Rob Zacny

Episode 376: Underrepresented Theaters and Conflicts

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Three Moves Ahead 376:

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Underrepresented Theaters and Conflicts
Rob, Bruce, and Troy "I was named after a siege" Goodfellow get together to talk about battles that just don't get enough love. Our Patreon donors voted and decided that this week the panel was to discuss theaters, battles, and conflicts that haven't been given a fair shake in the strategy gaming community. Rob and Troy have their hobby horses but Bruce takes exception to the question itself.


 

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Hello Bruce.

 

Recognizability is just one of the factors. Those wargames about Russo-Polish wars are ignored in most of the Eastern Europe. Just as, say, AGEOD's Revolution Under Siege. Because people here do not care about wargames. They care more about good Nam movie like Full Metal Jacket than obscure complex game about Russia you can't play without reading manual. There are thematic preferences, yes. For some reason people in Russia like postapocalypse and fantasy. There are also genre preferences, people all over Eastern Europe like turn-based strategy games but usually not wargames.

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"Stuff wot people like" really resonated with me. I would perhaps phrase it as "know": Gary Grisby's War in the East and DC Barbarossa might be fabulous games, but as a kid who grew up in Western Europe I heard very little about that side of the war, so whenever I try playing, e.g., DCB, I simply don't know enough about the units, armies' mo, commanders' names, etc.

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The only computer game that does the Boer war on an operational scale that I know of is the Ageod title 'Pride of Nations' which has it as a discrete scenario. Although it is strictly military and does not go into the political aspects of the war Rob was talking about. The game also has an Indian Mutiny scenario which is another forgotten theatre.

 

The representation of the China theatre in WW2 bears out Bruce's theory that there are actually quite a lot of Chinese games that represent this part of the war (as well as innumerable Chinese TV shows and movies). Language and unfamiliarity mean there are fewer English language productions, which usually need some kind of non-Chinese hook or reference to get the punters into it ( the most recent example I saw was a book on the battle of Shanghai that has the subtitle 'Stalingrad on the Yangtze'). 

 

Which is unfortunate as there is a fascinating setup there along the lines of a COIN game where you have two strained allies, the KMT and the CCP who have to co-operate against the invasion, but also have their own agenda of eliminating the other. There is a board game War of the Suns that does look at this tension to an extent and represents the different sides, but goes into terrifying detail on different warlords and cliques that would benefit from a degree of simplification for ignorant western audiences.

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I would really like to see Vietnam handled at the political and or theater level. Vietnam 1965 was ok but I'd like to see a game put you in the shoes of LBJ,Nixon, Westmoreland, or Macnamara. I can't think of any PC games that have done so in recent memory.

 

I'd also love to see a PC adaptation for the Iran-Iraq war. That war is fascinating at so many levels and is a rare example of a "modern" war with "modern" technology being fought at a near total war level over an extended period of time. Most modern wars are either COIN or a big country beating up on a little one. Iran-Iraq is modern technology and roughly equal opponents with some really interesting political dynamics. The problem with that game is there's no "good guy" so no one wants to touch it because there's no one anyone wants to play as. 

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In the podcast the politics of the situation was often a neglected part of any strategic game. Even in WW2 the politics between the US and the UK as allies and the even the interpersonal politics of the commanders is often overlooked. 

 

I have some personal connections with overlooked conflicts. Three great uncles were at Gallipoli and a grandfather who was on Moubatten's staff for the later part of the Burma campaign. My grandfather was also in the British WW2 'intervention' in Greece where he helped to organise the evacuation.

 

The podcast with Simon Bolivar is:  Revolutions  (iTunes) by Mike Duncan - there are other revolutions covered.

 

The Phillipines conflict with the US against the insurgents was brutal. The Wikipedia entry (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Philippine–American_War#Atrocities) has more on this than the relatively staid "Lessons from a Successful Counterinsurgency: The Philippines, 1899-1902" (PDF ). Movie/War Trivia. The thesis that Colonel Kurtz wrote in "Apocalypse Now: Directors Cut", in the file being read by Captain Willard on the riverine boat,  was on the US counter insurgency in the Phillipines. This thesis may have lead to Kurtz's methods becoming "unsound".

 

My vote for the most unrepresented conflict related to WW2 Japan USSR - the 2 battles of Khalkhin Gol - there was a game on the battle in a monthly magazine in the time of but not "Strategy and Tactics". 

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16 hours ago, greywhite said:

I have some personal connections with overlooked conflicts. Three great uncles were at Gallipoli and a grandfather who was on Moubatten's staff for the later part of the Burma campaign. My grandfather was also in the British WW2 'intervention' in Greece where he helped to organise the evacuation.

 

 

Gallipoli the movie totally holds up as well by the way. 

 

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There are two types of people in this world, those that relate to stories made real to them through films or forefathers and those who learn about the first Sino Japanese war on the friday and spend £40 on 1/2400 Chinese and Japanese 1890s battleships on the saturday. I'm not sure it's just conflicts that are highly game-able, i think some of us are just attracted to things that seem exotic and off the beaten track to us.

 

OCS Burma is a fantastic Burma game

 

My pick for an under represented topic would be Warring States China. 

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In terms of relative historical importance, I'd say pretty much any non-European or Western related era/region/event will be underrepresented. 

 

I have yet to see a Mongol Total War or China Total War despite their rich martial histories.

 

Sadly these areas don't hold the same interest as western topics like crusades and medieval Europe. 

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I like Gallipoli. It has the same Victorians-vs-misbehaving-pure-hearts kinds of themes as Weir's other movies: (Picnic at Hanging Rock, Cars that Ate Paris, Truman Show, Witness, etc.) The running is an effective way to show the Great War squeezing broad human talents into specialist roles required by trench warfare, penny-wise-pound-foolish selflessness (trading places), Australian pastoral life vs. English unconcern use for the products of that life, etc. My biggest complaint is that the Ottoman defense is portrayed as heartless and monolithic when it was a much more interesting battle, but the movie isn't really about the battle.

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Bruce, what single volume (in English) would you recommend on the Polish-Soviet war? It's been on my radar for a while as something that deserves some attention and this episode pushed it up the priority list a bit. 

 

On another note, I'll second OCS Burma as being excellent. It's just incredible that a single system can do such a good job representing so many diverse theaters. Well worth a look, and it even works as a good intro game to the series. 

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Norman Davies (author of Europe: A History and The Isles) wrote a great book called White Eagle, Red Star that was reprinted in 2003. Well worth picking up in paperback.

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I was really disappointed that Bruce kept putting a damper on the discussion by pointing out "that wouldn't sell" or "that would be too hard to research".  The discussion was about "underrepresented theaters and conflicts", not whether games on them would be difficult to research or sell.  

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On 12/18/2016 at 10:11 AM, Jerry59 said:

I was really disappointed that Bruce kept putting a damper on the discussion by pointing out "that wouldn't sell" or "that would be too hard to research".  The discussion was about "underrepresented theaters and conflicts", not whether games on them would be difficult to research or sell.  

Meh. It's Bruce's on the podcast to be contrariness, I think. That's part of being Bruce.

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