Wargaming Survey Part I: Understanding Your Local Grognard

Brian King | March 31, 2005  | 0 comments  | Print  | E-mail

I propose that wargaming in general has several functional requirements that will be difficult, if not impossible to overcome when seeking to expand the base number of wargamers. These factors help determine what kind of person ends up playing a wargame…and may help explain our demographic in a more concise manner. This is not intended to be exhaustive list!

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  History and Wargaming - Brothers in Arms

  Wargaming requires at least a basic interest in history, and almost always includes an interest in military history. It would be hard to envision anyone sitting down to push German counters towards Moscow hour after hour, day after day, without having some interest in the history behind Operation Barbarossa (German invasion of the USSR in World War II). Whether learned in the classroom or through extra-curricular reading or television, an interest in history is probably mandatory.
• Wargaming is mostly an intellectual exercise. There are no pots to be won like in poker, you normally can’t sit and watch others play a full game like other spectator sports (how many wives have wondered why the playing surface appears exactly the same after weeks sitting on her dining room table?). Simply put, these games can appear downright boring to most folk. Even winning and losing is often an esoteric exercise more concerned with dissection of strategy and tactics on both sides rather than a goal-line dance with in-your-face smack talking (although it DOES occasionally happen!).
• Almost without exception, wargames demand a certain pedantic, detail-oriented, predisposition. It takes talent and patience to manage 100’s or 1000’s of tiny counters (even digital ones), read tomes of game rules, and have the endurance to see a wargame through to the end. In general, you can’t just breeze through the rules, and expect to play a wargame. Wargaming demands constant attention to minutia such as the true interpretation of sometimes ambiguous rules, disagreements over gamey tactics, effects of terrain, dissertations on chance, discussion on the realism of simulated portrayals of historical events, and a thousand other details in these games. Few can just be glossed over or successfully ignored by an impatient person.

I have 10,000 more where these came from!

These points may seem self-evident to anyone who proudly claims the title of Grognard, but I believe listing them will help with the final analysis when interpreting the results of this experiment. Given the traits necessary for serious wargaming, exactly what type of person can we expect to naturally "pick up" this pastime? Are wargamers naturally drawn to certain hobbies and environments which will "gateway" them into wargaming? Is there a pool of wargamers out there who have yet to be "found" and brought into the fold? I hope to uncover some of these answers when comparing the personality types of a sampling of current wargamers. If we find trends, it might help give insight into the current makeup of players in our hobby, as well as provide a frame of reference when looking outside our community for new blood. With the right information about who we are, it might also be possible to extrapolate where we might expect wargaming to be in the next 20 years. At least, that is the hope of this pedantic, detail-oriented, military historian and wargamer!

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