Nice review – the writer liked the collection generally, including the chapter on gaming insurgencies that Volko Ruhnke and I wrote.
He did note:
Examining the short blurbs at the end of each essay, I noticed that the vast majority of the authors had Master’s and/or Doctorate levels of education. Only one or two authors had anything lower and they were Bachelor’s degrees at the very minimum.
Guilty!!
It appears that I and co-editor Pat Harrigan are the two bringing up the academic rear….
The schedule for the Zones of Connection: 21-22 May 2021 symposium has been roughed in and my panel is on Friday, May 21, 2030-2130 Eastern Daylight Time (UTC -4:00).
For people who want to listen in: see the twitch.tv links above; for anyone who wants to take part, things are handled through Discord (generally; Zoom if there is a screwup) and you can register at https://dexposure.com/zoc2021.html
Friday 8:30-9:30
Room A
Title: The Cold War Gone Hot, Again: Retrofuturism or Futuristic Retro?
Participants: Brian Train
Style: Panel/Roundtable
Blurb: In the 1980s a number of serious wargames on a hypothetical Third World War were published, exciting some interest at the time. Over the last 10 years or so there has been a second wave of newly designed wargames that study that same subject – the Soviet invasion of Europe in the mid-1980s that never happened. Nostalgia for an actual past that one remembers imperfectly is one thing. But nostalgic game design to commemorate a then-hypothetical future war that is now a fictional past is a strange inversion of historiography indeed, and an additional twist beyond the approach taken by the designers of Twilight Struggle. What kind of retrofuturism is it? Is it even retrofuturism at all?
Also, the triumvirate behind the Eurowargames anthology will be holding a roundtable on the wargames connection between North American and European cultures.
Title: Speaking About Wargames, in Different Languages: A Comparison of Experiences as International Wargaming Content Creators
Participants: Jan Heinemann, Riccardo Masini, Fred Serval
Style: Roundtable
Blurb: Coming from different cultural and national backgrounds, content creators Jan Heinemann (Germany), Riccardo Masini (Italy) and Fred Serval (France) have recently joined their common knowledge to coordinate a collection of essays about wargaming in Europe and its many new design trends all over the world. But what about their different experiences as wargaming content creators on YouTube and other social media, with different approaches and different groups of viewers? Together with other prominent international content creators, this roundtable aims at highlighting the peculiar features of speaking about wargames also to non-English speaking viewers: the related difficulties caused by the language barrier and the different historical heritages, the perks granted by cultural diversity and the related criticalities, the needs of the different publics, the choice of media and style, the most requested contents and the games that prove harder to introduce, sometimes for lack of interest on the topic and sometimes even for their controversial nature in other nations. An engaging and rarely seen comparison and mutual confrontation about what it means to speak about board wargaming, a hobby born in the United States in the 1950s, also to non-US players by non-US content creators in the 2020s. Showing once again how gaming can prove to be an important bridge and connection between different cultures.
I’m looking forward to seeing what these guys have to say!
Call for Submissions for the Fall 2021 Journal of Advanced Military Studies (JAMS)
Marine Corps University Press publishes JAMS on topics of concern to the Marine Corps and the Department of Defense on international relations, political science, security studies, and political economics topics.
Our Fall 2021 issue will have a broadly construed theme:
Wargaming and the Military
This issue will address the past, present, and future state of wargaming and the military. The editors are interested in exploring the topic from a variety of perspectives, including the current status of wargaming and how the Services can prepare for tomorrow with innovative professional military education and wargaming. This exploration can include a historical analysis of wargaming and PME; an analysis of current military use of wargaming in an operational setting; and future wargaming concepts for PME and the battlefield. Article submissions are due by May 31.
The Journal of Advanced Military Studies is a peer-reviewed journal, and submissions should be 4,000–10,000 words, footnoted, and formatted according to Chicago Manual of Style (17th edition). Junior faculty and advanced graduate students are encouraged to submit. MCUP is also looking for book reviewers from international studies, political science, and contemporary history fields.
To receive a copy of the journal or to discuss an article idea or book review, please contact MCU_Press@usmcu.edu.
One project I undertook during the winter was to prepare a piece for an upcoming anthology on Eurowargames – basically an expansion on my “games as citizen journalism” wheeze. This project is edited by Riccardo Masini, Fred Serval and Jan Heinemann, three very good names; they put out a call for articles last fall.
The original focus has somewhat widened, and the range of submissions will reflect that I think. Latest is that the anthology will be published in fall or winter of 2021, after getting sufficient funding through Kickstarter.
They did ask me my opinion about crowdfunding this, and I had no objection to using it as a pre-order system, but please, NO STRETCH GOALS!
Just get the book funded, and only the book. No tooled leather slipcases, commemorative tea cosies, or sets of commissioned miniatures of the authors (that last one is tempting though. I wonder what I would look like as a small action figure).
Anyway, the above interview (made before the final deadline for article submissions, so they did not yet know for certain what-all they had) gives more details.
Once upon a time, I edited Strategist, the monthly newsletter of the Strategy Gaming Society. Boardgamegeek.com says that “the American Wargaming Association (AWA) merged with the National Wargaming Alliance (NWA) in 1984. The combined organization was renamed the Strategy Gaming Society (SGS). The AWA’s newsletter was called “The American Wargamer“, issued from 1973 to November 1984. The NWA’s newsletter was called “Kriegsrat“, issued until November 1984. With the December 1984 issue, the combined publication became “Strategist”.
George Phillies, who is still quite active in wargaming, was a central figure in the Society from way back, but I think the Society has been defunct for quite a while now. Anyway, I took over the newsletter after John Kula had had it for a while and edited it for a year before concluding I just did not have the time or energy to keep it going the way I wanted it (I was then still in the process of recovering from getting run over by a car at the end of 1998).
This was all 20 years in the past, and in the interests of oh I don’t know future ludic archaeologists I am putting up those dozen issues, in PDF form, on the Resources page (converted cheaply from their original MS Publisher format, so there might be an oopsy or two somewhere). They give you 3 GB of space here at WordPress and I am not using much of it so far. Game Links and Resources
Here is an index to the contents, nothing really remarkable except that I did publish a few simple games in its pages: Attrition, War Fair, Wolf Pack and Zulu Spears by Lloyd Krassner; Battle of Seattle by me; and the first appearance of Waterloo 20 by Joe Miranda. Another funny thing I ran was a series of “Military Movie Star” bios where I wrote about the star’s service career and the war/action movies they were in later. Did you know James Mason was a pacifist and conscientious objector in World War Two?
In the new number of the Journal of Analog Game Studies, Giame Alonge writes on the history and recurrent appeal of Nazi roles and symbology in board wargaming.
Giame Alonge is a Professor of Film Studies at the University of Turin, and a lifelong wargamer. He wrote a review of the anthology Zones of Control anthology (Harrigan and Kirschenbaum, eds.), and he and I had a correspondence about the blind spots of wargames about modern and contemporary warfare mentioned in “Chess, Go and Vietnam”, the chapter on insurgency games that Volko Ruhnke and I co-wrote for the anthology. I’m pleased to see that our discussion has helped inspire him to write this piece.
In it he also invokes Susan Sontag’s excellent essay “Fascinating Fascism”, a connection I’ve often thought about but have never seen someone else mention in connection with wargames. Sontag wrote the essay in 1974, when wargaming was still on its way up but still wrestling with its closet-Nazi problem. I rather doubt Sontag would ever have heard about wargaming at the time but if she had, she would regard it as one more example.
As Alonge points out, Sontag said, “for fantasy to have depth, it must have detail”. This certainly underlines what I and others have written about that pointless degree of historical intricacy in OOB research , pointless because it misses the point precisely and entirely… that is, the Benno Effect.
Released today, from John Curry’s History of Wargaming Project: Small Wars, New Perspectives on Wargaming Counterinsurgency on the Tabletop.
The book contains six sets of rules for playing out situations from 20th and 21st century irregular wars. It’s a bit unusual in that all but one of them are written to portray the action at the operational/ campaign level, where each stand of figures on the tabletop represents a large combined-arms unit. Using card-based systems, these games are particularly suitable for the solo wargamer.
Boots on the Ground: Company Level Actions in the early 21st Century
An Isolated Outpost: Six Months in the Sahara
Eight Years in a Distant Country: Soviet involvement in Afghanistan
Ovambo: Counter- insurgency in South West Africa
Good Morning Vietnam: LBJ’s War 1965-68
Flying Column: The Irish Troubles 1920-21
Oh, and I wrote the foreword, and supplied a list of readings and games on counterinsurgency! Look in the front and the back, when you are done having fun with these rules.
Eight pages of stuff and like always 95% of it is about digital games and gaming, but I have bought and liked:
Works of Game: on the Aesthetics of Game and Art, by John Sharp
Uncertainty in Games, by Greg Costikyan
The Well Played Game: a Player’s Philosophy by Bernard de Koven
Critical Play: Radical Game Design by Mary Flanagan (excellent book)
War Games: A History of War on Paper by Philipp von Hilgers
Use promocode GIVEBOOKS40 at checkout. Hurry, offer ends at midnight 11/27/2017! (Discount applies to website purchase only.) Service is prompt and shipping is pretty reasonable too.
I feel I ought to point out that, while the tone of CT is certainly serious, it thankfully isn’t sanctimonious, earnest or po-faced.
In fact, a refreshing element of this game for me has been the flashes of humour in there (also to be found in some of Brian’s other designs, Ukrainian Crisis for one). For instance, the Jean Paul Sartre card with its tagline, ‘Either way, he and Albert Camus are no longer friends.’
While some may argue that humour is inappropriate in a wargame, unless the game as the whole is intended as satire (War on Terror), my view is that humour has always been a part of war, and not only as a ‘defense mechanism’ employed by soldiers and civilians.
Rather, humour/absurdity is in an odd way one of the intrinsic elements of war (and the literature of war seems to me to confirm this), part of its troubling strangeness, what novelist J.G. Ballard called the ‘casual surrealism of war’ (which probably more often is simply weird and jarring, rather than blackly humourous).
As the son of British ex-pats living in Shanghai when the Pacific War began, Ballard spent his early teens in a Japanese internment camp. In particular his experience, in the dog days of the war, of leaving the camp and exploring the devastated and largely abandoned city, seems to have left an especially vivid impression on him, informing all his subsequent writing (only a small portion of which – his 1984 novel Empire of the Sun for instance – is explicitly about war).
Incidentally, like the jokes that Brian sneaks into his games, much of Ballard’s writing is slyly humourous – ‘guerrilla humour’ as it were, rather than the more obvious sort that bludgeons you with massive frontal assaults (War on Terror again springs to mind).
Those who know me well, know that J.G. Ballard is one of my absolute favourite writers. This guy gets me!
I went to a number of interesting presentations too. There seemed to be not as many as the conference in Seattle last year, generally. This might be due to the time of year – someone on the panel I presented with came in the day before, and left the day after to get back to his classes – or due to geographical distances.
The game night was fun, and even catered (though I had already had a big dinner). I taught four people how to play Guerrilla Checkers, and sent them off with copies of their own.
We had pretty good weather too, a few degrees warmer than here but the sunlight was much more direct. Unfortunately, no time for touristy things except that we did get to the USS Midway museum just up the road from the hotel, and clambered around in the guts of an aircraft carrier for three hours. It was fun, I had never been in such a large ship, and the capper was the talking robot in the Captain’s cabin, in the likeness of Captain Larry Ernst, the last Captain of the Midway before it was finally decommissioned in 1991. Spooky video above.
I do regret not being able to get to Balboa Park, where all the museums are. The San Diego Museum of Man had an exhibit on the history of cannibalism, and just a few hundred yards away was the Marie Hitchcock Puppet Theatre! Two of my favourite topics… one would weep bitter tears at missing the combination of the two. Anyway, an excuse to go back to San Diego one day. (Image: the All Puppet Players, of Phoenix AZ)
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