Connections 2002

Lecture: Military History and Wargaming

by Russ Lockwood



presented by Dr. Martin Campion

For 29 years, Campion taught military history at Pittsburg State University in Pittsburg, Kansas. In 1950, he started designing his own wargames because there were none to buy, although they became unuseable since he added so many facets to the rules to simulate everything and anything.

When he bacame a professor, he started to incorporate wargames into his courses to encourage his students to "learn to care about history." Indeed, he started a "History Laboratory" at the college, which was a fancy name for a room with cubicles that students could use to simulate war.

He mostly used commercial games, but adapated for his own lesson plans. Most were two-person Avalon Hill and SPI games, where he "fiddled" with the game mechanics to divide up responsibilities in command and control. He often required students to send written messages instead of talking to one another to introduce added dependency on others, fog of war, and command friction. As he noted, he became a master at creative umpiring, where he would make up the rules on the fly or tell students rules as they went along.

For example, when he used SPI's Soldiers and SPI's American Revolution, he kept the CRT hidden from the students. When they needed a battle outcome, he would roll in secret and tell them the results.

He eventually branched into computer wargames, using a terminal attached to a mainframe in the main room, then shuttling to and from the Lab. He ran three main games: Masters and Slaves (19th century US South), Rilas West (19th Century Westward Expansion), and Medieval Lords (medieval power structure building).

Bio

Dr. Martin Campion - Programmer for Perspicacity Software Martin Campion started designing wargames while he was in high school c. 1950. Disguised as an American Intellectual Historian, he got a Ph.D. at the University of Minnesota in 1970, and a job at what became Pittsburg State University (Kansas) in 1965. There he began to develop military history courses and to use games in the teaching of his courses. On the side, he wrote for SPI magazines from 1970 to 1980, and contributed a large section on wargames to Horn and; Cleaves, Guide to Simulations/Games for Education and Training (1980). He went on to use computer games in his courses and to design several for his own use, two of which were published by SSI: Rails West! (1984) and Medieval Lords (1991). Retired from teaching, he is presently working on some computer games.

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