alexander the Great 17, 56, 216, 247
Algonquian tribe 26, 34
Amazons 286
America’s Army 265
Anderson, Pamela 296
animals 1, 7, 11, 12, 14
and hunting 9
Anne of France 279
Antiochus III, of Syria 60
Antiochus IV Epiphanes 70, 88
Antoninus Pius 72, 300
Apollonius 85
Ares 16, 45
Aristophanes 16
Aristotle 21
Army Battlezone 265
Arthur, King 108, 301
artificial intelligence 232, 240, 248, 250, 318
Ashford, Mary 109
Athena 45
Aubigny, Julie d’ 272
Augustine, Saint 90, 274
Augustus, Gaius Octavianus 47, 54, 57, 58, 59, 83, 86, 87, 298
and female gladiators 273, 275
and gladiatorial games 54, 56, 58, 72, 81
Aumann, Robert and game theory 179, 233
Aurelius, Marcus Antoninus 54, 65, 67, 73, 75, 80, 84, 86, 300, 310
Austen, Jane 280
Avalon Hill 155
Avatip tribe 10
Babbage, Charles 230
Basil of Cappadocia 90
Battlezone 264
Baudrillard, Jean 319
Bayard, Émile 289
Beer, Rachel 306
behourd 111, 190
ben Ezra, Abraham 142
bin Laden, Osama 38
Blackfoot tribe 34
Blood Rayne 295
BOGSAT 177, 179, 248, 256, 260, 266, 306, 315
Boiskos 17
Bolsheviks 133
Bonaparte, Louis Napoleon 20, 143, 217
Bonet, Honoré 304
Bowie, James 131
boxing 15
and women 288, 289, 290
Bruning, Max 289
Brutus, Decimus 67
Buckley, William 34
Bueil, Jean de 122
Buelow, Heinrich von 174, 313
Bundy, McGeorge 182
Bundy, William 182
Burr, Aaron 127
Caesar, Gaius Julius 57, 59, 66, 72
and gladiatorial games 57, 70, 72, 81
Caligula, Gaius Julius
and gladiatorial games 58, 67, 73, 76, 78, 81, 84
Call of Duty 262, 264
Canning, George
and dueling 130
Capitolinus, Julius 72
Carrouges, Jean de 105
Cassander 56
Cassius Dio 56, 73, 78, 81, 85, 300
Castro, Fidel 180
Catherine I, of Russia
and dueling 132
Catilina, Lucius Servius 67
Chagnon, Napoleon 31
Charlemagne 101
Charles V, Emperor 74, 120, 247
and single combat 50
and wargames 147
Charles VI, of France 105
and single combat 50
Charles VII, of France 279
Chastellain, Georges 106
chess 6, 149, 189, 212, 240, 248, 312
and women 278, 280, 282, 285, 292, 293
changing rules of 280
computerized 232
development of 142
parallels with war 143
strategy of 144
variants of 141
Chiapas tribe 26
Chosroes 51
and single combat 51
Christianity
and gladiatorial games 88
Chumash tribe 26
Churchill, Sir Winston 234, 235
and wargames 148
Cicero, Marcus Tulius 18, 56, 72, 74, 85
in praise of gladiators 77
Clark, Mark 199
Claudius, Tiberius Caesar 83, 298, 299
and gladiatorial games 58, 60, 76, 78
Clausewitz, Carl von 2, 26, 31, 61, 141, 145, 147, 150, 171, 174, 189, 191, 235, 268
Clement of Alexandria 88
Cline, Ray 182
Close Combat Tactical Simulation system 266
cockfights 95
Colosseum 59, 62, 76, 93, 139
combat of champions 7, 37, 38, 50, 51, 97, 104, 274, 310
and women 305
in Byzantine times 48, 51
in early Greece 46
in early Islam 52
in early Middle Ages 48
in Japan 52
combat sports 7, 14, 15, 19, 23, 37, 310
and women 306
in Sparta 20
Commodus, Marcus Aurelius
and gladiatorial games 73, 76, 78, 79, 82, 96
computers 7, 149, 230, 245, 250
Constantinus, Flavius Valerius 89
contact sports 7, 20, 21, 23
and women 306
declining violence in 20
conventional warfare
and games 245, 246
Copeland, William 101
Cossus, Aulus Cornelius 47
Crassus, Marcus Licinius 47
Crawford, Chris 248, 250, 283, 285
Cronjé, Pieter 218
crupellarii 63
Curiatii 47
Curio, Gaius Scribonius 72
Dagobert, King of Austrasia 51
Damasius, Pope 67
Darwin, Charles 11, 290
David 51, 298, 309
and combat at Gibeon 42
and Goliath 41, 42
Davis, Dwight 198
Dayan, Moshe 203, 314
deep play 95
Delacroix, Eugène 289
DeMille, Cecil B. 219
Demonax 86
Dietrich, Joseph 222
Dio Chrysostom 85
Diomedes
in single combat 44, 55
Dionysius Halicarnassus 77
Diylos 56
Domitianus, Titus Flavius
and gladiatorial games 60, 65, 72, 273
Doom 262
Dostoyevsky, Fyodor 133
Duchamp, Marcel 294, 321
dueling 83, 242, 310
and preparation for war 137
and women 305, 306
in Germany 134
in Russia 133
in the nineteenth century 131
in the seventeenth century 125
in the US 130
manuals of 127
origins of 124
weapons in 128, 137, 312
Dungeons and Dragons 283
Dunnigan, James 153, 156, 253, 254
Eastern Front 248, 251, 252, 253
Edward, the Black Prince 50
Edward I, of En
gland 5, 103, 144
and tournaments 112
Edward II, of England 112
and tournaments 118
Edward III, of England 303
and single combat 50
and tournaments 115, 118, 122
Eglinton Tournament 217
Eisenstein, Sergey 219
Elizabeth I, of England 121, 279
Elo, Arpad 281
Elyot, Thomas 22
Embick, Stanley 199, 200
Ems, Rudolf of 118
Ender’s Game 269
Engels, Friedrich 173, 305
Enguerrand IV 108
Enuma Elish 39
Epaminondas 22
and combat sports 17
Epheios 16
Epictetus 85
equites 63
Eskimo 26, 34
essedarii 63
Etruscans, inventors of gladiatorial games 55
Euler, Leonhard 4
Euripides 16, 46
Evelyn, John 123
Excalibur 283
Exercise Certain Encounter 201
Exercise Desert Strike 201
Fascism, Italian
and dueling 136
Faustina and gladiators 300
Felix, Minucius 85
Festus 299
feuding 38
fight leaders 39
in Mae Enga warfare 28, 29
Fischer, Bobby 248
Flamininus, Titus 57
Flavius, Josephus 71, 88, 190, 321
flight simulators 256, 257, 264
Foch, Ferdinand 173
Follow-On Forces Attack (FOFA) 186
football, American 21, 23
Forge of Freedom 251, 252
Francis I, of France 279
and single combat 50
Fredegar 51
Frederick II, of Prussia 145, 191, 222
and dueling 126
and wargames 147
Frederick William I, of Prussia 147
Frederick William III, of Prussia 147
and wargames 150
Wargames Page 52