Gaming in Context

It has been a few of things that got me wondering.  One was playing the next (the 21st) in the series of Neil Thomas' One Hour Wargames scenarios and the other was reading the latest of Just Jack's campaign battle reports (this time set in Morocco in 1942 during Operation Torch); Henry Hyde has just released a couple of scenario books, which I think are mainly based in the columns he used to write for Wargames, Soldiers and Strategy; and the last, quite tangential, was reading The Elfish Gene.*  And what they were all bringing home to me is the importance of context for wargaming enjoyment.

There are lots of different ways of bringing in context to a game. The most obvious one is the competitive (or semi-competitive) head-to-head nature of some games, although for every gamer who talks about that, there seem to be a couple who are at pains to stress the opposite! I don't know how universal that trend is.  Next is personal investment - I think this is quite strong in some points-based systems, in which the tabletop army is in some sense "your army" in the way that it isn't so much in scenario games: it is almost something analagous to making up a character for an RPG.  When I played 40K as a child, although I didn't play competitions or competitive pick-up games, I noticed that this idea definitely existed.  I think there is something of it in a lot of the first few decades of hobby wargaming (from Featherstone to the late 80s) when a trip to the shops was framed as "getting reinforcements for my army".  I don't read that so much now, I don't think.

Another way is historical study. I don't mean that games are done as an academic exercise, but I do mean that people intend the games to represent history in some way and take some pains to achieve this. They might do this more or less well, but the intent is obvious and so is the feeling when it works well: the connection between the game and the historical event, no matter how tenuous, is really felt.  Next is the context that campaign games give; when I was reading about wargaming campaigns as a young wargamer, one of the main ways their virtue was sold was to give greater versimilitude to the battles, because commanders would act more realistically if there was a tomorrow, rather than the world ending at 10pm throw-out time/bed time/last orders.  And whilst no doubt true, I think of this as somewhat secondary to the ongoing narrative of the campaign, howsoever expressed. The campaign can also be a useful vehicle for the personal investment in the army I mentioned above, although I don't think that it has to take that form - but it can be brilliant when it does work.  Just Jack's campaigns are superb examples of this in action.

So why is this on my mind at the moment? Well, because I noticed during the OHW scenario game that I was just not quite as into it as I thought I might be: I was genuinely more invested in the result of Just Jack's last battle than I was in my own!  The problem is that taken as individual scenarios, the OHW scenarios are great: clear, easy to set-up, have real tactical conundrums: they are proper 'Tabletop Teasers' in the best sense.  And taken as individual scenarios, they are great for the physical circumstances I find myself in at the moment, where time and space are scarce. But I realized it wasn't quite enough, I needed more context, more investment in the whole thing for it all to come alive for me.  Now I know that many of the OHW scenarios are based on historical battles: but to make them into suitable scenarios for his rules, I think that the link becomes a bit tenuous.  The "Salamanca" battle for example felt like an interesting scenario, but had nothing of the feel of Salamanca.  In part this is because his scenarios are 'scale agnostic' - but as one wise old warrior has written, combat is not fractal: platoons, battalions and divisions fight very differently.

So, a quick re-jig is in order I think, I need to spend a few days getting some more historical scenarios and/or some campaigns prepared!

(* - why The Elfish Gene? Although written about RPGs rather than wargames (although wargames appear in there and get quite a good press in comparison!), and the writer is a pretty unsympathetic in some ways, he has (to steal someone else's ideas about it) an absolute genius for explaining why on a good day the thing is so compelling).