Niall Ferguson’s How to Win a War made an interesting case for wargaming strategic alternatives in war. My reaction is that it sounds like fun, but it isn’t history
George Box once said “All models are wrong, some are useful.” This seems to be a wise caution about using wargames as historical tools. Ferguson quickly dismisses first person shooter games like Call to Duty and Axis and Allies, noting their easily detected flaws, and limited utility (learning about WWII weapons, for example).
The Calm & the Storm is apparently more sophisticated and its flaws are less apparent, suggesting that possible strategic results are more accurate and useful.
Red Alert! War is the volatile mixture of violence, chance and reason. Chance delivers results way outside expectations, uncertainty and fog result in actions that seem irrational, and the interplay of human emotion invoked by use of violence makes results inestimable.
Ferguson appears to have fallen victim to a convincing set of variables and a good-looking interface, suggesting the results are more “realistic.” This is similar to Fogg’s concern that people are more easily convinced by websites that look good in “How People Evaluate A Web Site‘s Credibility.”
It follows that the inevitably wrong results are more menacing since convincing data that looks good is seductively misleading
So where is Box’s “usefulness”? Perhaps it is best limited to better perceiving starategic dilemmas faced by each power rather than outcomes of alternate strategic choices.
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James Gee’s Learning by Design: good video games as learning machines is an interesting look at human behavior, but he’s dead wrong about the base assumption that videogames are about learning. According to Gee:
the question is: How do good game designers manage to get new players to learn long, complex, and difficult games? The answer, I believe, is this: the designers of many good games have hit on profoundly good methods of getting people to learn and to enjoy learning.
Gamers have to suffer through the learning to get to the interesting part. I think the payoff isn’t enjoying learning, it’s living a fantasy (experiencing the past or future, or other worlds), exercising extraordinary powers (space flight, magic, generalship, kingship), taking risks (going in harms way, confronting extraordinary dangers) outside normal existence. The learning part is the up front cost of doing business. Good, bad, or ugly: if the payoff after the learning is done, the game will be a success.
There are great posts out there this week on Gee and Ferguson from Jennifer, Jenny, Maureen, and Lee Ann. I commented on Jenny and Lee Ann’s posts
April 23, 2007 at 8:39 pm
Thanks for bringing in the aspect of chance and emotions in war–I see it missing from too many reports on battles. Very few decisions are made on totally rational basis, and the sky is not always clear. As far as counter-factuals, just the examining as many aspects as possible could be a learning experience. Makes it easier to understand why certain groups behaved certain ways. Otherwise, in a text the many reasons become laundry lists. I want to check out the game this summer, but with a pretty jaundiced eye.
April 24, 2007 at 10:15 am
I think you’re absolutely right about the “payoff” of play being a carrot to the “learning” portion of video games… and that really does bring up issues when applied to the classroom– the most effective method of education is certainly not letting students do something “fun” upon completion of learning– it’s making learning itself fun.
April 24, 2007 at 3:02 pm
You said, “Niall Ferguson’s How to Win a War made an interesting case for wargaming strategic alternatives in war. My reaction is that it sounds like fun, but it isn’t history” and I thank you for saying it! See my Blog post on this as more support for that statement…playing the “what if” game is fun for class discussions (and for the occasional best-selling book!), but even referring to it in the same breadth as doing history is crazy talk!!
The better approach, in my opinion, is to discuss the events that led up to the war and then, maybe discuss different tactics that could have prevented it and how likely those things were to have happened instead.
Now, for me, this seems to be the best use of some type of interactive gaming device, to simulate the conditions of the drumbeat to war and, by plugging in different responses to crises, maybe a different outcome will result. But that does not sound near as much fun as playing Japan and taking over the world in 1942, does it?
As for the idea of changing the outcome of the actual shooting war, that is great for gaming (I especially love that type of game, more than Myst I can tell you that!), but I am unsure of how much it really teaches a student of history. Once you start down a different path, all historic value seems to disappear.
April 24, 2007 at 3:24 pm
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