Editors’ Introduction

[General William] Westmoreland’s strategy had always been to use the American troops as a “shield behind which” the GVN forces could move in to establish government security. The commanding general never quite came to terms with the fact that the war was being fought at points rather than along lines. With the support or even the neutrality of the population, the enemy forces could break up into small units and go anywhere in the countryside circumnavigating the “Free World” outposts. Westmoreland was trying to play chess while his enemy was playing Go.

—Frances FitzGerald, Fire in the Lake

In 1961, Charles S. Roberts and Avalon Hill, the Baltimore, Maryland, company he had founded seven years earlier, published four board games with certain things in common. All four were based on historical military subjects—in fact, three out of the four concerned the American Civil War, whose centenary was that year (the other game was D-Day). All of them came with a sheet of die-cut cardboard counters, mostly a half-inch square and printed in two colors to represent the military units that fought in the particular battles and campaigns. All of them featured something called a Combat Results Table to adjudicate the outcome of individual battles within a probabilistic range based on a die roll.¹ All four of the games also included a mapboard depicting some place in the real world, ranging in scope from the eastern half of the Continental United States to Nazi-occupied France to the ridges and roadways converging at Gettysburg, Pennsylvania, to the woods around Chancellorsville, Virginia. There is nothing about the game board in Monopoly that actually resembles the street plan of Atlantic City, but these games were different—at a glance you could see Paris relative to Calais, or where Little Round Top sat amid the fields and farms outside of a certain crossroads town. Finally, all of the maps were overlaid with the hexagonal grid that was to become wargaming’s most enduring visual icon. Despite the games’ differing topics and scope, each of them took advantage of this hex grid to implement a concept called a Zone of Control.

Mechanically, a Zone of Control (ZOC) is easy to explain: a combat unit’s presence in any one hex is sufficient to exert some set of effects on the six hexes immediately adjacent to it. Maybe an enemy unit has to expend more movement points to enter and leave a ZOC hex (reflecting the friction of skirmishing patrols in modern warfare) or maybe the unit must immediately stop and enter into combat (reflecting what would happen when a Union and Confederate regiment found each other eyeball to eyeball across an open field). Just as important, however, a ZOC is also an artifact of the abstraction inherent in the enterprise of “gaming” war—wars and battles, after all, are not really fought on hex grids, units don’t always deploy in a consistent fashion or formation, turns are not taken sequentially by opposing battlefield commanders, and so forth. Wargames at their most fundamental, regardless of medium or motivation or scope, seek to model the brutal reality of armed conflict with a set of heuristics and formulas, conventions and physical or programmable components. As a method for representing the projection of military force in a range of scales and historical epochs, Zones of Control are thus one means toward achieving the elusive compromise between gameplay and simulation, between abstraction and realism.

For us, however, the idea of Zones of Control also suggested something more. It is a conspicuously powerful phrasing, one that we felt could be put to effective use in editing a book about wargames in multiple media, formats, and player communities. Why edit such a book at all? Most all of our readers will already know that games with military themes date back to antiquity, as Jon Peterson reminds us in his opening chapter. For all of their historical variety however, wargames remain underserved by the established academic and trade literature on games and game history. Many popular writers seem content to move from a token acknowledgment of chess or Go or Chaturanga to the first-person shooter. At other times wargames are treated in a cursory manner, obligatory to mention but best not lingered over on the way to more tempting (and less bellicose) fare involving magic or meeples. Sometimes there is a slightly more nuanced genealogy invoking the Prussian Kriegsspiel or H. G. Wells’s Little Wars (1913), and perhaps a mention of Avalon Hill or Simulations Publications, Incorporated (SPI), before arriving at the presumptive finality of the digital present. By contrast, Zones of Control seeks to offer a richer and more granular set of perspectives on wargaming’s past, present, and future, particularly in its Western contexts.

The kind of “wargames” we have in mind are generally those games that cover specific historical conflicts—wars, battles, and campaigns—as well as games grounded in recognizable real-world geopolitics. (Wargames set in fantastical or science-fictional contexts are largely, though not entirely, absent from this book.) We mean both recreational or commercial games as well as those employed by professional militaries and policymakers. We mean games that attempt to interpret and understand past conflicts, and those that seek to model and forecast potential future ones. And we mean games played on both tabletops and on screens, which is to say games in both analog and digital media. The tax­onomies and genealogies here are complex, and cannot be disambiguated simply by recourse to medium and method or even the play of a particular game system. Gaming at the Naval War College at Newport, Rhode Island for example, has historically involved computer simulations, role-playing and discussion, and officers moving miniature ships around on the floor with rulers and protractors. Recreational or hobby games about naval warfare have also been published in most of these formats, indeed sometimes utilizing the same rule sets or game engines (such was the case with both Fred Jane’s miniatures rules in the early twentieth century and the Harpoon series of today). We also follow Peter Perla’s insistence, in his The Art of Wargaming (1990), on using the contracted compound “wargaming” (not “war gaming”) to represent the form’s characteristic synthesis of topical simulation and ludic play.

Wargaming, by definition, traffics in martial subject matter. Perceived in its full historical and material diversity, however, it is not inherently militaristic. Such at least is our governing belief—readers should use what follows to arrive at their own determination. Wargaming is also possessed of deeper significance to game studies and game history than the merely topical; that is, its relevance or import cannot be evaluated simply by the extent to which one does or does not think themselves interested in games about war. Its professional practitioners will often define wargaming as a tool for abductive reasoning, a term first introduced by Charles Sanders Pierce for testing hypotheses. As contributor Rex Brynen has previously suggested, “Wargaming is much more policy- and planning-oriented than most other gaming. It also has much more rigorous traditions of design, validation, adjudication, instrumentation/reporting, and analysis.”² In her chapter here, Sharon Ghamari-Tabrizi argues for understanding wargames as systems of inscription, rather than as mere topical playthings. The toolbox of modeling techniques and heuristics originated by wargaming has also found increasing application in other subject domains: Mark Herman has written elsewhere (2009) about the use of wargaming in strategic corporate planning, while in this volume Brynen, Mary Flanagan, and James Wallman all find ties to different kinds of “serious” games, including what Brynen has termed “peace games” for peacebuilding.

Moreover, as much as they can be games about history, wargames are also part of the history of games, as Peterson makes clear. Therefore, in their chapters here, Scott Glancy examines the methods of depicting physical conflict in tabletop role-playing game systems, and Henry Lowood finds essential connections between the emergence of computer game engines like that of id Software’s Doom (1993) and the prior innovation of systems- and scenario-driven designs in board wargaming. Wargames have also interacted freely with the arts, sometimes in surprising ways; the contributions here from David Levinthal and Brian Conley document wargames in relation to individual artistic practice, and Esther MacCallum-Stewart surveys literary representations of wargaming in a variety of idioms.

Perhaps most important, wargames are unquestionably the most sophisticated ludic productions ever attempted in paper or predigital form, their systems and procedures self-documenting with all of their working parts materially exposed as soon as one opens the box and begins examining the often notoriously intricate rules, charts, and components.³ (Jim Dunnigan, as we will see, calls them paper time machines.) These games thus offer the single largest extant corpus of coherent exemplars whereby the complexity (and chaos) of lived experience is reduced to ludic systems and procedures, surely a resource worth our attention and inquiry. Indeed, wargame hobbyists will often amass collections of hundreds or even thousands of titles, sometimes a dozen or more on a popular topic like Gettysburg or D-Day or the Battle of the Bulge. For the more critically minded among them, the goal is not to find the single, definitive simulation—indeed, one that merely mechanically replicated the historical outcome at each playing would be deemed a failure—but rather to compare and contrast the techniques and inter­pretations across the different designs, much as a historian reads multiple accounts and sources to arrive at her own synthesis of events.

This bears further comment. Although there are many commonalities among wargames, there are also enormous variations in their purposes and designs. The goals of the hobby game player and the goals of the security professional are not the same, although both might be employing very similar game systems. Contrariwise, even games that ostensibly cover the same subject matter can do so in widely divergent ways. Two examples will suffice.

Charles Roberts’s aforementioned Gettysburg (1961) assigns varying combat and movement values to individual Union and Confederate units (Jubal Early’s division, for example, rates a 4–2, making it stronger in combat than George Pickett’s 3–2). This deterministic manner of assessing unit capabilities became nearly as common in wargame design as the hex map itself, but even this is not universal. By contrast, Rachel Simmons’s recent design for The Guns of Gettysburg (2013) forgoes combat ratings altogether; with the exception of the famously tough Union “Iron Brigade,” combat effectiveness is determined through a combination of position, terrain and previous combat casualties. Far from being arbitrary, this design decision reflects a particular form of historical understanding, one that assigns more value to contingent factors on the battlefield and deemphasizes the relative “quality” of the fighting men.

The venerable Avalon Hill game Kingmaker (1974) is designed as a multiplayer simulation of the Wars of the Roses, supporting up to seven players. Players do not take on the roles of the belligerent houses of York and Lancaster, but instead play fluctuating blocs of allied noble families, whose armies move across a map of England to control, and sometimes execute, Yorkist and Lancastrian personages such as Henry VI and Richard, Duke of York—who are, literally, tokens. By contrast, a more recent game on the same subject, Columbia Games’ Richard III: The Wars of the Roses (2009), is designed for two players filling the expected roles of the Houses of York and Lancaster. Jerry Taylor, Richard III’s principal designer, explains that the multifactional view of the Wars of the Roses expressed through Kingmaker was the “prevailing view among historians” in the 1970s, but that modern scholarship now leans once again toward the traditional view of the conflict as one primarily between York and Lancaster. Taylor could therefore not design Richard III as a multiplayer game “without doing massive violence to history”; he concedes that it would be plausible to design a three-player simulation, with the third player representing the forces of Richard Neville, Earl of Warwick, but “I’ve never been able to figure out a way to make a satisfactory three-player game yet” (Grant 2012).

The wargame design process therefore encodes assumptions about historical events (or contemporary real-world situations) into the mechanics of the game itself. In this they are no different from any other system of representation, since it is in the nature of a model to simplify the complexity of the world, but as Dunnigan and others frequently point out, tabletop games offer one of the most transparent demonstrations of this process. Their rules and procedures are available for all to see.

It is for this reason among others that, if there is a center of gravity to Zones of Control, readers will find it in the volume’s preponderant attention to manual tabletop (“board”) games, a decision that reverses the usual primacy of computer games in previous surveys or collections such as the landmark Joystick Soldiers: The Politics of Play in Military Video Games (2010). We give space to the AAA shooters but place them in dialogue with a much broader array of design practices and ludic frameworks spanning both tabletop games and digital platforms and encompassing commercially available (hobby) games on the one hand and professional defense and national security gaming on the other.

By their very nature, manual or tabletop games account for the chronological majority of the collective record of gaming war. As well, we felt keenly that these games—particularly in their commercial incarnations from Charles S. Roberts forward—represent an underexplored area for ludology and game studies. From the 1960s until well into the 1980s, board wargaming was the single most vital area for game designers to hone their craft; as Greg Costikyan (2006) has noted, the term “game designer,” in fact, has its origins at SPI, along with key industry innovations in game production and market research.⁴ The conduit between board wargaming and the then-budding computer games industry—for example, between Avalon Hill and the Hunt Valley studios in Maryland—was a straight line, with many leading figures moving from one industry to the other. Moreover, the tabletop design tradition continues to this day, with a typical calendar year seeing the publication of several hundred new board wargames from the several dozen publishers serving the hobby’s globalized, if niche, community. We have attempted to showcase some of this ongoing design innovation in addition to paying our respects to influential game systems. Once a board wargame could be expected to sell tens of thousands of copies, perhaps even a hundred thousand or more; today no title can command the upper end of such a market, but as recent press coverage shows (Albert 2014; Roeder 2014), there are indications board wargaming may be making something of a comeback—a function of their ongoing topicality and agility in covering material that a major digital studio wouldn’t touch, and because of a recent trend toward simplifying designs, a change from previous decades’ voluminous rules sets and playing times measured in weeks or months.⁵

Tabletop (manual) gaming also remains influential in both educational and national security circles, where the strengths of its material affordances are recognized and routinely leveraged alongside computer-based simulations. As Philip Sabin argues, a manual game is accessible, teachable, and customizable in ways that most computer games are not, especially to a novice audience of nonprogrammers. Board wargames thus handily teach what we now term procedural literacy. This is a virtue not only in the classroom but also in think tanks and on field exercises, where a game that cannot be efficiently broken down and analyzed and explained is a game that is effectively useless. (These are also contexts where cost-effectiveness, rapid prototyping, and agile development are virtues.) Wargaming, in other words, is a design space where there is a strong manual and tabletop ethos that is refined and upheld to this day, and despite the notoriety of the military shooter and the investment in high-end virtual simulation environments by the Western defense establishment, we believe wargaming cannot be adequately studied without a full measure of attention to its analog fundamentals.

We also trust that now is an opportune moment for a broadly synthesizing volume like Zones of Control. For a long time there were only a handful of essential but well-worn texts on the subject of wargaming, variously written by analysts (Francis J. McHugh and Peter Perla), journalists (Andrew Wilson and Thomas B. Allen) or hobby luminaries (James F. Dunnigan and Nicholas Palmer).⁶ These foundational studies are now joined by a new wave of books from a wider range of perspectives. In his Wargames (2013), the Israeli military historian Martin Van Creveld has sought a comprehensive survey of wargaming in Western contexts, encompassing not only tabletop and digital games but also gladiatorial contests, chivalric tourneys, and battlefield reenactments. Jon Peterson’s opus Playing at the World (2012) offers readers the definitive account of the tangled genealogy of Dungeons & Dragons and makes clear what tabletop role-playing games do and do not owe to miniatures and board wargaming. In Eurogames (2012), Stewart Woods rightly foregrounds wargaming within the broader tradition of tabletop “hobby games.” Philip Sabin has written two essential studies, Lost Battles (2007) and Simulating War (2012), about the historian and educator’s use of wargames in both scholarly and classroom contexts; working in a media and cultural studies idiom, Philipp von Hilgers’s War Games (2012) ties the discourses of media archaeology and the materialities of communication to the long early modern and modern histories of military gaming; Patrick Crogan’s Gameplay Mode (2011) is the first full-length work from game studies to offer a critical framework for the digital military simulation; political theorist Richard Barbrook, meanwhile, has found in board wargames a kind of genealogy for the street-level tactics of the avant-garde Left, a history he unveils in Class Wargames (2014). Not all of the aforementioned authors are contributors to Zones of Control, but many are, and among our other aspirations for the volume we hope we can contribute by placing them and other key thinkers in close contact to one another for the first time.

We are also aware that different readers will come to these pages with different expectations. Fortunately, one of the powers of a book is to bring divergent voices and critical perspectives into tangible proximity by virtue of their sharing space beneath a common cover. (Readers, it should be said, will also find a full spectrum of political postures represented here.) Though not every contribution here will necessarily engage every reader equally, the volume is an occasion to browse and explore, or eavesdrop if you will, on the conversations (in the zones) of others. For the hobbyist, Zones of Control collects extended statements from many well-known designers and luminaries, but it also offers historical and critical perspectives typically absent from the pages of designer’s notes or hobby ’zines. For the professional national security game designer or member of the military, meanwhile, this volume offers a crosswalk to neighboring communities in much the same manner as Connections, the small but vital wargame practitioners’ conference held annually since 1993.⁷ This comes at a time when there is also renewed emphasis on wargaming in the defense establishment, notably an influential memorandum calling for “innovation” in wargaming issued by US Deputy Secretary of Defense Robert Work in 2015.⁸ It also demonstrates what humanistic and historical perspectives can bring to the sometimes too-presentist or positivistic objectives of a professional trained mostly outside those critical and intellectual traditions.

For the academic reader, we suggest that some of this material be regarded as primary source documentation from various communities of practice, but we have also attempted to align the volume with a number of academic fields and specializations, especially in the contributions of the longer chapters. We have already sought to articulate what we take to be wargaming’s significance to game studies or ludology. For media studies and media archaeology, wargaming offers an extended case study in negotiating medial forms, notably paper and other analog components and in relation to the digital—a negotiation carried out in terms of abstraction and representation, and the material instantiation of procedure and probability to represent the (a) “real” in the manner we have discussed. For popular culture and fan studies, Zones of Control offers insight into an overlooked community. For military history and war studies, this volume is an opportunity for these fields to reflect once again on the still-marginal status of games as tools for education and research, a message brought home by Robert M. Citino and Lisa Faden and Rob MacDougall, as well as Sabin.⁹ Finally, for digital humanities and digital history, wargames offer numerous examples of working models, the attempt to reduce the complexity of lived (literally embattled) experience to systems of procedure and algorithms against the ground-truth of a historical record.¹⁰

In short, then, because wargaming deals with war does not mean that it should be shunned by ludology or a progressive scholarly establishment, nor should the diversity of its design practices and critical perspectives be homogenized for the sake of a metanarrative about Western militarism. But neither have we shied away from wargaming’s implications in what Andrew J. Bacevich (2005) has termed the new American militarism. Readers will thus find discussion of wargaming’s ethics and morality in the contributions from Miguel Sicart and Soraya Murray, among others, as well as an account of what has widely been regarded as one of the most progressive wargame designs in some time, 11 bit studios’ This War of Mine (2014), contributed by its senior writer and developer, Kacper Kwiatkowski. Patrick Crogan and Luke Caldwell and Tim Lenoir, meanwhile, bring wargaming under intense scrutiny in their respective contributions, using toolkits from the forefront of media and cultural theory. Their critical perspectives are an essential balance to the nuanced, detail-oriented historical accounts of many other contributors and the enthusiasms of individual players and designers. Crogan in particular brings the conceit of a “zone of control” fully up to date with his account of the medial battlespace undergirding contemporary autonomous warfare. And as Caldwell and Lenoir trenchantly conclude: “if our wargames cannot imagine peace, what should we expect of our future military?”

With all military histories it is necessary to remember that war is not a matter of maps with red and blue arrows and oblongs, but of weary, thirsty men with sore feet and aching shoulders wondering where they are.

—George MacDonald Fraser, Quartered Safe Out Here

Like John Keegan—who opened his groundbreaking book The Face of Battle (1976) with the same admission—neither of us have ever been in a battle, or in uniform. We are white, cisgendered American males, both the products of urban/suburban, middle-class upbringings at a time when the United States lacked compulsory military service. Nuclear war was a visceral fear brought home in countless movies like The Day After and, for that matter, WarGames (both 1983). By contrast, what conventional wars there were—Iran-Iraq, the Falklands (Malvinas), Lebanon, the so-called “brushfire” wars whose sharp imagery was a staple on the nightly network news—were geographically remote and self-contained. The Big One—a Soviet-led Warsaw Pact invasion of Western Europe—remained only hypothetical but was a prospect anticipated in countless professional and hobby wargames at the time. (Tom Clancy and Larry Bond’s Red Storm Rising, their best-selling novelization of just such a scenario, was in fact based in part on their play of Bond’s naval wargame Harpoon.) For Kirschenbaum, this milieu meant discovering boxed wargames on the same shelves as role playing games at the local hobby store: playing Avalon Hill, GDW, and SPI titles was part of his adolescence, coexisting unselfconsciously with Rush albums, Dungeons & Dragons, Tom Clancy novels, and an Apple II computer. The intricacies of wargames like Squad Leader (1977) or Wellington’s Victory (1976) did not seem substantially different from these other pursuits. By contrast, Harrigan was, in the acerbic phrase of the narrator of Roberto Bolaño’s The Third Reich (1989), one of those “adolescents more interested in role-playing games and even computer games than the rigors of the hexagonal board.” Wargames were intimidatingly complex, rarely played, and intellectually aspirational, and it was several more years before he regularly began to delve into their mysteries.

We tender these biographical details because as editors of this volume we are typical of the demographic that has dominated hobby and entertainment wargaming, and to a large extent national security gaming as well. As a consequence we have exerted our own zones of control over what follows, both overtly in our editorial role but also in more subtle ways, as subjects who occupy positions of structural advantage in the social hierarchy. Our relationship to wargames, let alone war, is gendered; it is also marked by our privileges of race, class, sexuality, and nationhood. We are mindful of William Broyles Jr.’s observation in his widely read essay “Why Men Love War” (1984) that men’s fascination, indeed their capacity to love (his word) the brutality of war is rooted in an early and commonplace indoctrination into the fantasy of war as a game, a safe space within a magic circle where the dead get back up after being struck down. Whatever else they might be, wargames such as we treat here are often undeniably part of a progression of such masculine fantasies.

We are thus grateful to have some leading female voices to explicitly engage questions of gender, notably Mary Flanagan, Elizabeth Losh, Soraya Murray, and Jenny Thompson in their contributions. Nonetheless, Zones of Control is majority male in its authorship. The best that can be said for this is that it is indicative of the demographics of wargaming at large.¹¹ At the hobby game table, female wargamers and wargame designers remain few and far between, though there are some—including Kai Jensen, who has made major contributions to the Combat Commander system described herein by John Foley. In the 1970s, Linda Mosca designed several games for SPI. A singular figure is Helena Gail Rubinstein (not to be confused with the cosmetics magnate), whose game Killer Angels, a rigorous simulation of the Gettysburg campaign, was published by West End Games in 1984 after originating as her senior thesis at Barnard College. Sabin, for his part, notes increasing female enrollments in his wargaming courses at King’s College, London. Female designers and analysts have made perhaps slightly greater inroads in contemporary national security gaming, as the contributions from Elizabeth M. Bartels, Yuna Huh Wong, and Elizabeth Losh here demonstrate, though they remain a minority voice in that space as well. Moreover, though thus far both board wargaming and national security gaming have avoided the very public ugliness surrounding the rise of women’s voices that we have seen in commercial video gamer culture, they nonetheless have their own internal challenges to address.¹²

The volume’s shortcomings in including non-Anglo-American perspectives are, we acknowledge, more extensive. There are board wargaming communities elsewhere in Europe besides the United Kingdom, notably France (we are thus pleased to have Laurent Closier’s contribution), Scandinavia, and Poland, as well as Russia and Asia, notably China and Japan (we are pleased to include Tetsuya Nakamura). Represented hardly at all, however, are games and game designers originating in the Middle East or Southern hemisphere. Related to this, while gender surfaces as an explicit topic in various chapters, race by and large does not. Much can and should be written on race and nationality in wargaming, but the weight of the hobby’s Anglo-American heritage has so far greatly limited this. It is our hope that this book can at least help to spur further writing in those areas, since we have underserved them here.¹³

We are also conscious of what we have left out from a sheer topical standpoint. We could have included chapters dedicated to high-profile tabletop games about war (Risk, Axis and Allies) or video game franchises (Red Orchestra, Combat Mission, World of Tanks, Kuma\War); we could have included more material on real-time and turn-based strategy franchises (Total War, Civilization, Panzer General) or the vast number of miniatures gaming rule sets or flight simulators; chapters could be written on online “board” gameplay through engines like Cyberboard and VASSAL, or fan activities such as the convention and tournament scene, after action reports, podcasts, game blogs, forum communities, and the like. Likewise, there is certainly more to be done with the 1980s efforts of Avalon Hill, SSI, and others to port tabletop hex-and-counter gaming to personal computers, as well as the current revolution in tablet wargaming and virtual tabletops. There is no chapter written strictly from the perspective of a game collector or archivist or preservationist, or one on the economics of wargames in the game industry. And so on. Zones of Control will, we hope, give hobbyists, academics, game designers and analysts, and other constituencies much to read, reflect on, and enjoy, but there is much more to be done, and if the book helps expose some of these neglected topics for subsequent critical and historical scrutiny, then we will be all the more gratified.

Sod this for a game of soldiers!

—Traditional

Zones of Control is organized into nine different sections (or if you prefer, “zones”), each anchored by a long chapter from an established professional or scholarly authority. Following and in dialogue with those chapters are shorter pieces from a variety of different contributors. Some are from prominent designers or other hobby or industry luminaries, some are from respected critics or journalists. Some of the shorter chapters are analytical, while others are reflective and anecdotal, serving to document the history of a particular game or project. Some are provocations, others concise case studies. Finally, some of the short pieces are artifacts of more specialized discourses that we could not fully represent in the volume but that we wanted to sample as representative of the way a particular community or constituency approaches wargaming practice.¹⁴

Following Jim Dunnigan’s introduction, the opening section, “Paper Wars,” canvases the history and practice of tabletop wargame design. The lead chapter in this section is by Jon Peterson, who discusses the history of tabletop wargaming from its beginnings to the present day. It is a superb orientation for a newcomer to the topic. Shorter chapters in this section serve to document John Curry’s History of Wargaming project, which is helping to preserve the history of the field; Tetsuya Nakamura, Jack Greene, and Lee Brimmicombe-Wood then offer case studies of board wargame design for topics covering land, sea, and air, respectively; Mark Mahaffey’s chapter on wargame cartography foregrounds the singular importance of the game map, the actual material underpinning of much of tabletop wargaming; finally, A. Scott Glancy explores the linkage between wargames and combat systems in tabletop role-playing games, an essential historical lineage as Peterson has also argued elsewhere (2012). The next section, “War Engines,” examines the history of universal war simulators—systems that can be used to model multiple scenarios, conflicts, and modes of conflict, one of the most distinctive accomplishments of wargaming as a design practice. The lead chapter here is by Henry Lowood, who surveys and analyzes the history of this design space. Matthew B. Caffrey Jr. extends Lowood’s discussion into defense and national security gaming. Other short chapters then discuss specific game engines or game systems, notably Advanced Squad Leader and Combat Commander (in the course of which J. R. Tracy and John Foley also ably illustrate how very different two game systems on the same subject can be); while Mark Herman and Ted Raicer offer similar complementary analysis for the important innovation of “card-driven” wargame systems. Finally, Troy Goodfellow presents a case study of fan-based scenario design using computer game engines. “Operations” next turns our attention to the mathematical as well as theoretical underpinnings of wargame systems, notably operations research, actuarial tables, statistics, randomness, probability, Lanchester equations, Monte Carlo modeling, and related concepts. The lead chapter is by Peter Perla, who expands upon his classic book The Art of Wargaming (1990), deepening the historical discussion of wargaming to include the history of operations research. Brien Miller and Rachel Simmons then present case studies from their own design practices, ranging from a statistical model of submarine warfare to recreating the Napoleonic battlefield. Don Gilman and John Tiller and Catherine Cavagnaro follow with a pair of case studies reconstructing the design of two computer wargame systems, including the landmark Harpoon series. The final pair of chapters in this section shift us to professional wargaming: Nobel laureate Thomas Schelling recounts his personal history of contributions to game theory and national security gaming, while Russell Vane brings us close to a pure game-theoretical model of wargame design.

If the first third of the book is devoted to establishing the history and theoretical underpinnings of wargaming, the middle sections probe more contemporary as well as potentially more controversial topics. “The Bleeding Edge” thus examines games on contemporary and potential conflicts, paying particular attention to the digital state of the art. The lead chapter, by Luke Caldwell and Tim Lenoir, seeks to untangle the dense web of connections between military gaming in the AAA space and the so-called Revolution in Military Affairs (RMA), which has prompted so much upheaval in the defense establishment; for Caldwell and Lenoir, popular entertainment wargaming becomes a way to “premediate” (the term is Richard Grusin’s) the inevitability of conflict for both the military and an acquiescent public. Following this, Larry Bond and Laurent Closier each offer case studies of topical and highly sensitive situations, a still hypothetical (as of this writing) Israeli air campaign against the Iranian nuclear industry, and 2004’s Operation Phantom Fury, otherwise known as the Second Battle of Fallujah. Andrew Wackerfuss and Marcus Schulzke, meanwhile, address the ways in which wargames also—inevitably—propagate representations of war, Wackerfuss through the World War I tower defense game Toy Soldiers (2010) while Schulzke revisits the still enormously influential America’s Army (2002–). Finally, two essential chapters offer careful discussions of wargaming ethics and sociopolitics in the same AAA space discussed by Caldwell and Lenoir: for Miguel Sicart, the Modern Warfare series, and for Soraya Murray, Spec Ops: The Line (2012). The next section, “Systems and Situations,” further sharpens the edge, paying particular attention to wargames in resistive or countercultural contexts, including examples of nonstandard critical games. The lead chapter in this section is by Sharon Ghamari-Tabrizi, who—arrestingly—reads wargames first and foremost as writing systems, that is, as technologies of inscription, a development she centers on the RAND Corporation. Through original archival research, Elizabeth Losh further extends Ghamari-Tabrizi’s insights, both in relation to RAND and to the uniquely corporatized and militarized landscape of southern California, while emphasizing the situation of the female game designer in these settings. Alexander Galloway and Richard Barbrook reveal the surprising centrality of wargaming to various forms of leftist political practice, Galloway through attention to Guy Debord’s once nearly forgotten Game of War (Becker-Ho and Debord 2006) and Barbrook through the related contemporary activities of the London-based Class Wargames group. Finally, chapters by David Levinthal on his photography and Brian Conley on his tabletop installations document two noteworthy examples of artists adopting wargaming as their medium. “The War Room” section next examines the utility of wargames for classroom instruction and scholarly research for history, war studies, and defense. The lead chapter in this section is by Philip Sabin, who expands on ideas published in his aforementioned books to pursue the use of wargaming as a tool for historical understanding. Shorter chapters in this section, including Robert M. Citino’s and Rob MacDougall and Lisa Faden’s, further develop and extend that potential. Charles Vasey represents a designer’s perspective as he weighs the trade-offs inherent in his craft, while Jeremy Antley uses the example of Twilight Struggle (2005), the most popular wargame in recent memory,¹⁵ to explore how games themselves become artifacts of the very history they seek to model. Finally, Alexander H. Levis and Robert J. Elder give a glimpse into the sequestered world of professional military gaming as they discuss wargame design and evaluation in a national security setting.

The final third of the volume widens our scope still further, while also forecasting into the near-term future. “Irregularities” spotlights non-force-on-force games, including counterinsurgency simulations and games involving NGOs, noncombatants, and other nonmilitary groups. The lead chapter in this section is by Rex Brynen, who explores simulating the political, economic, and social actions taken by an armed force, collectively termed the “nonkinetic.” Shorter chapters in this section discuss several tabletop counterinsurgency simulations, including the simulation of noncombatants and other elements of the “human terrain system”—and moreover, do so across both national security gaming (Elizabeth M. Bartels and Yuna Huh Wong) and the wargaming hobby (Brian Train and Volko Ruhnke); designer Ed Beach, meanwhile, reminds us that nonkinetic factors have a much longer history and explores his treatment of them in his games about the early modern era; last, James Wallman opens up the space of “cultural gaming,” demonstrating how design concepts originating in wargaming can be brought to bear on a variety of other subjects and circumstances. Following this, “Other Theaters” examines wargaming in literature and film, while likewise addressing miniatures wargaming, science fiction wargaming, and actual historical reenactments. The lead chapter in this section is by Esther MacCallum-Stewart, who surveys the appearances of wargaming in many media forms, with special emphasis on Iain M. Banks’s novel The Player of Games (1988) and Orson Scott Card’s novel Ender’s Game (1985). Bill McDonald then discusses Laurence Sterne’s Tristram Shandy (1759), which features the first known appearance of miniature wargaming in English literature; and John Prados, designer of the Avalon Hill game Third Reich (1974), offers his first extended comments on Roberto Bolaño’s novel of the same name, where the game serves as the novel’s central structuring device. We then turn to “wargaming” in other settings, with Stephen V. Cole relating the design history of the long-running line of science fiction wargames Star Fleet Battles (1979–1999), and Ian Sturrock and James Wallis examining the history and gameplay of Games Workshop’s Warhammer 40,000 (1983–2014) line of miniature wargames; this is complemented by Larry Brom’s reflections on his historical miniatures rules for depicting colonial warfare. Jenny Thompson considers what “wargaming” means in the context of real-life World War I and World War II battle reenactments. The “Fight the Future” section offers a conclusion of sorts by projecting the future of wargaming. The lead chapter in this section is by Patrick Crogan, who traces a new understanding of the global map as a unified (and medial) simulation space within the context of contemporary drone warfare. Here “game” and global grid converge. Journalist and gamer Michael Peck offers a consideration of the current and future marketplace for wargames; prolific designer Joseph Miranda describes methods for modeling cyberwar and network-centric warfare; Kacper Kwiatkowski allows us a glimpse into the design process of This War of Mine, perhaps the first genuinely new kind of wargame we have seen in quite some time. Finally, Greg Costikyan renders his evaluation of current design limitations and his suggestions for new directions, a call further extended and sharpened by Mary Flanagan in her chapter, as strong a closing statement for the volume as a whole as we can imagine.

In “Why Men Love War,” Broyles writes, “Aside from being a fairly happy-go-lucky carnivore, I have no lust for blood, nor do I enjoy killing animals, fish, or even insects.” Either of us could have produced the same sentence. That great patriarch of Edwardian pacifism H. G. Wells remains perhaps the most frequently quoted proponent of the piety that the playing of wargames is redemptive because they teach us what a “blundering thing” real war is. Perhaps. Today’s professional game designers and analysts similarly insist that wargaming saves lives. But we will also acknowledge something else of Broyles, who in the course of his essay confides, “Nothing I had ever studied was as complex or as creative as the small-unit tactics of Vietnam.” Any wargamer who has lingered into the early morning hours optimizing the loadout on a cardboard or virtual F-16 will understand what this means. Wargames provide the means of exploring exactly those complexities, coupled with the privilege of doing so vicariously.

Wargames, in other words, are precisely Zones of Control, ordered and rationalized spaces wherein rules and procedure—sculpted out of algorithmic steps and probabilistic curves—reign supreme. This is their great appeal, and very likely their greatest liability. They have exerted a significant hold over the imagination, and not infrequently over state policy and military practice. Editing this book has been a source of great personal satisfaction for us, and we hope that readers of Zones of Control will come to understand something of this remarkable and continually compelling form of play.

About the Editors

Patrick Harrigan is the coeditor of the MIT Press volumes Third Person: Authoring and Exploring Vast Narratives (2009), Second Person: Role-Playing and Story in Games and Playable Media (2007), and First Person: New Media as Story, Performance, and Game (2004), all with Noah Wardrip-Fruin. He is a former marketing director and creative developer for Fantasy Flight Games, and he coedited FFG’s The Art of H.P. Lovecraft’s Cthulhu Mythos (2006), with Brian Wood. His work has been published by Chaosium, Pagan Publishing, Gameplaywright, ETC Press, and Camden House. He has also written a novel, Lost Clusters (2005), and a collection of short stories, Thin Times and Thin Places (2012). His website is <www.patharrigan.com>.

Matthew G. Kirschenbaum is associate professor in the Department of English at the University of Maryland and associate director of the Maryland Institute for Technology in the Humanities (MITH, an applied think tank for the digital humanities). His first book, Mechanisms: New Media and the Forensic Imagination, was published by the MIT Press in 2008 and won multiple awards, including the Prize for a First Book from the Modern Language Association (MLA). Kirschenbaum speaks and writes often on topics in the digital humanities and new media; his work has received widespread coverage in the media, including the New York Times, Guardian, National Public Radio, Wired, and Chronicle of Higher Education. He is a 2011 Guggenheim Fellow. But he was a grognard before he did any of that.

Notes

1 Much the same technique was then being used in classified games being conducted by the RAND Corporation.

2 See <https://paxsims.wordpress.com/2011/08/05/connections-2011-aar>.

3 This sort of thorough documentation, by definition true for commercial wargames, is much less common in policy games, where designers’ notes are often variable, inconsistent, or absent; this is one reason why such games are often dismissed as a rigorous analytic method. We hope that the present volume will show the value of more robust documentation and analysis of these sorts of games.

4 He attributes the term to SPI’s art director, Redmond Simonsen.

5 The classic dilemma for wargame designers is the tension between simulation and playability. Increased fidelity to detail generally means increased playing time, and there are countless examples of games that are simply too complex and time-consuming for all but the most dedicated hobbyists to play. The trend in recent years, however, is to reduce gameplay complexity, often by utilizing novel rules systems to minimize the burden on the players. (Notable in this regard is the card-driven system developed by Mark Herman; see the chapters by Herman, Ted Raicer, Ed Beach and Jeremy Antley in this volume; see also Harrigan and Wardrip-Fruin 2011.) But at what point does a simplified game system start to lose its value as a historical simulation? Do we learn more from Dana Lombardy’s “monster” game Streets of Stalingrad (2003), which boasts a historically accurate and complete order of battle for the conflict, than from Tetsuya Nakamura’s much less complex (but far more playable) Storm over Stalingrad (2006)? (See also Sabin 2012, 51-52.) These sorts of questions lie at the heart of Zones of Control. How do we model a conflict-driven world, and why?

6 Many of these, long out of print, have recently been resurrected through the efforts of John Curry, whose History of Wargaming Project is described in these pages.

7 See <http://connections-wargaming.com>.

8 A copy of Work’s memorandum is available here: <http://news.usni.org/2015/03/18/document-memo-to-pentagon-leadership-on-wargaming>. Also of note is a response from Peter Perla, “Work-ing Wargaming”: <https://wargamingcommunity.wordpress.com/2015/05/14/peter-perla-on-work-ing-wargaming/>. Taken together, the two documents are a glimpse into the state of professional US defense and national security wargaming as this book goes to press.

9 The excellent Play the Past group blog <http://www.playthepast.org>, as well as two recent and similarly named—but unconnected—collections, Playing the Past (2008) and Pastplay (2014) raise similar questions, and underscore the extent to which “play” is once again emerging as a rubric for historical understanding, military or otherwise.

10 See also this NEH-sponsored workshop on “Digital Methods for Military History”: <http://www.northeastern.edu/nulab/dmmh>.

11 Thus it has ever been: H. G. Wells famously commended his book and game Little Wars to “boys from twelve years of age to one hundred and fifty and for that more intelligent sort of girls who like boys’ games and boys’ books.”

12 In 2014 the PaxSims blog convened an online discussion dedicated to this topic. It is important reading: <https://paxsims.wordpress.com/2014/10/15/women-and-professional-wargaming>.

13 See, for example, Mukherjee 2010; and Alexander R. Galloway’s work on Special Force and Under Ash, two first-person shooters played from the perspective of Palestinian subjects (Galloway 2006, 78–84).

14 A few contributors also found themselves limited in their ability to discuss classified games or developments in their field, but we are pleased they have been able to share what insights they can into the Byzantine world of the defense gaming establishment.

15 Some have argued that because of its atypicality, Twilight Struggle is not a “real” wargame, but we will leave such jesuitical distinctions to the message boards.