The following item was written for PAXsims by Andrew Burtch and Marie-Louise Deruazof the Canadian War Museum.
On 8 June 2023, the Canadian War Museum opened War Games, an exhibition that had been in development through 2019 and delayed, owing to COVID. The exhibition was the product of a long research and relationship-building process between the Museum, wargame collectors, game development specialists, and the broader professional wargaming community. As of writing there remains about a week and change until the final closure of the exhibition War Games, so it seems fitting to summarise the exhibition’s development and its reception.
Fun news first. Since the exhibition opened in June, more than 140,000 visitors have seen fit to explore the world of war games as presented at the Museum, placing the exhibition among the War Museum’s best-performing offerings in recent years. Approximately 70 per cent of all visitors to the Museum decided to take a chance and explore the exhibition. To museum people, these are good capture rates, and we will surely be thinking about what the War Games experience taught us for quite some time to come. That outcome was surely not possible without the active and enthusiastic assistance of many of the regular readers and contributors to PAXSims and Connections North.
Observing youth interacting with contemporary small arms displays in the museum (above) suggested that their point of entry into military history was through online shooters such as Call of Duty. That, combined with the curator’s slothful enjoyment of video games and tabletop games in his off hours, led to the original idea paper which was submitted in 2012. As a series of exhibitions marking the 100th anniversary of the First World War was ending, the idea paper was dusted off and fleshed out with additional research into something more substantial.
There were many resources to draw upon to understand the history of wargaming, from histories of the hobby version of wargaming, such as those written by Jim Dunnigan and others, to historical surveys of professional wargaming by Peter Perla, Anthony Sabin, Matt Caffrey, and many others, there was an embarrassment of material available to produce a narrative of how games and war came to be so inextricably linked well before they became the subject of massive blockbuster AAA video game releases.
In early 2020, the exhibition team submitted the proposed exhibition topic to a series of focus groups based on audiences we were targeting. These groups were broken up into “day out” visitors, typically families or casual visitors, museum enthusiasts, and history seekers, the visitors most dedicated to learning about military history. The focus groups tested some of the assumptions the team had about the direction of the exhibition, its content and potential interactive elements and the research led to a few key findings. The exhibition had to have clear links between games and military history (what else is the War Museum for?). It had to have meaningful and unique interactives (games or things to do), otherwise the Museum risked reproducing experiences people could just as simply do at home.
The sum of the exercise meant that the team had to locate materials and stories that would speak to the international historical interconnections between war and gaming. The team also had to make some difficult decisions about what to include and exclude for reasons of space or feasibility. This meant that a wealth of wargaming history in Canada conducted through operational research outlets might not be covered as extensively as we (well, I) would have liked.
The team settled on an episodic but chronological approach to telling the story of the war and games connection from ancient times to the world wars, to the Cold War, to the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, up to recent challenges to which contemporary wargamers had developed tabletop or digital responses. In each section we would seek to balance both the professional applications of wargaming and the ways in which wars seeped into popular culture through games. Where appropriate, we would point out the interchanges where military planners took advantage of game techniques and technologies to develop wargaming products, and conversely, how military techniques and technologies entered popular wargaming. We planned to present stories where possible that highlighted the diverse history of wargaming, a goal embraced in the spirit of the Derby House Principles. The approach was intended to present what we hoped were easily-digestible amounts of content that would speak to the Museum’s general audience of non-specialists who might be time-limited during their visit, so they could leave the exhibition understanding the basics of wargaming, featuring highlights of historical interactions between games and war. We knew that specialist audiences might be disappointed with some of our choices given their extensive knowledge of the subject, so we also wanted to make sure the exhibition was representative of some of the key stories. Specialists, we knew, could fill in the blanks on their own during their visit.
Research and consultation for this project led the team to interested parties at the Canadian Army Simulation Centre, Canadian Army Command and Staff College, the Learning Innovations Team at the Canadian Defence Academy, the Wargaming cell at the Canadian Joint Warfare Centre, Defence Research and Development Canada, the United States Naval War College Museum, the Frontier Army Museum, the Krulak Center for Innovation and Future Warfare, the National Army Museum, the Imperial War Museum, the RAND Corporation, Dundas West Games, the Strong Museum of Play, the Imperial War Museum, among our many contributors. From each contact we learned more about the history and modern circumstances of wargaming.
But one of the most important connections came about when team members had the opportunity to hear Dr. Rex Brynen speak about the art of wargaming at the NATO Operational Research conference that took place in Ottawa in the fall of 2019. It was through the team’s initial acquaintance with Dr. Brynen that we became aware of the broader defence research and wargaming communities, as well as some of the useful debates about the psychology of wargaming, tensions between scenario development and client expectations, and other elements that shaped exhibition research.
We had the considerable advantage in planning the exhibition by having access to the Canadian Museum of History’s Avedon Games collection, which contains a massive variety of Canadian and international hobby games including some of the Avalon Hill games used in the exhibition. We also had the considerable good luck of learning about the sizable collection of rare international war games held by David Stewart-Patterson, a retired journalist and thoughtful collector. His knowledge about his collection and trends in hobby wargaming was a huge help to the team. You can read about his insights and view highlights of his collection at https://www.gamesofwar.org/.
One of the most memorable experiences of the exhibition emerged from a collaboration with one of PAXsims’ own contributors, Kit Barry (Sheridan College). Early in the process we determined that we wanted to tell the story of the Western Approaches Tactical Unit (WATU), and gave considerable thought to how we might try to replicate the experience of convoy commanders passing through the WATU war game. Our own visitor research and previous experience presenting games in exhibitions taught us that the average visitor would not be able to endure a full or faithful playthough of the actual WATU game, so with Kit, we undertook to adapt the experience to engage with as wide an audience as possible. The initial versions of the game Kit had proposed was a tactical game that reflected the work done at WATU.We soon discovered that a fair amount of our audience may not understand the strategic situation in the North Atlantic. In the end, it was too difficult to develop a game that included both the convoy-level tactical decision-making and the strategic level context of the war.
After many iterations (this could be an article in itself) and considerable playtesting during the pandemic with long suffering team members’ families, then later with Museum staff and a few willing Museum visitors, the team settled on the format of the game Atlantic Peril. The game places players in the role of a convoy commander, directing a large convoy across the Atlantic, picking the route most likely to avoid encountering U-boats and temperamental weather, experiencing mechanical difficulty or unexpected intelligence along the way, and situating escorts around the merchant ships of the convoy. In each turn, the convoy fights different concentrations of U-boats, and depending on a variety of factors comes out victorious or limps to the next square of sea on the way to Liverpool. The game has been played hundreds of times in the exhibition space, each playthrough guided by one of the Museum’s well-trained Program Interpreters who adapt play for very young children or wargame novices as well as more experienced hobby wargamers and history buffs (history seekers, in museum-speak). The very positive response to the game suggests that the compromise we reached through playtesting, seeking to make the Battle of the Atlantic understandable in its broader context, was a win-win. The end game communicated a scenario that even young children could understand, while providing essential context for the surrounding displays about WATU, including convoy track charts, illustrations of the actual WATU war game in progress, and artifacts. The convoy escort game pieces for the game were 3D printed based on Helen Coop’s WATU game piece which was graciously loaned to us by the Western Approaches Museum. Unsurprisingly, the museum was asked many times whether the game would be packaged for sale. The short answer is no, but the Museum does plan to make the game available as a free download and will be adapted for the permanent galleries as a staff-led guided activity.
We value the considerable public engagement with the exhibition, and regard it as a result in part of the many emails, calls, in-person or virtual consultations held with specialists in this community and elsewhere. For what we got right, thank you. And for what we left off the table, well, there’s always the next round. The strength of the War Games exhibition lies in considering the games themselves as artifacts rather than as temporary experiences. They tell us about what people, professionals, hobbyists, and novices absorbed about the wars of their time. Some of these stories came out when we toured audiences through the exhibition who would often bring up the role that games had played in their own personal and professional lives. The exhibition presented unique museological challenges, whether it be in tracking down questions of intellectual property from game publishers, reproducing game artifacts as playable experiences. Much as a wargamer’s work isn’t completed when the board is put away, the work of the Museum doesn’t stop once the exhibition closes. We will undoubtedly be reflecting on the experience of the War Games exhibition for some time to come.
Andrew Burtch and Marie-Louise Deruaz, Canadian War Museum.
PAXsims 