Wargamer's Newsletter is to be congratulated on consistently supporting diversity in wargaming against the apparent attractions of uniformity as advocated by Miniature Warfare. This insistence on the value of individual and local effort not only realistically accepts the truly amateur status of wargamers, encouraging the preservation of freedom to develop the game, but also allows a hearing to those who resist the dominant trend towards increasing complexity. The game has undergone considerable changes since the younger von Reiswitz secured its acceptance by the Prussian Army in 1824. Von Reiswitz's game was of the rigid and probabilistic type, that is it was strictly controlled by carefully defined rules and used dice to allow for variables such as casualties. By the time it was established in England at the turn of the century by Spenser dilkinson it had become free and ceased to be probabilistic. In other words, the decisions of umpires relying on their experience was largely substituted for both rules and dice. The popular revival of the game under the impetus of Mr. Donald Featherstone's '"dargames" involved a reversion to the rigid, probabilistic type. Meanwhile, in America the game has moved away from the table-top to the board and even from the manual to the machinegame using computers. This last development is the result not only of the increasing complexity of war itself but of the increasingly complex rules, involving the introduction of more mathematics, either of the deterministic kind, in which the outcome of events is decided by expected values, or of the so-called "Monte Carlo" type, in which the results are determined randomly. In Britain, however, the manual, table-top, rigid, probabilistic game retains its popularity and continues to develop. Mr. Featherstone's rules remain perhaps the most-widely used and the most developed, both in his own subsequent publications and in other people's versions, probably because of their adaptibility. Two other contributions of note are Brigadier Young's and Lieutenant Colonel Lawford's "Charge!" and Mr. J. Tunstill's "Discovering Wargames." The former employ military experience and historical scholarship to re-create the look of the battlefield, the latter insists on the importance of scale. All these publications, together with most of the rules put out by societies and individuals, possess the common characteristic of complexity: sets of rules aimed at covering every contingency and, accordingly, the use of a relatively large scale. On the other hand, Mr. Neil Cogswell, with the support of the Newsletter, has put forward, and elicited from others, rules, which are simple in character, rules, that is, which account only for a few general situations and which operate on a relatively small scalet thus allowing the easier representation of larger battles; Devising simple rules, however, is not a simple process, because of the complexity of the factors involved. Nevertheless, it is by no means a pointless or impossible task. All human knowledge involves the collection of a vast amount of data about complex phenomena and, then, deriving a simple theory to account for those phenomena. This is the standard process in the natural sciences, the achievements of, for instance, Newton and Darwin, consisting of just such work. Similarly in mathematics the complexity of, to take a highly relevant instance, probability was reduced to a simple theory, pre-eminently by Pascal. Thus, von Neumann postulated Game Theory to account for the complex phenomena of situations of conflict. At the very least, therefore, wargamers owe it to themselves, in framing their rules, to make their mathematics as easy as possible. Even though war presents us with exceedingly complex phenomena, it is not impossible to arrive at a simple theory of war, which, coupled with the theory of probability, wargamers might take as the bases of their rules. Von Clausewitz, probably the most influential writer on the art of war, argued that a simple theory would help to clarify the problems involved. His starting-point is the wargamer's; that because of the element of chance War of all branches of human activity (is) the most like a gambling game.' The chief element in war he called friction, made up of danger, physical exertion and the confusion of information, whilst it is always attended by the circumstances of locality and, to a lesser extent, of time and weather, all factors which wargames try to take into account. Moreover, Clausewitz pointed out that the regulation formations are inculcated into disciplined troops and the general methods of handling these formations in the field are the professional task of trained officers, leaving the high command free to concentrate on the employment of these forces, which constitutes tactics. A simple wargame, therefore, can make the same assumptions about a professional army, by ignoring the lower levels of command and adopting a smaller scale. This leaves the players free to concentrate on tactics, rather than the interpretation of detailed rules, and to assume the roles of the high commands rather than every level of command even down to the ranks. In conclusion, therefore, despite the complexity of war and the increasing complexity of many types of rules, wargaming, if not war itself, remains a game. It is a game, which, as Mr. Cogswell showed in his account of "The War of the Bomber Succession", published in the Newsletter, does not become less valid by being more simple and certainly need not be less enjoyable by being less complex. Back to Table of Contents -- Wargamer's Newsletter # 113 To Wargamer's Newsletter List of Issues To MagWeb Master Magazine List © Copyright 1971 by Donald Featherstone. 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