The inevitable happened the other day; a colleague asked me what I did last Sunday afternoon, and I had to tell him: I was refereeing a wargame. A wargame? What's that? So I just came right out and told him. I confessed everything. He seemed puzzled, and in need of more explanation, but vaguely interested.

I should explain that my friend is a professor of economics at the college where I teach. And I should also explain that he is from Senegal, on the western coast of Africa. And finally I should explain that Tariq is the kind of guy who, when interested in something, will go at it like mad, digging up tons of information until he knows more about it than you do.

So he apparently spent many long hours on the internet learning about miniature wargaming, and at lunch on Tuesday I got a million questions.

"I see that World War Two is everybody's favorite," he said.

"Well, it's currently the most popular," I said, "but there are trends and fads, and things come and go."

"But it's so recent. Does nobody find it offensive?"

"Find what offensive?"

"To be playing games based on the Nazis and all that."

This gave me pause. I'm sure there might be some people who would indeed be offended by playing games involving Nazis. But wargaming is a fairly small and isolated hobby. This struck me as ironic and amusing: one of the long-stated purposes of HMGS is to spread the word about wargaming and get "us" out into the popular media. But of course, wargaming benefits from not getting much attention, because if more people came and saw us playing games about the Taliban, or Vietnam, or whatever, they'd probably be a bit upset by that. If I look back at some of the hardest, most frightening aspects of my own life, I don't think I'd appreciate somebody turning them into a game.

But it wasn't World War Two that Tariq wanted to talk about. You see, he had discovered Colonial Period wargaming. Now, Tariq is a very polite man, and his "questions" were couched in polite terms, but I could tell that he was.... well, pissed off.

"...and I see that there are many games involving the conquest of Africa: killing the Zulus, killing the Sudanese, killing the Tuaregs..."

"Yes," I said, "Pretty much any war is fair game."

"Ah," he smiled and wagged a finger, "But that was hardly a `fair game,' those wars. We Africans don't think of those as `wars' at all, any more than you would think of September 11`' as a `battle.' Artillery and machine guns against men with spears? And look what came of it: the oppression and murder of millions of people. Seven million killed by the Belgians just in the Congo alone. Africa turned into one vast slave labor camp. I think this is something that should not be made into a game."

"Well," I said, "War in general is pretty horrible, and I think you could make a case for not turning it into `fun.' But remember that most games and even sports simulate some kind of violence. Look at Chess, for instance -- it's definitely a war game. Nobody objects to that. And it also depends on what you choose to emphasize. For instance, I think everybody agrees that playing a game based on a battle of the American Civil War is OK. But playing a game based on slaves trying to escape from a plantation would probably be considered in very, very bad taste."

Tariq disagreed. He thinks the whole endeavor is in bad taste.

About six months prior to my conversation with Tariq, I played house-host to an old, dear friend from Germany. She wanted to see New York, and so was crashing at our place. Needless to say, in our small apartment there isn't much room to hide anything, and so she immediately noticed my miniatures. We began talking about it. While she found the whole hobby a bit strange, she had no moral objections to playing games about Napoleon. But when she, too, learned that World War Two was the most popular period in the hobby, she gasped:

"Oh my God, you can't be serious" were, in fact, her exact words.

I showed her some of the rulebooks for that period. Many of them feature miniatures fighting in rubbled city streets.

Ursula is my age -- she's in her thirties -- so she doesn't have any personal experience with Allied bombing or even rubbled cities. Her parents, of course, grew up in the wasteland of post-war Germany, and her mother in particular (who grew up in the Soviet zone) can tell you some stories that would make your skin crawl.

"It's too recent," she said. "There are people still alive who remember it. It's disrespectful and childish to 'play' at it. Napoleon is okay, but not that... Do they even make games of dropping atomic bombs on people?"

"Ummm..." (To be honest, I wasn't sure.) "Ummm... there are games about Allied bombers over Germany, yes, but the two sides are usually the fighters versus the bombers. The game itself is not about trying to kill civilians."

"What about games about Concentration Camps?"

"No -- of course not."

"But why not?" she asked. "I mean, if you can make a game about fire-bombing a city full of women and children, then why not a game about a concentration camp?"

I found myself in the weird position of arguing to my friend that I was just as sick and demented as the next guy:

"Look, it's not really that different from Napoleon or Julius Caesar or anything else. The tools change, but not the intent. War involves killing people. But what we're doing is trying to re-create the intellectual challenge of planning battles. We don't consciously glorify the killing itself."

I wonder, six months later, if I was right about that. I certainly didn't convince Ursula with that argument, and I didn't really convince myself, either. If we don't glorify the killing in our games, then why is it that we're happy when we kill the enemy units and thus win the game? Roll a six and watch that canister fire slaughter the infantry...

At this last Historicon I commented to a friend that the whole ambience of the place was a lot more "mature" than it was a decade ago. By that I meant that there weren't guys running around with SS Totenkopf "Tour" T-shirts, and that sort of nasty regalia. But I kept thinking about Ursula's comment about moral equivalency: Nobody in HMGS would ever consider making a game about the September 11th attacks. Yet we do make games about the conflict that immediately touches upon those attacks. "Dropping Tanks on Tora-Bora," for example, was a well-publicized event -- a game about a conflict that was still underway in Afghanistan.

I am Arab-American, and have family in Baghdad (my dad came over from Iraq in the 1950s). I remember the slew of Gulf War games ten years ago, and I don't remember being offended at the thought that somebody might be gaming dropping bombs on my aunts and uncles. But maybe that's just me: I have thick skin.

Since HMGS does profess to be concerned about the image of the hobby in the wider world, and since we all seem to be happy when reporters show up to put our hobby on the evening news, perhaps we should begin giving this a little more thought. Are we doing enough to ensure that the huge number of people outside the hobby see us as rational, sane adults? When we express any embarrassment about our hobby, it's usually of the variety: "Aw shucks, I'm a 40-year-old guy playing with toy soldiers." But that's a fairly harmless image, and I wonder if that's the image most people see.

Or do they, like Tariq and Ursula, see us in a more sinister light?

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