Ariel Ulrich, Blog Post #2
Wargames
Slowly, every so slowly, you walk hunched over closer and closer to the enemy. You can see them plotting and talking about their next move. They have no idea you are there. You adjust your gun in your hand. Creeping closer and closer, you hold your breath. Then you hear it from behind you: footsteps. Someone is coming. You are going to be discovered. You decide to go down shooting. BAM! You look down, your vest is lit up red. You’re shot. The other team turns to you and laughs. “You have to walk away until it goes green again,” they say. You decide right then and there that you no longer like laser tag because you keep losing.
I am sure you first thought that I was describing actual war combat. While combat is a worthy topic to discuss because it has so much weight, in this post I want to discuss the history of wargames and their possible benefits and disadvantages. War as entertainment has been around as long as the first human stories and performances. We seem to have a drive to tell tales of war to make us seem powerful or the heroes. From the pharaohs of ancient Egypt to the Greeks to Shakespeare, war has been glorified. Today, war is still used as entertainment to sit and watch, but it has also reached interactive levels through certain types of games and videogames.
Wargames have a long history, but one of the best places to start is at chess. Chess is often called an “abstract wargame” as it is about stargazing and conquering and battling, but it does not outright create the necessary realistic depiction of combat that would categorize it as a wargame. Though after the wide-spreading of chess people began to alter it and tweak it to make it a more realistic war simulator. One of the outcomes of this was in the late 1700s coined by Johann Hellwig. He adapted chess into a game that much more closely resembled war.It involved changeable terrain and grids as well as more modern-to-that-time soldiers. The difficulty with this game was that it was hard to transport and thus couldn’t be produced easily which kept it from gaining a lot of popularity. Additionally, the customizable-ness of the game caused a decrease in the realism and many armies laughed at the ridiculousness rather than take the wargame seriously.
Inspired by Hellwig’s game, a man named Georg Heinrich Rudolf Johann von Reisswitz developed a similar game of his own. He called it Kriegsspiel. With the help of the growing advancements in cartography, especially in Prussia, and his son, the two were able to create the father for all strategic modern day wargames. This game was played on a map of actual terrain and had movable block pieces. Georg’s son introduced the idea of an umpire to the game as well as dice. These were both important because it allowed real situations to be stimulated. The umpire did not have to be fair and he would often only let the two sides see the parts of the army they could normally view from their camps. He would also be in charge of moving the pieces via orders from the players and he could interpret them in any way he chose. Dice also added more elements of unpredictability to the game and made things more of a gamble. This game was taken very seriously, unlike its predecessor, and used as a tool to teach strategy and war tactics.
Arguably, while there are many many more wargame board games, the next generation of wargames came along with the creation of the computer. This new technology gave birth to videogames which spawned a whole new and more interactive way to simulate war. First person shooter games are among the most popular and topical. It is debatable how well these games simulate combat. For instance, in a first person shooter game a player can take way more damage than a real person could. Also the number of kills a player can get is much different than what it would be in normal instances. But above all, the death in these games are temporary and artificial; whereas in real war, a soldier only has one life. Though they cannot be too far off as video-wargames are used as a tactical training tool for a lot of armed forces.
It has been argued that these types of wargames have been used as a new form of political propaganda. These games are often created in response to real world events and often depict political enemies of the west. So there are a lot of wargames that are based in the middle east, of which there was a spike after 9/11, and that allows for a negative narrative of those geographic areas to become widespread. Wargames are also used as a recruitment tool. The US Army gave out copies of America’s Army at certain recruiting stations to try and get a rise in enlistments.
There is a lot of stigma around the mental impacts of wargames and the lessons that they supposedly teach. People question whether wargames make us more violent or less empathetic. There is a proven correlation between the two, however that is not a causation. The difference being that these appear at the same time but it doesn’t mean that video-wargames are causing the behavior. There was also a study that showed that girls who played video games seemed more susceptible to the violence than boys.
No matter what happens in the world, it seems humans have a fascination with war. These wargames were created as tools for learning how war works, but also for pure entertainment. It is interesting that we have continued to evolve these games and the number of them grows. The fun can come from the fact that you get to live a scenario without any of the consequences of real combat. Also while wargames can flip tables just like monopoly, it can be said that wargames, especially video-wargames, can help teach how to work as part of a team to reach a desired goal. Plus wargames have the added benefit of being able to write history in advance. So we can learn how people think and how to respond to what may come down the road.
References
Hitchens, M. (2014, November 26). War in Video Games - Between Reality and Entertainment. E-International Relations. Retrieved March, 2022, from https://www.e-ir.info/2014/11/26/war-in-video-games-between-reality-and-entertainment/
Homans, C. (2011, August 31). War Games: A Short History – Foreign Policy. Foreign Policy. Retrieved March, 2022, from https://foreignpolicy.com/2011/08/31/war-games-a-short-history/
Invicta & Peterson, J. (Directors). (2019). How Did War Become a Game? [Film; YouTube Video]. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-seIA9tukDs&list=WL&index=13
Jane, F., & Leeson, B. (n.d.). Wargame. Wikipedia. Retrieved March, 2022, from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wargame
Ragsdale, G. (2012, July 4). War Games: What Are They Good For? Psychology Today. Retrieved March, 2022, from https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/empathy/201207/war-games-what-are-they-good
This is a very interesting post! I especially enjoyed how you began with a story that at first seemed like an actual piece from combat, yet it was simply laser tag. Your connection between the two was incredibly clear, and you did a great job examining the history of war games and their resemblance to actual war. The study on mental health and video games, specifically violence and empathy, was intriguing and greatly caught my attention. I wonder how these results may change in later years given that thousands of children resorted to video games and media usage during COVID shutdowns, ultimately spending hundreds of hours with their eyes locked to a screen. How will this frame their emotions in the long run, especially in a time of war- whether it's combat, nuclear, cold war, etc?
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