by Maurice Suckling (Original)
In his essay on the board game Twilight Struggle (TS) from Pat Harrigan and Matthew G. Kirschenbaum’s 2016 collection Zones of Control: perspectives on wargaming, Jeremy Antley notes that “wargames are synthesized reflections of the past situated in the present mindset of their creation,” and concludes that TS is “in effect, both a secondary source about Cold War history and a primary source about modern reflection on the Cold War experience. Because of this, Twilight Struggle, and by extension the wargame genre as a whole, holds tremendous promise as an investigative source for use in historical scholarship and pedagogy” (Location 10727). In the same collection, designer Ted S. Raicer, comments on the nature of Card Driven Game (CDG) systems and how “having a hand of cards allowed for a certain level of advance planning, while lack of knowledge of the opponent’s hand introduce an element of fog of war and the random nature of the draw Clausewitz’s ‘friction’ (‘In war everything is simple, but the simple things are difficult’)” (Location 3852). I write in support of these notions, not only to further explore them inside the design of TS and their ubiquity and applicability in other game designs, but also to consider the broader ramifications of this line of academic enquiry.
