Shall We Play a Game?

Angela Chen and Clara Collier are “fascinated by what happens when we try to reduce the most violent and unpredictable of human actions down to a set of rules.” Their conversation with games historian Jon Peterson, author of Playing at the World, reveals how efforts to mirror the complexities of military strategy yielded more complicated tabletop games, even among the anti-war crowd.

It was a time when the counterculture was really concerned about the war mongers, and that colored their perception of wargames. This is something [D&D co-creator] Gary Gygax came down very hard against early on, suggesting that, in his experience, most hobby wargamers were strictly anti-war. The wargames market was basically inaccessible to people that were part of the anti-war movement, unless it was couched in a way that wasn’t revisiting the atrocities that people were seeing on TV coming out of Vietnam.