Wargaming as Technique
Amabel Holland · 2024
This chapter explores the technique of wargaming and the ways in which it used. It is possible to model something in exacting detail, but this often loses sight of the purpose of the model, and the purpose of model-building. The traditional toolkit of commercial wargaming – hex grids, combat factors, terrain effects charts, and combat results tables – proved well-suited for kinetic warfare, and this blinkered focus can result in a ghoulish sanitization of war, its horrors, and its inherently political nature. Mechanical innovation, both within the space and borrowing from outside of it, created modern tools working within this simulationist tradition but eschewing kinetics to focus on politics. This has made games capable of articulating sophisticated and explicitly political arguments, and of modeling complex political systems or ideologies. As a result, a number of ambitious, politically-minded simulation games have appeared in the last decade.