The Fog of War

War games are not war, and expert gamesmen are not necessarily experts on war. We like to think of ourselves as experts, of course, and our studies of war conducted by reading books and moving bits of cardboard about on hexagons encourage us in this delusion. Many wargamers think they "understand war" and so we do, compared to the average citizen; but war has factors which we cannot bring to the games table.

Great military men are usually great leaders of troops. They know what they can expect from their men, and they know how to get it from them. Harry V going from watchfire to watchfire encouraging his cold and beaten army; Caesar outside Pharsalia making obscene gestures with a pickle; Napoleon and the Sword of Marengo; "a moi, la Legion!": this is the stuff of war, and our simulations are at best only pale shadows of it.

Then there is technical knowledge. The Great Captains have a "feel" for capabilities. They know what a division, without supplies and with most of its armor scattered across the desert with broken treads, can accomplish against an enemy whose equipment is intact but whose organization is broken. More than that, a Rommel can make them continue -- and has the nerve to try. Mechili fell on 8 April, 1941, to precisely 4 tanks: we should have thought Rommel a fool to assault a strong position with such a weak force.

Sometimes gamers can catch glimpses of the excitement of battle. Playing far too long into the night after endless cups of coffee we begin to feel the mind- numbing confusion that comes from too many important decisions made with too little information; but again, we experience only shadow, not substance. We might come closer to understanding battle if we introduce some new rules.

Instead of victory points, let the stakes be hundreds or thousands of dollars. For every pasteboard unit killed, let their commander have a sharp needle thrust into his flesh, while for surrendering them let it be an unpleasant electric shock. Meanwhile turn on a loud buzz saw, float a cloud of tear gas into the player's face every time he examines the board to see where the enemy -- or his own -- forces have got to. We still wouldn't have a battlefield simulation, but we'd be closer to it.

Fortunately the gamer doesn't need to make estimates of what his forces can accomplish while a simulations referee gleefully tortures him. In fact, he doesn,t need to make estimates at all. The rules define capabilities for him, and if they aren't in the rules they aren't going to interfere. We can complicate things for him by giving him choices: for example, a rule that trades off combat factors for mobility as I once suggested for Afrika Korps; another that throws the dice to determine morale as the miniaturists do; but there is no way to make the combat capability of a game piece depend on an act of sheer will by its player (unless he is telekinetic or gets frisky with the dice.)

I needn't belabor the point. A war game must simply try to equalize the "confusion factors" inherent in war. The game rules must reduce matters of technical expertise to some kind of formulae in the design. We determine which side had the most problems recruiting expert mechanics, and we add a rule giving that side more breakdowns than the other.

Of course a real world military commander might have solved the problem somehow, but we can't leave that option to the game player. We have left the world of battle and moved up to another realm of abstraction: the lair of the strategist.

More Simulation and Psychology

Introduction
What Are We Trying to Simulate?
Strategy
What Can We Simulate?
A History of Operations
Panzerblitz and Jutland