"Veteran Wargamer, Episode 11" Topic

I very much enjoyed listening to the new episode of Jay Arnold's increasingly enjoyable series of podcasts, in which Jay and his guest, Henry Hyde, discuss Realism and Playability in wargames. I recommend it highly:

link

I agree wholeheartedly with their conclusion that "realism" isn't a particularly good term for describing any correspondence between games and reality, both of them preferring "plausibility" instead. (I like that choice of term, but also occasionally use "authentic".)

They did miss a couple things (though there's only so much you can cover in a single podcast without going overlong), like the fact that "realism" and "playability" are not mutually exclusive properties of a game, and thus there is no direct or necessary trade-off between them. I was hoping that one of them would point out that, in addition to command decisions that resemble those made by the wargamers' historical counterparts, plausibility is enhanced by game mechanics in which events happen for causes that mimic causal relationships in history instead of just popping up on a random die roll or card draw. And why does somebody always bring up the fact that wargamers are not tired, dirty, hungry or under fire when they are playing, and therefore the game can't be "realistic"? While tabletop games can be used to describe and explore many aspects of military history, I can't think of a single example of one that attempts to recreate the experience of being in combat . . . nor could it!

These petty quibbles aside, the whole series, and this episode in particular, is worth your time; hats off to Jay, and keep up the good work.

Ah, thanks for the link, I went looking for Jay's podcast after hearing him on Meeples & Miniatures but could only find a page that you had to livestream it on. Just downloaded a bunch.

I'm just getting an RSS read out, gobbledy gook from the link above.

link

But I did find the Soundcloud page.

theveteranwargamer.blogspot.com

And it is avail, for Free, on Itunes too?

But is there a link where you can download the Mp3 with no restriction so you can upload it to any Mp3 listening device?

Andrew: That link takes me to a page with a summary paragraph for each episode, followed by a direct link to an .mp3

Maybe try a different browser?