TOY SOLDIERS AND WARGAMES
Green, D. G.
I've always been a collector, and when I was a kid I had what was undoubtedly the best collection of toy soldiers in the neighborhood. Boxes and boxes of them, occupying a sizable part of the...
...Unlike most other games where the rules are quickly learned and the players concentrate on subtleties and refinements, wargames demand constant attention to detail...
...Much effort goes into designing new game systems...
...Any American could easily be told apart from any enemy, and those distinctions could never be blurred...
...But with heroes goes some personal quality (Achilles' stubbornness or Hector's domesticity), and the interchangeability of our plastic warriors was hard to overcome...
...Another favorite battle took place under the workbench, where the lumber was stacked...
...We learned that Americans always win...
...For instance, it was an unbreakable rule that the "good guys" (most often Americans) couldn't win too easily— they must first be repulsed with heavy losses, then return to win the day in a struggle that would leave almost every soldier on both sides dead...
...The difficulty lies in disentangling what our culture was teaching us (or thought it was teaching us) from what we taught ourselves —that is, to what extent our play-acting helped us deal with aggressive impulses universal to what (for lack of a better term) we call "human nature...
...WE LEARNED, from our two-color scheme, that there is an enemy, and that the enemy is easily defined...
...now hundreds of these games are available...
...Are they more militaristic, less sensitive to violence than other highly educated males (as garners tend to be...
...Our solitary or dual (at most triple) generalship accustomed us to wastage...
...Here, I think, is the strongest contrast to the type of "playing soldier" that kids do in groups, where everyone has a part and has to be accounted for...
...I have played and enjoyed these games, including the latter, for many years, so once again I must raise the question without presuming to answer it...
...And there was always the Light Brigade to serve as a spectacular example of carnage...
...This, of course, was history as we were taught it...
...In contrast to real armies, there were no slackers...
...This further blurs the distinction between game as game and game as tool —realism vs...
...I would be very curious to know whether distorted reflections of Vietnam are preserved in our children's play...
...Yet in essence wargames pose what historians call "contrafactual" and we call "what-if' propositions...
...Even those for whom the battle of Megiddo is far enough removed to be inured to the thought of real swords slashing real (Continued on p. 144) 118 NOTEBOOK (continued from p. 118) bellies might have qualms when faced with one of the most popular game situations—a hypothetical Soviet invasion of West Germany, complete with tactical nuclear weapons...
...The fact that a person (such as myself) can fiercely (I'm tempted to say militantly) believe in the necessity for peace and disarmament and still enjoy playing with toy soldiers may simply be one of the piquant contradictions of our late-capitalist culture...
...I suggest, however, that the symbolic problem of wargames goes back to the confusion of functions between game and tool—for the aggressions of wargames differ from those of chess in that they refer us out of the living room and back to the world...
...It was almost as important, however, that it be a tough fight...
...After ten years of growth in the wargame industry, it's safe to say there's no major battle ancient or modern that hasn't received its wargame treatment...
...Cultural memories of Tarawa and the Bulge were preserved in our play...
...Surely, how a war started and what resulted are more important than how it was fought...
...Americans started their wars as plucky underdogs who managed in the end to overwhelm enemies foreign and, by implication, domestic...
...A great deal of research goes into each and a constant debate rages between those who demand historical accuracy (which can lead to paralyzing detail) and those who demand playability (which can distort the situation the game claims to represent...
...The amount of detail printed on map and counters would be intimidating to a novice...
...playability in a new light...
...Until the late '60s, all wargames were manufactured by a single company—Avalon Hill of Baltimore—but in the '70s a flood of new games and companies (some 117 rather fly-by-night) inundated the market...
...For purposes of comparison, the game of Monopoly is considered to have a complexity rating of 2.34...
...For readers who have never seen a wargame, I will describe a typical product (from Simulations Publications, Inc...
...Games on the Bulge, for instance, range from a small affair that uses a hundred pieces and can be played in an hour or two, to a dinosaur with four large maps and several thousand pieces that requires hundreds of hours of individual or team play...
...it was the war our fathers fought in, the war that held our imaginations...
...the Americans must always return and conquer...
...It was difference that counted...
...is: nothing...
...Wargames, even on the "buff' level that can be so irritating to outsiders (what would have happened if Lew Wallace's brigade had shown up when it was supposed to...
...The complex relation between play and violence is one I am not equipped to untangle...
...Yet I can't help thinking that the peculiarly intense nature of modern warfare pointed us in the direction of having every war become a war of extermination...
...there always seems to be room for one more treatment of an old favorite...
...My favorites were a series about two and a half inches high in two colors: the familiar U.S...
...Before that, there were Nazis and Japanese...
...indeed, wargame companies have developed as a profitable sideline the designing of simulations for the military...
...Or it may indicate something darker about ourselves (myself...
...On occasion, a small American force would be overwhelmed by the enemy (fighting to the last man, of course), but that was not the end of the play...
...Over the years I acquired a number of different sizes and types of soldiers...
...We came from white middleclass suburbs and were taught to look down on overt racism...
...called Berlin '85: The Enemy at the Gates...
...Boxes and boxes of them, occupying a sizable part of the basement...
...According to the publisher's own rating, Berlin '85's complexity is "moderate (6.7...
...The game simulates a Warsaw Pact attack on West Berlin...
...The playing pieces are small cardboard squares, color-coded by nationality...
...In the 20th century this may seem too obvious to require comment, but it contradicted the lessons taught in the popular media, where individual heroism was all...
...But to us the color difference was real...
...But World War II was with us throughout our childhood...
...Often enough, one or another friend would join my basement sessions, but just as often I would be alone...
...thus support a healthy curiosity that can lead to the study of history...
...Those were the Eisenhower–Kennedy years, when the Cold War was in full swing, and the maps in our elementary-school readers, if they didn't always picture the "Free World" as pristine white, always pictured the "Communist Bloc" as bloody red...
...The first, regular and carefully laid out, resembled a fort...
...the second a jumble of rubble...
...One way out was arbitrarily to designate one of our side as the more-or-less official hero...
...Yet it's a worthy experiment...
...I doubt the distinction between winner and loser (good guys and bad guys) was any less clear to the Victorians...
...It was an article of faith, of the secular religion, more reassuring than the nonsecular because demonstrably true...
...girls are socialized quite differently, and seem to grow up with almost no interest in things military, which I can't help but feel is an advance...
...perhaps some of their real-life brutality was transferred to my basement floor...
...For there were no 116 morale problems...
...any reader of Victorian literature will have encountered them many times...
...no lesser conflict was possible...
...The difference between wargames and other games is that they are historical (or, as in our first example, pseudohistorical...
...Army olive green—the good guys—and a sand color, which, if it represented any particular nationality, was taken to be Japanese...
...Wargames are thus used as preparation for "real" war...
...It is played on a paper mapboard ruled hexagonally to regulate movement...
...Given these elements, it is not surprising our battles were carried out at a level of carnage no real army could possibly sustain...
...The level of detail was generally quite good: the pillboxes were pockmarked from shell hits and the weapons were authentic...
...Since no one is hurt in paper wars, what about the players...
...Chess, for instance, although in its origins a "wargame," teaches no lessons beyond its own framework...
...The little cardboard squares represent people, abstracted and moved about the map without compunction, by the instrumental logic of military necessity...
...By the end of the battle, the first construction would usually be reduced to the second...
...they all did what they were supposed to do, which was fight (no rear echelon either), and the fighting was not felt to be accurate unless they dropped like flies...
...My father gave me a bushel basket full of wood scraps to use in my wars, and I developed two types of construction...
...Many parents I know prefer to buy their sons dolls rather than toy soldiers, toy guns, or any accessory of pretend violence...
...ABOUT THE TIME that toy soldiers started to decline in importance for me, wargames . came along...
...There the enemy soldiers would dig in, defending themselves against amphibious assault from the good guys, who would wade ashore from the gray-painted concrete sea...
...Did earlier cultures conduct their play with such ferocity...
...I can't decide...
...No prisoners...
...earlier editions had the World War II M-1...
...The easy answer to the question, "What of historical value do we learn from wargames...
...An opposite lesson was concealed in those figures, which we did not or could not draw: that there was no real difference between the two sides...
...Judging from the garners I have known, I would say not...
...But, as I recall, this was felt to be an evasion...
...It was my favorite pastime to spend an afternoon, a day, a weekend down in the basement, away from light, air, and healthful exercise, staging miniature wars...
...in true Sgt...
...With the figures came accessories: sandbag emplacements, simulated ruins, pontoon bridges, pillboxes, bombed-out buildings, palm trees, barbed wire, and of course tanks, jeeps, and other vehicles, on a much smaller scale than the figures...
...No Bataan without a Back to Bataan...
...Since the conflict between historical accuracy and playability suggests that wargames might serve more than one function, we're entitled to ask: what do we learn from them...
...Doubly profitable in some instances, for a good military design can be adapted to a good commercial design...
...Wargames such as the last one I described have the capability of annihilating entire weekends for groups of people, a quality matched perhaps only by such legendary shipboard poker games as the ones in which Richard Nixon won his political grubstake...
...That struggle, and the current one, were for control of the world...
...If children need to sublimate their violent side through violent play, this will presumably prove futile...
...Nevertheless, I think it helpful to keep some distance between a late 20th-century way of playing with toy soldiers and a broader sense of playing at war that runs throughout Western culture...
...This activity, of course, is not dissimilar to that of Pentagon planners...
...The major reason for going it alone was that even the best of friends couldn't be trusted to follow the rules...
...115 At least one source of this perception is easy to see...
...Otherwise, the figures were indistinguishable...
...Each side had men firing standing, men firing kneeling, men firing prone, men running, men with bazookas and machine guns, men throwing grenades, and (anachronistically) men bayoneting...
...something we would rather not—but must—know...
...they were drawn from the culture around us, from movies, TV, and comic books...
...Rock fashion, he would take out a large number of the enemy singlehandedly...
...teamwork was more important...
...The very structure of our play reflected this...
...Lately some games have even attempted to reproduce the "fog of war" by denying the player information about his own side...
...In which case it seems that objections to wargames center around their symbolism —that to simulate•the bane of human existence for pleasure and a little instruction is at least in bad taste and perhaps immoral...
...Here I must pose a question I can't answer...
...If that is a good side effect of playing wargames (although many garners seem as mired in buffism as the Wehrmacht was in Russian mud), what of the bad...
...Most of my soldiers were armed with the 7.62 mm rifle popular with NATO in the '50s...
...Toy soldiers are hardly a product of the 20th century...
...Historians generally scorn what-ifs as bad methodology, but it seems to me that what-ifs are the basis of historical curiosity...
...I'M DRAWN TO THE QUESTION I can not answer—the connection between play and violence...
...This may be a bad way of formulating the distinction, for attempts to say anything useful about human nature seem doomed in advance...
...Obviously, we didn't create our styles of play in a vacuum...
...The "rules," of course, were unspoken—a shared sense of what was proper play...
...the rules are 12 dense pages long...
...perhaps those plastic palm trees are now part of a metaphorical Pleiku instead of Iwo Jima...
...THE PECULIARLY ABSORBING QUALITY of games is their ability to destroy our ordinary sense of time and impose their own: a kind of self-transcendence, more reliable than sex because undiminished by age or familiarity (as any chess, bridge, or poker fanatic knows...
...q 144...
...One of the ways a culture reproduces itself is by preparing its young men for war, and in a sense our culture was doing that for us...
...Yet wargames claim to represent history, and some games attempt to apply the industry's term "conflict stimulation" to situations other than war: SPI's Conquistador, for instance, deals with the European settlement of the Americas...
...Both included cubbyholes for the enemy (who was always the defender: another rule) to hide in...
...This scenario, in imitation of many Pacific battles, had a name: Bloody Cove...
...I am not suggesting that it was color that was important, of course...
...We learned that war is anonymous...
Vol. 32 • January 1985 • No. 1
