Zones of Control Quotes

“Some have argued that because of its atypicality, Twilight Struggle is not a “real” wargame, but we will leave such jesuitical distinctions to the message boards.”
― Pat Harrigan, Zones of Control: Perspectives on Wargaming

“Today’s professional game designers and analysts similarly insist that wargaming saves lives. But we will also acknowledge something else of Broyles, who in the course of his essay confides, “Nothing I had ever studied was as complex or as creative as the small-unit tactics of Vietnam.” Any wargamer who has lingered into the early morning hours optimizing the loadout on a cardboard or virtual F-16 will understand what this means. Wargames provide the means of exploring exactly those complexities, coupled with the privilege of doing so vicariously.”
― Pat Harrigan, Zones of Control: Perspectives on Wargaming

“Although there are many commonalities among wargames, there are also enormous variations in their purposes and designs. The goals of the hobby game player and the goals of the security professional are not the same, although both might be employing very similar game systems. Contrariwise, even games that ostensibly cover the same subject matter can do so in widely divergent ways.”
― Pat Harrigan, Zones of Control: Perspectives on Wargaming

“Indeed, wargame hobbyists will often amass collections of hundreds or even thousands of titles, sometimes a dozen or more on a popular topic like Gettysburg or D-Day or the Battle of the Bulge. For the more critically minded among them, the goal is not to find the single, definitive simulation—indeed, one that merely mechanically replicated the historical outcome at each playing would be deemed a failure—but rather to compare and contrast the techniques and interpretations across the different designs, much as a historian reads multiple accounts and sources to arrive at her own synthesis of events.”
― Pat Harrigan, Zones of Control: Perspectives on Wargaming

“(Jim Dunnigan, as we will see, calls them paper time machines.)”
― Pat Harrigan, Zones of Control: Perspectives on Wargaming

“Wargaming, by definition, traffics in martial subject matter. Perceived in its full historical and material diversity, however, it is not inherently militaristic. Such at least is our governing belief—readers should use what follows to arrive at their own determination. Wargaming is also possessed of deeper significance to game studies and game history than the merely topical; that is, its relevance or import cannot be evaluated simply by the extent to which one does or does not think themselves interested in games about war. Its professional practitioners will often define wargaming as a tool for abductive reasoning, a term first introduced by Charles Sanders Pierce for testing hypotheses. As contributor Rex Brynen has previously suggested, “Wargaming is much more policy- and planning-oriented than most other gaming. It also has much more rigorous traditions of design, validation, adjudication, instrumentation/reporting, and analysis.”
― Pat Harrigan, Zones of Control: Perspectives on Wargaming

“We also follow Peter Perla’s insistence, in his The Art of Wargaming (1990), on using the contracted compound “wargaming” (not “war gaming”) to represent the form’s characteristic synthesis of topical simulation and ludic play.”
― Pat Harrigan, Zones of Control: Perspectives on Wargaming

“Wargames at their most fundamental, regardless of medium or motivation or scope, seek to model the brutal reality of armed conflict with a set of heuristics and formulas, conventions and physical or programmable components.”
― Pat Harrigan, Zones of Control: Perspectives on Wargaming

“[General William] Westmoreland’s strategy had always been to use the American troops as a “shield behind which” the GVN forces could move in to establish government security. The commanding general never quite came to terms with the fact that the war was being fought at points rather than along lines. With the support or even the neutrality of the population, the enemy forces could break up into small units and go anywhere in the countryside circumnavigating the “Free World” outposts. Westmoreland was trying to play chess while his enemy was playing Go. —Frances FitzGerald, Fire in the Lake”
― Pat Harrigan, Zones of Control: Perspectives on Wargaming