Little Wars and Dragons
Sorry I’ve been away for a few. I caught a bug that laid me out and I had to take care of the kids.
So, in our discussion of Interactive Fiction we talked about Pretend Play and I mentioned that without rules, the game quickly degenerates. To more forward on the topic we need to go back to 1913, where celebrated novelist H.G. Wells is lying on the floor of his home, playing with toys.
Two years before, Wells published a small volume titled Floor Games describing the miniature landscapes he and his two sons would create out of wooden blocks, plasticine trees, and model soldiers. The fun in Floor Games is pretty freeform; like pretend play with tiny props, and years later the book will be used as the basis for the field of psychotherapy known as sandplay.
But lying on the floor facing a field of meticulously crafted wooden soldiers, Wells works on rules. He’s drawing upon the wargames of Prussian military commanders, called Kriegspiel, popularizing it into a pastime with another small volume titled Little Wars.
With this book, Wells invents the hobby of wargaming, where each player controls a set of soldiers and usually simulates a famous historical battle. Each model soldier on the floor or tabletop represents a unit — platoon, company division — whose size depends upon the scope of the battle.
Since the new hobby grows from Kriegspiel, a very serious business, wargaming values realism. Over the course of decades, rules grow increasingly complex to reflect the variables of battle. Participants exhaustively research to the point of becoming amateur historians (if they weren’t already). It’s all very proper, until a couple of guys from the American Midwest come along and take a turn towards the fantastical.
In 1971, Gary Gygax, a wargaming enthusiast from the Lake Geneva area of Wisconsin, co-authors a set of rules for wargaming in Medieval Europe and adds something new — a supplemental set of rules for a Fantasy setting inspired by the legends of King Arthur and the fiction of J.R.R. Tolkein. I had the pleasure of meeting and playing with Gary a couple of years ago, and he told me how surprised he was by the heaps of mail he began receiving about those supplemental rules. To his amazement, the realism-focused world of wargaming found guilty pleasure in dragons and wizards.
One of those drawn to the fantasy supplement was Dave Arneson, who had begun to tire of the unit representation of soldiers on the field. Arneson decided to have each player control only one soldier, and instead of that soldier only having two states, alive or dead, Arneson used a range of numbers to indicate health. Now being shot didn’t necessarily mean removing your soldier from the field, just reducing the number of points incurred from being hit. Arneson wrote up his rules and sent them to Gygax, and the two began a collaboration that resulted two years later in Dungeons and Dragons.
How the game works, and how the wargaming aesthetic of realism lead to trouble, next time.
So, in our discussion of Interactive Fiction we talked about Pretend Play and I mentioned that without rules, the game quickly degenerates. To more forward on the topic we need to go back to 1913, where celebrated novelist H.G. Wells is lying on the floor of his home, playing with toys.
Two years before, Wells published a small volume titled Floor Games describing the miniature landscapes he and his two sons would create out of wooden blocks, plasticine trees, and model soldiers. The fun in Floor Games is pretty freeform; like pretend play with tiny props, and years later the book will be used as the basis for the field of psychotherapy known as sandplay.
But lying on the floor facing a field of meticulously crafted wooden soldiers, Wells works on rules. He’s drawing upon the wargames of Prussian military commanders, called Kriegspiel, popularizing it into a pastime with another small volume titled Little Wars.
With this book, Wells invents the hobby of wargaming, where each player controls a set of soldiers and usually simulates a famous historical battle. Each model soldier on the floor or tabletop represents a unit — platoon, company division — whose size depends upon the scope of the battle.
Since the new hobby grows from Kriegspiel, a very serious business, wargaming values realism. Over the course of decades, rules grow increasingly complex to reflect the variables of battle. Participants exhaustively research to the point of becoming amateur historians (if they weren’t already). It’s all very proper, until a couple of guys from the American Midwest come along and take a turn towards the fantastical.
In 1971, Gary Gygax, a wargaming enthusiast from the Lake Geneva area of Wisconsin, co-authors a set of rules for wargaming in Medieval Europe and adds something new — a supplemental set of rules for a Fantasy setting inspired by the legends of King Arthur and the fiction of J.R.R. Tolkein. I had the pleasure of meeting and playing with Gary a couple of years ago, and he told me how surprised he was by the heaps of mail he began receiving about those supplemental rules. To his amazement, the realism-focused world of wargaming found guilty pleasure in dragons and wizards.
One of those drawn to the fantasy supplement was Dave Arneson, who had begun to tire of the unit representation of soldiers on the field. Arneson decided to have each player control only one soldier, and instead of that soldier only having two states, alive or dead, Arneson used a range of numbers to indicate health. Now being shot didn’t necessarily mean removing your soldier from the field, just reducing the number of points incurred from being hit. Arneson wrote up his rules and sent them to Gygax, and the two began a collaboration that resulted two years later in Dungeons and Dragons.
How the game works, and how the wargaming aesthetic of realism lead to trouble, next time.
posted by Christopher A. Dellario at 2:04 PM
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