Simulating the World (Pt. 2)

A Wargames (Pre-)History

Two of the world’s oldest games, war games of a sort, are chess and Go (i.e., Weiqi), which have long, rich histories that stretch back centuries. Weiqi is thought to have originated some four thousand years ago, making it one of the oldest war games still played.[1] War games like chess and Weiqi have become permanent fixtures of the civilian world, as ultimate games of strategy, patience, and mental endurance. Entire libraries have been written on games like chess. However, the war game, as we know it, and the precursors to role-playing games, is relatively modern in invention—modern meaning within the last two hundred or so years, give or take a few decades.

The war-gaming, as well as the role-playing game, hobby is in debt to the likes of Prussian military strategists, who first developed and used a game called Kriegsspiel[2] (i.e., literary “war game”) to train military officers in tactics and strategy. Such a pedagogical tool is full of possibilities. Soldiers are trained in tried and true tactics and strategies.

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Following the Prussian victory over the French in 1870/71, the Prussian use of war games as a training tool was introduced to and adopted by many of the world’s industrial nations, including France, England, and the United States. The use of war games to simulate combat without risk, to simulate an unknown in the larger world, is still an important staple of military culture today. However, war games have branched out into something more complicated, as to include actual military exercises and computer simulations, among other things. Simulating combat and the events that surround combat, like the fog of war, uncertainty, bad intelligence, strengthened enemy positions, etc., provide a valuable tool for military officers. For civilian hobbyists, the simulation-like environment of war games has led to a rich hobby, where players can reenact famous battles, finding ways for the losing side to win.

Outside of military circles, Kriegsspiel was played in clubs and was quite popular as a pastime. It was H. G. Wells who introduced the concept of war-gaming to the wider English-speaking public, despite some bleedover from military circles playing Kriegsspiel, in his (little) book called Little Wars (1913).[3] Little Wars gave grown men the rules needed to play war with their collections of lead toy soldiers. The first commercially available (and first successful) war games, however, came out in the 1950s, produced by what would be one of the largest game companies, Avalon Hill, now owned by Hasbro, also the company that owns the Dungeons & Dragons franchise.[4] Moving back to Little Wars, the rise of civilian (and military war-gaming), at least in England, appears to have coincided with the mass production and sale of toy soldiers. Brown writes that England alone was producing some 200,000 toy soldiers by 1910.[5] One might assume that little British boys were infatuated with these toy soldiers, based on the numbers. In part, this may be true. However, Brown suggests the toy soldier market also appealed to those “older men” who preferred toy soldiers for their war game activities.[6] According to Brown, the likes of Robert Louis Stevenson, Jerome K. Jerome, G. K. Chesterton, and H. G. Wells (i.e., author of Little Wars), all played war games with their toy soldier collections.[7] Brown retells a story concerning Wells’s fascination with toy soldiers:

The fascination with toy soldiers in England did not end there, as Brown dutifully notes. Wealthier patrons of the British toy-making industry often purchased the most expensive (larger) toy displays, which sold for an astounding five pounds.9 Brown argues that it is possible wealthy patrons came from military backgrounds as well, where military war games were all the rage during the late-nineteenth and early-twenty century.[10] Brown found evidence that the Prince advised the British military in 1872 to adopt Kriegsspiel, which was seen as a key tool in helping the Prussians defeat the French, and it appears that regular and volunteer officers took the Prince’s advice to heart.[11]

War games begin our fascination with simulating the world, whether a small or large aspect of our rather complicated world. Moreover, war games were the by-product of elite and military training tools, which crossed over into the world of leisure. By the end of the Second World War, the war games industry would see explosive growth in the civilian world.

Bibliographic Notes:

1). This is according to Encyclopedia Britannica.

2). Okay, technically speaking, von Reisswitz's Kriegsspiel wasn't the first modern war game. Sebastian Deterding argues that the first modern war games were a variation of an already existing game: Chess. Thus, the first war games were chess variants. The honor of developing the first modern war game should probably be given to Christian Ludwig Hellwig.

3). You can still find a copy of Little Wars on the Gutenberg Project.

4). N.B. Ironically, Hasbro also owns much (if not all) of the former TSR Inc.'s portfolio developed during the 1970s and 1980s.

5). Kenneth D. Brown, “Modelling for War?” Toy Soldiers in Late Victorian and Edwardian Britain,” Journal of Social History 24, no. 2 (Winter 1990): 239.

6). Brown, “Modelling for War,” 241.

7). Brown, “Modelling for War,” 241.

8). Brown, “Modelling for War,” 241.

9). Brown, “Modelling for War,” 241.

10). Brown, “Modelling for War,” 242.

11). Brown, “Modelling for War,” 242.

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