In the real world I have the privilege (for that it is) to work with young people, although I am not responsible for the lesson that resulted in the essay extract quoted above. Kids generally get a bad press, mostly undeserved. On the whole, they are a fair reflection of the general population – no better, but no worse. So whilst it would be easy (if rather hypocritical) for me to take a cheap shot at the youth of today, I will refrain from doing so. The young student quoted above was missing the point somewhat, had failed to grasp the essentials of medieval battle, and had some difficulty expressing the effects of the early death of Henry V on the English position in the latter part of the war. So what? Well, I guess it comes down to your view of what wargaming is all about and why you play it.
I’m sure a lot of you reading the quotation above thought something along the lines of “stupid kid. Don’t they know any history? What are schools coming to? Back in my day we could recite the kings of England backwards whilst being thrashed to within an inch of our lives” and other useful lies that age and grumpiness generate. Yet are our games really so much more accurate? It is easy for us to chortle at the apparently supercharged HYW English keeping going like militaristic Duracell rabbits. Yet many are the games, encouraged by popular rules sets, which have players fielding a single Waffen SS division with what appears to be the entire German war production of King Tigers. Is a mini-maxed “competition” army list-generated force really superior to the bad history of a 12 year old?
We mock at our peril. If we are serious about our games being a fair refection of history we should at least make the effort to portray realistic forces.
My own work with bad history continues apace. Recently I’ve taken a break from Astronef playtesting to do some blind playtesting for Mike Baumann’s forthcoming pulp sci-fi epic The Amazing Interplanetary Adventures of Dick Garrison, to be published by Wessex Games and supported with a range of wonderfully camp Flash Gordon-esque figures from Wargames Supply Dump. It is very refreshing for me to work out of genre and to go through the nit-picking of playtesting on someone else’s rules. As I said in my previous blog entry (Searching for Jerusalem), writers, consciously or unconsciously, all borrow from the same intellectual toolkit, and occasionally contribute a new device to the collective bag. Playtesting gives me a great opportunity to get inside the mind of another designer and learn from that experience to improve my own games.
Astronef’s campaign system is due for playtesting over the summer. Of course being a campaign system, it will require a campaign to playtest it on. So whilst the sun beats down on you, think of me and my gallant band of testers plotting the colonisation of Mars, with pith helmet, Martini-Henry, and of course the common cold…
Matthew Hartley
June 2009
