October 20, 2006
War Games Posted by Fredric Smoler at 02:50 PM EST In the current issue of New York magazine, the historian Niall Ferguson, an industrious gentleman now simultaneously employed by Harvard, New York University, and Oxford, writes in praise of computerized war games, particularly ones dealing with World War II. Ferguson dislikes point-and-shoot games like Medal of Honor and Call of Duty, preferring strategy games like Axis and Allies, and he is very much taken with a new release called The Calm and the Storm. He praises the ability of multiplayer strategy games to assess the counterfactuals that interest historians of the Second World War, and laments historians’ supposed refusal to look at the results of such war games: “What if the Nazis had invaded Britain in 1940? What if Hitler had captured Moscow in 1941? What if the Japanese had won the Battle of Midway in 1942? These are questions that computer games ought, in theory, to be able to help answer. And yet no military historian, to my knowledge, has made use of them.”
I am pretty sure that last remark is false, or at least misleading. I have a vivid memory that longtime Harvard luminary Ernest May’s fascinating book on Hitler’s conquest of France, Strange Victory, points out that sophisticated computer simulations of the campaign always result in a German defeat. Military historians have certainly made use of non-computerized war games to assess counterfactuals, a case in point being a war game played by the British and German militaries modeling a 1940 German invasion of Britain (the invasion fails). But what about Mr. Ferguson’s main assertion, which is that World War II historical simulation multiplayer strategy games are a powerful way to think about the problems of the present, and are clearly better suited to that purpose than Cold War-era simulation games? Ferguson writes that “Cold War games are now obsolete. Then, there were just two players, each armed to the teeth with nukes. Today we live in a multipolar, multiplayer world. Some players are much better armed than others. In that sense, today’s strategic problems are more like those of the World War II era. Sure, the U.S. can invade Iraq. But what will the French do? The Russians? The Chinese? What if invading Iraq ends up benefiting Iran?”
Point of disclosure: I spent more than a decade and a half playing and (in a very small way) helping develop some rules for what I think was then the most sophisticated (while also playable) World War II simulation game, a boxed map-board game called World in Flames. Over the years, World in Flames won a lot of awards given by the industry: Game of the Year, State of the Art, Best Twentieth-Century Game and Game of the Decade. Its rules and components were repeatedly expanded, tweaked, and re-released, and if you insisted on all the bells and whistles—the crowd I knew did—WiF (as it was known) was playable if you had at least 50 spare hours, at least five fellow lunatics with that much time on their hands, the ability to master more than a hundred pages of rules, room to spread out maps and charts that covered an area significantly exceeding a Ping-Pong table, and enough real estate to leave the thing set up for the many weekends it took to play it.
There was supposed to be an even more sophisticated game everyone claimed was clearly unplayable and was no longer sold, but if you liked a sophisticated World War II game, WiF was your baby. Like the games Mr. Ferguson enjoys, WiF had economies, diplomatic rules for modeling the behavior of neutrals and minor powers, economic warfare, and very intricate combat charts. In the days when I knew it, WiF proved hard to computerize, although at least one computerized version has since been released. As recently as the late 1990s, the computer professionals who played WiF asserted that the capacities of any existing AI (artificial intelligence) were inadequate to competently play any single great power represented in WiF. At its full extent, WiF had separate players for the British Commonwealth, France, the United States, the USSR, China, Germany, Italy, and Japan, although you could play a satisfying version with five players.
Did WiF help explore strategic counterfactuals of the Second World War? While I was fascinated by the game, and remain deeply engaged by World War II counterfactuals, I’d have to admit not really, or at least not many of them in a satisfying way. For one thing, what actually happened in World War Two was in a sense improbable, and exploring some elementary counterfactuals is hard to do in a competitive strategy game. Hitler did as well as he did only because of fantastic luck and massive incompetence by his adversaries from 1933 through the Battle of Moscow. Hindsight is 20-20, and in a game, all the Allied players know that Hitler was, well, Hitler. He could not be appeased. Fighting in 1936, or 1938, was clearly the better choice, but if this happens, there is no World War II looking anything even remotely like the historical one. In a game world, Stalin cannot easily be given a really good reason to sign the pact with Hitler, or keep to its terms in the first half of 1940. If the Allies are made anything like as competent as they could have been in the Battle of France, Hitler never gets to Russia, or is so weakened that his forces are doomed at the outset of the Russian campaign. If Stalin is given a chance to deploy his forces rationally, the German armies do not get to do anything like the historical damage they did in 1941. If the Allies know that the Japanese are coming, the Japanese do not do very well. WiF made the Germans and Japanese ahistorically strong and the Russians ahistorically weak, so that game would be satisfying to the players taking the Axis powers. There were ways around this—a complicated bidding system for the powers, based on how they thought they would do in a game of uncertain duration, coupled with modifications of the rules to make the Allied powers more formidable—but the basic outline of the original game made it hard to modify the rules to the extent necessary.
WiF was still utterly absorbing, but it was a game, not an effective tool for exploring counterfactuals. Friends who still play strategy games modeling the same events on the same scale, including the computerized ones Professor Ferguson plays, tell me that all of them have versions of the problems that affected WiF, and that WiF remains the best of the lot. You can satisfyingly explore counterfactuals on a smaller scale than the whole of WWII, but that is a different thing. To return to the questions Professor Ferguson posed, “What if the Nazis had invaded Britain in 1940? What if Hitler had captured Moscow in 1941? What if the Japanese had won the Battle of Midway in 1942?” Because of war games, professional historians do think that a 1940 Nazi invasion of Britain would have almost certainly failed, but those are not strategy games modeling the whole of the Second World War. Games modeling smaller-scale events and events of shorter duration are much better at illuminating counterfactuals.
I do not see how a strategy game can help us determine what would have happened if Hitler had taken Moscow in 1941, because the effect of taking Moscow would have been in large part political. The effect on the Soviet rail net is easier to explore, but how does the game assess the effect of the loss on Moscow on Turkish, Swedish, Spanish, American, and British decision makers, or on the will to fight of the inhabitants of the Soviet Union? A strategy game can and should assume there will be such effects, and provide probabilities for various reactions by such actors, but it thereby assumes these things, rather than explores them. As for Midway, the American victory may have been improbable, but not nearly as improbable as a Japanese victory in the World War II, no matter what happened at Midway.
WiF taught me a lot—among other things, some trivia, like the name of every capital ship that took part in the war, and the approximate combat radius of almost every military aircraft—but it did not teach me much about assessing the war’s counterfactuals. To the extent that it is possible to learn anything about that, I learned to do it by spending decades in university libraries. Professor Ferguson claims to have learned more from strategy games. With respect to the virtues of The Calm and the Storm, he writes that “I made a fatal mistake. I decided to dispense with the Nazi-Soviet pact and defeat Poland single-handed. It didn’t work. And as soon as things began to go wrong, I found myself entirely alone. . . . I had discovered, in short, that unilateral action can lead to disastrous isolation.” I don’t think this is a lesson that can be learned only from computerized games.
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