Saturday 11 June 2016

Anti-Realistic Wargaming

As I am sure many of you already know, in the general debates over philosophy these days, there is much about realism and anti-realism. Having been subjected, in the last few weeks, to endless stuff about this, I reckoned that there was a blog post about it. Furthermore, of course, misery loves company. So I thought that I would inflict it upon you, my reader.

First of all we need to have some idea about what a realist is, and then try to define what an anti-realist might be. This, however, is easier said than done. In the philosophy of religion, a realist is someone who believes that God actually exist. But that does not precisely mean that an anti-realist does not believe in God, just that they think that God is not an observable in the world and therefore we cannot speak of God.

By an odd quirk of the human mind, there is a very similar debate in philosophy of science. Here, the question is (or rather, the example usually is) whether electrons exist. A realist would say they do, point to the theories for them and the effects they have. An anti-realist might well counter by arguing that we cannot see electrons and so the ways we have of talking about them are merely conventional words with given meanings within the mathematical models we have to predict the world around us.

All of that said, of course, most people are realists, most of the time. Most people who believe in God believe in a real God. Indeed, we could argue that most people who do not believe in God do not believe in a real God, and, at risk of too many negatives, do not not believe in an anti-realist God.  Similarly, most people believe in electrons as actually existing, not, probably, as our descriptions of them, but as some sort of entity in the world. Even anti-realist philosophers of science, practically, believe in electrons somehow, or else they would refuse to use word processors to type out their arguments for the non-reality of the electron.

I have to admit here to being a realist, and to regarding anti-realism as being a bit bizarre. I can kind of understand where they are coming from, but, as a former jobbing physicist, do actually regard electrons as entities, albeit unobservable entities. I think I would also claim that most physicists would fall into the realist camp here as well. In fact, the subtleties of philosophy of science are ignored by most physicists.

With respect to wargaming, however, realism and its opponents rear their ugly heads. I am not talking here about historical accuracy, but in whether the effects we discuss are real effects. Let us presume that we can, within some knowable degree of freedom, reproduce a battle on the wargames table, and do it with some known degree of accuracy, however that might actually be measured. That established, our attention must turn to the rules, and what they are modelling.

Most obviously, of course, there are morale rules. Morale is one of those Cinderella rules in wargaming. We all know what it is and what it means, but we do not really have a good handle on it. Indeed, as I think I have mentioned before, DBA ignores morale except on a broad scale and some proponents of the rule set argue that morale is built into the combat outcome rules.

However you argue it, morale is, broadly speaking, an unobservable. I cannot go into a wargame shop and order a slice of morale, or deliver to the army their morale for the day. We can, of course, see its effects. Troops have fought bravely, or run away, as a result of their morale status. But morale is unobserved, all we see, like the electrons, is the effect of morale.

I could go further as a radical anti-realist, of course. A movement rule is not about how far or how fast units can move. It is about how fast the do move. ‘Movement’ is in fact something that is not fixed and thus, cannot be measured. We decide in writing the rules, how far our units are allowed to move. Further, the movement of a unit on the battlefield is not the same as the movement of the individuals, but all I can really measure is the latter, and then only by determining how far some point of the unit has moved, be that headquarters, colour party or one corner of a theoretical rectangle of men.

Thus, as an anti-realist, I can argue that movement rules, as well as morale rules, do not refer to anything real. We draw our nice orders of battle, sketch out the deployment of the units and place their equivalents on the wargame table, but this, and the motions in which we set them, do not refer to anything. The battle of Naseby was not the clash of neat squares of battalia as they are drawn on the famous map of the battle. Those clusters of musketeers around a central pike block might look good on table or map, but it is highly unlikely that the reality looked anything like that.

It is also unlikely that our rules reflect anything much in reality. Of course, we can argue that morale is important in battles, and everyone would concede that that is correct. But we cannot define morale easily. We can only see its effects. We cannot even, by my argument, define movement successfully. We can, again, only see the effects. The rules are mere instruments for obtaining some outcome. The mechanism has nothing to do with what might happen on a battlefield.

So, are the anti-realists right? As I hope I have suggested above, I fail to believe that they are, but I do think that they pose a question to us as wargamers. Even if we concede that our wargaming is historical, we then have to wonder if the rules we use have any relation to the real.  My example of morale is only one where the referent is not an entity in real life. I have tried to suggest that movement might be another, and I dare say that if I tried hard enough, I could find an argument for suggesting that combat rules do not refer either.

Whether this is a problem for us or not depends on taste, of course.


13 comments:

  1. I read an interesting work on military psychology recently called 'Bullets and Brains' (Leo Murray). Until then I thought I had morale summed up in my mind - and that modifiers weren't such a bad method of modelling. After all, weren't we really just putting a 'probability of staying put' together vs a dice roll?

    Well the book kind of opens your eyes a little more and questions exactly what we think we're modelling vs reality. The psychology of the situation is a little more complex (or blindingly simple perhaps?) - soliders will fuss, fight or freeze and are influenced by criteria such as 'weapon pull' and the 'is it worth it' calculation - so really, all we're doing with our morale modifiers is playing a game - whose complexity is determined by how much OCD the author has. The more complexity we add to the morale rule, the more we pat ourselves on the back and call it believable.

    I recently tried Neil Thomas's One Hour Wargames where one dice roll pretty much controls everything in the round. Did it give me better/worse results than a commercial ruleset? Did I care if the players still had fun? Probably not, and there lies the rub.

    When we realise that what we're modelling still places far too much order around the chaos of war, and the personalities and goals of troops and influence of individual commanders can never be accurately simulated with rules, we're probably starting to understand.

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Of course, we are playing a game or, if you like, several games within the game that combine to one hobby event. surprisingly, given all that, we can still have fun.

      Complex models are notorious for two things. firstly, for removing the fun, and secondly for being no more accurate than a simple model. But the simplest model of all is to roll a dice and decide who wins from that. Which is not what wargamers really want to do either.

      I think you are right on the last point, and i still don't understand....

      Delete
  2. In my more paranoid moments I might wonder why so many people spend so much time dividing people into various categories all of which exclude me. I am probably closer to an anti-realist than a realist except that I do not regard the absence of proof of existence as proof of non existence. I am very comfortable with the idea that there are many things that I will never know for sure and many many more that will exist without my ever hearing of them.

    When it comes to wargaming though we are not talking about things that exist or don't exist we are talking about constructs to model behaviour. Morale was always a poor choice of terms, the use of "Reaction" tests by WRG in the old days was much better as we aren't really trying to decide how enthusiastic a unit is, we are trying to determine their reaction to a situation or set of events, their morale, in a military sense, being just one factor amongst many. If a unit is in a bad situation it might retreat because the men have no will to fight, it might retreat because the men are seasoned professionals with high morale but enough experience to know that its a no win situation with no profit to be gained from standing and dying at that moment so retreat only to fight again or it could even be a retreat ordered by a local commander not the general. As a gamer we really don't necessarily need to know why what we need the rules to tell us are 1) do they retreat and 2) are they done for the day or are they going to be ready and maybe even enthusiastic to return to the fight in X or Y amount of time.

    Movement in wargames is also an artificial construct. Real troops move at various rates depending on training, formation, ground etc and cover x amount of time in x minutes. However battles don't progress in short fixed bounds or turns and herein lies the problem. To be practical we play the game in fixed turns and use relative movement rates for different units. However our time lengths are unrealistically short and troops almost never all move at the same except in very limited situations such as a multiunit phalanx advancing when the paean (sp!) is sung. If troops were allowed to move at full speed for a full "period" where a period supposedly represented 1/2 hour then they could probably all cross the table in a single bound although some would get there first and have time to have a sit while waiting for the slow pokes. Obviously having an enemy in the way is one reason that doesn't happen but the other deals with a general's control of the battlefield, ability to apply reserves and so on. The only rules I've seen that overcome this are almost completely unplayable, certainly as a game.

    So in the end, the wargame rules and any particular aspect of them morale, movement, combat mechanism etc are only mechanisms that give us what we think is an appropriate result when we use the rules to recreate an historical event of which we have a description. They are not the thing themselves. But they do exist in their own right.


    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. So, you fit into the 'not to be categorised' category? I can live with that. But the human mind does odd things to the world, and dividing it up into workable chunks is one of them.

      But I agree, wargames and their rules are artificial constructs. Morale is probably not a good concept in many circumstances, but we are stuck with it, I think. The rules give us outcomes, but too often give us process details as well, which we probably don't need. again, DBA seems to try to move away from details, but a lot of people don't like that.

      The rules do exist, and what they refer to exists, to some extent. But a lot of the wargame must exist in our minds, otherwise it wouldn't work at all.

      Delete
  3. Even if you class yourself as a realist, at some stage you encounter something that you have to accept as a convenient construct, if only to give you a handle towards greater understanding of the issue. Without such pragmatism it's likely you'll spend your life in total introspection. So it is with war games. We accept notional time & ground scales not because as some argue it makes games more "realistic" but in order to impose some structure that moderates both sides; imagine if you were able to move as far as you wished in a turn & the resulting arguments. So also does it apply to morale rules; early wargames books are full of anecdotes of games without such, or where units can fight to the last man, with special pleading for the Old Guard, 95th Rifles etc.
    Whether such rules make for more enjoyable or more realistic games is, as you say, a matter of personal choice.
    The "variable length bound" never seems to have cought on, likewise the variable length move as advocated by Steve Hezzlewood is uncommon, probably due to the necessity to roll for each move, although it's something I'm drawn to.
    The ultimate such mechanism is of course Fire & Fury's combined morale & movement mechanism. However realistic or not you consider it, it does give a good tense, down to the wire game.

    ReplyDelete
  4. Even if you class yourself as a realist, at some stage you encounter something that you have to accept as a convenient construct, if only to give you a handle towards greater understanding of the issue. Without such pragmatism it's likely you'll spend your life in total introspection. So it is with war games. We accept notional time & ground scales not because as some argue it makes games more "realistic" but in order to impose some structure that moderates both sides; imagine if you were able to move as far as you wished in a turn & the resulting arguments. So also does it apply to morale rules; early wargames books are full of anecdotes of games without such, or where units can fight to the last man, with special pleading for the Old Guard, 95th Rifles etc.
    Whether such rules make for more enjoyable or more realistic games is, as you say, a matter of personal choice.
    The "variable length bound" never seems to have cought on, likewise the variable length move as advocated by Steve Hezzlewood is uncommon, probably due to the necessity to roll for each move, although it's something I'm drawn to.
    The ultimate such mechanism is of course Fire & Fury's combined morale & movement mechanism. However realistic or not you consider it, it does give a good tense, down to the wire game.

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. yes, I guess the issue then becomes the (to use posh philosophical language) ontological status of our convenient constructs. 'electrons' can be considered a convenient construct for thinking about sub-atomic interactions, or valency in chemistry. But you can argue that this is all they are.

      similarly we can argue that morale is a similar construct, but that is all it is. Or we can say that it is a real thin. both would agree it affects the outcomes of wargames fought with rule sets which have morale rules.

      Which is a long winded way of repeating that it is a matter of taste.

      Delete
  5. Another good and thought-proviking post. I have nothing to add beyond what has already been said, so I'll just register my disappointment that you could not bring to bear a magical realist perspective too. :)

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Oops, just spotted the typo in my post. Obviously, I am pro-viking, but in this instance I actually meant provoking. That'll be a Freudian slip then.

      Delete
    2. I'll try magic realist wargaming when you don your Viking reenactors horned helmet...

      Delete
    3. I'm wearing my Viking horned helmet (aka Viking beer hat) right now ... honest! :)

      Delete
  6. An interesting post! Really got me thinking. I'd probably put myself in the realist camp as well, I just think that with some inventiveness and imagination you can approximate almost anything. For example, in my WW1 Trench Raider rules, each turn represents 5 seconds. With some unlucky activation rolls, models can sit idle for two, three or for turns... does this mean they literally stand there while the enemy moves around them? No, it's an approximation representing one side having the momentum and the upper hand. It feels a bit odd playing through it, but when it's all done and you look back it's pretty easy for the imagination to fill in the gaps. I think that's what good wargames rules should do.

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. I am thinking now that the imagination in wargaming tidies away an awful lot of these things. We can construct the 'story of the battle' to account for actually happened.

      I think Wellington once said that no-one who was present gave the same account of a battle or a ball and the sequence of events. Can we use that to justify our games?

      Delete