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Lawrence, I’d suggest starting with Peter Perla’s Art of Wargaming (newly reissued from John Curry) and Phil Sabin’s Simulating War.
It seems that the book was intended to talk about the “history” rather than “historical analysis” as it subtitle suggested. Isn’t it the first book on the subject? All I browse in Amazon about wargames pointed me to miniatures books a lot of the times. I think I am interested to pay for a copy.
Either way, thanks for saving me 28 dollars!
As I noted to Matt Caffrey at Connections while browsing the book’s language, it’s not the German, it’s the Germans.
Ultimately, however, this analysis–like any other–is making a claim of offering insight, and even asserting some degree of causal connection (even if processes are nonlinear and dialectical). To do that, one requires some explicit attention to why this particular “archaeology” is more convincing than an alternative, and isn’t simply an ahistorical kaleidoscope rooted more in the analysts imagination than the actual historical processes of the past. I see no reason why this book couldn’t have more explicitly discussed how it accessed archival material, and what it did–or did not–use. There are certainly cases where more systematically process-tracing the development and adoption of particular wargames would have made the argument both stronger and more convincing. Finally, the style seems to me to be more a product of tribal fashion (all scholarly disciplines do it) than analytical necessity. A more accessible text would not only have been more convincing, but also would have broadened its consumption beyond the “guild.”
I’d say the style is an artifact not just of “cultural studies” (or the translation) but specifically of German media theory/materialities of communication. In a sense, the whole book is a kind of footnote to Friedrich Kittler’s gnomic reference to the sand table exercises of the German general staff in the opening sentences of one of his major texts, Grammaphone/Film/Typewriter. There *is* method here I’d argue, but like Foucault’s genealogy it is a methodology that embraces non-linearity, rupture, discontinuity. And like the most recent inheritor of these traditions, media archaeology, the object is to create alternatives to progressivist, linear narratives of an ultimately unrecoverable past.
Put another way, this is a book that’s coming from a very different place than works by, say, Sabin and Perla. None of that, of course, should absolve it of its shortcoming, but I do think it succeeds in recovering a lineage and genealogy that departs markedly from the familiar story, where there is nothing between classical games of antiquity like chess and Go and the von Reisswitz Kriegspiel.