Happy New Year

Happy New Year, everyone. Other than a clutch of links the other day my last contribution to the blogosphere were the now timeless musings on sneakers and toothbrushes which are to be found below. What’s been happening in the interim? Let’s see:

Trip to Alabama to visit Kari’s family over the holidays. In addition to lots of Quality Time with the folks we finally made it to see Return of the King (two hobbit thumbs up, go read Jason’s review); plus I got my local cuisine in with a brace of fried catfish.

No MLA for us this year, so it was back to DC for New Year’s and then (these last two days) a visit from my parents and brother, who drove down from New York. Earlier today we all went out together to the new wing (if you’ll pardon the expression) of the Smithsonian Air and Space Musuem that’s just opened at Dulles airport. The facility (officially named the Steven F. Udvar-Hazy Center) is a vast hanger-like exhibition space with dozens and dozens of planes parked inside and suspended from the ceiling, including an Air France Concorde, a Boeing 707, an SR-71 Blackbird, the Space Shuttle Enterprise, and dozens of smaller fixed wing aircraft from military and commercial aviation. The most notorious display there is the Enola Gay. The plane is presented matter-of-factly with a brief placard detailing its technical specs and a couple of sentences describing the mission to drop the “Little Boy” 20-kiloton atomic bomb on the Japanese city of Hiroshima. There is no discussion of the blast effects (or after-effects), or the larger military/political/ethical dimensions of the issue. To be fair, none of the aircraft on display have extensive exhibition notes; the Enola Gay’s placard is of a piece with the others, and the plane itself is inconspicous in every way except its aura which dwarfs the mammoth B-29 fusalage and gave my father chills.

I’ve also, I confess, been devoting some hours (and more dollars) to stoking my rediscovered interest in historical wargaming (you can now find some links to the hobby on my sidebar). When I was younger, my approach to acquiring new games was simple: whatever I could lay my hands on at the local hobbyshop. I never ventured out into the wider world of mail order, subscriptions, or the gaming conventions, all of which would have allowed me to build my collection more systematically. So lately I’ve been ghosting the Avalon Hill/SPI auctions on eBay, bidding and for better or for worse mostly winning, and approaching the whole endeavor with a much more specific agenda. My primary interest is the Napoleonic era, and at the tactical rather than the strategic level. This means I’m interested in games that address particular battles, even particular segements of battles, rather than entire conflicts or campaigns. The decision making runs more along the lines of “should this cavalry regiment charge that hill” than “should my army move back to Vienna to secure its supply lines for the winter.” The bigger games, with turns marked off in months or years and maps scaled to hundreds of miles per hex just feel too abstract to me now. I’m also, however, taking a more curatorial approach to my collection: there are certain classic titles I want to acquire, notable because they are early (or influential) game systems, or the work of a particular designer. I’m not interested in paying top-dollar for mint condition copies—I just want to own these games and be able to examine them and of course play them. In short, I want to be able to track how the hobby evolved historically, something that is clearly the product of my adult textualist predilictions and which was uttlerly lacking in me as a sixteen year old.

“Games,” incidentally, are at best a loose fit for these products. The following remarks from the Designer’s Note’s to Wellington’s Victory are revealing:

I will begin by saying that I cannot claim that Wellington’s Victory is an accurate simulation of the Battle of Waterloo. Like Wellington, I believe that an accurate account (much less a game) never has or will be produced on the subject of Waterloo. No soldier, historian, or game designer knows or fully understands exactly what occured that Sunday afternoon more than a century and a half ago. All I can therefore claim is that the game accurately reflects my own carefully constructed interpretation of the events of June 18, 1815. I am grateful that our exhaustive playtesting indicates that when the game is played effectively, it does in fact resemble a reasonably accurate working model of the actual battle.

“A reasonably accurate working model of the actual battle.” That’s exactly what rekindled my interest in the hobby. The designer goes on to add: ” . . . play balance was never a high priority in terms of the overall design of the game. From the outset I was primarily concerned with the game as a teaching device which would enable players (including myself) to gain a better understanding of Napoleonic battle tactics.” Play balance, i.e. giving both sides an equal chance at winning—what one expects from Monopoly or Chess or even a proto-wargame like Stratego or Risk—has been subsumed by historical accuracy, a pronounced pedagogical sensibility, and above all the workings of a well-tuned formal system. It’s perhaps not hard to see the connections between this sort of thinking and my current professional purview of simulation, representation, and textuality.

Now, however, the travel is done, the family’s departed, and the eBay auctions are expiring. Time to get back to work. I’ll be putting together online syllabi over the next couple of weeks, and may be tempted to follow George’s lead and adapt Liz’s MT courseware templates. We’ll see. There’s still the book of course, which I’m eager to get back to in earnest; and proposals to write; and articles to submit.

Forward!