It Still "Just Feels Right"

A Response to Bill Haggart's Article

by Sam Mustafa

(I thank Bill for his very considerate offer of sendin me a copy of his article and inviting a response. This rebuttal is offered in the same spirit of friendly but frank debate.)

Bill Haggart's interesting article takes aim at the way that wargamers have used the word "simulation" in the past. He offers a critique of what he feels are short-sighted and/or facile analyses of simulations, and then proposes a new set of criteria that he believes would ultimately benefit the hobby in the long run, and in the short run at least would end "the pointless rehash" of arguments about games and simulations. Specifically, he takes issue with my argument in MWAN 124 that all wargamers are just looking for a game that "feels right" to them. Bill prefers a set of objective criteria that would be recognized by everybody and serve to identify the hobby and its elements more descriptively.

Bill takes examples from other hobbies that he claims do indeed have such objective criteria, such as RC model airplanes. I know next to nothing about that hobby, so I'll just assume that everything he says about it is true. But do concepts like "Semi Scale" or "True Scale" really have any equivalent in our hobby? I have my doubts.

Wargaming does not have the same task as RC-airplanes. We are not dealing with a single machine, a single pilot, and a single set of laws of aerodynamics. It may indeed be possible to create a perfect True Scale ME-109f. But how on earth would you propose a True Scale Battle of Waterloo? There is no one single model, but hundreds of thousands, and it is not a machine- an objectively definitive device that is being modeled, but a huge panoply of human perceptions and memories. There simply is no objective way to model perception.

Bill worries that the hobby has been unable to define itself because the labels used are "false distinctions... that shed very little light on game design in this generation or the next." He may very well be right about that.

But games are very personal and preferential by nature. Defining or differentiating games according to "likes" or whether or not something "feels right" is about all that we can seriously do. Yesterday I attended the meeting of my local boardgame club. For whatever reason, the guys were in the mood to play a Battle of the Bulge game. Out came the choices. There must have been twelve different Bulge games that were trotted out and suggested.

Now if wargames are simulations - if such a thing is possible - then how do you account for all the different ways to represent this one battle? And how do you account for the fact that Joe really likes this Bulge game but not that one, and Steve really likes that one, but not the other.... They're all the same scale: all division-level representations. They all cover exactly the same order of battle, map, and period of time. Using Bill's criteria, they'd all fall in exactly the same category. Yet ten guys in a basement came up with ten reasons as to how they were all substantially different. Bill's quest for a common wargame vocabulary and distinctions seems inevitably to crash into this issue of perception again: why do so many division-level games on the Battle of the Bulge meet with such widely different interpretations as to whether or not they're "good" or "successful simulations," or whatever.

I don't disagree with Bill as to the ways in which a common wargame vocabulary might be useful. But I would also find a third arm very useful, and I don't expect either to be possible any time soon. The nature of the beast just doesn't allow for it.

What if the "Well-Placed Folks" Don't Like Your Footnotes...?

If I correctly understand one of Bill's goals, then he would prefer an objective categorization of games that would not be done by the designers themselves because they can't be trusted. An "Academie de Wargames," so to speak. He writes:

    "7n every case, the designer would have to declare the specific intentions of his desi gn, and provide the evidence that it does actually simulate something. Then it cane called a simulation."

I have to ask, "called... by whom?" Who gets to decide if the designer is "right" in the way he has categorized his game, and what good does that do the rest of us who disagree with that categorization? Bill suggests on page ten that "a few well-placed folks" will start and then sustain this movement toward objective categorization. I'm particularly curious about this. How does one know if one is a "well-placed folk?" Bill says that they will not be the designers, but rather "the writers in the hobby magazines who describe and critique our games, and the manufacturers who produce and market them." I'm surprised that he hasn't realized that most of us wear all those hats. This is a small hobby. Take me for example. I'm a writer and game critic. I'm also a game designer. And - in partnership with one other person - I'm also a game publisher. So... do I get to make the categories (based on my credentials as a critic and manufacturer), or do I have to adhere to the categories (based on my status as a designer?)

These aforementioned "well-placed folks" are the people who, we presume, are responsible for the hobby being in its current condition, right? I have no objective evidence to back this up, but I've always assumed that wargaming is the way it is because we wargamers like it that way.

This same fundamental problem lies at the heart of Bill's quest for objective accuracy in games. On page 9 he lays out his criteria for how "accuracy comes in:"

    The designer creates the simulation target by the data he chooses. The accuracy of the shot is how successfully the simulation mimics the data. There is an added element of accuracy for the historical war game_ The historical data must be reasonab y valid and support the simulation conclusions. This requires knowing something about historiography as well as simulations.

If I may say so, I think he's being very optimistic about the power of facts. I'm not even sure how he'd intend to use them. Let's say that I'm designing a Napolconics game, and I want it to meet Bill's criteria. Would I need to footnote every single instance when I assigned a morale rating? Let's say I decided to call the Saxon infantry "Average." There are probably 30 possible references just on my bookshelf alone. How many of them do I need to cite before I've proven the accuracy of my design decision? And do we really think that - even with 30 footnotes - everybody will agree with me or recognize my decision as accurate and definitive?

If there's one thing I've learned in a career as a professional historian, it's that "the facts" never speak for themselves. On my shelf I can find several well-regarded Napoleonic histories that will tell you that Napoleon's German Confederation troops were loyal and enthusiastic. Just this past summer I was in Germany doing primary-source research in a Prussian military archive and I discovered some things that totally changed my opinion about the morale of those regiments. (I uncovered diaries, court proceedings, and correspondence that leads me to believe that desertion was very high in Confederaation regiments, and morale very low, and the men felt mistreated by their French officers.) So Wargame Designer #1 creates a game and gives the Confederation regiments very high morale, based on those popular books by Elting, Gill, Nafziger, and others. Designer #2 creates a game and gives the same regiments very low morale, based on what I just found in the archives. Two totally different conclusions, resulting in different games. Multiply this by the number of game-design decisions that go into even a simple design, and I think you'll agree that objective documentation is a Fool's Errand. I'll design it the way I think is right, another designer will do it the way that he thinks is right, and you the player will choose which one "feels right" to you, based on your own encounter with the data.

Even if by some miracle we could arrive at an agreement on what "the facts" say, and how that should be incorprated into a game design, what do we do when a player decides: "Hmm... I think the Saxon infantry should be rated Good. I'm just going to play them as Good." Players do this all the time. It hardly matters what's in the book, how it was characterized, or how many facts lay behind my design decisions. Bill may not like "it feels right" as a criterion for games/simulations, but that's exactly how most wargamers do it. You could categorize a game design all you like, or hold the designer to a specific set of vocabulary when he's promoting his product, but garners will do as they please. And who am I, as the designer, to say they're wrong? They've paid their money. It's their game now, and they should play it the way they like.

Hey! Who Put My Simulation on the Game Shelf?

I think Bill misses something when he claims that game designers deliberately avoid categorizing their designs either by nefarious intent, incompetence, or some combination of the two. First of all, a lot of game designers do categorize their designs. But that doesn't seem to matter much to game players, who come up with their own categories faster than the designer ever could. Take, for instance, Frank Chadwick's Volley and Bayonet. A visit to the Yahoo! chat-site for this game will reveal the ongoing arguments as to what, exactly, Volley and Bayonet is. One guy last week called it a "GUMPS" - a Generic Universal Miniatures Playing System. Others refuted that, saying, No, V&B has limits - it can be used for this period but not for that one. Somebody then piped up and said, "Oh, but my group has used it quite happily for that period, and we think it works great..." Scroll back through the months and you'll see that all of these players are happy customers; all of them are using the product, even though very few of them have the same vision of what the product is. So my challenge to Bill would be: "Assign a category to Volley and Bayonet, and see if you can get more than 10% of V&B players to agree with that categorization."

Bill did assign a category to Volley and Bayonet. He placed it in the "Scale" sub-category of Historical Wargames, because, according to him, it "require[s] that time, terrain, and combat units are to some particular scale." That differentiates it from the "Representational" subcategory, where he places Piquet, which does not meet those criteria.

Bill didn't like my idea of a "Chaos-vs.-Control Continuum." He prefers these either/or categories. Yet Volley and Bayonet, after all, might have a specific ground scale, but its time and figure scales are pretty fuzzy. There's no figure-to-man ratio in V&B, and all brigades are abstracted to a generic 3" area, regardless of their strength. On the other hand, Piquet does in fact have a time-per-turn scale, a ground scale, and a figure scale, yet Bill put it under "Representational," which implies that it doesn't. Aren't there many games (a majority, even?) that don't fall neatly into these two categories, but rather have elements of both'? The question is one of degrees, and yes, perception.

Bill nearly admits as much, himself, on page ten, when he opens the door for many different wargame categories to proliferate beyond the basic four he laid out. How many more? Who gets to decide? What if I decide to invent a new category for my new game because I don't like any of the existing ones. Surely I won't be the only game designer who does that. Wouldn't we arrive in short order back at the "problem" he identified early-on: that the designer makes up his own vocabulary and it's purely subjective? (Or will the "Well-Placed Folks" show up at my door in their black suits and give me a well-placed kick in the crotch?)

Conclusion: I Don't Need a Simulation to Make-Believe I'm Simulating

At the beginning of his article Bill states that "wargamers and wargame designers in particular don't appear to know what simulations arc or how they work."

I'm not sure how that's supposed to relate to me, since I'm on record saying that wargames aren't simulations, anyway. So no disrespect to Bill -I just don't really care whether or not my game would measure up as a simulation using someone else's criteria. And this brings me to my final point: Could somebody please explain why, exactly, the hobby would be better off if we stopped arguing about "simulations?" Bill seems to believe that the hobby has been stuck in some sort of rut since the 1970s and that we won't get out of it until we adopt objective categorization. He concludes that:

If the next generation of games is to he more innovative, demonstrating more mature designs, if our hobby is to grow, then Historical Wargaming will have to be more innovative and mature.

I just can't help but see this quest as futile. Bill begins his article by wanting to do away with what he calls "a pointless debate," but ends up suggesting rules and criteria that would have to be enforced somehow by consensus. I think I'd have more success herding cats than I would at organizing garners around a single set of criteria for defining their hobby. If he thinks we're stuck in arguments now, just wait until he tries to invent game categories and get people to use them!

More to point, though, I have yet to be convinced as to how, exactly, we'd all be better off, "more innovative, demonstrating more mature designs," as he says, if we imposed these allegedly objective categorical labels on games. How, precisely, is a set of categories going to make me more innovative and mature as a game designer? Would people like my game Grande Armee better if it had some sort of label on it that read "This is a Representational Historical Wargame?" Would they play it any differently or more frequently'? Would it sell more or less? Would it "advance the hobby?" (whatever that means.) Would it make any difference at all?

No. We play games. We play them to have fun, to make-believe, to enjoy each other's company. We choose which games we play and buy based on whether they make our precious time feel well-spent, and no two garners are going to reach that conclusion in exactly the same way, no matter what labels we use to describe the games.

It really is just that simple.

Wargame Design

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© Copyright 2004 Hal Thinglum
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