By my last count I own three games that are explicitly about war. And likely a lot more in which the acts of war are touched on in some way or another. I don’t often talk about those games. But I do pick up on conversations about the genre and I’ve been thinking about it. Particularly how to talk about wargames.

For the longest time wargames did not have a good reputation in Germany. For reasons, which seem to slowly fade into oblivion, their association with war wasn’t considered particularly pleasant. (You’d think that thinking of war as something unpleasant would be self-evident, but yet here we are.) In the past there was an attempt at rebranding those games as “co-sims” (conflict simulations). By now most German-speaking gaming circles seem to have adopted the English term “wargame”. Even if that term itself is slowly falling out of use to be replaced by the wider term of “historical game”. Because, among other things, people still get a little tense, when you mention that you like to play wargames.

In my experience the pros and cons for these games, can be outlined via three simple questions.

Are you even allowed to have fun playing wargames? The answer here is rather simple: yes. Of course you are. Wargames are not wars, they’re games. There not re-enactments of wars, they’re games. They’re not even emotional reconstructions of wars, they’re games. To put it plainly: wargames are games.

As such they work using the same principles, that generate excitement in many of us. Games are fun: they fascinate us with their possibilities, and create moments of tension and levity around the table. It would be silly to act, as if wargames don’t let us have fun in the same way. They may differ in they goals and how they are conceptualised, but their methods are the same.

By gaining agency players experience a sense of power in the context of the fictionalised (and occasionally fictional) world of the game. This gaining of agency is no less thrilling and fun in a wargame, as it is in other games. In fact, the ‘famous’ Hannibal Smith quote is even more fitting when talking about wargames, as opposed to board games in general. We love it when a plan comes together, because its success is so rarely guaranteed. Too many uncertainties play into the outcome of our plans. We enjoy our successes in a board game in much the same way we do in a wargame. This enjoyment happens independently of any thematic enmeshment in the game. In wargames this is the (often) historical background the design refers to.

Are you allowed to just ignore the historical background of a wargame? The modern board game scene considers it a sign of maturity, seriousness and responsibility to not simply ignore the historical background of a board game. This is perfectly reasonable for a number of reasons. After all, the way that board games incorporate their themes in their overall design can quickly run into the danger of trivialising historical atrocities, or validating outdated cultural mores or problematic views of history. If a game’s theme is primarily used to illustrate rules mechanisms or to aesthetically enrich player interaction, you might be led to assume that everything the theme alludes to is celebrated as a good thing, or are at least presented uncritically and without judgement.

I don’t think that the same argument can just as easily be made about wargames. Since their rules are directly drawn from the game’s setting itself – the idea of depiction and simulation is part of wargaming’s DNA (cf. Peter Perla – The Art of Wargaming) – it’s difficult to just ignore the background. It is, by definition, articulated through parts of the game’s rules mechanisms. The oft-lauded, deeply thematic experiences in these types of games, is borne out of the conceptual approach to outline the setting through mechanisms. It’s the reason why the claim that playing a wargame is a way of deeply engaging with history has become so popular.

To some extent this is accurate. But still, I don’t subscribe to that argument. You could just as well say that using finger paints is a way to deeply engage with art history. Or that playing a guitar is a way to deeply engage with music history. What I’m trying to say is that using an object is not in itself enough to classify as “deep engagement”. Using an object is not the same as engaging with the ideas and concepts that this object is connected to.

It’s the people engaged in the activity, that make a difference. Whether it’s finger paints, guitars or even wargames. What matters is how much (or even how little) players already know about a topic, and how nuanced their understanding of it already is. When I start applying finger paints on a canvas, it’s a very different form of engagement with art and art history than if Ai Weiwei were to do the same. It is possible to engage with a historical theme (or a conflict) using a game, but it doesn’t happen because of it.

That’s why taking a game’s historical background into account often enriches play, but it is not a prerequisite for it. You can ignore a wargame’s historical setting, and still enjoy it. (For some, it’s the only way to do so.) But if you want people to deeply engage history with a game, it is necessary to set players up with everything they need to know about the game’s historical setting.

If players lack this knowledge, they often notice it intuitively. It’s what leads them to look up what they don’t know, after the fact. This, too, is often touted as a strength of wargames: they generate interest in a historical era. But this sets the bar far too low, in my opinion. “Generating interest” is something you can also do by changing your facebook profile picture, or reposting somebody else’s thread on social media. “Generating interest” is a slacktivism slogan, and not much more.

The actual promise of wargames is a different one: can we learn something from them?

I would expect to learn as much from a wargame, as I would from an essay spat out by ChatGPT. Although this comparison is arguably skewed, as an AI generated text is based on hallucinations (i.e. unverified claims) by the AI itself. In a wargame, players get to hallucinate meaningful connections themselves.

This may sound merely flippant, but at its core there is an important characteristic of games here. Their themes are only created by players establishing connections between mechanisms, images and terms. I’m using the word “establish” here on purpose. A game’s thematic expression doesn’t arrive at your table fully formed. It’s not as if players just have to sit down and read and interpret it properly. A game doesn’t function like a classical literary text, that can be correctly decoded with enough (media) literacy.

Instead players pick and choose thematic elements from the game and arrange them in such a way, that the overall experience makes sense to them. Which means, in practice, that we come up with a narrative that takes every aspect of the game into account, while trying to stay as free of contradictions as possible. The important part being, that it’s the players who determine which combination of rules and terms constitutes a contradiction and which don’t. We are the ones who decide how imprecise and vague the connections between numerous parts of the game are allowed to be, and what we’re willing to accept as a sensible connection. Tellingly, neither designers nor objective reality get to have a say in this. In games we create fictions, which are by definition at best in dialogue with the real world and never a wholesale depiction of it.

As players we are the ones to construct a game’s theme, and we set the standards for what passes as coherent and plausible. Whatever the designer’s intentions may have been and (more importantly) whatever the actual facts may be, they only ever become relevant, once we know about them and want to take them into consideration.

To learn something meaningful from a game, requires players to already know what the game is trying to get across. The less we know about the game’s setting, the more prone we are to making mistakes and drawing the wrong conclusions. Ones which, in lieu of somebody correcting our mistakes, we assume to be correct and go on to adopt uncritically.

Wargames can serve as a way to illustrate familiar ideas and concepts. Especially when they have a level of complexity and dynamism to them. By making them tangible this way, we can comprehend them as a kind of closed system. In a wargame we can then look at the outcomes that our playable model of such a system produces. This kind of visualisation can feel like learning, but only because we lack the critical faculties to test the validity of what we’ve played. This is similar to how reading an AI generated text feels like gaining useful insights, as long as we’re not in a position to identify any of its mistakes.

There are valid reasons to talk about wargames, in my opinion. Even if I consider the allegedly intellectual benefits they offer less extraordinary, than the pure designcraft they exhibit and the experiences they facilitate. Most wargames come with themes that make many people understandably uncomfortable. But I would argue that this is primarily an issue of aesthetics, not of moral principle. Wargames are games that generate a sense of tension, or evoke similar emotions of triumph and defeat as many board games do. That’s how they manage to be exciting to play. They successfully evoke a sense of agency in us. If there is one criticism to be made about wargames, it’s probably the inevitable association created by playing them. We experience a sense of playful fun through a feeling of agency that is often tied to imagining military conflicts. This is something that we shouldn’t accept uncritically. And maybe this is the exact reason why we should be talking about wargames.