Shall We Play a Game?

Historian Jon Peterson traces the route from Prussian military headquarters to Gary Gygax’s basement.

Jon Peterson is an expert on the history of wargames, and the tabletop role-playing games that they spawned. His books include Playing at the World, on simulated combat from chess to Dungeons & Dragons, The Elusive Shift, on the evolution of role-playing, and Game Wizards, on the legal feuds that shaped the early history of D&D.

One of us (Clara) has spent more time than she’d like to admit at the gaming table. The other (Angela) has never filled out a character sheet in her life. But both of us are fascinated by what happens when we try to reduce the most violent and unpredictable of human actions down to a set of rules. In this interview, the three of us discuss how advances in statistics and cartography made wargaming possible, the journey from 18th century Prussian military officers to Midwestern hobbyists, how RAND played an instrumental role in the birth of D&D, and how little the core debates on game design have changed in the past 200 years. Have fun.

This interview has been edited for clarity.

Umpires, topography, and dice

Angela Chen: I wanted to start by talking about the very early history of wargames. In your book Playing at the World, you write that an Indian game called chaturanga was the precursor to and inspiration for chess, which then developed into the first modern wargame.

Jon Peterson: Right, and through India, chaturanga made it to the Arabic world. And when chess was introduced to Europe through the Iberian Peninsula and the Caliphate, it had a huge impact, first in Spain and then spreading to the remainder of Europe. People viewed the game as a means of studying statecraft, and so they saw it differently from other kinds of parlor games that were circulating at the time.

Christoph Weickhmann writes about this in his 1664 book The Newly Invented Great Kings’ Game. He believed that games that were based on a board — based on being able to deploy units and manage them, and to engage in a competition that required you to understand different lines of attack— could help you become a better leader.

But in these early games, you had very prescribed movements, so people questioned how useful it really was as an understanding of military tactics or grand strategy. And so a lot of people started proposing ways that you could improve the game of chess. People said, “let's get rid of all these confusing units and break this down to what the battlefields of Europe look like today. There's infantry, there's cavalry, there's artillery. Let's focus on trying to figure out ways to represent them, still using the basic concepts of chess, where there’s a board, there’s a grid.”

So Johann Hellwig, who was educated in Brunswick in the late 18th century, was the one who first recommended a game like this for the instruction of the young who needed to learn how to be officers. He recommended playing a game that would be entertaining, but at the same time didactic.

Angela: At this point it’s still on a board. How did it develop from there?

Jon: Well, let’s talk about Georg Venturini first. Venturini really applied a scale to the map, which was not something you would find in Hellwig’s game. His map was still treated like a chessboard, but he was concerned about questions like: What distance is this square supposed to represent? How far does the soldier march in a day? And based on that, how many squares will a soldier march in the day in a realistic game?

Clara Collier: The wargame variants that exist before Venturini sound a lot like combat in tactical turn-based video games that have squares on a grid. The squares can have different terrain — this one can be swampy, and it makes your unit slower, for example. But there's no sense of how that corresponds to real distances in space.

Jon: Quite accurate, yes. Venturini really wanted to create a scale as a tool that bound the setting of the game to its system.

Then the same principles determine how far artillery can fire. It becomes a question of, “based on how far we think the distance to the square is, how far can our guns fire?” And they calculated this before people actually had rifled barrels, so guns couldn't actually fire very far at all. Throughout the 19th century, as time went on, technological innovation required designers to revisit the principles of wargames and adjust for that.

Angela: After Venturini, we get the elder Georg von Reisswitz and his son, who together invented the first modern wargame, the Kriegsspiel. It sounds like there were a few key conceptual leaps between Hellwig’s and Venturini’s games and what the Reisswitzes developed.

Jon: Reisswitz the elder lived in what was then Breslau. Reisswitz dispensed entirely with the grid. He said,“Okay, I'm just going to build these terrain models, and these terrain models are to a specific scale, and I'm going to use a ruler, and the ruler is going to determine how far it is that these particular troops move.”

Clara: So many of the chess variants appear all over Europe. But once you get into Kriegsspiel in the early 1800s, the whole tradition is so German and so concentrated in the German-speaking world. Why is that?

Jon: It was probably Leibniz who really first proposed that you could operate a simulation that would look at the branches of the military. This was picked up on by later German military scientists.

To get down to brass tacks: by the end of the 1790s, the German-speaking world had a big problem and his name was Napoleon. People were really thinking about ways to get an edge over the French. And there was a lot of work on trying to measure everything related to warfare, trying to figure out statistics, trying to predict answers to questions like “if we expect we're in a march of 10,000 soldiers from this place to this place, over this period of time, how many of them will be kicked to death by their own horses?”

They took statistical data and used it to be able to make predictions. Is there something particularly German about that? Yeah, probably — they had a great interest, again, in those modernist principles of being able to quantify and, based on quantifications, being able to predict what was going to happen in the future. Certainly those all dovetailed with all the requirements for the invention of wargaming.

So again, between 1811 and 1812 Napoleon was kind of wiping the board with most of the German-speaking world. And there's a tremendous interest in being able to get tools that could help the military gain an edge. Occupied Prussia basically was not allowed to have an army, so Prussian military scientists turned their interests to things like wargames. And that's really where the elder Reisswitz fits in.

Then his son, who was an artillery officer, took over his father’s game designs, and he started looking at simulation systems and probability. Once you combine that with the idea of using an instrument of chance, like rolling a die right against a table of probability, you have something new.

Clara: He introduces dice and combat result tables to board games.

Jon: Yes, and simultaneously. They come together in the 1824 work of the younger Reisswitz.

And there’s the concept of a referee, or umpire. The way you play this game is no longer that you pick up a piece like a chess piece and move it across the board. Instead, your job is to write orders to pass along to a messenger, played by the referee, who will take them to a unit that’s going to tell you what to do. And all you’re going to get back as feedback from your actions is a written field report saying, “yeah, we tried to take that move and everybody was killed.” The referee decides that with dice and tables behind the scenes.