This was amazing, thank you so much and i'm glad i've found this as me and a few others are currently working on a 10/15mm system that aims at mass battle
Great video, although I disagree with 3:45, you can absolutely combine these different wargames types, when talking about video games like the Total War series, there is a campaign map full of economic decision making, and individual battles, where the units you have available to you are heavily influenced by the economics of the campaign map. You can play the game like a war game with a huge focus to your faction economics where battles are a minor part of the gameplay (you can even auto-resolve them if uninterested), or you can skim over the campaign map and focus on how you fight out individual battles. The same would be capable in a board game with a Risk style campaign map but battles are fought out on another game board. Granted, they are two separate game types within a larger game, but aspects of each contribute to the other, losing one aspect of the game will hinder progress in the other and visa versa.
Video games are very different from tabletop... you can combine "all" elements of wargaming into a computer game however you would struggle to do this via tabletop
Depends on the war, but generally, 'war' means 'mass murder'. Work by Richard Wrangham and the likes of de Waal show that chimps go on wars of sorts, and kill every member of a nearby tribe and take their land -- which massively boosts their own living standards. It might be one of the worst truths I've ever come across in all of science. More so, since such seems quite true within humans, as well. Most human wars have ended in mass murder, too. Forcing your will onto another is more like soft invasion, slavery, and related -- not war as such, which is closely related to hard invasion (murder, in essence). Of course, that's if we're talking about something like WWII or some other serious hot war. Naturally, cold wars and otherwise have much more of what you're saying than direct murder and such -- but most wars in history have been hot, and very bloody. Any war profound enough to actually control a population merely becomes 'culture', and is no longer even known or seen as war by most. Of course, recent wars have been a mixture of both hot and cold methods.
I actually think we can say that warfare is very much like a game. Typically, a large-scale, complex, social game between grown men, which leads to death and otherwise. Of course, for this very reason, we never actually talk about war as game-playing, and nor should we. However, we could talk about game-playing as the development towards warfare, or at least the capability for such. The clear 'in between' class here is 'sports'; namely, the hard sports like Boxing. Boxing is somewhere between 'child game' and 'warfare', only on the personal level. Of course, inter-personal war happens all the time. Not to mention the darker and more profound, intra-personal -- where all war begins, you might say. At least, where many wars begin! All of human sociality is a vast nest of game-playing and game-making, and has some serious war-like elements, no less -- including lying, cheating, gossip, bullying, and causing a real kind of pain, though without physical contact (namely, of the nervous system and various other sub-systems related to emotional regulation), and a simple matter of 'hurt feelings' (which is really a lesser form of the aforementioned). (Of course, this implies that something like the sport of Ice Hockey is strangely close to warfare, as it's both quite aggressive, male-centric, tactical, win-lose, very difficult, culturally and emotionally important -- and of import -- and team-based. Makes sense: but, we still don't properly consider Ice Hockey war... but, it is a certain kind of war.) Having said all that, most man-made board wargames are very different from war, because they don't fully take into account the randomness and quickness of warfare: alas, it would require at least 110 IQ to even play the game to any notable degree, and would be very annoying, and would most likely require an umpire. Some wargames like this exist, but they are not very popular for these very reasons. In this way, board wargames tend to be closer to child games/play -- not shockingly -- than warfare. But, it's a mistake to believe these are fundamentally unrelated, or even wholly different things. Nonetheless, the clue is in the title -- wargame. It's aiming at warfare on some level; otherwise, it wouldn't actually have the word in the name. And, notice how men love both games and war -- and maybe wargames above all else for the last 5,000 years. Makes perfect Darwinian sense to me. A brief look at gaming sales over the last 25 years would prove that every male human with an Internet connection is hooked -- hooked -- on war-based video games and such of the ilk. Not rocket science to figure that one out.
This was absolutely fascinating, thank you.
Please let other people know about the channel.
@@LewisPulsipher will do!
This was amazing, thank you so much and i'm glad i've found this as me and a few others are currently working on a 10/15mm system that aims at mass battle
"Stochastic games" = "it just be like that sometimes"...
Great video, although I disagree with 3:45, you can absolutely combine these different wargames types, when talking about video games like the Total War series, there is a campaign map full of economic decision making, and individual battles, where the units you have available to you are heavily influenced by the economics of the campaign map. You can play the game like a war game with a huge focus to your faction economics where battles are a minor part of the gameplay (you can even auto-resolve them if uninterested), or you can skim over the campaign map and focus on how you fight out individual battles.
The same would be capable in a board game with a Risk style campaign map but battles are fought out on another game board. Granted, they are two separate game types within a larger game, but aspects of each contribute to the other, losing one aspect of the game will hinder progress in the other and visa versa.
Video games are very different from tabletop... you can combine "all" elements of wargaming into a computer game however you would struggle to do this via tabletop
War is forcing your will on another, it’s seldom annihilation.
Depends on the war, but generally, 'war' means 'mass murder'. Work by Richard Wrangham and the likes of de Waal show that chimps go on wars of sorts, and kill every member of a nearby tribe and take their land -- which massively boosts their own living standards. It might be one of the worst truths I've ever come across in all of science. More so, since such seems quite true within humans, as well.
Most human wars have ended in mass murder, too. Forcing your will onto another is more like soft invasion, slavery, and related -- not war as such, which is closely related to hard invasion (murder, in essence). Of course, that's if we're talking about something like WWII or some other serious hot war. Naturally, cold wars and otherwise have much more of what you're saying than direct murder and such -- but most wars in history have been hot, and very bloody. Any war profound enough to actually control a population merely becomes 'culture', and is no longer even known or seen as war by most. Of course, recent wars have been a mixture of both hot and cold methods.
I’ve been turning my war games into drinking game and using territories as 20$
I actually think we can say that warfare is very much like a game. Typically, a large-scale, complex, social game between grown men, which leads to death and otherwise. Of course, for this very reason, we never actually talk about war as game-playing, and nor should we. However, we could talk about game-playing as the development towards warfare, or at least the capability for such. The clear 'in between' class here is 'sports'; namely, the hard sports like Boxing. Boxing is somewhere between 'child game' and 'warfare', only on the personal level. Of course, inter-personal war happens all the time. Not to mention the darker and more profound, intra-personal -- where all war begins, you might say. At least, where many wars begin! All of human sociality is a vast nest of game-playing and game-making, and has some serious war-like elements, no less -- including lying, cheating, gossip, bullying, and causing a real kind of pain, though without physical contact (namely, of the nervous system and various other sub-systems related to emotional regulation), and a simple matter of 'hurt feelings' (which is really a lesser form of the aforementioned). (Of course, this implies that something like the sport of Ice Hockey is strangely close to warfare, as it's both quite aggressive, male-centric, tactical, win-lose, very difficult, culturally and emotionally important -- and of import -- and team-based. Makes sense: but, we still don't properly consider Ice Hockey war... but, it is a certain kind of war.)
Having said all that, most man-made board wargames are very different from war, because they don't fully take into account the randomness and quickness of warfare: alas, it would require at least 110 IQ to even play the game to any notable degree, and would be very annoying, and would most likely require an umpire. Some wargames like this exist, but they are not very popular for these very reasons.
In this way, board wargames tend to be closer to child games/play -- not shockingly -- than warfare. But, it's a mistake to believe these are fundamentally unrelated, or even wholly different things. Nonetheless, the clue is in the title -- wargame. It's aiming at warfare on some level; otherwise, it wouldn't actually have the word in the name. And, notice how men love both games and war -- and maybe wargames above all else for the last 5,000 years. Makes perfect Darwinian sense to me. A brief look at gaming sales over the last 25 years would prove that every male human with an Internet connection is hooked -- hooked -- on war-based video games and such of the ilk. Not rocket science to figure that one out.