Fifteen busy days away

I’m only now writing up the account of my trip across the big blue briny because I came back with a persistent cold, to a dead computer and a union on strike.

But I did have a good time while I was Over There!

First stop was the Connections-UK conference at Brunel University, September 9-11. I arrived a day early because I cross eight time zones and am reliably only semi-conscious when arriving at Heathrow Airport. (I can never sleep on airplanes, just doze a little, so I watched Barry Lyndon for the umpteenth time as well as Army of Shadows for the first time, and bits and pieces of some other films they had stashed in the back of the seat of the person in front of me.) Thankfully all I had to do is go to the new semi-outside bus terminal and wait for the U3 Uxbridge, and 20 minutes later I was at the place I was staying for the week, very basic room but directly across the road from Brunel University campus. I had dinner with David Burden at a nice pub by the canal and we talked game design.

The next day was the beginning of Connections-UK, and after an introductory talk we separated into “old hands” and “new chums”. I went with the former to play three moves of Jim Wallman’s Green and Pleasant Land, a wargame we had played in very altered form at Connections-UK in 2018. After seven years some of the events in the earlier game had come to pass, while others had faded from plausibility, and the focus of the game was less kinetic/military and more on getting departments of the UK government to cooperate with each other in controlling a stream of varied artificial and natural disasters. I think by and large we managed to do that, though my department wasn’t called on to do much, and Albion lived to see another day.

After lunch (sandwiches) an interesting talk by David Banks on the types of knowledge that wargaming can deliver. Basic message was that certain claims are made about wargaming but there is no clear universal way of determining their value, so we fall back on intuition, emotional narratives and community norms to reinforce what we think the game has demonstrated. In theory, wargames should be treated as experiments with stringent controls and multiple iterations, hoping to establish a general law through the standard scientific method. In practice that cannot be done because of the number of variables and interactions possible, even in a modest and simple game, but they do have some value and actionable knowledge and therefore success… if they are treated in ways like single case analysis and discovering causal mechanisms (using games, why did this event unfold as it did, and what things came together to make it so?) and exploring organizational modelling (gathering the multiple outcomes of games into a single framework or scheme to create a set of plausible possible outcomes). Even with these alternative methods, we need to remember that wargame payoffs are more theoretical than empirical because they are based on multiple interactions of objective and subjective models and things – this humbles us to remember the limits of wargaming.

We had social gaming in the evenings, and I brought a trusty set of Guerrilla Checkers with me to teach, along with a new game I’ve created called Gravel that uses much the same equipment as a set of the former (and which I will publish as soon as I am happy with it). Both aroused interest and perhaps a little cerebral disturbance.

The next day I attended a session on “insights from historical wargaming” and there were some great research presentations on historical wargaming practices, e.g. Royal Navy and Imperial Russian Navy wargaming before the Great War, lessons from Vietnam era counterinsurgency games, and using games to explore historical incidents as case studies.

I could not attend the second annual Game Jam event as I needed time to set up my stuff for the afternoon Games Fair on both days. They gave me a whole room to myself and called it “The Brian Train Experience” and I set out demo copies of QUICK Junior with the new map, the Scaleable Urban Simulation (brigade level Latvia module, not the divisional Taiwan module as I thought the former would be of more interest – there were quite a few new games being demonstrated that were set in the Baltic States) and 91 DSSB.

The latter two got some interest, but we did sit down and have a few good turns of QUICK Junior – in the photo are Pete Sizer, Pijus Kruminas, Natalia Zwarts and James Moulding. They all agreed that the hex + locations method for mapping was a good way to demonstrate the complexity, changeability and channeling behaviour of urban terrain. I was glad of the vote of confidence.

After presentations on the uses of commercial gaming and its professional uses (Fred Serval was supposed to attend but there were labour disruptions connected to the wobbly Macron government so he couldn’t leave Paris in time) and using serious games to explore and reinforce community resilience, the peak event on the third day was Mark Herman delivering the second Peter Perla Memorial Lecture. Mark is one of those rare folks who has had considerable success and delivered some great innovations in both the commercial and professional wargaming fields, and his remarkable speaking skills and communication style were on display. Some good quotes:

• “Wargames are to modelling and simulation what anthropology is to mathematics. If wargames had a patron saint, it would be Jane Goodall, not James Clerk Maxwell.”
• “An insight is a human participant reaching a first order conclusion based on experiences and information uniquely produced in the wargame.”
• “Keep it simple, smartly.” (though that’s not him, it’s from James Dunnigan)

Some practical suggestions he had for wargames presented in a professional setting:

• keep them manual: written rules have visible grammatical bugs which can be corrected and modified quickly and simply, unlike the hidden coding bugs in a digital game – likewise, revision and adjustment of parameters and assumptions is a lot easier
• have a solitaire mode (with a simple manual “AI” bot) where a senior person can work on the game out of the view of other people, so they can play it alone and experiment without having to defend what they are doing
• rapid design prototypes and quick modifications of off-the-shelf items can get you to the “85% there” stage quickly
• a video playthrough that demonstrates how the game works can be gold, to people who learn that way (personally, I don’t but fair enough).

On the second Games Fair session I didn’t have any takers (many people were leaving early because of the Tube workers’ strike that week) so I had a little time to go around and see some other people’s games. David Burden had Tooru’s Fire, an interesting one set in Estonia that focused on the interface between urban and rural areas, and I got to talk to Des Fitzgerald who had an interesting urban conflict game called Fish City that focused on the different stages of the urban battle… I left him with a copy of my EXURB, on the same subject.

It was great to see old friends (who are all one year older, how does that happen) and make some new acquaintances, I really enjoyed this one and I do like Brunel University as a venue for it. It’s not sure whether next year’s event will be at Brunel but I hope it will be.

Friday I went to Richard Barbrook’s flat in Stratford – if the weather was good we were to shoot matchsticks at tin soldiers HG Wells style, but it rained so we stayed indoors and played The Chair Is Empty, the new name (thanks Roger Leroux) for Strongman. A good play and some good suggestions for improvement.

Saturday I went out to Hampstead to see my stepmother’s new flat – she is 85 and finally settled in her own place, a small but very nice place that has a support person in the building and is in a great part of town. She and my stepsister and I had lunch at the Spaniard’s Inn (forget what I ate but did have sticky toffee pudding for the first time in my life) and went for a walk on Hampstead Heath, something I have been meaning to do since the first Connections-UK in 2013 when I was staying in KCL college digs out near there but never had time to do.

Sunday I had lunch with Charles Vasey at Ziani’s, a Venetian Italian restaurant in Chelsea. A wonderful place to eat and talk for hours, though this was the third time in five days he had had lunch there as Mark Herman and David Isby had blown through town and wanted to see him. Had roast lamb that was very good but don’t let Charles pick the wine (though it was also very good)!

Monday it was time to shift to Turin. I had to cross London to get to Stansted Airport for a Ryanair flight there, thankfully the Tube strike was over so it was relatively easy to get there hours and hours early but still I don’t think I ever want to use that airport again – true cattle barn and thankfully I had Fast Track so went through security pretty quickly, but still next time it will be British Airways from Gatwick which would have been quite a bit easier. I got into Turin late and Giaime Alonge met me at the airport and took me back to his place, I would be staying in the same apartment block as his family.

Tuesday I went to visit the National Museum of the Risorgimento with Giaime, he and Giuseppe Tamba are working with the Museum to publish Houses of Cards/ Castelli di Carta, a simple card game I designed on the Grande Brigantaggio period in southern Italy after the Risorgimento. It will likely be sold through their gift shop and might be used in some schools, since a history professor (Dr. Carmine Pinto) is adding a playbook-like component to the game that explains a lot behind the people and organizations depicted in the game. The museum is really good, besides the usual uniforms, guns portraits and swords many of the exhibits are from popular media of the time – mass-produced and lithographed material commenting on and satirizing or boosting the issues of the day as Italy struggled towards becoming a single nation state.

Here’s another item for the “game as journalism” list: a game of Goose centred on events leading up to the Risorgimento.

Wednesday I had lunch with Riccardo Fassone and Stefano Ruzza, both colleagues of Giaime at the University of Turin. Stefano is in the Political Science department and often uses games, including A Distant Plain, in his classroom. We were at a genuine trattoria, one of the few left in the city, and I had fresh casarecce con chiangoli (pasta with meat sauce made with boar, something I had never had before – like pork of course but stronger and darker). After that I gave a lecture to a mixed class of interdisciplinary MA students about the elements of game design used for games on irregular war and how these differ (or should) from games on “conventional” wars. Some very intelligent questions from the students! Later Mauro Mola, a student in the department who is working towards a PhD interviewed me for his project on game designers and design. We had dinner at the Piazza Vittorio Veneto by the River Po, I had tajarin con funghi (local pasta specialty).

Thursday I spent the morning playing through Mauro’s game Bella Ciao: From Strikes to Insurrection in Torino, which he has designed as part of his PhD thesis and which will be published in a larger box together with my smaller Turin-area resistance games, Orange Gobi and Operation Canuck. A very good game for a first effort, I tried but could not make much headway as the Socialists. In the afternoon we had a public game event at the University – a “ludotheque” to show off some of the games they have collected in a room dedicated to using board games as part of instruction. I played Colonial Twilight with Riccardo, Giaime and Stefano while some other students had fun poking around with Guerrilla Checkers, Gravel and High-Rise. A consigliere from the city government showed up, he had been invited to meet me – Turin has an annual board gaming event called “TOPlay” and I suppose he had something to do with organizing or popularizing it – and Enrica Brichetto from the Museo Diffuso della Resistenza dropped in too. Finally, we had a late supper – I had rabbit!

I didn’t get much sleep as I had to get up early to catch the train to Lausanne – there was only one train going directly there from Milan and only a 15 minute window between the train arriving from Turin to catch it. But the high speed train was bang on time and I caught some fantastic scenery of the Alps as we went north and then turned east (I think I also caught my cold on the train too, as by Monday I was feeling unwell. And I am sure you can find better pictures of the Alps than this one I took).

In Lausanne I stayed at a nice small hotel right by Lake Geneva with a view of the lake, there was great summer weather all weekend. I met Nicolas Pensyres again after first meeting him at Connections-UK, and we went to dinner with his wife Sonia (good chicken cordon bleu).

The next day was the first day of Wargame Connections Suisse, held at the Centre General Guisan about a mile from my hotel. Walking there I saw this temple, placed in the middle of a park.

We had a panel of people, including me, talking about urban warfare and wargaming, and then adjourned to have lunch (small tartlike things) and play! Again, I had brought all three demos with me (and talked about them in my presentation, as well as EXURB and Dislocated) but we ended up playing QUICK Junior both days because it is easy and fast to teach.

Giuseppe Tamba on the right in this picture, he had to leave early because there was going to be massive strikes in Italy the next day. The Centre d’Histoire et de Prospective Militaires which organized the event gave me some nice books and a bottle of wine as a thank you gift! Later we went out to a Vietnamese buffet restaurant by the lake, it was great.

Soon it was time to say goodbye, and the summer weather turned rainy and cool. I took the train to Geneva and the airport, Swiss trains are indeed a marvel… clean, quiet and dead on time. Flight home was in two stages Geneva-Montreal-Victoria and I watched Antonioni’s Blow Up among bits of other films (2001 Space Odyssey, Les bonees femmes, Sam Bahadur and an episode of Barry which is still genius TV) with a sore throat to keep me company.

I got home to a dead computer (old iMac from 2008-9 whose hard drive finally failed, have since replaced it with a newer used iMac from 2017) and a union on strike, so the day after I went on the picket lines, congested and nine time zones out of whack!

All in all it was a good trip but very busy, I was quite tired and run down by the end of it… one more chapter in the “jobby” saga.