Wargaming Survey Part II: Grognards Revealed

Brian King | May 26, 2005  | 0 comments  | Print  | E-mail

In the interest of time, I’ll quickly summarize some of the other results that I found interesting.

On the question of whether the wargaming hobby is growing or shrinking, getting stronger or weaker, etc. the community was almost evenly split. There is no consensus on whether it is weak, strong, or growing. This is somewhat significant when considering most of us are long-time veterans of the hobby, and should have a good idea of the course of wargaming given our longevity. This suggests (to me at least) we are either in a period of uncertainty within the hobby, or that the hobby has consistently been tracking along the same path neither growing nor shrinking to any appreciable degree…making it hard for long time enthusiasts to put their finger on where things stand now or are going in the future.

Another question I threw in based on personal experience was how many local friends you have to play against. Personally, I have always had trouble finding local opponents, which was something I always attributed to a combination of my introverted leanings and the dearth of other wargamers in my social groups. I was interested to learn if others shared a similar situation, and found that almost 46% of wargamers report that have ZERO local wargamers with whom they can play face to face. A lucky 15% knew 3 or more wargamers locally. It is probably a reasonable assumption to say that our introverted backgrounds play at least some part in preventing us from getting out and meeting other wargamers.

I threw in one question to support my initial belief that wargamers almost certainly need some interest in military history in order to play these games. When asked to rate their interest in military history, I was not surprised that 84% rated it as “high”, with the other 15.1% rating it as “moderate” and only 3 people out of 640+ said they had absolutely no interest in military history. I think it goes without saying that military history and wargaming are complementary areas of interest for us. The vast majority (76.7%) marked reading as their primary source of their education in all things military history, and this seems to support the pedantic leanings found in the typical wargamer. Nonetheless, I was quite surprised to learn that over 50% of you actually got some military history education in school…something must have been missing from my textbooks!

Conclusion and Data

What have I learned from this exercise? First and foremost, wargamers ARE a unique group - which was really no surprise to this veteran gamer. Yet, seeing those introverted rationals stack up in the data was somewhat of a pleasant surprise to me, even though I’ve always subconsciously known it to be true. The few wargamers I’ve run across face to face have always been intelligent and bright individuals, but most have been reserved with those introverted tendencies I myself possess. No, wargamers typically aren’t shut-ins or vampires, afraid of contact with the outside world, but 3/4 of us exhibit some introverted leanings based on this survey. The fact that over 1 in 3 wargamers are in the exact same INTJ personality group illustrates this point with great effect. Furthermore, introverted youngsters are less likely to proselytize outside their closest friends about this great new hobby they’ve found, helping explain a bit more of the difficulties in growing the hobby.

Additionally, wargamers are overwhelmingly interested in at least some aspects of military history. I surmised wargaming REQUIRES an interest in military history, and I believe this to be mostly true based on the results. This is supported by looking at other hobbies shared by wargamers such as model building, miniatures, reading, and so forth. This suggests, at least somewhat, that these other hobbies are areas where we can turn to find future wargamers (in addition to the war-themed PC games mentioned earlier). Many of the personal stories attached to this survey mirror my own discovery of wargames, simply by stumbling upon them while looking for new military models at the hobby store. I really wasn’t surprised the data showed this supposition to be true. All of my personal wargaming friends over the years have definitely had an interest in military history.

Some future areas for study might include topics such as exactly what is required for a person to move along the continuum from casual strategy gaming to Grognard wargaming. Knowing more about this, we might be able to anticipate what types of games would be most conducive towards attracting younger casual gamers into the wargamer arena. Another area of curiosity would be to discover what it is that makes this a male-dominated hobby. At face value it would seem that young girls/women are less likely to be interested in military history than their male counterparts, precluding them from ever sitting down to explore a game about the Eastern Front. But what about games with no military history elements? What areas of gaming are most women drawn today, and do any of those hold hope of promoting wargaming to our female colleagues? A final area of research (an imperfect science to be sure!) might be to determine exactly where the boundary lies between strategy/casual "war-themed" games and the traditional wargames. It is possible some of us old Grognards could have new wargames pass us by without ever knowing it, simply because they are games unlike anything we have seen before…

Finally, I present all my data to you by turning on the results to the survey software. This will allow you to see all the information I collected here, and I welcome you to use it to draw your own conclusions or counter my theories. I make no claims on being a scientist, and I have tried to faithfully assess the numbers without injecting too much personal bias or opinion. However, since I am inside the group being studied, there was undoubtedly some influence upon my interpretations. The numbers you see in the results might be slightly off from what I have written here, since the survey is technically still open for wargamers who would like to participate.

Thanks for taking the time to take the survey (for those that did) and for spending the time to read this summary. I hope you are able to take away at least a little better understanding of your local Grognard. He is not all that different from you or I!

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Author Information:

Brian "Siberian H.E.A.T." King is the CO of Armchair General Magazine’s website, armchairgeneral.com. When that doesn’t keep him busy enough, he can sometimes be convinced to actually sit down and write articles on military history and wargaming. His wife is also a test subject in the quest to discover exactly how difficult it is to get women to play wargames!

Brian King (May 2005)

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