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Art, Controversy, and Wargames

1/17/2023

7 Comments

 
I love historical games, and I want everyone else to love them too. Fortunately, our hobby seems to be moving in that direction--I am starting to see tons of references to war games and historical games mixed in with conversation about "more mainstream" games, and this warms my heart. This rise in wargame chatter has also led to the renewal of a conversation that happens cyclically in this branch of the hobby. Are wargames controversial? Under what conditions, if any, are we ethically allowed to enjoy them? 

I have mixed feelings about these discussions. On the one hand, they mean that people are talking about wargaming and introducing even more people to my favorite part of the board game world. On the other, I find these questions frustrating. Why? Because asking them in this way is indicative of broader--and troubling--attitudes about games, what they are able to do, and where they culturally belong. 

As game designer Volko Ruhnke mentions in the Punchboard interview linked above, we ask questions about the legitimacy of games in ways that we would not ask them about other forms of media. It is no more questionable to enjoy a wargame about real-world events, including tragic ones, than it is to watch a film or read a book about an intense topic. If you watch the Oscars, you'll know that most critically acclaimed films are often emotionally brutal and focused on challenging aspects of history and culture. Historical dramas about WW2, slavery in America, and even current events are all fair game. We are also very comfortable with watching movies that center human suffering of all kinds. (I'm actually not sure I will be able to watch The Whale because of the intensity of the main character's despair.)

The same is true for literature. David Diop's At Night All Blood is Black won an International Booker Prize and is a brutal novel about war, colonization, death, and madness. R.F. Kuang may write fantasy novels, but her storylines are based on real-world history and its atrocities--and The Poppy War was one of the best trilogies I have ever read, while Babel was easily my top book of 2022. I have read and enjoyed a number of books with heavy subject matter over the past couple of years, including Schindler's List, I'll Be Gone in the Dark, and Death in Mud Lick. These were books on serious topics, but I absolutely enjoyed reading them.

I'm not saying that you can't question/criticize any of these works. Actually, reflecting and having conversations about art is... part of the point of art. I personally have questions about how much true crime is too much, and I would never assign something like The Boy in the Striped Pajamas in a literature class--not because the subject matter is too brutal, but because I don't agree with how tragedy is depicted in that novel. But I think most of us wouldn't dispute these works' general right to exist. (Unless, of course, you're an enraged culture warrior obsessed with defunding public libraries.) 

But somehow, when the conversation turns to games, the rules change. What makes games different from other forms of artistic expression? I think that this pivot comes from the same place as my absolute least favorite comment about games, which I am sure many of us have heard before: "Don't take it so seriously, this is just a game! Just have fun already!" This always comes up as a way to dismiss the hard questions... and is thus closely related to the assumption that games can't or don't ask them. 

Games are absolutely fun, and too few adults--especially in the United States--assign enough value to play. Our work culture teaches us that games are for children, and that they are a waste of time. There are endless self-help books, magazine articles, and YouTube channels always ready to tell you how to use your time better, how not to waste it, how to get more done in the hours allotted to us on this earth. Play is often seen as frivolous. The first time I got a lot of views on a post on this very site, I excitedly told a colleague about it. She responded with, "Liz, you're so smart, why don't you write about something important?" 

I think I am writing about something important. Sometimes I have to stop myself from apologizing for my love of games, for the fact that I prioritize gaming when I will only be alive for an unknown-but-limited period of time. But when I stop and think about it, I don't regret my choices. 

Fun is not frivolous. Enjoyment is not childish. Sometimes, "fun" just means "engaging"--and engagement is what games can offer us when we are trying to examine challenging historical topics. To ask whether it is okay to be engaged in this way is to dismiss gaming as a shallow, unreflective activity. Yet, the very things that prompt new wargamers to ask whether historical games are "controversial" are actually part of their value--player engagement and agency pull gamers into the subject at hand, and offer them ways of approaching historical problems that no book or film can provide.

This is why games make fantastic teaching tools, even or especially when they focus on controversial subjects. Games are, in fact, taken very seriously in more circles than ever before. University professors who adopt Reacting to the Past see amazing results in their classrooms. Professional wargamers bring real-world problems to life to help military leaders learn more about modern conflicts and possible responses to them. CMU's Center for Learning Through Games and Simulations has begun to publish games that are vetted like other academic publications. And, of course, you should be listening to the Beyond Solitaire podcast to learn about all of this and more. ;) 

There are a lot of ways to game, and a lot of ways to have fun. But play is the first and truest way to teach and to learn. The real crime would be to dismiss it. 


7 Comments
m1ke
1/17/2023 01:28:17 pm

I only disagree with one thing you said, which is that I think there's a very logical reason wargaming is treated differently from other media: the vast majority of wargames >require< the user to take on the role of one side in the conflict, and perform actions as that side. Depending on which conflict and which side, that can make some people varying degrees of uncomfortable.
Certainly other media may involve self-identification with one side or another if being subjective isn't the creator's goal and/or they're deliberately adopting a specific POV, but wargames by their nature (with a few exceptions) have it built in. Other media the user is consuming, whereas with wargames they are inherently participating, if only imaginarily.
As a wargamer myself, I am NOT saying I think there's anything wrong with enjoying wargames, just that it makes sense to me that people (especially outsiders) are inclined to interrogate them more than war movies, books, etc.

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Liz link
1/17/2023 01:41:00 pm

I don't see this as a disagreement at all, rather an extension of a larger conversation.

I totally agree with you that wargames do something unique, which is put players into historical roles that are uncomfortable or worse. I just also happen to think that we also have a tendency to view this practice as particularly bad/wrong because we devalue play and view what we do in a playful context as disrespectful when there is serious subject matter involved.

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Jean-Luc Szach
1/17/2023 04:54:20 pm

Fantastic topic and post, Liz. Thanks for blogging. I agree that the discomfort that many people may feel with the idea of playing day as a Nazi (or any other soldier/nation that one finds morally reprehensible) is a “bridge too far” for many dipping their toes into wargaming. But I like how you reframe the discomfort as experience.

Yes, there’s more agency in playing as a Nazi than as watching a movie about Nazis. And that’s more discomforting perhaps. But I see it as akin to the discomfort a writer or an actor would feel to inhabit the mind of a character they find repugnant. Yet the work that author did in the book one finds valuable or the actor did in the role that made you think for days about a topic is incredibly valued by our culture.

I also have to thank you for championing play as well. Play is the birthplace of creativity and insight. Incredibly important to us as human beings.

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Juan Carlos H. R.
1/18/2023 04:07:53 am

Hi.

First time here and I want to thank you for reflection. I totally agree with you and your Reply Comment section.

As a historian I love historical, usually war/conflict, board games and their capacity to makes us learn about the main or makes us understand how it's conceived/imagined by the society.

As Jean-Luc has said, I think one of the most controversial point is the agency that the uncomfortable side has to be perform by the player in a very personal way. The user has to take part in decision that migth be uncomfortable or worse, despite the fictional abstraction, and that generates rejection

However, thats agency also maybe a great tool in order to provide voice to a characters/population/class that has been historically ignored. I trully think that one of the keys are the way of how the tradicionally subaltern historical subject are trated.

Again, thank you for the article.

Cheers,

JC.

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Andrew Osborne
1/18/2023 10:03:13 am

I wonder if the level of uncomfortableness is related to either an over-inflated view of ourself and our own virtues (“I’m the good guy and would never do what those bad guys did”) or an over-simplification of the conflict (“good guys vs the bad guys).

The more I learn of various wars the more I’m surprised by both the human-ness of the combatants and the complexity of the conflict. I’m not saying that we should not attribute a moral character to a conflict, but if your view of the American Civil War is “the racist bad guys vs the good guys”, then you have an incredibly shallow understanding of that conflict.

Most recently I’ve enjoyed reading a biography of Dietrich Bonhoeffer, a German pastor who lived through the Nazi transformation of Germany. It was jarring to my brain to hear the words of someone who loved his country (wait–Germany was the bad guy!) yet resisted the moral compromise that he observed rising in the 1930s. It makes me wonder how I (being a paragon of virtue) would have responded to these events.

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Christian van Someren
1/18/2023 05:09:30 am

This is a great post, and I certainly agree with your points. But I do think it goes both ways, some games are just games.

For example, I just got John Company, which is an absolutely amazing game with a strong sense of history and which definitely has a thesis to share.

But then I see East India Companies. Here is a game with the same setting as John Company, but it is apparently not at all introspective about its setting. It seems to follow the mode of many euros of using "history" as a dash of theme without really thinking about what the game is actually saying. Perhaps the most egregious example of this is Mombasa, which may be a great game, but if anything, it is whitewashing history and promoting a certain myth about European colonialism.

OK, maybe that aligns with your point, even a game with seemingly no deeper meaning is still saying something. I just find it a shame when designers don't consider what kind of message their game is conveying.

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Liz link
1/18/2023 05:17:04 am

I actually do think this aligns with my point. >:) Dismissing a game as "just a game" and "just play" is also a way of dismissing the idea that the game is open to criticism.

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    My name is Liz Davidson, and I play solo board games. A lot of solo board games...
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