Are professional wargamers the bad guys?

A YouTube documentary has just been released examining the growth of professional wargaming and its implications. The documentary - The Games Behind Your Government’s Next War - is presented by a popular and well known tabletop gaming journalist Quintin ‘Quinns’ Smith. It features interviews with some of the big names in the UK professional wargaming scene.

The premise of the documentary is that the government and/or defence industry may want to employ you - a regular board gamer - to help make professional wargames, and this may not be a good thing. Professional wargamers may not be the ‘good guys’ in the room.

As someone that is making the transition from developing hobby board games to the professional gaming space, or attempting to, I can’t help but feel this is a timely and important documentary.

I will not rehash all the points made in the documentary. It is pretty much essential watching if you work in the professional wargaming space or are thinking to, and want an insight into how it may be seen by informed external viewers.

But I do want to share what I think it gets right, and where I have a different view. Caveats abound. This is a highly complicated topic that merits more conversation, so consider this more ‘a first thoughts’ post as I start to personally explore the issue.

I think this is an exceedingly well made documentary. I fully support more scrutiny of the field. It is important enough to merit it. I am new to professional wargaming and I have not seen anything by way of self-reflection about the rights and wrongs of what we are doing. Maybe it exists, but if it does it’s not front and centre. 

That said, there are contradictions in some of the arguments presented by Quinns, and to be fair, he acknowledges throughout that it’s a complex subject where he has mixed views. All that to say I hope I don’t mis-represent his points.

What I think he gets right. 

1) There is a risk that wargaming has a self-fulfilling prophecy. 

I am reminded of a key finding from Margret MacMillian’s The War That Ended Peace: The Road to 1914; one of the reasons that the Great War became inevitable was because policymakers thought it was inevitable. I see countless professional games on future conflict between the US and China and fear they are greasing a familiar wheel. 

Unfortunately, like Quinns, I don’t know what you do about it. Is it better not to grease the wheel? Or is the wheel going to turn anyway, and key actors caught unaware if they haven’t wargamed the situation? I don’t know.

2) There is a risk that wargaming leads to the wrong answers. 

Quinns highlights the failed Ukrainian 2023 summer offensive, and the role that wargaming may have had in driving some of the poor decision-making in that. There’s some evidence that it did, and so this is a fair concern.

By contrast, Graham Longley-Brown and Jeremy Smith run a scenario with different assumptions using the Rapid Campaign Analysis Toolkit (RCAT) that demonstrates that Ukraine’s summer offensive was extremely unlikely to work as the Ukrainian Army lacked NATO command and control capabilities.

Point being: like all analytical tools, the effectiveness of a wargame is dependent on the assumptions built into it. The Bank of England doesn’t stop modelling for inflation when it fails to meet its inflation target, it tries to improve its model.

Where I take issue.

1) Wargames are ultimately a tool to kill people with, and isn’t that inherently bad?

Quinns acknowledges that he’s glad that the British Army has tanks. It’s not a comment he explores further unfortunately. But it follows that he thinks they should be effective, otherwise what’s the point? If you want them to be effective, then it follows that you want the crews manning them, and the commanders commanding them, to receive training and analysis which makes them good at their job. And what is their job? Well, among other things, to kill people. It’s a contradiction in his argument that remains unaddressed.

2) Can the military be trusted?

I’m definitely paraphrasing Quinns here a bit, but essentially he is concerned a) that given Britain’s history of invading and subjugating other countries, is helping the British army become a more effective fighting force morally a good thing, and b) even if it is, isn’t there a risk that less morally upstanding actors will also learn from our wargames and do bad things with them?

On (a), I’m not sure it is relevant in 2024. We don’t know what the future holds, but for the moment we are wargaming peace-keeping and responding to foreign state aggression. On (b), an argument that we shouldn’t develop best practice because there is a risk others will learn from it seems perverse. Furthermore, none of what is happening is rocket science. This is not the Manhattan Project. China - if that is a foe - is developing its own wargaming prowess. ‘Foes’ or bad actors will wargame independent of what Britain is doing. Surely - if we accept the premise that wargaming should exist - we should focus on doing it the best we can, to reduce the risk of getting that wrong answer?

So, circling back, where does this leave me, the target audience of this documentary? 

Well, I remain convinced that professional wargaming is important and worthwhile. But there are takeaways that I will ponder further:

1. Professional wargaming should be less defensive. Quinns rightly in my view calls out BS when he highlights the defensive stance wargamers take talking to outsiders: “hey, it has humane uses too”. Yes, we should talk about civic application, but why not also be proud of its military application? There will always be those that are anti- anything to do with war. But most people are capable of a more nuanced view. We make training wargames to help our Armed Forces become more effective, and analytical wargames to help our decision-makers make more informed strategic and operational decisions. Personally, I’m proud to say that I do this.

2. Professional wargaming should be more reflective of its impact. I’m out on a bit of a limb here as - like I said earlier - this could be happening and I’m just not aware of it. I’m going to Connections UK next week, the event that featured so prominently in the documentary, so I should get a better idea then. But I suspect this isn’t happening as much as it should be. Maybe something for a future blog, when I learn more.

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