Ritual Theory Goes Wargaming

“Games are rituals, contrived to produce situations of dramatic tension and victory”                 – Randall Collins

“The unreality of games announces that what is real, is not yet real. They are unconscious practice exercises of the right life” – Theodor Adorno

“Some play can be very serious indeed.” – John Huizinga

Recently, I was fortunate enough to attend King’s College London and NATO Allied Command Transformation’s (ACT) Wargaming Week. Being there meant bringing both my multiple research interests (security studies, US-China relations and social theory) across various sub-fields, and my identity as some kind of a “wargamer” myself. In this blog post, I outline how my early thoughts on ritual theory’s application to deterrence interacts with my own subjective experience of being a player in these games. Critical Military Studies and International Political Sociology scholarship has made progress in applying social theories to wargaming, most notably Dr Aggie Hirst’s call in The Politics of Play to take play seriously in international relations. In fact, Hirst’s notion of wargames as pharmacotic has already positioned wargames as rituals of sacrifice. It is a great time to send ritual theory to the wargames!

If you are reading this blog, you are quite likely already familiar with ritual theory as it appears in the micro-sociological literature. For those that are not – likely my fellow wargamers – I will briefly outline what a leading contemporary American sociologist, Randall Collins, means by ritual. As we go along, I will share some anonymised examples from either Wargaming Week or my past experiences wargaming. Collins argues that a ritual needs certain ingredients to warrant the name, and that the combination of these elements are intrinsic to the social significance of the activity. International Relations scholars have already taken up his call, shedding light on questions of peace, war and diplomacy.

Beyond this, Collins also identifies typical kinds of outcome that also have resonance with what wargame designers seem to want from their games. By wargaming, I am only referring here to manual table-top games that represent conflict in some way – moving pieces on a map and competing for victory. The essential qualities are the absence of real military forces (more indicative of an exercise), an oppositional structure, and forcing players to game through the consequences of their actions.

Are wargames a kind of ritual?

A ritual must include an aspect of group assembly of some form. The physical presence of multiple people is important, according to Collins, but he has also begun to write about the similarities and differences that occur when the assembly takes place online, for example on a video call. Professional wargames are invariably multiplayer affairs, with the highest profile versions involving many dozens of players and untold additional numbers of support staff.  Although it is possible to play remotely, such as on the commercially available Tabletop Simulator, the core experience is to gather around maps and tables in the same room as your simulated allies – and perhaps even your simulated enemies.

Rituals must have barriers to outsiders. That is, there must be a clear distinction between participants and non-participants. In a wargame, this can be highly formal where players are strictly assigned and identified. Typically, a degree of informality is allowed or encouraged, with observers leaning in to comment or suggest moves. Even then, it is not socially permitted for just anyone to wander in and join a game. It is always clear who the principal players are, and who is running the game. In my own experience at Wargaming Week, any game I participated in was always at the invitation of the people running the game and the role I took up was largely selected by them.

Collins emphasizes the mutual focus of attention and shared mood that characterises a ritual as opposed to some other closed social gathering. In the most literal sense, the focus of a wargame might be thought to be the board or map. In actuality, although this physical object is literally central to play and highly symbolic of the game, it is still something of a placeholder. Based on my own experiences, I would suggest that the mutual focus of attention is what the community calls the “game state”. Represented on the board, yes, but also existing subjectively and intersubjectively within and among the players. Most games provide a payoff for being especially emotionally attuned to your fellow players. As I play, I sense the nervousness of my opponent through a sudden absence of chat at the table: a bold move is likely coming that I must respond to.

A successful wargame provokes a shared mood among the players. First, a certain degree of seriousness in suspension of disbelief is required. It is obvious that I am not the entire government of China, and that my opponent is not the personification of the United States. Nevertheless, as we collectively slip into the game state these facts are put aside. Especially in a professional gaming setting, the fun intrinsic to most games is also sidelined for a shared sense of seriousness. Competitive game play, particularly when leveraging fog-of-war mechanics, leads to an atmosphere of tension, anxiety and fear.

A wargamer reading this blog might object to the identification of their craft with a ritual. At a glance the scripted and repetitive aspects of ritualistic actions clash with the professional wargamer’s goals of enabling player choice, creativity and exploration. After all, the method differs from its close relatives such as formal simulation and modelling precisely because it is not predictable and therefore not truly repeatable. The necessary clarification here is that not every movement and utterance of a ritual needs to be scripted. As Collin’s identification of “games as rituals” shows, the scripting of the activity can exactly be some rules that nevertheless allow a lot of choice for individuals in how they act within them. The written and unwritten rules of wargaming are of paramount importance – no professional or hobbyist could deny that. The social rules of the wargame ritual mean observing the constraints and undertaking your role without complaint. How we play might matter more than what we play.

Wargames exhibit all of the ingredients of a Collinsian ritual, then. But what about the effects? My own experience is that a good wargame is one that produces a group energy that is powerful and infectious. The question is, to what ends can this energy go towards? Collins suggests the typical ritual outcomes are group solidarity, individual emotional energy, the creation or maintenance of symbols and standards of morality. Group identity is present at multiple levels. In the immediate, we are all “wargamers” by playing one. More broadly, a sense of “us” versus “them” is also quite strong – at KCL we were all players from the US/NATO/EU aligned world. Questions of symbolism are more complex, and best left to my own future research.

Next Steps

Considering wargames as rituals makes for immediate links to wider wargaming literature. Evan D’Alessandro’s work on immersion in wargaming is a great example of how the community is self-reflecting on what makes wargames “work”. From the micro- and international political sociology perspective, we might instead ask about enchantment. How do designers, players and audiences take mundane objects like paper maps, cardboard counters and plastic dice and turn them into a potent synthetic emotional experience?

Collins asks us to think about failed rituals, and similarly professional wargamers want to understand fail-states in order to avoid them. Sometimes this is a question of genre-policing. Many wargamers have heard regrettable stories of generic meetings being re-labelled “wargames” in order to steal some of their persuasive magic without doing the work of designing rules and so forth. When Collins describes the failed ritual, he summons images of emptiness and falling flat. Even in a “proper” wargame with the paraphernalia of maps and dice this can still occur. With no shared mood and resulting emotional effervescence, the instrumental goal of a game can fail on social grounds. Wargamers may find Collins’ micro-sociology useful to understand why this can be.

For my own work, this past week I was struck by certain features of wargaming that hadn’t occurred to me before joining the Ritual Deterrence project. These activities allow for a controlled sacrifice of certainty for security professionals where uncertainty might otherwise show weakness, a lack of skill or a lack of resolve. Another way of thinking about this is the game as a ritual of self-humbling that carefully forecloses the possibility of outright humiliation. That is, failure in a wargame should be a valuable learning experience rather than a lethal disaster, as it would be in a real war. The specific measures that gamers and designers use to make a game feel like a safe place to be uncertain is an empirical question that may have useful answers.

Finally, the international dimension of wargaming rituals needs a systematic study. Military games tend to have some kind of public afterlife. For example, the infamous Millennium Challenge game has been relitigated multiple times despite being ostensibly classified, and wargames are directly invoked in disagreements on which weapons to buy. Even the one I participated in at KCL has an associated NATO press release explaining its meaning to an open audience. Whether these messages are picked up, however, and by whom, largely remains an unknown. Does someone in the Russian military read the aforementioned NATO press release and report on it, or even adjust their wargames in response? We do not, and perhaps cannot always, know. The same questions exist for allies and partners, however, and it may be possible to empirically trace how different games produce group solidarity, emotional energy and symbols that are picked up by an international audience. In other words, if we draw the scope of a wargame a little wider to include audiences, including hostile ones, can wargames produce an international collective effervescence and shared symbols?

I would like to thank the organisers and sponsors of KCL Wargaming Week once again. I hope this blog post shows just how much I gained from it, intellectually. Similarly, I am grateful to all of my simulated allies and opponents who provided such rich play and stimulating conversations before, during and after our games.