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The Art of Wargaming: A Guide for Professionals and Hobbyists

Peter Perla

3.87 · Rating details · 69 ratings · 13 reviews

Traces the history of war games, looks at how they have been used by the Navy War College, and defines the fundamental principles of designing, playing and evaluating war games.

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Hardcover, 364 pages

Published March 1st 1990 by US Naval Institute Press

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Jul 12, 2012 Johnny rated it liked it

Shelves: game-criticism, game-industry

Peter Perla stands in a fairly unique position. A veteran hobby gamer, he also served in several positions which enabled him to observe and consult upon professional wargaming. A perennial guest speaker at game conventions and various war colleges themselves, he straddles the fence between an intellectual hobby and an analytical approach to military doctrine and policy. I read a portion of this book when it was first published, but largely skipped over the portions describing professional Peter Perla stands in a fairly unique position. A veteran hobby gamer, he also served in several positions which enabled him to observe and consult upon professional wargaming. A perennial guest speaker at game conventions and various war colleges themselves, he straddles the fence between an intellectual hobby and an analytical approach to military doctrine and policy. I read a portion of this book when it was first published, but largely skipped over the portions describing professional wargaming and analysis. I am an unabashed hobbyist. I’ve learned a lot about history and military doctrine since I started playing wargames, but I’ve never had any desire to be part of the formal, professional side.

Recently, I picked up Perla’s The Art of Wargaming to adjust my 50 minute presentation on the history of wargaming for my History of Games class at DePaul University. The class is divided into an Ancients unit (Egypt, The Game of Senet as paradigm for Race Games, a lab and analysis session on Senet, and a brief overview of the history of Race Games to the present), a Medieval Unit (Iberia, Chess as paradigm for Strategy Games, a lab and analysis session for both Medieval Chess and “Mad Queen” Chess, and a brief overview of the history of Strategy Games to the present), a 19th century Unit (Antebellum and Frontier U.S., Faro as a paradigm for Gambling Games, a lab and analysis session for Faro, and a brief overview of Gambling Games to the present), and finally a Modern Unit (Japan, Pokemon TCG as a paradigm for card, video, and role-playing games, a lab and analysis session for Pokemon TCG, and a brief history of card, video, and role-playing games). Every quarter, I try to tighten up each of these blitzkrieg presentations to deliver some historical insight, introduce game design concepts and mechanics, challenge students to be creative with design decisions, and integrate several different types of history and history writing into one package. It’s a great challenge.

This time, however, I actually read the portions on professional wargaming. My interest is now threefold. In my History of Video Games class, I talk about the role of the military establishment and Rand Corporation in early multiplayer games, I provide occasional anecdotes about how military complexes have ignored wargame results to their peril (or relied too heavily on them), and encourage students to think about their own possible designs. So, I found Perla’s ideas about professional design to be much relevant than before. Also, concurrent with picking up the Perla book, I heard a fascinating interview with Gregory A. Daddis, author of No Sure Victory: Measuring U. S. Army Effectiveness and Progress in the Vietnam War, in which he spoke of the flaw of relying upon body count as the metric of effectiveness during the Vietnam Conflict. More fascinating, he revealed how the “body count” metric became a default because the metrics desired under McNamara’s counter-insurgency doctrine were impossible to quantify. Suddenly, evaluation of military effectiveness became much more interesting to me. Finally, I’m constantly playtesting and evaluating game designs and game design ideas of all kinds, so I just wanted a broader perspective than my previous experience.

Here are some of the useful portions of Perla’s book that stimulated me in this more complete reading of The Art of Wargaming. In every kind of gaming, but particularly in wargaming, there is a recurring debate between “realism” and “playability.” Perla brilliantly restates the issue: “One reason for the debate between those who emphasize realism and those who stress playability is that they are really disagreeing about something else, the balance between the game system and the game player.” (p. 302) I didn’t realize that Charles S. Roberts had created the first hobby game CRT (Combat Results Table) after seeing a complex grid used at the Rand Corporation to wargame World War III (p. 116). Perla also spoke to the idea of wargame review criteria with a caustic quotation from Don Greenwood which expresses something I often had to pound into reviewers when I was an editor: “There is no denying that it has become highly fashionable of late for wargamers to point out supposed flaws and mock professional game designs by their own self-ordained criteria. There is nothing wrong with this provided those criteria are shared by the majority of the hobby as well.” (p. 135)

I very much appreciated Perla’s cautionary admonition that “models are not the game” (my summation of a comment on p. 191). My other favorite comment about game design was “Keep players out of the weeds.” (p. 197) The latter comment was intended to remind designers not to get too microscopic in detail. In addition to interesting tables comparing military exercises and wargames (p. 281) and analysis and wargames (p. 286), I liked Perla’s outline of a hobby game review (p. 265) and his five principles of wargame rules writing: 1) adapt the rules to the game, not the game to the rules; 2) tell the players everything they need to know to play the game by structuring rules around the sequence of play; 3) provide plenty of examples to illustrate the way rules are supposed to work; 4) explain the underlying rationale for particularly important or especially unusual rules; and 5) integrate the text explaining rules with graphical playing aids to help implement them. (p. 227)

Published in 1990, The Art of Wargaming is surprisingly accurate in predicting the direction of wargames (both hobby and professional) for the next couple of decades (1991-present). It is not really a game for players who want to become more effective at gaming (reading old replays in The General or new ones in C3i would do more), but it is a clever manifesto about the relationship between reality and gaming, how one can learn and how games should instigate research. I’m sorry I quite on this book back in the ‘90s because it is quite useful for me now.
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Sep 08, 2011 John Carter McKnight rated it really liked it

Shelves: academic

Two excellent books in one: an exhaustive history of military and hobby wargaming, with deep insights into cyclical pressures on the industry, and a good manual of game design and development. Sometimes an excessive level of detail, but an overlooked and invaluable resource for academic games scholars and developers/designers alike. Absolutely worth tracking down and at least reading the chapters of direct interest.

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Mar 02, 2018 Daniel rated it really liked it

Shelves: non-fiction, military, decision-making

The central theme of the book is how the development of wargaming has traded off realism for competing aspects. Hobby gamers seek playability, often at the cost of historical accuracy. Another trade-off is in simulating battles, HG Wells tried to use toy cannons to move beyond dice rolls.

Validation remains the fundamental challenge. All the talk of realism is misplaced until a wargame is enacted in a real war. Leading figures are inevitably lured by mathematical obscurity in simulating battles ...more

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Oct 27, 2017 Graham rated it it was amazing · review of another edition

Shelves: military, history, non-fiction, owned, contemporary-affairs, how-to, gaming

Tremendous; what a great, foundational work covering both hobby and professional gaming (and identifying some overlap between the two). Some of the references are a bit dated - this is a reprint of a 1990 book - and it would be enlightening to see some of the games of the past 30 years referenced in this context. There are also some weird formatting issues/choices in terms of changing fonts and font sizes and the footnote structure, but that's a minor concern.

In short, if you're at all ...more

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Feb 17, 2017 Michael Burnam-Fink rated it it was amazing

Shelves: academic, 2017, war, games

The Art of Wargaming is a fascinating book, a compendium of advice and key questions that remains relevant almost 30 years later. Perla is an academic who designs and runs professional wargames for the Naval War College, and an ardent hobbyist gamer who can speak about the difference between Avalon Hill and SPI games and the biases of various trade publications. Perla (likely, I can't say for sure) wrote this book as an academic career building block, to bulwark up a small professional wargaming The Art of Wargaming is a fascinating book, a compendium of advice and key questions that remains relevant almost 30 years later. Perla is an academic who designs and runs professional wargames for the Naval War College, and an ardent hobbyist gamer who can speak about the difference between Avalon Hill and SPI games and the biases of various trade publications. Perla (likely, I can't say for sure) wrote this book as an academic career building block, to bulwark up a small professional wargaming community in his interest, and a direct response to Allan's War Games. In many ways, the books compliment each other. Perla has a narrower focus on US Navy wargaming and an agenda to push, but he also has much deeper knowledge and clear perspective.

The first third of the book is a history of wargames, stretching from Sun Tzu and various European forms of "battle chess", to classic Prussian General Staff kriegspiel, to the heydey of American hobby wargaming in the 60s and 70s, as well as the Naval Electronic Warfare Simulator, a 60s era mainframe monstrosity that let virtual fleet clash in real time. Allan has a better view of seminar gaming and RAND's political simulations, but Perla can talk about the hobby, and the relatively simple Avalon Hill games against the "monsters" that SPI made, and how most games are rarely played, or played solo.

The second and third sections concern Perla's perspective as a game designer, and the role that wargames can play in a professional environment. Wargames are distinct from training exercises, which are tightly constrained to speed learning the proper execution of necessary skills, and operations research, which seek analytic mathematical models. Rather, a wargame is a sequence of decisions made by players, under pressures of time and imperfect information, with rule-bounded consequences, in order to develop the intangible strategic skills of leadership. A wargame is a conversation between its developers and its players, and the most important question is "why": why did the players make their decisions; why did the designers embed these assumptions.

Perla includes several lists of questions to help guide vital debriefings (I refuse to call the post-wargame discussion a 'hot washup') and game design. These lists seem like enumerated common sense, which is high praise. I have to say that Perla and I share many biases as gamers, even if we come from entirely different gaming traditions, in preferring games that abstract away the "weeds" in favor of key decisions, and which look towards the player's process as the key element of gameplay, as long as outcomes are not distinctly immersion breaking in anachronism. Though he has a grognard's disdain for TSR and the goblins and elves of fantasy roleplaying games, he seems the acme of his ambition as the commander's viewpoint game: fully encompassing the fog of war and uncertainty in action, and predicting a bright future for computer aided gaming tools.

I do wish that Perla had written a little more on applications, provided a deconstruction of a few games, or more examples of how he'd build a game to his specifications. The futurism is well... predicting the future is hard, and this book came out a few years before Real Time Strategy emerged as a genre, or before eurogames revitalized board-games for adults. But one of the advantages of the lost time is that Perla isn't thinking about the debates in realism and interfaces and fun in the same terms we are, and that in some sense he's closer to the important issues of information, decision, and action (shades of the OODA loop there) than we are today.

I'd love to see what he thinks of Command: Modern Air Naval Operations as a computerized version of what he does for a living, or of the COIN games (A Distant Plain, Fire in the Lake, etc) as modern representations of asymmetric warfare, or of the Paxgames community. And given that last I googled, he's still around, I may do that. ...more

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Dec 18, 2019 Hofstetter Patrick rated it liked it · review of another edition

Shelves: military, wargaming

I use wargaming both professionally and as a hobby, i.e. as an officer and as a private person. But reading Peter Perla's book was a real disappointment for me because it has the reputation of being a standard work on war games, but these expectations were not fulfilled.

The historical part is well edited, but the other chapters seem to me to be little structured, often repetitive and especially too navy-focused. In particular I would have expected more concrete information about how wargames ...more

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Apr 02, 2018 Shon Chen Felice rated it it was amazing

The Most Recommended book of The Art of Wargaming, Perla is a Genius.
The Art of Wargaming is an EXCELLENT addition to both the Novice & Professional Wargamer.

And I love my Autographed Copy !!! 1st Edition !!!! Priceless ....

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Mar 09, 2019 Ayushman rated it really liked it · review of another edition

Abandoned.

This is probably a good book but it was really uninteresting to me.

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Mar 09, 2017 Ernst rated it really liked it

Shelves: strategy, history

This book was at the time the omnibus cover the entire realm of wargaming, its history, scene, methodology, purposes and capabilities. In that sense it is very interesting to get an insight why you would spend efforts and time of wargames, as a hobby or as a professional pursuit. The only drawback is that the book has aged a bit since it was written and has therefore missed a lot of contemporary developments in method and technology. But it still is a great book.

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Mar 19, 2009 James rated it it was amazing

Shelves: entertainment-and-recreation, military, culture-and-politics, general-science-math-technology, history, writing, computers, games, employment

Dated now, but outstanding. The author first gives a solid, if a tad dry, history of the development of both professional (i.e., used by governments to train military people or test strategies being considered) and hobby (played for self-education and fun) wargames. This includes those using miniatures, various more abstract maps and unit counters, and computerized versions.
From there he goes on to provide a straightforward guide, a checklist of sorts, describing the processes of planning, ...more

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Jul 06, 2010 John rated it it was ok

Shelves: gaming, non-fiction

As a "guide for professionals and hobbyists" I think it's probably of more use to professionals. As a hobbyist I did find the history of wargaming interesting, but the sections on designing and developing wargames seemed much more aimed at the professional.

In this sense professional refers to those who play wargames for a living, not those who make them. In other words, military officers and others who use wargames in their profession.

Admittedly, I last read this book around ten years ago. Since ...more

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Jul 08, 2013 Bill Bruno rated it liked it

An informative book. One caveat, the books talks about being a guide to professionals and hobbyists for a reason. The professionals he talks about are military professionals and much of the book is taken up with wargaming as a military training exercise.

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