Of Love and War Games
“Do you think you could turn the volume down on that war game you’re playing so I can least pretend that you’re listening to me?” So my beloved asked, very sweetly, in her slight Dallas twang. What could I say?
“Why sure, Sweetie. Just a second…. Okay, what were you saying?” Of course, she was saying something amazingly feminine, about the intricacies of a philanderer's second marriage, how crass the new bride’s wedding dress was…
“I swear, you could almost see butt-crack—I don’t know why the priest didn’t send her home. Well, she was an Episcopal priest…”
Playing “Medieval: Total War” as the Duke of Milan, I managed to drive the Papal armies out of Florence, but that didn’t lift my excommunication —which was sure to tempt the Holy Roman Emperor to declare war and take back the fortress of Metz.
“My cousins heard about the wedding from their waiter at the country club and he said…”
Damn it. The Emperor did lay siege to Metz, and his trebuchets broke right through the walls I’d forgotten to upgrade… no matter how many archers I had pouring flaming arrows onto his siege equipment.
“And for some reason those people registered at Barney’s instead of Neiman’s. I think they were embarrassed.…”
There are dangers to long-distance relationships. When you live in different cities, and your only common experiences take place during visits, your time together is mostly consumed by discussions of… the things you don’t have in common. On the positive side, when your beloved is on a topic where you don’t have the ovaries even to feign convincing interest, you can always try to gain hegemony over Europe. Or drive out Saruman’s Uruk-Hai from Edoras. Or establish a crushing commercial dominance over the Spice Trade… all depending on which strategy game you’ve popped into the PC. This is harder to pull off in person.
I’m not sure that strategy nerds really were meant to mate. Certainly, my first 25 years of obsession with such games seemed to suggest that real love was incompatible with imaginary war. My teenaged visits to The Compleat Strategist in Manhattan bore this out. The floor-to-ceiling stacks of boxed games offering chances to reenact military campaigns of every era—from the Sumerians to the cyborgs—did not reek of romance. They suggested, instead, pale skin, late nights fueled with Diet Coke, and long bouts of celibacy. But these games were nothing compared to the glass cases full of military miniatures—Swiss pikemen facing Austrian knights, Napoleonic grenadiers confronting Spanish guerrillas, freakish chess sets made out of figures from Dr. Who—each lovingly painted with a tiny brush by the kind of guy who…doesn’t get out much. The kind of red-eyed fifty-something guy who I’d see hanging around the store, in the middle of a weekday, arguing with the manager that the World War I game he’d bought was weighted against the Serbians, and he deserved a refund. I should have taken this as a warning.
It was already too late. At age 9, I’d decided that I was meant to be a chess genius—having watched Bobby Fischer play Boris Spassky on TV, and wolfed down some romantic histories of chess my father brought home, gamely trying to cater to his nattering, weirdo son. (“We brought the wrong kid home from the hospital,” he used to say, shaking his head, whenever he’d hear from the teacher that I’d spent my recess reading a science encyclopedia. In Queens Catholic schools, you get in trouble for pulling stunts like that.) I could think of no figure more dashing than Emmanuel Lasker hunched over a chessboard in some dusky European café, wreathed in cigar smoke like Jove in the clouds, demolishing all comers. For a skinny kid who insisted on wearing striped overalls and a Choo-Choo Charlie hat right up to the brink of puberty, this was heady stuff.
Unsatisfied with simply playing chess—I dreamed of greatness—I decided to reenact the kind of spectacle that marked other chess geniuses: A simultaneous tournament. Somehow I convinced the children’s librarian to let me use the place, and lured five other kids from Immaculate Conception to play against me, with the promise of snacks. I set up boards with each of them, and walked from one to another, sniffing thoughtfully and doing my best impression of a late-19th century genius. Of course, I mostly lost.
The thing is, I was good at every aspect of chess—except at playing it. Like a modern day neocon military analyst, I could never think more than two moves ahead. Instead, I’d get so excited about the chance to move a powerful piece and make a devastating attack, I never had the patience to predict how my opponent might react. I guess I expected him just to fall over dead. As years went on, I learned that getting good at chess meant losing. A lot. To other guys. This was more than I could stand, and so I stopped playing—except against the primitive chess computer which my parents, after much pleading, bought me. I unwrapped it on Christmas Eve, eager to hone my skills without humiliation… only to figure out by New Year’s that my computer was cheating. Whenever I started to win, it would make my pieces vanish from the board. This taught me certain life lessons which I prefer not to think about.
So I stocked up on board games—scorning the painted miniature Swiss and Dalleks as “nerdy”—and lovingly laid out the enormous battle maps on my bedroom floor. It started with “Rise and Decline of the Third Reich,” an Avalon Hill classic whose advanced game let you play six different protagonists of World War II, and conduct advanced diplomacy… in my case, against myself. That game, like most of the others, had a rules book some 36 pages long—and I could never find another soul willing to learn those rules, much less to waste his early teen years sliding little cardboard chits around hexagons. Playing alone encouraged me to cultivate a mild version of multiple personality disorder, as I tried to “fool” myself about when and where Operation Barbarossa would begin, and “negotiated” between Petain and Mussolini in my underwear. Had the Internet existed back then, I certainly could have found other near-sighted brainiacs, played them online, and been propositioned by Belgian pedophiles. But all that awaited the march of Progress.
Why couldn’t I find anyone to play against? I didn’t live in that kind of neighborhood. Indeed, the guy who has been my best friend since I was seven had to take me aside in 7th grade and inform me that it just wasn’t cool to listen exclusively to classical music…. And certainly not to run around admitting it.
“Why not?” I demanded. “It’s superior.” (My first 18 years could be summed up in terms of TV sitcoms—as a young Niles Crane trapped on the set of “That 70s Show.”)
He stared at with that blank incomprehension with which I now view modern dance. “They’re going to think you’re a… fag!”
I parried back that I failed to see the connection between complex melodic structures and… whatever it was that “fags” did, apart from dressing like Indian chiefs and bikers.
“People are going to kick your ass!” he said at last. “I almost want to kick your ass.”
I caved. I started buying Kiss records and “hanging out,” drinking domestic beer from the can while he practiced with his garage band. Of course, the bass player and the drummer still wanted to kick my ass.
But I didn’t kick the habit. Instead, I upped my dosage. I moved from “Third Reich” to “Guns of August,” a game as futile and funless, I think, as the actual war. (At least that meant it was accurate.) I fed my Cold War paranoia by playing “Invasion America,” which posited hordes of invaders landing at every port and pouring north across the border. (Good thing that scenario never came to pass, now isn’t it?) I went back to the root of our current problems, and tried to reverse the Reformation by playing “A Mighty Fortress”—the only board game in history with a “theological debate” table where a roll of the dice might get your Jesuit burned at the stake.
In search of something more intense (like an opponent) I made my first solo trips into Manhattan. As Queens kids, we viewed “The City” with all the anxiety of home-schooled Midwestern Mormons; it seemed to us like a foreign country full of tattooed cannibals. Of course, since this was the 1970s, we weren’t wholly wrong. But I shook off my mother’s agora-xeno-phobic pleas, bought a bag of tokens, and started traveling once a week to “play test” at SPI—the Xanadu of wargames. For over a year, I played against a group of older opponents, testing what was for me the perfect game: Called “Empires of the Middle Ages,” it included excommunications, rule by feudal lords, and Crusades—all the things which fired my youthful Catholic imagination, after 13 years of gently-strummed “Kumbaya.” And I had plenty of opponents: smart older teenagers who went to Hunter College High, divorced guys who’d studied Medieval history and had nothing to do on a Tuesday night, and bespectacled game developers who would take my frenzied suggestions seriously. (To this day, I am proud to have pointed out that Venice was never controlled by the Holy Roman Emperor; they changed that part of the game. Behold my legacy.)
Of course, when it came to playing, I still really sucked—indeed, my strategy nearly sucked the air out of the room, as I made bold and futile attacks against much stronger opponents, counting on triumphing through “surprise.” By the second week, no one was surprised, though most of them were exasperated—especially by my incessant verbal defense of the worst aspects (my favorites) of medieval Catholic practice: witch-burnings, Templars, abbots who wielded maces (since Canon law forbade them to carry a sword). I may even at some point (memory fails me) have stuck up for the Plague….
The company, sadly, closed before they could expel me from their ranks. But the game appeared, and I’m still proud that if you buy it (used, on Ebay), my name appears in the credits, on one of those many pages my friends would never read. Now I play my games on a high-powered computer that doesn’t cheat. And I still mostly lose. But I do so quietly, with the volume turned way down low….
Comments
Nothing worse than those pesky imams preaching heresy throughout the levant.
I prefer the Byzantines myself, less chance of excommunication.
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boy that post took me back in time-- i had stacks of SPI and AH game
which i played solo too. 30 years on and my parents even now
dutifully dust boxes of my mediavel miniatures, which in the course of
too many moves to recount, I have shamelessly abandoned…
Damn, those were fun days! Sure beats being an adult…
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A great piece. I have never gotten into the online games, but friends and I still get together to play war games, and two of us are even married!
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Mr. Zmirak needs to be excommunicated for his take on “The Guns of August. It was a great game especially as all you had to do to win the Great War was simply not attack since the defenders had such an advantage. I played it with one of my fellow nerds from high school, who like me evolved past Warhammer, Risk and Axis and Allies. I would like to think my Brusilov defensive would have saved the Tsar and kept the Soviets from coming to power. I still think of those Avalon Hill games when I listen to REM’s “World Leader Pretend.”
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“my strategy nearly sucked the air out of the room, as I made bold and futile attacks against much stronger opponents, counting on triumphing through ‘surprise.’”
Kind of reminds me of people who constantly bluff in poker, thinking the suprise pair of 2s
will beat an obvious flush.
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Please forward my condolences to your parents. I have a son very similar to you, and I can empathize.
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As a Washington area bachelor until my late 30s, I enjoyed many marvels of abusing my free time: collecting and drinking burgundy, smoking cigars, long dinners with a multitude of attractive companions, reading five books a week, rowing out of the Potomac Boat Club, concerts at the Phillips Collection, going to every choral event in the area, leisurely drives in my sports car (a Miata, I was a poor bachelor), taking evening courses, and cooking gourmet meals. I also was a Daily communicant at the 7:30 a.m. Mass at my church.
It all changed when I met the Miss that became my Mrs. And she demanded my conscious and emotional engagement. That demand curve has now exponentially scaled into similar demands from our ever-growing progeny. In topology we’d call this an n-dimensional expanding form with perfectly mapable symmetry, and in economics we’d just call it an unbounded exponential demand function.
In other words: kiss those games goodbye John. And get all the books you’ll need for the rest of your life read.
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I second Mr. Ward’s comments. Computer games are for single men with time on their hands.
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The other alternative, of course, is to find a woman who appreciates your games. Granted, I play Medieval II and Civ IV like a girl (building up my culture! developing trade! hey, why is your army in my city?). Still, I figure any guy who can put up with a recovering WoW addict (I went cold turkey...twice) deserves some indulgence on the strategy game front.
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Having spent my adolescence more in the pursuit of the art of “how to seduce a member of the opposite sex”, a skill that still keeps on giving, John’s recollections give me hope that my youngest son, who displays interests more in line with John’s, can grow up to become a decent human being.
Now with respect to seeing a parade of hot looking young girls being paraded through my house, I guess I’ll have to give up on that one.
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I minor quibble I know but, “Midwestern Mormons”....? Spoken like a true Gothamite, no matter one’s prosaic Queens connection. I know it might be difficult to break away from the Saul Steinberg School of Geography but the Mormons aint been from the midwest since Treasure-huntin Joe Smith leapt out of the second floor of that jail in Corinth, chased by some irritated fathers and husbands of Missouri.
The Mormon’s redoubt is in the province known as the “Intermountain West”........a place west of Colorado and bumping hard up on the Sierras.
This , of course fails to register in any history of the Sieges of Metz and so it was likely an honest mistake but consider yourself duly informed
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@ Mr. Sabin,
Maybe Herr Zmirak meant the Amish(pronounced with a long /a/).
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There’s not an electric Mormon fence around Utah, you know.
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Someone send John a copy of “Marriage: A Path to Sanctity” real quick.
Or if need be I will.
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Re Rayne,
“There’s not an electric Mormon Fence around Utah, you know” No, but perhaps there should be. Now now...just kidding, but only slightly.
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I love military history. Perhaps it comes from growing up with a brother given to (pre-computer) war games (yes, those hand-painted lead pieces) and hearing about Clausewitz et al from the age of six.
I’d rather ponder the tactical genius of Alexander or Nelson with a man (or indeed woman), than the cut of a wedding dress.
Yet, by all accounts, I’m a very feminine female.
We must resist social stereotyping.
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Actually, there is another Reformation game in which you can burn people at the stake:"Here I Stand” by GMT Games. It just came out a couple years ago.
Great piece, by the way. Very amusing, especially to someone who still plays the board games - AH may be gone, but its successors are still cranking out games.
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Wow, Avalon Hill, now that’s a great company. Played D-Day with Smitty back in 62, and progressed to Panzer Leader with my brother who was always required to be Commie Marshall, in the defense of the Great Homeland; me, I was Heinz Guderian, sometimes Von Manstein. Now the wife plays with the DS, whatever that is, and for me, I’m reading Edith Stein’s Finite and Eternal Being, thanks to the Carmelites, and I’ve got a headache, which will be rendered harmless by two fingers of Buffalo Trace and a decent cigar!
Great stuff Zmirak!
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And John, following on Mr. Ward’s testimony, hopefully I may be permitted to paraphrase an old saying from the Twenty Years:
“Molti bambini, molto amore”.
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An interesting post, Mr. Zmirak. Do you happen to have stairs in your house? :V
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Another great game is the “Europa Universalis” series. Although the pope is pretty impotent, at least it’s good to be the Holy Roman Emperor in the newest, 3rd edition of the series. Colonial adventures count for a lot but you can also crusade and defend the gates of Vienna.
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I prefer the Micrsoft Combat fighter series of simulations.
I hear that many single women play the Sims online…
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...you heard wrong.
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I do love Europa Universalis, although the latest update looked to me as if they might have ruined the game, so I didn’t buy it.
Are these games for single guys only? I guess I’ll find out. I do hope that married life will never entail some time alone. Surely, there’s got to be some down time, while the lady is off at antique auctions, shopping at Whole Foods (or better, farmers’ markets), or getting a pedicure.... There will always be SOME time left over for war....
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Oops, I meant “never rule out” time alone....
As for the girls out there who love wargames, good on ya! My gal likes to watch football. And she can’t stand opera. So while she’s watching a UT game, I expect I’ll be in the other room conquering Kurdistan, or watching a DVD of the Magic Flute.
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Philistine! If you had any culture you’d do table top and paint your armies and make the scenery yourself.
Being a child of the 80s, Warhammer was the game of choice for us and for a sci-fi game it has very paleo themes (and pseudo-Latin). I actually ran into someone who was into “the hobby” as well at my old job and we have a small group to occasionaly get together, drink beer, criticise each other’s armies and kick each other’s ass.
I’m in my mid-30s and still like playing with dolls, uh, playing open-ended strategy games with a pleasing aesthetic. LOL
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Medieval II looks pretty, but it just doesn’t have the heart of the original Medieval Total War.
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My brother (7 1/2 years older) was a total devotee of war games and lead soldiers. To occupy this annoying younger sister, he would have me play against him (Avalon Hill! All those colorful,tiny cardboard squares! Game boards covered in hexagons laid over battle fields!) - I always lost, naturally. We also spent a lot of time painting those lead figures. To say that the other little girls didn’t understand me is putting it mildly. We grew up on Staten Island, and what a treat it was to take the ferry to Manhattan and go shopping at the Compleat Strategist. Our parents would give him money for new clothes, and he would return with a new game and a few books under his arm - clothes be damned! And all this time, I thought we were the only nerds who spent the ‘70’s this way.
I would like to add that my husband and I are complete opposites, and, despite this, are approaching our 20th wedding anniversary. A well-developed ability to feign interest and a refusal to ridicule the other’s hobbies have been key!
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Milan destroying the Papal States? Some sort of neo-Guelph approach? Destroy the Papal States to save them? Neo-Guelph nation building? You shock me sir. Excommunicate indeed.
You neo-Guelphs will be the end of the party yet.
It is a small mercy that the internet did not exist for gaming during my college years (late 80’s).
Instead we wasted our time on AH Games: Conquest of the Empire, Axis&Allies;, etc.
The chit based games you love were reserved only for the initiated… and were definitely two notches more nerdy.
The secret to gaming after marriage is: children.
Courtship is all about you and your promessa. Raising children is a joint spiritual venture that unites you with your wife in such a way that the ordinary daily activities are jointly experienced and lived; at the end of the day you are both free to reflect and recharge your spiritual batteries in individual pursuits.
It is the natural order of child-rearing; anything else is modern-day drivel.
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Judging by the comments even traditional conservatives contain a large number of imperialists and internationalist busybodies. Is it ever possible for an American to simply say “its none of business”? Georgia and Russia must work this out on their own The only interest the USA has is keeping on good terms with 120 million Russians and their thousands of nuclear weapons.
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Whoops! I should have written:
...American to simply say “its none of OUR business”
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All I can say about Russia and Georgia in this context, Pablo, is that if you’re playing Novgorod you’d better make sure you have good fortifications and solidly upgraded citadels before the Mongols arrive--and make sure to crush them at least 10 turns before the Timurids crash onto the scene. Actually, the player with the best chance of fighting either Asiatic horde is England, believe it or not. Those longbows have much longer range than the Mongol or Timurid mounted archers, and you can massacre them before they even reach the stakes your archers have planted.
Put that in your pipe, President Bush, and smoke it.
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The sheer contentment in sucking down coffee while playing a 4, 8 or even 10 hour strategy game session is rivaled for me only by the embarrassment at the end of it in knowing that I could have much better spent that time in, say, Bible study, finishing the rebuild on the windsor v8 in the garage, brushing up on my Gaelige or even just taking a bicycle ride. It has been like this for me though since L’Empereur, Genghis Khan and Uncharted Waters were released on the Nintendo /Super Nintendo when I was a boy. While I’m always susceptible to it, this problem is worst in times of physical illness or low spirits. I have a sort of sanguine foreboding that some genius in Japan will in a near, higher tech future get the combination of life, war, sports, sex, religion, politics, fishing and flight simulation just right in a single game and all with amazing graphics, at which point the pleasure/pain ratio of keeping up a life in the real world will make it tough to do anything but sit in front of the computer screen, drooling and compulsively clicking away. I am hoping to find a woman and start a family before such a thing happens.
Now, all of that said, what I like best in these games is to play the part of the spider king, Louis XI. The first medieval was for cavalry enthusiasts but the grinding, siege based style of M2 suits my strategy better. I build up the economy and population in a few isolated provinces and use the wealth to play the other nations against each other, all the while trying to avoid wars myself (aside from the occasional boatload of highland swordsmen sent on crusade to attack some Levantine province, which is then traded for a pile of gold or a strategic point in mainland Europe). The goal to me isn’t to capture 100 provinces, which is a recipe for a migraine, but to continually be getting stronger and occupying choke points as your neighbors get weaker. In my last game, Scotland with its 7 or 8 provinces had the the strongest economy, most advanced military technology, highest population of any nation, controlled the college of cardinals and all of the most important trade resources while its neighbors, to my own evil satisfaction, were fighting over heaps of rubble with poorly armed, late dark age units. There’s probably something to be said about how, whether and to what degree a person’s conduct in these games reflects their actual selves.
The Danes and Scots do kick everyone else’s ass in the game, and that’s for sure, anyway.
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I had thought my post on Georgia had been deleted, but I just put it in the wrong place!
I played AH’s “1914” as a kid and never got more than 2 other boys to play me. So, I had to shift over to “Risk”. Later, Girls and sports came along. But I still love the “1914” map - a great rendering of France/Belgium
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1914 was an outstanding game, one of the last that I learned (as the games ane/or my life got too complicated in the late 70s’s).
Mr. Z—your piece reminds me of my much-missed older brother, who introduced me to wargaming and gave me only one piece of dating advice, which he’d come by the hard way—if your date asks what you are thinking about in a quiet moment, do NOT respond: “I was wondering if the Jesuits really put a hit out on Wallenstein”.
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