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History is the study of the past. People study the past for all kinds of reasons, including to inform games that simulate (to some extent) warfare that happened in the past. BUT - designing or playing a game is not the same thing as studying the past. Those are separate processes: historical research (step 1) informs game design/play (step 2). The steps cannot be reversed. Playing a war game cannot be a valid source of historical knowledge. Of course, playing a game can motivate one to study the past via proper sources.

Furthermore, history and military theory are also not the same thing. A game can demonstrate theoretical concepts, although there are levels of abstraction between actual military concepts and game concepts.

Though wargaming is used as a military teaching tool consistently, so its application to military theory does have some merit.

I dont see things as seperate as you do, but I think we are kinda making the same point from different sides.

Could playing a wargame be a valid historical source of knowledge if run with intent to inform the players of the historical events of a battle?

Just a thought as I know a few people who use wargaming as a school teaching tool in history classes to further a students interest and knowledge in the period.

So if playing the game, you learn of the historical uniforms, troops and period tactics, along with a narrative from the person running the event of the battles outcome and historical effects, you could argue that 'playing a game' could offer some way of immersing a student into learning historical knowledge in a manner that may grasp their imagination more than a simple lecture or classroom format.

What a uniform or a camo scheme looked like in reality can be demonstrated (where such demonstration is a validly historical argument) via scale models. Similarly, the progression of a historical battle can be demonstrated by moving around miniatures, or some other symbol of the units involved. But that demonstration is not a game. Unlike such a demonstration, the outcome of a game is necessarily open.

Gaming can (but does not necessarily) motivate players and bystanders to learn about uniforms, units, period tactics, etc, etc, but gaming is not those things. It is similar to how you can show movies like Saving Private Ryan or Fury (or The Longest Day or Sink The Bismarck) to students to stimulate their enthusiasm via imaginatively immersive experiences.

Big P wrote:If you mean can gaming, to any degree, provide a historical simulation of historical combat, then I tend to agree. Nothing can simulate such extreme events...

This would also be true of reading a book. And yet very few would make a claim that "The idea that we can learn about history by reading books is nonsense." In both cases you do an activity and have an experience. That experience can be learning something about the past.

So perhaps the game itself, may not provide a teaching element,

Why not? It seems like there's this strange standard of 100% perfect representation or you can't learn from it. Books don't 100% represent their topics either.

A game gives you input. It gives you feedback. If that feedback or input contains information, you can learn from it. The fact that some games give you incorrect information and would give you a wrong idea about what the past was like should tell us that of course it's possible to learn from a game. If you can get the wrong idea then you are getting information.

The thing to let go of is this crazy idea that if it's not 100% perfect and complete of a simulation it's worthless. That's not how simulations work. They isolate particular elements and then abstract the rest. And educational ones can indeed teach you about the selected/isolated elements. Just like how a book will select a subset of a historical subject and you can learn from it.

The point of history is not simulate real life events. It is to study what actually happened. Games, at least in the sense we're talking about, don't do that.


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I completely agree with this:

 frozenwastes wrote:
The thing to let go of is this crazy idea that if it's not 100% perfect and complete of a simulation it's worthless.

But I think "simulation" and "game" are not synonyms.

Manchu wrote:History is the study of the past. People study the past for all kinds of reasons, including to inform games that simulate (to some extent) warfare that happened in the past. BUT - designing or playing a game is not the same thing as studying the past. Those are separate processes: historical research (step 1) informs game design/play (step 2). The steps cannot be reversed. Playing a war game cannot be a valid source of historical knowledge. Of course, playing a game can motivate one to study the past via proper sources.

Games contain and impart information. They are acts of communication. So of course they can communicate things about the past just like books can. There are two main issues: A) Are the selected elements historically justified and B) does the game represent them? Just like if you were evaluating a history text you would want to know if the source material is accurate/reliable and whether the text properly represents them.

Playing a wargame most certainly can be a valid source of historical knowledge. As long as the designer has done the work. And this is the issue and why this topic popped up in a Bolt Action thread. Games don't have to have teaching history as a goal. And many or even most don't. If the designer doesn't actually make this process as a goal and just designs for whatever other design goals he/she has, then it would only actually work as an opportunity to learn about the past purely by accident. Just like how if someone writes a book that doesn't have communicating something about the past as its goal, it's value as a historical source can only be accidental at best (and misinformation at worst).

Most of us like our games to be like historical fiction or war movies. That doesn't mean you can't make one that's like a documentary.

A game is just a medium. A method of asking people to make decisions and taking and giving feedback/information.

Just assuming for the sake of argument that games are best understood as a medium for disseminating information (which is pretty shaky in itself), media are not neutral vis-a-vis the transmitted information. A book and a game may both be forms of media but that does not make them equivalent. This whole line of argument, however, is totally irrelevant. The point of a game is not to capture information gleaned from studying the past but rather to allow players to have fun. The historical research part only comes into the picture in terms of "flavoring" the fun. Similarly, movies like The Longest Day and Fury are meant to entertain. The entertainment is "flavored" (in movies, we call it genre) by references to World War 2.

 Manchu wrote:
The point of history is not simulate real life events. It is to study what actually happened. Games, at least in the sense we're talking about, don't do that.

I disagree. I think any time information can be communicated, that information can be either accurate or inaccurate. A historical wargame is an expression of the designer. The designer is communicating something about the period. Whether it's accurate or not is another matter.

I think we also have a different view of history. I see it as the study of human accounts about the past. And it's often overturned by physical anthropology and archaeological study.

For example, in the Edo era accounts of the final battles of the Sengoku period in Japan, the Edo told stories of their victory of a great force of cavalry. For centuries people thought the mounted samurai rode into battle on their horses and charged just like in other places in the world. If you get a history book about the period from the 20th century, you'll likely be given the impression that Sengoku period cavalry charged just like cavalry in many other places in the world. Over the last couple of decades forensic tests were done that show the horses were not large enough to carry a mounted samurai at a full gallop. Furthermore the species they had did not have sufficient bone density in their foreleg and if you weighed one down with a samurai in armour and forced it to a gallop, its legs would fracture and the horse would stumble or throw the rider. The japanese horses were very, very small and were well suited to navigating hills and difficult terrain, but a charge was impossible. The closest primary sources were wrong. Art from shortly after the war that showed a samurai on a horse at a full stride were just being dramatic. They were the result of the Edo wanting to tell (and show) the story of their victory in a more dramatic way. The historians who used their accounts as primary sources were not being bad historians. They were simply acting within the confines of their field of study.

Now imagine I want to design a miniatures game that teaches this thing about Sengoku cavalry. I simply do not allow Sengoku era Samurai cavalry to charge. You play it and notice that while the Ashigaru can charge, foot samurai can charge, but mounted samurai cannot. They can ride up quickly and fight, but don't go into a full charge.

Bam. You just learned about the past from playing a game. By me isolating a single element and then representing it.


.

No -- you just represented historical research in a game mechanic.

Manchu wrote:Just assuming for the sake of argument that games are best understood as a medium for disseminating information (which is pretty shaky in itself),

No. They are best understood as a form of entertainment that can't help but communicate information. Games will communicate, but that's not what they primary are. Things can have more than one aspect. Games designed for educational purposes will prioritize one aspect higher than another. An intentionally educational game will reinforce the transmission of information more than one that does not.

This whole line of argument, however, is totally irrelevant. The point of a game is not to capture information gleaned from studying the past but rather to allow players to have fun. The historical research part only comes into the picture in terms of "flavoring" the fun. Similarly, movies like The Longest Day and Fury are meant to entertain. The entertainment is "flavored" (in movies, we call it genre) by references to World War 2.

So does it follow that because movies that are flavoured like that exist, that other types of movies that actually communicate things about the past are impossible? I think not. Furthermore, even dramatic movies can communicate accurate information about the past. It's all about what the person making the movie wants to do with it. What their priorities are.

To bring this back to bolt action and mortars, you can make a historical assessment about the effect of medium mortars in combat in the past. You might come to a conclusion about them being reliable and consistent. Bolt Action, on the other hand, wants them to be zany fun. They want a process of zeroing in but they want the dice to largely send them off in all sorts of directions because it's enjoyable and dramatic. As Big P pointed out, in most cases many mortars shouldn't even be on the table. What Bolt Action is communicating about mortars is inaccurate. But historical accuracy is not a priority for Bolt Action. It's a zany, fun action movie approach to WW2. That doesn't stop other games from having different priorities or make imparting accurate information impossible.

.

This whole notion of thinking of games as capsules for containing/transmitting information is beside the point. The issue is, can you figure out what happened in the past by playing a war game? The answer is no. Playing a game is not the same thing as studying the past. Whether the game "contains" any accurate information about the past ("the Wehrmacht used Tiger tanks") does not matter precisely because that information is exterior to the game.

When we, for example, discuss the utility of mortars in BA (or any game), the issue is not historical.

 Manchu wrote:
No -- you just represented historical research in a game mechanic.

If I represent historical research and then it gets communicated to someone else, then they have learned history.

Just think about it. if the mechanic represents the research and then you experience the mechanic, you will get a piece of information. Represent = re - present. To present again. I'm presenting the information in the mechanic and you are receiving it. I could go further and offer the player an option to "push their horses" and have a chance of the horse fracturing its foreleg. Then the player would learn even more. My mechanic would present even more research (in this case physical anthropology).

 frozenwastes wrote:
But historical accuracy is not a priority for Bolt Action. It's a zany, fun action movie approach to WW2.

That's an interesting assertion, but one that applies evenly across every miniatures game I've ever seen. Even micro-armor uses scale and time compression. Every game, no matter how "hhhhhhistorical" it purports to be, still relies on completely 100% historical inaccuracies.

Perhaps one can achieve it in hex and counter games, but having seen my brother and friend play A World At War, even that has historical inaccuracies and concessions so that one may play a scenario within 12 hours.


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Even Phoenix Command, perhaps the most "serious" and "accurate" system ever designed for gaming combat, could in no way represent historical realism.

The first step concession one must take in playing "historical games" is recognizing that zero percent of it is "historically accurate".

 frozenwastes wrote:
if the mechanic represents the research and then you experience the mechanic, you will get a piece of information

The information you experience is about a game mechanic based on a priori historical research. Hence:

 Manchu wrote:
History is the study of the past. People study the past for all kinds of reasons, including to inform games that simulate (to some extent) warfare that happened in the past. BUT - designing or playing a game is not the same thing as studying the past. Those are separate processes: historical research (step 1) informs game design/play (step 2). The steps cannot be reversed. Playing a war game cannot be a valid source of historical knowledge. Of course, playing a game can motivate one to study the past via proper sources.

 judgedoug wrote:
The first concession one must take in playing "historical games" is recognizing that zero percent of it is "historically accurate".

This, among other reasons, is why I always refer to the genre as "historicals" rather than "historical gaming." I mean, all gaming takes place in history and is therefore historical (LOL). It is very important to realize the label "historical" in war games just refers to the genre just like how A Longest Day is a "historical drama."

Manchu wrote:This whole notion of thinking of games as capsules for containing/transmitting information is beside the point.

It is the most important point. If you are going to claim that you can't learn about the past by playing a game than containing/transmitting information is very, very relevant because that is part of learning.

The issue is, can you figure out what happened in the past by playing a war game? The answer is no.

In my study of the past I'm not just interested in figuring out what happened, but understanding it. Understanding the processes. How things interact. A game can most certainly communicate those things to you. They will (re)present the designers understanding of those things to the degree that the designer prioritizes their communication.

Playing a game is not the same thing as studying the past. Whether the game "contains" any accurate information about the past ("the Wehrmacht used Tiger tanks") does not matter precisely because that information is exterior to the game.

I look at a table of a game in progress and I see a model of a tiger tank. I learn that "the Wehrmacht used Tiger tanks" from within the experience of the game. This "exterior to the game" idea is nonsense. Visual representations (there's that re presenting thing again) also impart information.


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 judgedoug wrote:
Perhaps one can achieve it in ...

You acheive it by isolating elements, not by adding additional layers of complexity. You choose a select element to represent in a mechanic and then the person using the mechanic gets the information. You don't get historical accuracy from trying to represent everything, but by isolating what you do want to represent and abstracting what doesn't concern you as a designer.

The first step concession one must take in playing "historical games" is recognizing that zero percent of it is "historically accurate".

This is demonstrably false. All you need is one element that actually represents a chosen source for history and the percentage will be greater than zero.

 frozenwastes wrote:
How things interact.

Games tell you how things interact in the game. See also the difference between military history and military theory.

 frozenwastes wrote:
This "exterior to the game" idea is nonsense.

Not at all. There are lots of games in the WW2 sub-genre. They are all informed by the same, more or less, historical data. That data is exterior to them. That is why there can be more than one of them.

 frozenwastes wrote:

The first step concession one must take in playing "historical games" is recognizing that zero percent of it is "historically accurate".

This is demonstrably false. All you need is one element that actually represents a chosen source for history and the percentage will be greater than zero.

He is, quite correctly, referring to the nature of history itself: that it is not a piecemeal collection of information, each piece of which can be laid out next to fictional pieces of information. The idea that physics works the same way in Taming of the Shrew, for example, as in reality does not make the play any more "historically accurate" than otherwise. "Historical accuracy" is just a bugbear in gaming. A game stands no closer to history by being informed by historical data at a more granular level because the distance between a game and history is already infinite.

Now if all you mean by "historically accurate" is "the Wehrmacht used Tiger tanks" then fine but that is not much of a standard for sorting between "zany" games and "serious" ones. It's just a rationalization for elitism.

 Manchu wrote:
The information you experience is about a game mechanic based on a priori historical research.

Yes.

Historical research --> game mechanic --> play --> player's mind

Information through a game.

Seriously, go read the academic research about using games to teach. It's only in our myopic hobby where we suddenly decide that the tools used by educators suddenly stop working.

I've failed to convince you, but don't take my word for it. It's time for you to do your own research. Some key words to use on academic databases include "learning through play" "educational games" and "replaying history."

 frozenwastes wrote:

The first step concession one must take in playing "historical games" is recognizing that zero percent of it is "historically accurate".

This is demonstrably false. All you need is one element that actually represents a chosen source for history and the percentage will be greater than zero.

I disagree. I know of no examples where a game simulates the actions within, and results of, a historical event perfectly.

Zany Bolt Action and Flames of War 40k and Battlegroup and Nuts and Chain of Command and so on and so forth are all a series of invented rules and dice rolls with a WW2 texture applied to them. One may have a preference for "flavor" or one may "feel" more accurate than the other, but are purely subjective. None of them are accurate to the actual conflict.

 frozenwastes wrote:
Some key words to use

Here's a keyword for you: "counterfactual reasoning."

 Manchu wrote:
Now if all you mean by "historically accurate" is "the Wehrmacht used Tiger tanks" then fine but that is not much of a standard for sorting between "zany" games and "serious" ones. It's just a rationalization for elitism.

I'm sorry, but I actually prefer dramatic ones that don't take representing history all that seriously. The degree of representation I am interested in is simply one where I am not jarred. This is a personal thing just like how some people don't enjoy certain historical dramas because of their inaccuracies. My approach is to ask what the game's approach is and enjoy it for what it is.

What I'm doing here is objecting to the ridiculous position that a technique that is well understood and functional in every area we apply it to (learning through games) suddenly fails when we apply it to our hobby. Utter nonsense.


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 judgedoug wrote:
I disagree. I know of no examples where a game simulates the actions within, and results of, a historical event perfectly.

Perfectly is the wrong expectation to have. We don't expect it in the actual academic field of history, but somehow we demand it from a game.

None of them are accurate to the actual conflict.

They can be accurate to isolated elements that were part of the actual conflict.

People just can't seem to get past all or nothing thinking when it comes to this issue. Do you expect a history book to represent a historical event perfectly? To be accurate to the actual conflict? No. You accept that it will focus on a subset of that conflict. Same thing with a game.


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 Manchu wrote:

 frozenwastes wrote:
Some key words to use

Here's a keyword for you: "counterfactual reasoning."

Sorry, I have decades of research about how games can actually be used successfully for academic purposes (including the subject of history) to back up what I'm saying. You have a blinkered insistence that somehow that falls apart as soon as it gets applied to our hobby.

Can you accept that games can impart information? What about the that the information can be about the past? If your answer is yes, then playing games can teach history. It's probably happening in a classroom somewhere as I type this.

On the off hand chance that you were actually serious about counterfactual reasoning and not just meaning it as a personal attack, it actually provides some great insight into how games can teach you about the past. Countfactual thinking is thinking about a past that didn't happen. If we apply that to a miniature game, the results of the game obviously didn't happen. They are not the events of the past. So where do we find the opportunity to learn about the past if the events of the minaiture game will be a past that did not happen? In the isolated elements that the game imparts. You might play a game where the Edo lose their battles against the cavalry, but if the mechanics have a chance for your cavalry to break their horses legs if they push them too hard, then you will have learned something about the past even if the results of the battle are counterfactual. The counterfactual can also provide a point of contrast. You can learn by comparing the results of a game to the results of the real battle (perhaps even as part of a victory point/battle assessment phase at the end of the game). This can help people understand the actions and decisions made by the people in history.

There's so many opporunities to learn about the past through gaming.

 frozenwastes wrote:
What I'm doing here is objecting to the ridiculous position that a technique that is well understood and functional in every area we apply it to (learning through games) suddenly fails when we apply it to our hobby. Utter nonsense.

Yes, you can use games to help people remember information more effectively or encourage them to be more interested in that information. That is not what I am talking about. What I have posted is:

 Manchu wrote:
Playing a war game cannot be a valid source of historical knowledge.

The game does not generate information about history. You cannot learn what happened in the past by playing a game. You can only ever "wrap" game mechanics up in historical references. I don't challenge that this "wrapping" can make the references more exciting.

 frozenwastes wrote:
I have decades of research about

Great, it's irrelevant.

 frozenwastes wrote:

I'm sorry, but I actually prefer dramatic ones that don't take representing history all that seriously.

People just can't seem to get past all or nothing thinking when it comes to this issue. Do you expect a history book to represent a historical event perfectly? To be accurate to the actual conflict? No. You accept that it will focus on a subset of that conflict. Same thing with a game.

Oh, I agree completely with that. So, again, "historical accuracy", as previously mentioned, is purely subjective, and there is no specific way to measure it (so that one game is "more historical" than the other).It's impossible to have a game be more measurably "accurate" than another game, other than the subjective "feel" (which then informs the "historical accuracy" elitism)

We start with a basis that no game can be 100% historically accurate; so now we are into the territory of "well this feels more accurate to me than that game". As you said, you prefer "dramatic" games, and I do too, in the sense that I don't want to have to Phoenix Command-style calculate wind resistance and direction in whether or not a bullet lands on a soldier's sternum versus shoulder, etc. But a mortar hitting somewhere near enough to it's target to possibly cause a kill and to pin them 16.67% of the time "feels" reasonable to me

 Manchu wrote:
The game does not generate information about history.

It doesn't need to. It just needs to communicate the historical information that the mechanics are based on. The game does not need to generate information about the past, only communicate it. History books do not generate information about the past, they just communicate it. Why do you have a double standard where you expect more from a game than a history book? Why not expect the same? The (re)presentation and interpretation of primary sources.

Careful now:

 frozenwastes wrote:
History books do not generate information about the past

 Manchu wrote:
The game does not generate information about history

Again, history is not just a collection of "pieces" of information about the past. Nor is an instance of valid historical research (which oftentimes appears bound into a book) just a container for those "pieces."

 judgedoug wrote:
we are into the territory of "well this feels more accurate to me than that game"

And I'd further argue that we should drop the pseudohistorical elitism and admit that when it comes to games we are really in the territory of "well this game is more fun to me."

I think the major difference between a game, even a historical game, and historical text, even the simple background for a historical game, is that the game itself is only going to teach the McNuggets, superficial factoids.

Sure, If you played Bolt Action with only the rules, and no prior knowledge of WWII, you'd gain a few bits of information: the germans had good machine guns, the Americans had good radios and semi-automatic rifles, the Soviets were a pretty callous bunch to their raw recruits, etc.

Those are all true facts, but don't really inform a player about the actual history of the war. It's set dressing, without any understanding of why the nations were at war, or what aspects of the nations lead to their approaches to fighting it.

I think Manchu is being a bit of a stickler, but I agree that a game itself is going to give pretty shallow and distorted information of the past, with no real history behind it.

 judgedoug wrote:
So, again, "historical accuracy", as previously mentioned, is purely subjective, and there is no specific way to measure it (so that one game is "more historical" than the other).It's impossible to have a game be more measurably "accurate" than another game, other than the subjective "feel" (which then informs the "historical accuracy" elitism)

This I disagree with almost entirely. The way to determine if one game is more "historically accurate" than another is to take the primary sources that informed the game design and see which ones hit the mark and which ones missed the mark. If I make a game where the rate of fire for a bolt action rifle is higher than that of an MG42 and another game has the rate of fire of an MG42 being higher than the bolt action rifle, we can look at the actual historical rates of fire of these weapons and determine which game is more accurate.

As you may have noticed, I'm all about isolating elements and abstracting what the game isn't concerned about. In that case the way to evaluate the accuracy of a game overall is to do it in aggregate. How many instances of things like having a bolt action rifle having a higher rate of fire than an MG42 would it take for you to declare my rules to be less accurate than Bolt Action as a whole? Probably not too many.

And there's no elistism here. I don't always want the more accurate game. Especially if its accuracy was achieved at the cost of fun. I want, as I expect many do, a balance of the two where the inaccuracies happen to be in areas we personally don't find jarring.

We start with a basis that no game can be 100% historically accurate; so now we are into the territory of "well this feels more accurate to me than that game". As you said, you prefer "dramatic" games, and I do too, in the sense that I don't want to have to Phoenix Command-style calculate wind resistance and direction in whether or not a bullet lands on a soldier's sternum versus shoulder, etc. But a mortar hitting somewhere near enough to it's target to possibly cause a kill and to pin them 16.67% of the time "feels" reasonable to me

I agree, but I feel the contrast between complex systems and simple and fast ones doesn't actually have anything to do with accuracy. You can figure out a simple system that produces results that match with history and complicated ones that don't. One of the reasons I like Bolt Action is that it's not complicated. There aren't big lengthy processes to go through in order to do something.

Company Commander is actually simpler than Bolt Action. And accurate enough that combat vets got a "this is too close to the real thing" reaction when I ran it for them. I don't prefer it as my game of choice. Why not? It sort of hurts. It gives you tons of uncertainty, asks you to make difficult decisions on little information and it brutally punishes mistakes. It's simple and accurate and provides a very, very different kind of "fun" than Bolt Action. One I'm not looking for.

To bring this back on topic, do you have any thoughts on what I talked about earlier about how mortars are highly variable in bolt action and their utility in the game might be enhanced when you pair them with lots of infantry and few items where you have lots of points contribute or not based on a single die roll?

I am certainly a stickler when it comes to what history is, probably because it is so widely misunderstood and abused.

What I am really getting at is, what you learn about (say) WW2 from playing any game is purely incidental. It's information you "come across" while doing something else, namely, playing the game.

Manchu wrote:Again, history is not just a collection of "pieces" of information about the past. Nor is an instance of valid historical research (which oftentimes appears bound into a book) just a container for those "pieces."

My theory of history is that it is a human activity. An academic pursuit of trying to understand what happened in the past as well as its implications and causes. It's humans communicating with other humans about things people said and did in the past. You take your primary sources (the pieces) and you arrange them and present your thoughts on them to other humans.

Some people talk about "history" as the actual past. I think that's confusing the map for the terrain. History is a map, not the actual ground. It's a collection of pieces (primary sources) that are arranged in a container (the presentation/interpretation/publication).

 frozenwastes wrote:
Some people talk about "history" as the actual past. I think that's confusing the map for the terrain.

Agreed, hence:

 Manchu wrote:
History is the study of the past.

 Manchu wrote:
I am certainly a stickler when it comes to what history is, probably because it is so widely misunderstood and abused.

What I am really getting at is, what you learn about (say) WW2 from playing any game is purely incidental. It's information you "come across" while doing something else, namely, playing the game.

As an educator, I guess I don't buy the segmentation. If something imparts understanding or communicates even an isolated element of a subject, I consider it valuable and worthwhile. My interest is fostering understanding in people's brains and don't accept that certain fields of study are off limits when it comes to using teaching techniques that I know work.

I consider giving a lecture, writing a book/article, and producing a game all expressions (or containers) for information (the pieces). I don't need the lecture to generate new information about the past. It's just a medium. And it needs to be properly constructed to communicate what I want someone to learn.

I don't accept that gaming has to be outside of the definition of "doing history" because I see presentation and communication to be essential acts of the discipline. And gaming can be a form of presentation. it can be (and has been) properly constructed, just like a lecture. As I said before, there are decades of research into teaching history (or any subject) through games.

What I will say is that most of the time, playing miniature games will not be "doing history". I'm just objecting to this insistence that it can never be. if I'm presenting information from historians in an interactive medium, then I'm a very casual part of the process of "doing history" which includes the communication of the information to another person. I don't separate education or communication of the findings from the actual research. There's no point to research that never gets communicated. Education and academics are fundamentally social acts.

Most of the time historical miniature gaming is like putting on a historical drama rather than doing history. There are historical elements to keep people from being jarred out of their suspension of disbelief, but actually imparting historical knowledge is rarely a priority. That said, doing a historical drama does not preclude one from getting things right. You can make a WW2 movie set in 1939 and have a tiger tank roll across the screen. Most of the general audience won't notice the problem. Or you could have it be a Pz1. You can do the same sort of thing with miniature game mechanics.

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 Manchu wrote:

 frozenwastes wrote:
Some people talk about "history" as the actual past. I think that's confusing the map for the terrain.

Agreed, hence:

 Manchu wrote:
History is the study of the past.

it's also very easy to slip into the colloquial usage in conversation. I've done it in this very thread.



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There have been a few mentions of "elitism" in this conversation. I think there should also be a mention of being defensive. People don't like to feel judged.

They certainly have no use for someone coming along and telling them that something they like is no good. So it's very nature for someone to shield themselves from that by claiming such criticism is "elitism."

It's my belief that mantras "historical accuracy is completely impossible" and "you can never learn about the past through a game" are simply an attempt to shield one's pursuits from percieved criticism.

If no game can be assessed to be historical accurate then no criticism of my pet game for such things can be valid. That's the kind of thinking I'm talking about.

My preference is to accept each game for what it is. It's okay that different designers have different goals and priorities.

if someone tells me that Bolt Action isn't historical and that I should check out Battlegroup, my response won't be some anti-intellectual assertion that there can never be a connection between history and a game in order to shield myself from their criticism. It will be to say "that's cool, but I like Bolt Action for how it plays as a game and I'm okay that it's not as accurate as your favorite game. It meets my goals for a game and it seems to meet the designers' goals as well."