Old School Wargaming: A Phenomonological Interpretation

I've been to Triples over the weekend, and in the tradition of this blog I am not going to write about it just yet; not directly anyway. Instead I shall attempt a brief melete on the subject of old school wargaming. Now, I'm no real fan of the genre; I find it dull and it seems obvious to me why people moved on to more complex and rewarding rulesets. I have no doubt that the grand old men of the hobby - Featherstone, Grant, Young et al - enjoyed themselves and were themselves fun to play with. My own theory is that because they had all seen active service, with all its attendant horrors, they emphasised the game side of things by making the context cartoon like rather than realistic.

Old school and toy soldier style games increasingly appear at shows, or at least the ones that I go to, and always attract a lot of attention and favourable comment. However, I strongly suspect that no-one much is playing them at home. So why the dichotomy? I think we can best interpret this in terms of philosophy. Now you might be surprised at the concept of a two thousand year old philosopher suggesting that we view things philosophically. However, stoicism - which as you will remember is my particular speciality - just won't do in these circumstances. Those proponents of old school behind the display games are essentially taking a Cartesian, reductionist approach to what they are doing. "Old School is best" they chant as they roll their D6, knock over casualties and argue about what constitutes a flank attack; and they believe not just what they say, but that the best gaming experience is objectively determinable.

However, the experience of the show attendee is actually phenomonological. They view the game in the context of their personal Weltenschauung and their life experiences. When looking at the game they are inevitably drawn in to a miasma of vicarious nostalgia, remembering not the games thay used to play themselves, but the games that they read about others playing. They are not so much admiring the game they see in front of them as indulging in a false consciousness of how things 'should be' driven by an illusion of how things in fact never were.

Any of them who watch the game progress or, even more so, if they actually play it quickly find their subjective viewpoint becomes less one of comfortable homecoming and more one of dissatisfaction. They quickly contrast the crude 'roll a 4,5 or 6 and you're dead' bloodbath with the more nuanced ebb and flow of rules designed more recently. Moving single figures palls after the first couple of bounds (as does calling turns bounds) and knocking over figures to show that they are dead rather than removing them causes nothing but confusion every time someone bangs the table. The end result of this is that the observer now recalls that they didn't start playing with nicely painted  Spencer Smith 30mm figures, but rather with unpainted Airfix Romans and Ancient Britons and that the only thing they have in common is that they wouldn't stand up either. They shudder, think fondly of their current set-up and pass on.

Anyone know where I can get a copy of this boardgame? It looks interesting.

Martin Heidegger, a prominent phenomonological philosopher (and Nazi, but best not to mention the war) was clearly in favour of figures being based on stands rather than individually and can therefore be counted as an opponent of old school wargaming. "Every man" he wrote " is born as many men and dies as a single one."