"What makes a set of wargaming rules a “simulation”?" Topic

* Wargamers-simulation != full-strength military simulation.

Official Defense Department definitions ONLY apply to what they call "simulations", and we are in no way required to abide by them.

Which is my main amusement with this discussion. The professional military defintions (BTW, the hobby activity derives from the professional military actvity) include what wargamers do in TTWG as simulations, but some wargamers seem to not consider TTWGs as simulations because they are not professional military activites.

There are as many definitions of "simulation" as there are people trying to define it. It's totally subjective.

Except for anyone who doesn't agree with you, then you denegrate their defintion.

Maybe applies to Murcan miniatures gaming:

the hobby activity derives from the professional military actvity

=> Simulations.

Meanwhile – on the other side of the Pond:

Huffington Post – Wells invented wargames 100 years ago

Wiki – H G WELLS – Little Wars 1913

=> Wargaming for fun

From the Wikipedia article you quoated:

According to Wells, the idea of the game developed from a visit by his friend Jerome K. Jerome. After dinner, Jerome began shooting down toy soldiers with a toy cannon and Wells joined in to compete. The two decided that with an addition of written rules, a good Kriegsspiel type game could be developed.

So, Wells and Jerome were deriving their game from Kriegsspiel, a professional military game.

Little Wars is a simulation.

Believe it or not – I took out this last word:

The US and British Armies used derivatives of the Prussian Kriegspiel for their staff officer training. There must have been a trickle-down effect to civilian life – even though Wells was a pacifist.

However, you have earned the Last Word.

Of course Little Wars is a "simulation"!
The art shows Officers and Gentleman in full dress and full uniform, wearing monocles, and sitting on the floor!

Wells and Jerome may have had a vague idea that a version of Little Wars could be used for military training, but it is incorrect to suggest that they were in any way 'deriving their game from Kriegsspiel'.

Consider the differences:

Kriegsspiel: played on maps, by teams in separate rooms, with an umpire administering the rules – a 'closed' game – in which shooting and combat were resolved by die rolls and results tables.

Little Wars: played on the floor/lawn, with toy soldiers and projectile-shooting toy artillery pieces, an 'open' game in which players administer the few rules themselves, without using dice or results tables.

When Wells refers to 'kriegspiel' he is using the word simply as shorthand for 'military training game'.

As used by Wells and Jerome in Little Wars, Kriegsspiel is a generic term. In there case it refrred to the several different types described to him my British military officers.

Kriegsspiel: played on maps, by teams in separate rooms, with an umpire administering the rules – a 'closed' game – in which shooting and combat were resolved by die rolls and results tables.

As you said, it is a generic term, referring to many methods of game. There is no single set of meta-game methodologies for the British versions of Kriegsspiel in the late 1800's. Some used maps, others didn't. Some might have had a double- or triple- blind, most didn't. Most heavily used umpires. Probably some used tables and dice.

I have no idea what you mean by "open" and "closed". The rules are the rules. People adhere to them, or modify them in an ad hoc manner. Umpires – now frequently called the "White Cell" – are actually instructed to modify rules and stochastic outcomes, not blindly enforce them.

Wells and Jerome's game looks more like the original German Kriegsspiel (which again, wasn't one thing, except at its origin) than the British versions. The umpire wasn't there to enforce rules as much as to lead Socratic discussion among the players on what was going on.

I'm not sure the meaning you see in the cosmetic differences.

So, monocles are not required for it to be a simulation!
That's a shame.

Closed Game:

 Wargames where the "fog of war" limits what the players know of the total situation depending
on their "cell". In closed wargames Wargame Control determines what the players should
logically see and know about the real situation using the "Three Map" method.

 A game in which players receive the accounts and kinds of information and intelligence of
friendly and enemy forces that they would normally receive in a similar real-world situation.
Most war games are closed games.

 Wargame in which Blue and Red teams know only what they would know under similar realworld conditions.

quoted from A Compendium of Wargaming Terms by William L.Simpson Jr, updated 2018.

Kriegsspiel was a 'closed' game; Little Wars, in which players could see all their own, and the enemy's troops, and administered the relatively few rules themselves, was an 'open' game.

My apologies for using terminology without an explanation. I remain of the opinion that Little Wars was in no way 'derived from' Krieggspiel (German or British versions).

By that definition, the original German Kriegsspiel, and many of the versions used by German staffs up to WWI were open. The players saw the whole sandtable, including any OPFOR (which wasn't in place for the first iterations). Most of the British Kriegsspiel games that Wells references in the appendix on Kriegsspiel based on taliking to British military officers are also open by this description.

There are thousands of ways to achieve this:

Wargames where the "fog of war" limits what the players know of the total situation depending on their "cell".

A game in which players receive the accounts and kinds of information and intelligence of friendly and enemy forces that they would normally receive in a similar real-world situation.

and this:

Wargame in which Blue and Red teams know only what they would know under similar realworld conditions.

without that:

In closed wargames Wargame Control determines what the players should logically see and know about the real situation using the "Three Map" method.

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Most war games are closed games.

Aysing something about "most" wargames means you can identify "all" wargames, and have detailed enough information to characterize more than "most" of them.

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You also provided a continuous quote, but redaced:

Poker is an example of a closed wargame.

Because your defintion is not a definition, but a colleciton of three selected quotes from three different sources. Which is how you wind up with poker being called a wargame even though it doesn't fit any of the different definitions of a wargame in the Compendium.

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Only one of the three quotes talks about an umpire concept

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Regardless of 21st Century discussions on wargaming, Wells and Jerome were aware of, and referring to various Kriegsspiel variants when they wrote the rules. From their writing on it, they were spending more time and disucssion thinking about what they wanted to be different.

Oxford Languages defines a simulation as "imitation of a situation or process." This is pretty much my definition as well. A simulation is a model. It can be simple or complicated. Detailed in coarse or fine grain. Concrete or abstract.

Here is a simple, yet 100% accurate simulation of World War Two: Roll 1d6, on a score of 1, 3, 5 the Allies win, on a score of 2, 4, 6 the Axis lose. Not a very interesting simulation, and certainly not much of a game. But it provides an imitation of a situation or process with a simple model.

Wargames are simulations in that they imitate or model the situation and process of war. The question is do we want a detailed, complex simulation, or a non-detailed, simple simulation?

Of course the more closely the results of a simulation mirror the outcomes of reality the better the simulation is.

Agree with that defintion, it's the one I have been saying.

A simulation, howver, is not a model. Per the defintion you dive, it is an activity, not a thing. Why this is important is because in order to execute the above model, you need to have information outside the model. And, you need to execute the model.

Who rolls the die? Where does it come from? What do we do if the die goes off the table or lands balanced on one edge? If the die is dropped instead of rolling, is it rerolled? Can I roll it in a dice tray?

I call these meta-elements of the simulation. Sometimes, some of them are part of rules. They can affect the game, but they don't affect the outcomes from the model.

The distinction between a model and a simulation leads to the distinction between the model and the other elements of the simulation or wargame. The distinctions among the elements of a wargame are important becuase you need different approaches (including differet tools) to manage them. Clarity on that helps make better rules, and better games.

What do I play? I'm going for "Partly closed door" game. We do not have 3 maps only 2. Some stuff is visible to the enemy so it cannot be an Open game. Not every thing is visible but the definition of "closed" is to be honest, a very poor definition. If you are a company commander you may well have sight directly of both some of your own forces and quite possibly some of the enemy, and a large part of the actual terrain the fight is taking place on.

I suggest you talk to the originators of your definitions and get them to work harder on credible definitions. To be fair definition of an issue is often the hardest part of the job. I spent may hours working on a wargame that never got far. It became clear that we had no useable definition of a wargame. You can't plan for a dream it turns into a nightmare.

Oh and yes my definition is not good, it is for illustrative use only. I suspect a good useable definition will take lots of time and thought.