History and the Boardgame

It has been my privilege this quarter to take a class on the historiography of the Reformation with Constantin Fasolt. The class, he has said, is to be a class not so much about the Reformation per se, but about knowledge of the Reformation. To this end we have begun the quarter reading various classic treatments of the Reformation from the nineteenth century, and attending specifically to their methodologies and theoretical frameworks rather than particular factual information. Having dispensed with the Idealist Hegel and the Positivist Ranke, we turned most recently to Engels, for whom both of the other writers suffered from the same problem:

"These ideologists are so gullible that they accept unquestioningly all the illusions that an epoch makes about itself or that ideologists of an epoch make about that epoch...To this day our ideologists have hardly any idea of the class struggles fought out in these upheavals, of which the political slogan on the banner is every time a bare expression..."(Frederick Engels, The Peasant War in Germany, pp. 12-13)

That is to say, that historians who look to tell the story of the past solely in terms of the decisions, opinions, and ambitions of individuals have crafted the shallowest of histories, and sketched only a brief outline, where they ought to have laid bare the mechanisms of events. For Engels, of course, the actual mechanisms of history are economic, and the interests of their social class will dominate individuals, if unconsciously, to the point that it is far clearer to look at history in terms of the struggles between these classes than in terms of the struggles between individuals or nations.

It is not the aim of this post simply to hold forth on the relative merits of the various schools of history, as I am neither qualified nor able to make any meaningful statement on them, but rather to offer a brief observation of the way in which such frameworks influence the design of historical boardgames; for it occurred to me, turning over Professor Fasolt's comments on Engels' separation of himself from these other sorts of history, and indeed the way in which the practice of history includes today many more subjects of inquiry than it once did, that this difference of approaches could be observed, if inexactly, in two boardgames with which I am familiar, Diplomacy and Antike. I say inexactly, because the history practiced in board games is very much like the history practiced in poetry, or in painting, for, being like them an art which is principally pleasing and edifying at its best (as opposed to history proper, which is principally edifying and pleasing at its best), it is constrained by the intents of its enterprise to offer only vague and adapted notions of history. Yet merely because one turns more confidently to the Commentaries of Caesar than the Pharsalia of Lucan for a history of the Roman Civil War does not mean that Lucan contains neither history nor a historical point of view. Similarly, although neither one tells us anything historically useful about the periods they claim ostensibly to cover, Antike and Diplomacy nonetheless offer differing perspectives about the mechanisms of history.

Diplomacy is a game about individual ingenuity in the exercise of military power. The game contains an economic element, in that certain spaces on the board ('supply centers') allow players to produce new military units, and others do not, but, as only this brief description makes apparent, there is no use for wealth other than war; in fact, it may be better to dispense altogether with the idea of an economic element to the game, and view 'supply centers' rather as armies in potentia, than any sort of wealth, as they can do nothing but produce military units. But this is not the place for any theoretical strategy. In any case, the object of the game is to achieve absolute supremacy, that is, to have more than half of the supply centers on the board. This is achieved by negotiation with other players, and combat between the players' forces; but again, since negotiations are conducted only gain assurances concerning military matters, it may be better said that victory is achieved through purely military means. The only actual action in the game is the movement and conflict of armies and fleets; victory, consequently, is entirely dependent on these factors.

Antike, on the other hand, is a game in which the military level is only one of many. Like Diplomacy, there are armies and fleets, but there are also cities, temples, and technologies. Instead of an economic level which offers only a third type of military unit, the potential one, Antike has three different resources, gold, iron, and marble, which appear on different spaces on the board, and can each be spent to purchase a specific thing. Victory is achieved in gathering points for achieving various goals, such has having a certain number of cities, temples, or fleets, or developing new technologies or destroying an opponent's temple. Although this variety of paths to victory might make it appear than Antike lacks the single-mindedness of Diplomacy, it becomes clear when playing the game that it is principally economic. The production and consumption of resources drives all the other aspects of the game, and, although no points are awarded for the possession of wealth, all the things for which points are awarded are purchased by it, so that the points may be seen as results of the player's economic policy.

It should be somewhat apparent from these brief descriptions that Diplomacy and Antike offer quite divergent historical frameworks. In the former, not only is everything ultimately decided by military power, but military power is also, quite literally, the only thing to talk about in the game: The narrative of a game of Diplomacy is one of military campaigns and alliances, in which the deployment of armies is alone important. Antike, on the other hand, although it gives appearances of being a slightly more nuanced portrayal of the same military situations as Diplomacy, actually rests on patterns of the exercise, production, and deployment of wealth, and not military power. The terms of victory in either game, that is to say, what really matters in the worlds these games present to us, likewise complement these views. A player is victorious in Diplomacy when he has such military power as no one can stop him; a player wins Antike by acquiring points from various sources, some military, some cultural (such as the game portrays them), and some commercial, but all of which grow out of the resources and wealth of the player's nation.

I would certainly go too far if I were to claim that Diplomacy is a perfect analogue to the history of politics and personages, or that Antike is the sort of game Engels would have made. Yet I do not think these associations are without value. Although there is absolutely no class struggle in Antike ("What about the people building those temples for the clerical-aristocratic interests?"), the game does offer something far closer to social and economic history than the maneuvers of Diplomacy. And the absence of any ideological level from Diplomacy (if such an level could even exist in a board game), does not diminish the fact that the game gives us war without any framework to make sense of it beyond itself, that is, precisely the sort surface history we saw Engels at odds with earlier.

Although I could say much more about these very interesting games, I will leave this essay here, and happily take them up another time.