What points value courage?

"If I might for a moment trumpet! How much better is this amiable miniature than the real thing! Here is a homeopathic remedy for the imaginative strategist. Here is the premeditation, the thrill, the strain of accumulating victory or disaster- and no smashed nor sanguinary bodies, no shattered fine buildings nor devastated country sides, no petty cruelties, none of that awful universal boredom and embitterment, that tiresome delay or stoppage or embarrassment of every gracious, bold, sweet, and charming thing, that we who are old enough to remember a modern war know to be the reality of belligerence." -H.G. Wells, 'Little Wars'

I think sometimes on the words of H.G Wells and know, without ever having the understanding that can only come in the face of experience, that a war over feet of carpet waged between tiny men and surly, treacherous dice, is infinitely preferable to trenches, mud and blood and all the things that meant war when I was a child.

I played wargames for their bold strategy, for the cut and thrust of tactics, the camaraderie of friends even when they were enemies. Back then our armies were all Blood Angels and Khorne Berzerkers and other fancy combinations of syllables that seemed very important but ultimately meant nothing.

Historic wargames held no appeal, the courage of an ordinary man on a foreign field fighting a war he neither wants nor understand didn’t ignite my imagination as Orks or steam powered Warjacks could.

I only came to historical wargaming as a man already grown, a man fatigued by the bright and brash models of my youth and the king's ransom needed to maintain them.

With this I was no longer fighting a war to spare smashed and sanguinary bodies, with this the few feet of carpet, the table with books under a green sheet, were no longer an alien world or far off fantastical kingdom.

There were the fields of Normandy churned up by tank and shell and littered with the dead. For the first time in my life I had to wonder; is it right for me to play at war whilst those brutally fed into its jaws still live?

Does a game about war demean those we have lost to it?

Books and films, plays and television have all handled the subject. Can a game not do the same?

Games, at least in their current form, are often too obsessed with the concept of ‘fun’ as being ‘synonymous with ‘play’ and feed into fantasies of empowerment and reward.

Wargames are really the games of battles, they start as the first shot is fired and end when the mission is complete. The curtain falls and we shake hands and gather up our dice and ponder how we’d do it differently next time. The pleasure of the act is in the big movements, the bold strategies, the gamble, the roll of the dice that sees a game, a battle, won or lost.

These are the motions that win real battles, the feint, the daring charge, the last stand. To play a historical wargame is to play at war through the eyes of a history book, the edited highlights, the decisive battles and the men and women who died lost in the margins of the page.

This is a matter of perspective.

In a movie we can see through the eyes of the soldiers and the civilians in the middle of this conflict. When we see a man felled by a snipers bullet we’re not sat in a room hundreds of miles away cursing the dice roll, we’re right there with them, in the rain, watching his friend peel the crumpled, sodden final letter from the dying man’s hands.

It’s impossible to get this feeling over a piece of plastic. it stands there aping the shape of a man, and we can give it a name and assign it any number of traits we want, but it will never match the feeling of seeing a man struck down. Wargames reduce the players to General Melchetts, far removed from the battlefield, never seeing the human cost of the battle we’re fighting.

To describe losing pieces in a war game in terms of its human cost might seem silly, but let us not forget that some of those ‘pieces’ are still very much alive.

As much as I enjoy historical wargaming there’s no system nor mechanic so far that has made me feel keenly the loss of the men under my command. Maybe there should be, but if such a mechanic could exist it will be found by someone far smarter than I.

So can a war game properly memorialise the soldiers lost in a war? Well no. That responsibility is ours.

When next you take to the fields of battle I ask only this of you. Know not just the battle you fight, but know the people who lived and died and never forget why they fought. For if all wars are to become little wars we must start by never forgetting the real ones.

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Postscript

This is perhaps more serious than I ever really meant to be on my blog, a silly little thing for me to waffle on about game mechanics and what they make me feel, but this subject made me feel something keenly that I wished to express, and whilst it might not be the best opening post it is one I felt passionately about.

Today is Remembrance Day in the UK and the rest of the Commonwealth, a day in which we hold two minutes silence to remember the sacrifice of soldiers in the first and second world wars and in the over 70 major conflicts since. I feel this yearly ritual important.

Throughout this post I speak directly of the experience of soldiers and this is intentional, for it is their sacrifice that I feel needs venerating. To kill and to be killed are two of the worst things we can ask of any other human being and are the eternal constants of war.

Let us venerate the sacrifice of our soldiers, not the wars that take them from us.