Games are exercises in agreement. Ultimately, what we sit down to do when we play a game is agree to a set of rules, and compete to win within them. Now, the definition of winning might change, agency might be distributed unequally, but in order for us to have a game where we compete in good faith, we have to agree to the rules.
What is profoundly disturbing about wargames, specifically games that attempt to model historical conflict, actors, and strategies, is that I am not entirely sure that players understand what it is they’re agreeing to. Paternalistic, I know.
To use the concept of manufactured consent, the propaganda model follows some pretty straightforward tenets. Within Chomsky’s original thesis, mass media companies are held by private corporations, are funded by advertising/special interest groups, and contain the agendas of those groups. Because of this, these mass media organizations have a strong incentive to distribute propaganda that supports the ideology and motives of their ownership and its bureaucracies.
This is all pretty boilerplate stuff that I imagine most media literate people are familiar with. The concept that I think is most interesting within Chomsky’s conception of things is the idea of access to the media. Because of the incentive structures that are in place, it is difficult for dissenting/countervailing ideas to find purchase because stuff that supports the dominant idea is just flat easier to produce in volume.
How does this intersect with wargames? Well, games and game production exist within similar frameworks. I have self-published one game myself, handling all the costs and doing everything as cheaply as possible. Even having done this, it is very challenging and places significant limitations on the scope and scale of what I can produce by myself. When I wanted to create a second game, which is more a counter-propaganda piece about capital economies, I produced it using a print-on-demand service because I could not feasibly produce it myself with the means available.
The truth is that artistic production is mostly, if not totally, limited by your personal wealth. It is not something that is popular to say out loud, because it risks sounding sour-grapey, but poor starving artists that achieve mass or popular success are exceedingly rare. Mass art is the purview of the elite or the well-off, and it cannot help but represent their interests, or risk not existing at all outside of the neurotic collectors like myself.
So, considering that art is created by the crusty upper and are often reflective of the elite’s ideological preferences, let me give you some profiles of popular wargame designers and designs, cobbled from their own descriptions or favorable descriptions:
Mark Herman, from BGG:
Herman was a senior partner for Booz Allen Hamilton and was a leader in the fields of wargaming, modeling, simulation, strategic planning, and analysis work. His 1983 design Gulf Strike, which covered the Iran-Iraq War and a US-led defense of Saudi Arabia, was used in the initial US analytic efforts at the beginning of the Gulf War in August 1990.
Herman, along with Booz Allen Principals Mark Frost and Robert Kurz, are co-authors of Wargaming for Leaders: Strategic Decision Making from the Battlefield to the Boardroom (McGraw-Hill, December 2008). He has also co-authored books on military history and a number of strategy articles on robotic and cyber warfare.
Here’s the description of Gulf Strike:
Gulf Strike was designed to be the state of the art in Land, Air, and Sea modern simulation. Since its original release, Gulf Strike has shown its ability to simulate the changing character of the Gulf Wars from the Iran-Iraq war to the Iraqi invasion of Kuwait and its potential aftermath. In fact the original 1983 edition correctly anticipated the type and character of units the United States would send to the region in the event of a crisis.
Volume IV in the Series: COIN (GMT) dives headlong into the momentous and complex battle for South Vietnam. A unique multi-faction treatment of the Vietnam War, Fire in the Lake will take players on US heliborne sweeps of the jungle and Communist infiltration of the South, and into inter-allied conferences, Saigon politics, interdiction of the Ho Chi Minh Trail, air defense of Northern infrastructure, graduated escalation, and media war.
Fire in the Lake illustrates perfectly what I’m talking about, where the game makes a point of describing the My Lai massacre in terms of a court conviction, rather than what actually occurred. Chris Farrell mentions in his review that it is troubling that many people who play games learn their history from those games and reviews of those games. Charlie Theel, a popular game reviewer, has often extolled how great and interesting COIN games are, presumably because he’s getting his history from them, as these games affect propaganda as history. With that latter game, it’s wild to see events of my lifetime packaged and sold as “a dishonest performance where the actor partakes in a conflict seeking to elevate an ideology not their own.” Yes, I’m very sure the next guy, designer of this game, was seeking to accurately reflect the values of his enemy.
He’s back! Volko Ruhnke, who I’ve written about before. Here’s his bio:
Volko Ruhnke is a game designer and CIA national security analyst who is most famously known for designing the card-driven wargames Labyrinth: The War on Terror, 2001 – ? and Wilderness War. He also is the designer of GMT Games' COIN Series about modern insurgency, including Andean Abyss, Cuba Libre, A Distant Plain, and Fire in the Lake.
COIN is often critically acclaimed for its representation of the various dimensions of a conflict: political, social, and military. People assume, naturally, I suppose, that a CIA guy is going to be great at modeling counterinsurgency.
There are many others, whose biographies are difficult to find. There’s Gene Billingsley, one of the founders of GMT Games, who has designed dozens of games in the “Next War” series, including fun topics like Korea, Poland, and Iran.
You’ve got unknown folks coming out with games like Purple Haze, fantasias of violence. There will never be a shortage of guys who like making games about how fucked up and secretly really cool it is to be a soldier.
I suppose it is unavoidable that all the well-known games about war are going to reflect Kissengerian lib balance of power bullshit. It’s baked into the bones of these games that nations can’t help but exploit power imbalances, but there’s a tautology to these arguments. Wargames force players into an ideological perspective in order to win—that is not necessarily reflective of the world.
Atop all of this, there is this infantile acceptance of a trope that is pure idiocy as far as I’m concerned—the idea that games are storytelling devices. Other than the fact that they are temporally constrained with beginnings and ends, you might as well say that your dishwasher has narrative because it runs a cycle. Games are symbols embedded within larger symbols with symbols on top. Ball, meet hoop. People create the narrative, in the way that sentences in a novel string together parcels of meaning to ultimately make a narrative.
Which is precisely what makes many wargame designs nightmarish. Players charge the symbols within these systems with meaning, and they make those systems do what they’re directed to do by the instruction booklet.
I think some of the more benign wargames are the ones that focus on WW2 or an ancient conflict like the Peloponnesian War. The former has so much narrative codification that whenever you play a game about it, history has become fantasy. The latter might as well be the Lord of the Rings for how long ago it occurred and how foreign the humans you’re simulating are.
What is deeply alarming to me, as we once again bomb another country, abet yet another genocide, is how the games we play encourage us to parrot the sentiments and ideology of some of the worst shitheads imaginable.