"Is wargaming a good thing?" Topic

Specifically for children. Have posted an article arguing why I think playing wargames are a positive thing. Please take a look and let me know your thoughts. Am even more keen though for non wargamers to have a look – so if you are aware of anyone that may have a bit of a negative view of wargames please tell them about the article / send them a link.

Cheers

No link do I see… :(

I think it depends on the wargame as well as the players involved.

I think if the game does not portray extreme violence and base behavior, it can be a nice study for kids to learn about various battles.

I think it is a good thing for kids, even with violence. Violence is a part of life and kids need to learn about it just like they need to learn about anything else.

I think it is a hymn to white men violence over minorities and male power over women in particular (very few women are represented in wargaming if only as victims or sexualized half naked objects. i.e: amazons).

So, no, it is not a good thing.

…But I like it :)

on the other hand, it is a powerful tool to learn your history and understand the world you live in. Past, present, future.

And now with a link so you can read the article….

thatwargamesblog.blogspot.co.uk

I would, by and large, agree with the author. Wargaming encourages reasoning and mathematics and has a winner--not "everyone wins!" and not a matter of opinion.That's good preparation for going out into a universe which doesn't much care what you want. Rules encourage close reading, and historical wargaming tends to encourage learningn history.

As for encouraging war--well, a society which is to survive needs soldiers. And I would say a good understanding of military history makes one more aware of the costs and risks. Without getting into contemporary politics, I don't think it would be hard to list a number of recent actions by politicians which couldn't have gotten majority support on a TMP poll. We'd already seen several of those movies, and would see no point in the remake.

But nothing for individuals comes with an absolute guarantee. Too many different circumstances.

"Children" should play a lot more abstact conflict/goal oriented games way before they are exposed to "wargames."

If "war" is about resource management, overcoming obstacles, logistics, strategies, tactics, anticipating/planning the future, following rules, understanding organizational structures and accepting not so pleasant outcomes than that pretty much explains everything we do in life.

I think learning to loose and keep fighting without losing your dignity needs more attention. So….maybe young adults should experience more "wargaming" as the vehicle for teaching such a skill as it seems that strategies for teaching this valuable ability is currently lacking….at home and in school.

None of the wargames I play are really competitive and the fact that not all games are competitive could be acknowledged. (I also hate the use of the word 'audience' when there is no one to hear; I much prefer 'readership' for things that are read).

No they are too hard to paint and they won't stand still.

Thank you for bringing up the subject of wargaming and children. I will be a grandpa this June and I am thinking of avoiding war in any toys I get/make for the coming arrival. I plan on buying Snickerdoodle (working title) a wooden railway and building him a Mississippi steamboat fleet, but I specifically decided against warships though it would normally be my kneejerk reaction. (of course, is teaching him riverboat gambling really a good thing?)

@rustymusket

I've just become a grand-dad too.

I envisage a game where no soldiers get killed, they only get wounded and carried away to hospital. Other soldiers might get frightened and run away and if any of them get 'bad' they get sent to the 'naughty' spot.

It is well that wargaming is so terrible, otherwise we should grow too fond of it.

V/R,
Jack

@JimDuncanUK

Congratulations! Have great fun!
Those are good ideas to wargame with the grandchild. Thanks! I am sure he will see Grandpa with his soldiers and I will be forced to be honest about it sooner or later.

Depends on the child's age, the game's thematic content, mechanics, and method of delivery (by which I mean the imaginative details, etc.). You have to know what a child can understand and contemplate, and what may be beyond his or her grasp to comprehend and put in context.
But aside from that, we're kidding ourselves (no pun intended) if we think children aren't aware of violence and war in the world. Yeah, a five year old really has no clue, but your average ten year old is quite aware that people hurt each other all the time. He or she may not be able to truly comprehend the horrible severity of it, but the child still knows. Whether they pretend play war or not, that comprehension exists. And in all likelihood, the child is already pretend playing conflict, even in the most pacifist of households. So the idea that wargaming might introduce children to either the horrors of war, or to a callous attitude towards war, is patently absurd. I contend, therefore, that wargaming in and of itself is at worst a morally neutral activity, harmless in all respects. And if the mere anecdote of my own experience is valid as evidence, I have played wargames of various sorts since the age of 13 (or younger, if one counts things like Battleship was inherently warlike games). I have never engaged in violence as an adult, and consider warfare at best a necessary evil to be avoided until no other resort is viable to prevent worse atrocities. So wargaming has hardly made me a warmonger or a man who favors violence, and I daresay that state remains true of 99% of others who play and enjoy wargames. And for the 1% who do favor violent acts and are also wargamers, I rather suspect the favoring of violence does not follow from the wargaming, but rather the other way around. And they're probably jerks, cheats, and otherwise disreputable souls.

And as a final note, I think it's safe to say that in all of human history's near constant state of warfare going on somewhere in the world, very, very few of these wars have been instigated or commanded in any real sense by children, except as victims themselves of far more evil adults. In short, your ten year old is not going to start a war, whether he plays a game or not. And in the rare-to-vanishing circumstance arises where a hormonal teen does start a war, it probably has more to do with said hormones (and the resulting idiocy of the same) than rolling dice on a tabletop.

As a side note, in my teenage years my friends and I were likely to be found playing wargames at one of our houses on a weekend night, versus our non-gaming peers, who were more likely out drinking, vandalizing other's property or otherwise causing trouble for their parents and the local law enforcement. I know as a parent which of these teen experiences I'd prefer for my own child. And while I was certainly well raised with solid moral instruction, the fact that I found constructive intellectual ways to occupy my time didn't hurt when it came to staying out of trouble!

Couldn't hurt, and might help to dispel the myth that "everyone is a winner" in some circles, which is a good thing, in my view.

No its not a good thing to involve children in wargaming.

I now have to buy three armies instead of one…

it's a very good thing to involve young people in such hobby:
- creativity
- sense of belonging to a Nation (after all you always choose an historical army which you like)
- cult of action and decision making
- aesthetic sense
- individualism
- awareness of being an élite between other gamers because wargame is based on learning and culture.

in practice an antidote to those invasive narcotizing useless and educationally armful other hobbies like laptops, video-games, facebook,tatoos, Rap grumblings ecc..

At its best, or most typical, wargaming with minis or boardgames is more informative and less passive than the videogame "wargaming" that has come to dominate the "game entertainment" world.

I would posit that simulated first-person videogame or online killing is much more destructive to psyches and imagination and empathy and true understanding of actual warfare than anything we do with dice and toy soldiers.

I would say it is a good thing.

I have given my story before, but short version. My parents thought that allowing me to have toy guns or toy Soldiers etc would make me more warlike. (a very 1960's idea) So they prevented me from having any. I grew up to be a U.S. Army Ranger and a Combat veteran- as any rational Soldier will tell you peace is better than war though it has fewer awards.

I have obviously also become a wargamer, and my parents wanted to ensure that I encouraged my children to have toy guns and Soldiers. There are good lessons to be learned, and it can as a hobby keep you away from more extreme and less positive forms of entertainment.