I think many people are making a FALSE distinction between 'Simulations' and 'Games' because it makes the implicit claim that some games are opting to fall on the side of history, while others are opting for fun, and that that is a firm distinction. I would offer that there are a variety of mechanics, some familiar and literal, some unfamiliar and abstract, directed at illustrating the same identical events. If those parameters are not what we personally either agree with or accept, we consign them to the pit of "fun games" In fact, some simulation style players react badly to what can appear to be elements of pure chance in their wargames. The operative words are "appears to be". If a game(and one can't escape the fact that they are ALL games) accents a certain literal, detailed, and table supported process that is also ultimately decided by chance, as opposed to a game that accents more abstracted considerations often focused on the softer issues of morale and control, that relies on chance, but in a different way, and at a different point in the process, the easy answer is that one is fun and the other a simulation. The fact is that I think of myself, Jim Getz, Brent Oman, and others, as quite intent upon designing games that illustrate certain aspects of combat that have been largely ignored by the established designs. Are we only interested in fun? NO! I think we are interested in designs that are interesting to play, and different in their appreciation of what battles,combat, and war teach us, but I reject forcefully definitions of what those games do by people that disagree, don't accept, or don't get, what's going on in those designs. Nor is complexity, in itself, a guarantee of accuracy, or simplicity, necessarily, a characteristic that leads to less valid perceptions. It has always been interesting to me that men who have actually seen combat--such as Don Featherstone and Peter Young, opted for very simple designs where significant amounts of "chance" were present. Perhaps, they saw war differently than those who only read of it through the eyes of a reflective and considered eyes of the historian. Are historians a worthless resource and wrong? NO! But one must consider that their analysis of a battle is in retrospect, minus the pressures of the moment, and when all the mystery of the event has been solved. Any magician will tell you that all tricks are easy to understand once the secret has been revealed. But the 'Magicians' of battles, the generals, must practice their art with only fragments of the knowledge, with all the "ifs" and "maybes" still possible not the certainties of the Monday morning quarterback historian. We must garner the pertinent information they provide in their works, WITHOUT incorporating their certainty and predictable analyses in our rules. When wargames are designed with the general-as-historian mindset, it is like watching a trick or puzzle where we substantially know the "secret". It makes such garners feel secure and smug in their knowledge, but never poses those scary unknowns that mark and challenge the special skills of a general. Finally, much of the "chance" that garners rage against is neither as random as some portray, it is simply an environment that is less directly controllable, nor is it less historical, but may be based on a different level of resolution or focused on different, equally important, aspects of war. Too many garners readily adopt a much too mechanistic and limited appreciation of war and turn a blind eye to a more inclusive and human set of factors. They measure gun caliber's and armor thickness differences in terms of millimeters, but ignore crews that bail out, officers that freeze, commanders that are deeply buried in the fog of war, maps that are wrong, and the whole "for want of a nail" factors of war. Too much chance? Nah! Too much certainty is more the problem and the "unreality!" The literal truth is almost always false.--BJ Back to Piquet Dispatch Vol. 1 Issue 4 Table of Contents Back to Piquet Dispatch List of Issues Back to MagWeb Magazine List © Copyright 1999 by Piquet, Inc. This article appears in MagWeb.com (Magazine Web) on the Internet World Wide Web. Other articles from military history and related magazines are available at http://www.magweb.com