Wargames

Unrestricted wargames can build confidence, test mental models, and provide a method to create military experiences outside of live exercises and direct combat operations. By pitting an individual or group against other living beings, these wargames require military professionals to confront the uncertainty of war. The dynamic nature of such wargames helps translate military theory into military practice. This article argues that unrestricted wargaming is a vital component of broadening military officers’ minds. By examining US and Japanese wargaming practices, the article proposes that unrestricted wargaming should be incorporated into Australian Army junior officer training courses to help officers test their biases, frame problems and accept alternative viewpoints.

This paper introduces the topic of military wargaming into current critical debates in International Relations (IR) on games and gaming, which to date have focused on civilian, recreational forms. Identifying a renaissance which began in the US in 2014, the core argument developed is that wargaming utilises key elements of critical/postpositivist theory in its interventions into the 'human training dimension' with the aim of impacting upon the inner domain of players in promotion of military ends. Drawing on Eyal Weizman's work, the paper makes two key claims: 1) Wargaming poses a profound methodological and epistemological challenge to the quantitatively-oriented Operations Research (OR) community which has dominated DoD analysis for nearly a century. 2) By decoupling critical/postpositivist traditions from their intended ends, using them instead to impact upon players, wargaming militarises them. The paper begins by locating the origins of the wargaming renaissance in the Defense Innovation Initiative and associated Third Offset Strategy. It then shows how US military gaming intervenes at the level of the human training dimension by cultivating specific forms of critical thinking, multiple futures planning, and reflexive decision-making using distinctively critical/ postpositivist insights. From there it sets out three key challenges posed by wargaming to OR which trouble the latter's claims to prediction, objectivity, and rationalism, before concluding that a new form of 'post-quantitative defence analysis' is emergent which militarises the tools of critical/postpositivist approaches.

En los últimos años los juegos recreativos de tablero de simulación histórica han ido suscitando un interés creciente en ámbitos académicos y docentes. En este artículo analizamos, a partir de diversos ejemplos, cómo estos juegos representan diversos conflictos del siglo XVIII y qué compromisos adoptan entre la jugabilidad y la historicidad.

To artists and cultural workers, the present task is to research and understand the processes in which propaganda and propaganda art construct our current reality. Propaganda is, in essence, the performance of power, the employment of various infrastructures—in the realms of politics, the economy, media, and the military—to construct a new normative reality. Considering that there is no reality absent from power, one has to question whether there is ever a politics without propaganda. But not all powers are alike, and thus propagandas in the plural might differ and conflict as well. The powers of the War on Terror and Bannon’s international alt-right are fundamentally different than those of popular mass movements, from Occupy to Black Lives Matter, pan-European platforms such as DiEM25, or the stateless democracy of the Rojava Revolution in northern Syria. They might not be able to avoid performing a propaganda of their own, but theirs is one that proposes an egalitarian narrative about the reality we live in and the world we can create collectively

Le Waffen-SS parteciparono a quasi tutte le battaglie della seconda guerra mondiale; i suoi soldati diedero prova di combattività, efficienza e forte motivazione ideologica al punto che, da una parte, esse si macchiarono di efferati episodi di violenza sommaria contro civili e prigionieri di guerra e, dall'altra, sovente dimostrarono un ingiustificabile disprezzo del pericolo.

Il mondo letterario salgariano è pieno di avventure e luoghi geografici più o meno di fantasia, ma quasi sempre si basano su elementi storici reali, anche se talvolta con qualche imprecisione riguardante dati, nomi e avvenimenti. L’argomento è così complesso che non è semplice dare un volto storico all’intera opera salgariana, infatti, sia per il numero elevato di romanzi e racconti sia per i numerosi periodi storici toccati, per poterlo fare ci vogliono persone appassionate ai libri e con conoscenze dei conflitti che vanno dall’antichità agli inizi della Prima guerra mondiale. Il lavoro di ricerca risulta quindi enorme e qui tentiamo un breve riassunto ragionato del vasto mondo storico militare salgariano.

The first sophisticated wargames (military board games) were developed between 1770 and 1830 and are models of military conflict. Designers of these early games experimented fruitfully with different concepts that were formulated in interaction with the external dynamics of the military systems that they tried to represent and the internal dynamics of the design process itself. The designers of early wargames were confronted with a problem that affects all models: the trade-off between realism and simplicity, which in the case of wargames amounts to the trade-off between realism and playability. I try to show how different game concepts were developed as an answer to this problem, and how these seemingly arcane concepts form a relevant topic of investigation in the history of ideas. Moreover, a direct offshoot of this conceptual experimentation between 1770 and 1830 was the 'free' German wargame (Kriegsspiel), which became an integral part of German operational planning in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, thus adding another chapter to the story of the influence of ideas on human history.

This paper argues that the political significance and cultural resonance of contemporary video wargames lies not simply in the forms of militarism that such games engender.  Rather video wargames are a signature late modern medium through which forms of resilience are entrained through permanent arousal and continuous exposure to contingency and failure.  The video wargamer is a subject who ultimately understands and experiences themselves as a resilient subject, a survivor.  While inevitable failure may make the player deeply frustrated, such anger is predominantly directed towards a delimited form of self-improvement rather than towards structural critique of the gameworld, which is ruled out of court because the rules of the game cannot be changed.  Wargaming thus serves as an activity in which specific models and practices of resilience training are increasingly made manifest.  Wargames may be best understood and critiqued not simply in terms of cultural militarisation or pre-training for war, but as a space for playing through continual emergency, as an increasingly prominent cultural form where the player learns emotionally and imaginatively to bear the disaster of living in the end times.

Prussian professional wargames (Kriegsspiele in German) came into existence during the Napoleonic Wars. I argue that the success of these wargames after the Wars of German Unification (1864-1870) was firmly connected with their role as integrative training solutions for the disintegrative tendencies  of the novel leadership concept of mission tactics (Auftragstaktik). Both professional wargames and mission tactics were actively sponsored by the Great General Staff under Moltke the Elder, and I argue that both were jointly pushed forward by a technological context that included the dramatic increase in nineteenth-century firepower and the military use of Germany’s railroad network.

While games are commonly viewed as frivolous fun, their rapid proliferation across the US defense establishment compels us to think again. Spanning spheres as diverse as total immersion training, nearpeer/cyber conflict, and future force strategies, a gaming renaissance is currently underway across the US military. Surprisingly given International Relations' (IR) interest in the production and projection of military power, the discipline has neglected to engage with this revival. This article argues that hyperreal games-that is, games that produce realities-play an increasingly important role in the attraction, production, management, and recovery of warfighters. Drawing upon one hundred hours of interviews undertaken with US military games designers, trainers, trainees, and veterans between 2017 and 2019, the article documents first-hand experiences of hyperreal gaming in warfighter recruitment, training, deployment, and rehabilitation. The core argument developed is that unlike simulations, which model scenarios, games are productive of people, values, and identity. If it is to understand games' use as tool of warfighter subjectification, the article argues, IR must renew its focus on military gaming disaggregated from the broader hyperrealities of modelling, simulation, and exercises with which it has hitherto been conflated.

Il presente gioco da tavolo (stampa e gioca) prende ispirazione da “Otto minuti per un impero” dell’autore Ryan Laukat. La presente edizione è una versione amatoriale, senza nessun intento commerciale, da utilizzare esclusivamente per motivi ludici e di studio. Utilizzando un’ambientazione fantasy, ci siamo rivolti, per quanto riguarda l’aspetto grafico, al materiale trovato su Internet, proprio per questo  l’utilizzo deve limitarsi esclusivamente all’ambito familiare, onde evitare di infrangere i diritti di copyright.
Questo sistema di gioco possiede innumerevoli ambientazioni (sportive, storiche, sociali, ecc.), noi ne abbiamo curato alcune come: “Dieci minuti per uno Scudetto” (dedicato al mondo del calcio, dove ogni giocatore interpreta un presidente di una squadra di football), “Dieci minuti per un Reich” (sulla seconda guerra mondiale), “Dieci minuti per un Principe” (sul Rinascimento in Italia), “Dieci minuti per un Regno” (con Longobardi, Franchi, Bizantini, ecc.), “Dieci minuti per un Clan” (sulla criminalità, tra Gomorra, Suburra e Il padrino).

Füze izi analizleri aktif hava savunma simülasyon analizlerinde, füze savunma sistemlerinin farklı füze tiplerine karşı gösterdikleri savunma başarımının hesaplanmasında kullanılır. Füze izi analiz senaryoları, idealleştirilmiş çevresel şartları içeren oldukça basit düzeyden, birbirleri ile ilişkilendirilmiş varlıkları ve uygulama şartlarını içeren ve karmaşık analizlere imkan veren karmaşıklıkta düzenlenirler. Yapılan analizler füze savunma sistemlerinin konuşlanma yerlerini, angajman kural uygulamalarını, füze uçuş profillerinin belirlenmesini, C4ISR mimari tasarımının oluşturulmasını ve sensör ve haberleşme sistemleri topolojisini belirlemeyi hedefler. Senaryolar amaç ve karmaşıklıklarına göre; Temel Füze İzi Analizi, Savunma Sahası Analizi, Operasyon Sahası analizi ve Senaryo Bakışı Analizi olmak üzere dört ana kategoride ele alınırlar.
Düz ve engebesiz dünya varsayımının yürütüldüğü Temel Füze İzi Analizinde, paralel/paralel olmayan hücum füzeleri atış şablonuna karşı anılan savunma başarımı ölçülerek, sistem yerleşim ve tanımlamalarının belirlenmesi sağlanır. Operasyon sahası, Savunma sahası ve senaryo bakışı analizleri, bir savunma sisteminin savunma bölge korumasından ve korunacak varlıkların savunulma başarımının ölçülmesinden başlayarak, birden fazla savunma sisteminin yerleşimlerinin belirlemesine ve başarımlarının ölçülmesine kadar uzayan, kademeli bir karmaşıklıkla ele alınan analizler olarak karşımıza çıkmaktadır. 
Çalışmada füze izi analizleri için EtSiS (Etmen Tabanlı Simülasyon Sistemi) kullanılarak „Füze İzi Analiz Etmen Modeli“ geliştirilmiş ve simülasyon senaryosunun etmen tabanlı olarak yönetilmesi gerçekleştirilmiştir. Yönetim, füze izi analiz senaryolarının hazırlanmasında zeki kılavuzluğu, senaryonun hücum füzelerinin hedeflerine ateşlenmeleri ile tetiklenmesini, tespit, teşhis, tanıma, angajman noktalarının ve savunulma başarımlarının tespit edilmesini, istatistiklerin hesaplanmasını içerir. Bunlara ek olarak, sensörler arası tespit paylaşımlarının, iletim gecikmelerinin ve  C4ISR mimari tasarımının savunma başarımına olan etkilerinin, koşum zamanlı olarak, analize dahil edilmesini içerir. Sistemin genel resminde belirlenen analizlere tekil füze  angajman detayında girdi, hücum füzesine karşı savunma sistemlerinin gerçekleştirdiği angajman fazları her angajman fazı için paylaşılan bilgi ve alınan eylemler detayında simülasyon analizine dahil edilmiştir.
Geliştirilen etmen modeli otomatik istatistik belirleme ve analiz yürütmenin yanısıra, ölçülen istatistikleri kural tabanlı muhakeme sisteminin parametre girdileri olarak belirler ve karar alma ve alınan kararlar ile senaryo modellerinin yönetimini sağlar.

According to the political events in Europe, in the recent years, Security Politics
has become a crucial field in academic research. Some of these events have influence on
the narrative in social policy on the continent (e.g. definitions about refugee status, the
solidarity question, the cost of shelter etc.). I would like to clarify the basics in order to
dissipate the misconceptions. The essential parts about these the Geneva Convention of
1951 and the Schengen Treaty.

Between 1986 and 1996 Australian game developers Strategic Studies Group (SSG) published twenty-five issues of their in-house magazine Run5. A subscription based magazine it provided information on SSG’s games to their audience of dedicated wargamers. The magazine featured articles on their games, new scenarios to play and detailed historical information on the battles featured. A set of the magazines donated to the Play it Again Project (both as hardcopy and as digital scans for the website), offer an extraordinary document of the story of SSG, providing a detailed chronicle of their games and insights into their design decisions. The magazines offer a sense of the character of the company, its culture and the rapport they achieved with their audience.
This chapter examines how Run5 works as an impressive archive of SSG for the era. The magazine not only played a vital role in allowing SSG to communicate directly to their audience, it gave their audience a voice, creating an archive not just of the company but also documentation of the player community.
In examining the relationship that Run5 created with its community, I consider how this activity relates to recent discussion on computer games and participatory culture (Jenkins; Banks; Sotamaa; Postigo; Scacchi), reflecting on Swalwell’s (Swalwell) observation that accounts of user productivity in the era of the microcomputer have largely been overlooked in games theory. Her research addresses the user activity associated with the arrival of micro-computing, when to play a computer game often required the player to type in the code themselves or even to build their own kit computer. In these early home computing experiments, games were often just another thing you could do on a computer. I differentiate the nature of these micro-computing hobbyists, whose activities blurred the distinction between the creator and consumer, with the nature of Run5’s role in supporting user productivity within SSG’s player community. Run5 addressed itself directly to an existing community of highly literate wargamers who purchased SSG’s games. SSG wanted to provide wargamers with computer games that were as versatile and customisable as the manual hex based board-games they were familiar with. When it first launched, Run5 acted as a vehicle to engage and educate SSG’s audience of wargamers on how wargames played on the computer.
A thematic examination of Run5’s articles reveals the magazine’s design focus. Its articles were designed not just to extend and improve player’s skills but to teach them how to customise and create their own scenarios within SSG’s game systems. The concept of a game system was familiar from manual wargames where designers and players would create different battle scenarios from a set of base movement, combat rules and tables by altering the battlefields and the units (and some rules) to reflect the different situations (Dunnigan). Wargamers had an existing culture of player’s adapting scenarios and creating their own. SSG’s computer based games systems supported this tradition of customisation allowing players to personalise their scenarios to reflect their historical and strategic interests. The adaptability of SSG’s game systems offer a model for participatory culture that in the history of computer games is generally associated with a much later era of games culture. Manual wargames (and the early computer wargames inspired by them) are a mostly forgotten part of the story of videogames. There is much we can learn from them - as Matthew Kirschenbaum argues the lack of knowledge about them today is disproportionate to their historical influence and market share (Kirschenbaum, “War Stories: Board Wargames and (Vast) Procedural Narratives”). Little attention has been paid to the central role that user-generated content played within wargame culture in the 1980s.
Run5 is a valuable record of SSG’s relationship with their audience. The magazine provides a rich archive not just of the game’s design but their reception: who played them, where they bought them and insight into how they played them. This is contrasted to the lack of records that exist of SSG’s later online interactions with their community. In 1988, SSG went online with Compuserve and Applelink forums providing product support to their community, hosting discussion on their game systems and wargaming in general.
records of these digital resources and communications have survived. Yet Run5 remains as a comprehensive record of the early history of computer wargames and the Australian developer’s part in that history.
I conclude the chapter with some observations on how SSG’s choice to share the now historic magazines online on the Popular Memory Archive has reignited a discussion with its community. The community’s relationship to the material is not simply one of nostalgia but continues to address the value of these historic game materials as a design resource.

Video games integrate the symbols of books and of book culture: several digital environments incorporate them in a manner that combines them with the rules of the game. This junction creates functional metaphors that move away from the preconceived notions concerning the codex. However, the representations they evoke say a lot about our culture and the contemporary imaginary. To reproduce certain aspects of books, video games require their own sets of figures, with their own meanings and functions. This paper proposes to analyze five of them: the mode of transportation, the accumulation of energy, the consumable tonic, the martial instrument and the gaming hypomnema. The latter avenue, underestimated, may enrich video game activity and even the quotidian lives of players through the various uses that the remediated book allows in digital format, such as an external memory or a notebook. It allows us to imagine players as scribes working on themselves through the revisiting of their gaming practices.

L’identité générique du jeu de stratégie en temps réel pose problème dès lors qu’on cherche à le penser historiquement. Entre le premier jeu nommé explicitement « real-time strategy » (Computer Quarterback, Danielle Bunten Berry, 1981) et les classiques du genre de la fin de la décennie 1990, l’expression se fait discrète. L’objectif de cette présentation sera de démontrer que même pour un genre dont les critères semblent inscrits dans le nom lui-même — stratégie et temps réel —, le genre est un processus de dénomination qui tient lieu d’un phénomène largement culturel. On soulignera trois points essentiels pour comprendre le vaste champ de la stratégie dans la décennie 1980 et sa relation avec l’action et le multijoueur. Premièrement, plusieurs jeux sont qualifiés au début de la décennie 1980 de « real-time », « arcade » ou « action » combiné(s) avec « strategy », « wargame » ou « tactical », alors que l’utilisation de ces termes ne renvoie tout simplement pas au même sens. Deuxièmement, d’autres jeux sont qualifiés de « real-time strategy » rétrospectivement autant par des universitaires que par des historiens amateurs pour souligner leur importance pour le genre ou par définition, sans que ces jeux ne l’aient été de manière synchronique. Troisièmement, plusieurs jeux — en particulier ceux de Danielle Bunten Berry — contribuent à mettre en place une culture du multijoueur dont le jeu de stratégie en temps réel des décennies 1990 et 2000 est largement redevable.