post eventum sapientibus

 Wargames blogs have been around for years now, and certain customs and practices have arisen. One of these is promising to do things that are not only never done, but which the both the bloggist and his or her readers know that there is little or no intention of doing in the first place. A small example of this is my claim yesterday that I was going to produce a model of the sap as illustrated by Vauban and Duffy. Clearly, I was never going to model the trench part - that would be silly - and I always knew that I would skip the fascines on the top given that they would probably be mostly covered in earth. I possibly half thought that I might add the sandbags, but in the end I didn't; partly CBA and partly because I think they would make the subsequent steps in my plan more difficult. So, what I have actually made is a row of gabions in front of an earth bank. It's pleasant enough, but falls woefully short of what was shown in the plans.

What it did do is give me a chance to get out the hot glue gun, which is far and away my favourite modelling tool. There is possibly some deep Freudian reason for that, but fortunately I have given up introspection for advent.

The gabions are from the Italeri Battlefield Accessory Set, in part because that's what I had to hand, but mainly because they come in half sections. 

You will note that we are back on the really, really crud covered cutting mat today.

The Strong Poetry of Wargaming

Back before I allowed myself to get side-tracked into ranting at the incompetents and hypocrites who run the country, one of the last posts on here which actually mentioned wargaming addressed our habit of constantly changing the rules, often in mid-game, a subject which often prompts questions from readers. I have been wondering whether what we do could perhaps be explained in philosophical terms. Allow me if you will to make the sweeping, and not particularly accurate, generalisation that one can divide western philosophers since the middle ages into three types: religious believers for whom the Truth is handed down on tablets of stone; enlightenment thinkers for whom there is an external Truth which can be found by reason and science; and those influenced by romanticism who take the view that Truth is subjective and found within us. I do this because it seems to me that it might be valid to divide wargamers into three portions in the same way, except that instead of the search for Truth, we are talking about the search for the ideal set of rules.

Faith based wargaming is simply to accept what someone else has decided is the case. I went through that phase myself as a teenager; we probably all did. What was written in the book that I borrowed from the library must surely be right. This is an approach is very much still alive, in both historical and fantasy settings, and in the most ultra-orthodox of forms, even to the extent that in some environments one can only play if one has toys from the official supplier. I have no first hand experience, but presumably competition wargaming wouldn't work without starting from this premise. And I would argue that it's also what is being practised by those who succumb to marketing hype and adopt new sets of rules as soon as they are published, albeit probably to eventually drop them and move on to the next big thing.

Readers will no doubt have read rulebooks written by those who take the view that there is a definitive way to play wargames, which can be uncovered by the application of scientific investigation and rational analysis. If one is only precise enough about how quickly troops marched, fired, reloaded etc in real life; about the efficacy of weapons on the battlefield; about the mechanics of command and control; if one can only reconcile ground scale, figure size and unit strength; then one will end up with what is, surely, out there somewhere waiting to be discovered, namely the 'perfect' set of rules. In the introduction to his book 'The Napoleonic Wargame', G.W. Jeffrey explains the approach: "wargames rules should be nothing more than tables of facts, which are referred to in order to determine the result of situations on the battlefield".

Paddy Griffiths on the other hand writes in 'Napoleonic Wargaming for Fun' that "No one can be very dogmatic about wargames rules, because they are always a very personal thing"; which I think places him among the romantics. I would define these as those who are searching for a game that encapsulates the ousia, the essence, of the historical period involved rather than attempting to develop a simulation of it. What this group really want is something that represents the overall feel, rather than pedantically seeks (and fails) to recreate the mechanics of, the triple acies of the Punic Wars, the clouds of skirmishers of the Napoleonic period, or whatever other historical nuance it is that interests them.

So, what does this have to do with continuously changing the rules? Well, firstly, James' example of the evolution of Kriegspiel into Free Kriegspiel took place in Germany, which was the home of Romaticism, and therefore an unsurprising place to see a switch from objective to subjective 'truth' in wargaming. And, it seems to me anyway, that this last section - the romantics - is where I/we fit. Nietzsche defined Truth as "a mobile army of metaphors" which I think nicely sums up how we go about it. We try one way of looking at something, and if it doesn't work, or perhaps if we just have a feeling that there may be a better alternative, we try another way of looking at it. If you view it as a continuing project rather than an attempt to achieve a definitive result - somewhat akin to Freud's concept that we each spend a lifetime wrestling with our unique and idiosyncratic problems which will inevitably still remain unresolved when we die - then it all makes sense.

Moscophoros

Unusually for me, I rather like the latest show at the Henry Moore Institute: Votives by Aleksandra Domanović.

The sculptures, made in the tradition of Greek korai, are intended to 'fold the aesthetic of classical sculpture into her investigation into how developing technology relates to the societies that create it'. I'm not entirely sure what that means, but nevertheless I'm going to say that she has achieved it. The pieces manage to be both recognisable in form to those who have visited ancient sites or museum galleries and yet are distinctly of the present day. I must be going soft.

The artist claims that all technology is gendered, but doesn't elaborate. Of the two technologies that she uses I'm going to guess that she thinks 3D printing is female (creating something from nothing) and inkjet printing is male (creating by emission on to a blank canvas), but that might prove nothing more than that I'm both a pseud and a good example of Freud's psychosexual theory of personality; neither of which will come as a surprise to readers of the blog. Still, a modern art exhibition that makes one think something other than "this is a bag of shit" is an event to be cherished.