"Why do we wargame ?" Topic

Just for fun… a little musing on my blog…..everyone has their own reasons. Personally, I have a passion for military history and gaming in miniature complements my study of it. I also enjoy the creativity and artistic nature of miniature wargaming. There are many reasons….competition, fellowship, etc…..

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Why do you wargame?

'cause its fun !

Always the Number 1 reason !

+1 Frederick

It's an obsession.

Because I am bored and can't afford Vegas and all its trappings

Racing cars was too expensive, racing motorcycles was too dangerous, downhill skiing is only certain months of the year, and other sports are too physical and not cerebral enough. Wargaming with historical miniatures combines my passions for history, thought puzzles, art, and competition into one hobby.

- Ix

It was the spectacle of a massive game of ancients that got me intrigued at the age of 15. From there I got into Napoleonics, etc, etc, etc and have enjoyed it for the last 45 years (well, most of the time except when my dice throwing is sh*t).

Wargames gives me a reason to build and paint miniatures.
Can't see the point in making display models. Just collect dust.
Also it's fun and I enjoy the social part too

To hear the lamentations of the little lead women.

Wargaming brings all my interests and leisure pursuits together. I have been passionate since childhood about history, particularly maritime and military history. Likewise I was always artistically inclined, spending a lot of time drawing and painting. Lastly, I always preferred spatial games such as checkers and chess to card games or other numerical games. So, first I moved into board games, and then discovered the magic of miniatures gaming. It may be an addiction, but at least you don't wake up hung over or diseased. You may still go broke, but it takes longer than gambling.

Wargaming satisfies a broad spectrum of things we want in life.

It satisfies the mind's desire for analytical challenges, such as learning and understanding rules and applying strategy, tactics, and logistics.

It satisfies the aesthetic senses in at least four aspects -- making attractive and interesting things with our hands, looking at and playing with attractive and interesting things, taking and looking at pictures of those things, and collecting things.

It provides enjoyable social interactions of many kinds, including playing against each other, playing cooperatively with each other, talking about our common interests (like in these forums), and showing our collections to each other. Our interests are quite out of the mainstream, and it feels very good to know that there are many other people who share those interests.

It provides some mild rushes, like when you take a chance on a particular tactic in a game. Succeed or fail, it's still a little rush.

Our hobby does lack any element of physical exercise. Walking around a convention a few weekends a year, standing for a few hours a week or month with our gaming groups, lifting boxes of miniatures or terrain, and shaking cans of spray paint just don't add up to enough to meet our bodies' needs. At least none of the activities of our hobby are intrinsically harmful (although you can certainly suffer accidents with Exacto knives or spray paint).

To see a narrative story line unfold on the tabletop.

I wanted to get some idea of what it was like to command armies in the Napoleonic era. I read military history all my life and wanted to be a part of it.

…all of that, and a touch of megalomania. To be in command of thousands to set the world to order.

Back when I was nine my parents one holiday season brought me to Polk's Hobby Shop in New York City. This was in 1957, and of course everything, when you are nine (because you are much smaller) looks stupendous. The place was piled high with toys and games packed everywhere through four stories, and they were in old musty cabinets that looked like they were 50 years old, and some of them had toys, old toys that were some of them as old of the cabinets. Of course the ranks and ranks of Britains, the chess sets, the boats, the ship models, airplanes and literally everything that could fire the imagination and create WET AMD in youth (because you walked around google eyed and never blinked) was there.

We were not there for me. Oh no, we were there to buy model railroad stuff for my father to make a grand guignol of a model railroad. This was allegedly FOR me, but it would be my fathers. I only wanted a little oval with a train that wound around the track, but my father conceived of it as this grand 12 by 24 foot thing that would be a model to his virtuosity and modeling skills. He thought he was a universal expert and could do anything. Sadly he couldn't and it was never finished and after the track was laid, he lost interest and it was eventually broken up.

Anyway, while my father was buying his stuff, I wandered away and as all small boys will do, wandered into an area I should not be in, a storeroom and storage area, where I found even MORE fantastic things-- toys and soldiers from it seemed like a century before, all manner of strange and wonderful objects.

Now I realize that I had stumbled into a portal, that is a place between dimensions and realms, and essentially in an ante-room of heaven. I looked around for an hour and then when I remembered I could be in real trouble if my father noticed me missing, went back but luckily found him buying all sorts of trains and things. I asked him if I could have a few toy soldiers but he gruffly told me he wasn't going to waste his money on that garbage, I was going to have a "REAL hobby." Whistfully I looked back at the slightly ajar door to the backroom and wondered if…

About six months later I discovered another "portal." My father had a friend out in what was I believe Parsippany, but this was when it was more or less still a howling wilderness and not the paved over farmland and woodlots on which only urban sprawl and strip malls not grow. Back then it was verdant and green and very much the country, much like the woods of Maine I am moving to now.

Anyway I had been a child of the city all my life, and this was the first time I had actually seen trees that weren't growing out of small squares in cement and I was confronted by "the wild." Jack Gingert had a farm and in the middle of a huge field was this artificial pond fed by a stream which my father and Jack went fishing on in a small boat. it was a rather large pond. Well I wasn't interested in it and I walked around the pond for a while and explored the fields. Eventually I walked along the small trail by the waters edge and came to the lower end of the pond where the trail crossed over the small dam that backed up the water of the stream to create the pond, and a small bridge crossed over the slipway at the dam. This bridge was right at the edge of the forest with the branches of great oaks and maples shading it and covering the path from the hot July sun. As I stepped into the shade I looked off to the right and "saw" into the forest. From the hot humid Juyl air, I walked into this cool shaded place with water gurgling and rushing below, and the shade shielded my eyes and I could only see a little into the forest for it was very thick and very green, and there was a wind stirring in the forest which slowly blew out of it and that wind was redolent with the smell of pine, and oak, and wild flowers, and rotting vegetation and in it I saw movement of things half seen and a few strange sounds. It smelled of excitement, and adventure, and life--- and death. I was almost overcome with the urge to step into the forest and become part of it, and it was almost as if I heard the forest say to me "Step into the forest, son of man."

Well I didn't. I hurried on over the bridge and out of the dark shade to the brilliant sun, but always looking back, always wanting to turn, to go back, to step into that forest. Later that evening as my father and Jack were playing backgammon I went out on the screened in front porch to read, but became transfixed on that forest line, far down the hill, over the field past the pond, and as the day wore on the darkness in the east began to deepen, and slowly imperceptibly the shadows crept up the hillside and as I lay there in one of those old kitchy- klunky futon couches with the big pine branches making its member, that cool, dark, dank, wonderful smell of the forest, as if following the shadows crept up the hillside and came right through the screens and enfolded me and lulled me to sleep.

Thirty six years ago I "stepped into the forest" by moving out to the country. I will soon be stepping into an even deeper forest in Maine.

However when I got my start in Wargames in 1962, at the age of 14, I stepped through another portal, through another reality, into the world of war games, which has a lot of that first portal I found in Polks, and much of the second portal I found in the forest. Now when I work on my hobby I cannot separate myself from the painting and the modelling, and the creations that I make and somehow they seem very real, and I frequently wonder if I am being watched, just as I felt I was being watched in that storeroom and in the woods, and that I am not partially in some other reality behind the reality that we see and deal with every day. For me it is an obsession because when I lose myself in games I feel that I am part of some other place and time, and that there is a secret reality to what I do. of course it's so much easier when you do imagi-nations for you can do what you wish, and fantasy though it is-- now and then--- you look out of the sides of your eyes because you are sure, SURE you saw something of that other reality flickering just out of your line of sight. War games is a portal as well.

I wargame….To crrrrush my enemies, to see dem driven befoar me, and to hear da lamentations of da vimmen.

Da lamentations of da vimmen is really the best part.

It prevents me from chasing people with a large ax.

Ottoathome, my experience is similar to yours. I first stumbled on to modern military history in the school library when I was 8. I loved those Trevor Dupuy volumes on WW2. So many places I had never heard of, and a world of history that never seemed to get much discussion in my classes in school. I was hooked. Then, I remember walking into the old Toys by Roy store near Dallas with my father back in the early 70's. There, in the glass cases were rows of Britains figures, as well as Corgi and Dinky Toy tanks and vehicles from the wars I had read so much about. I would get some of these toys to add to my collection on my birthdays and Christmas. A couple of years later, a friend got a copy of Avalon Hill's Tobruk and boardgaming became my outlet to explore more about WW2 history. Some years later, I went to a convention and saw miniatures games and when I finally was old enough to afford that hobby I was in it to stay. Gaming has been an enjoyable way to further my interest and fascination with military history.

No one in their right mind would give me a real army

Overcome inferiority complexes?

+2 Frederick
+1 Zippy

Sorry folks. I don't believe in philosophical justification and navel gazing.
You get it or you don't.

Bowling shoes optional.

The Groupies.

Otto that was beautiful. I read it to my wife.
Mike Bunkermeister Creek
Bunker Talk blog

To paraphrase AHGC, "Bringing history to life".

Dear Bunkermeister

"Willoughby-- Next stop Willoughby-- Willoughby next stop."

+1 Winston Smith.

As Charles Grant once wrote, "You either have the bug or you don't".

+1 Otto

Because I played with toy soldiers as a kid and teenager and still enjoy playing with toy soldiers.

Jim

@Otto, I throughly enjoyed reading your long post. I could almost feel the July heat, and the smell of the forest.

I have always liked military history and soldiers since I was a boy. Saturday afternoon war movies in B&W, drugstore plastic soldiers that came in a bag, and a vivid boyhood imagination. I can't explain why this fascinated me more than animals, or professional sports teams, or anything else, it just did.

Started with Milton Bradley wargames, then Avalon Hill games, and then finally miniatures with Napoleon's Battles in 1990. I was introduced to heritage napolettes by the owner of a game store in Orlando, FL. I found Modeler's Mart in Clearwater a couple hours' drive away. Otto's description of the hobby store he explored as a boy was similar to my experience; I thought I had found the answer to all my boyhood desires. Rather than chips of cardboard with abstract symbols, I could find miniature representations of any soldier in history, and finally immerse myself in dramatic battles of history.

And I would like to echo Glenn Goffin's comments about war gaming exercising the creative juices. Some people are fortunate to have a great passion in their field of work, but for me and probably many others, work is only a means to an end. But through painting figures in my own style, and creating terrain pieces (badly for now, but getting better), then using them to put on a game with others and their collections, I add value to my time with others.

That is why I wargame.

I can't help it….it's in my blood! I seriously can't remember NOT being interested in wargaming…ever. I have had toy soldiers/miniatures, built plastic military models, and played war themed board games since I was a young child. Heck, I even had a Snoopy "WWI Flying Ace" bedspread. It is, for me, the perfect combination of two dominant interests throughout my life …games and military history. I just love it!

Dear List

Ah, I see I have encourage many other hard-core mainlining gamers to whom the hobby is a wonderful obsession to go public.

I am pleased.

But I must caution you all to remember the one thread that unites us. We all not only depend on the transport of games and reading military history to catapult us into the world of let's pretend and make believe that we have never grown out of, but we are powerfully united by our urge to use our hands to craft, and model and paint, that is CREATE the artifacts of our alternate reality. We love to build and fashion these things and see our idea made real.

In this we share a role with the great creator himself, and like him, we LOVE our creation. I do not mean like, or are pleased by, but we love it as an extension and emanation of ourselves.

I was never quite content and happy in war games till I realized this.

And that's the other thing. When we create our worlds, they are ours. We do them simply for ourselves, not for family or friends, or wife, or work or country or even God. They are our own.

It's safer amd more humane than going to war.

pjm

Because I can't live back then and do it in person…yet!

Everyone knows that the hot chicks LUV wargamers!~

It is a prefect storm of art, history and gaming. I love the strategy, tactics and spectacle of it all. It's also a lot of fun!

I have met a lot of good people some of whom have become life long friends.