DISPATCHES PERSPECTIVE
Shoot first, ask questions later
Long-distance Nazi-faceshooting might be a pleasure exclusive to the modern age, but the roots of the military-entertainment complex go back further than we might suppose. Of course there is the example of chess, a symbolic wargame, skill in which was required of Renaissance princes and generals. But the symbiosis between games and war really began in earnest with the Prussian tradition of kriegsspiel, or wargaming. This is explained in a fascinating new book by the neuroscientist Kelly Clancy, Playing With Reality: How Games Shape Our World, which thankfully is not a hymn to ‘gamification’ but about the cultural and political uses to which games, and thinking about games, have been put throughout history.
In the late 18th century, the German mathematician Johann Hellwig created a version of chess that was more suited to modern battle planning: instead of 64 squares, it had 1,617, colour-coded by terrain type, while the king was replaced by a fixed city, and other pieces were transformed into contemporary artillery. This ‘war chess’, as you already know, did not catch on, but the idea of practising modern war by means of a boardgame led Prussian military strategist Georg Leopold von Reisswitz to go further.
Reisswitz experimented with moulding terrain out of wet sand but thought this would be too messy for royalty to play with, so he then invented a system of interlocking bas-relief porcelain tiles with which one could make a variety of landscapes, and carved troop formations from wood. He proudly presented it to the King, but it became nothing more than a favourite toy for the young princes.
It was our man’s son, Georg Heinrich Rudolf Johann von Reisswitz, who perfected his father’s vision, ditching the jigsaw board for large maps of real battlefields, and exploiting the emerging science of data to calculate players’ scores from probability tables of actual battle victories and losses. The teams were designated Red and Blue, a tradition that continues to this day in security circles (red-teaming and so forth). “Dedicated dice for cavalry, infantry, and artillery determined the damage of an attack”, the author explains. Troop types could only move a certain distance within a single turn, and communication was complicated by a simulation of the “fog of war”.
A series of wargames played within the US military probably had a significantly positive outcome for billions of people
In 1824, Reisswitz was invited to demonstrate the game to Prince Wilhelm, one of those young royals who had grown up with his father’s version, and after a rollicking weeks-long match observed by the King himself and other dignitaries it was pronounced a success, and thereon would be part of mandatory officer training. The concept spread quickly
