Historicity

When does alt-history start?

I’m a great fan of Mark Johnson’s Wargames2Go podcast. I listened to it long before I started my own, and it inspired me to take care with things like sound quality and clarity, on top of striving for the same coherence and eloquence that Mark demonstrates. 

His most recent episode was on post-war Germany, inspired by the excellent game Wir Sind Das Volk. Excellent episode, listen to it right after this if you haven’t already. Mark’s episodes are split between talking about games and talking about the history depicted in those games. Near the end of the recent episode Mark was talking about CDGs and how much he loves the way you can often either shuffle the cards and have the events play out in any order, or put the cards in order and have the events play out in historically correct chronological order. A great possible history lesson, until he added the caveat that in most CDGs, the player has the option of using the event or the ops points, so not all the historical events are going to happen, making things roll out not quite the same as history after all. He was also quick to say he wasn’t interested in alt-history events, things that possibly could have happened.

In general, I’m with him on that last part. I have little interest in the big alt-history stuff like what if Hitler invaded America and such like. However, it’s a fine distinction and it’s really just a matter of where you draw the line.  As Mark Herman has said, as soon as you make the first move in a wargame, you’re playing alt-history. Very true. We generally start the game from a historically correct spot in terms of geography and orders of battle, but then we make our own moves. Perhaps reinforcements come at preset historically correct times, or maybe they are random. Still, somehow, that usually still feels historical to me in a way that the wilder alt-history stuff doesn’t. So Mark and I are on much the same page.

However, I starting thinking about him not wanting any events in a CDG that didn’t actually happen. I think there might be a bit of faulty logic at work. There are many things that happened that were extremely unlikely. Low odds events that happened. As an example, think of Lost Orders 191 in the US Civil War. General Lee’s movement orders were found by a Union soldier. They were wrapped around some cigars in a vacated camp spot. The info they provided led directly to the Union victory at Antietem. (Of course, the Union troops were commanded by McClellan, so the victory might have been even greater in the hands of a less cautious general). But what are the chances of a copy of the orders being lost? There were only a handful of paper copies. Very strange for a general to lose his. And having been lost, what are the chances of a Union soldier finding them? My point being, if we were doing a civil war CDG, we would very likely include this event, even though the odds of it actually happening were extremely small.

On the other hand, there must be hundreds of examples of more likely events that just never happened. Leaders who were given good advice that they ignored, that would have changed their plans had it been heeded. Attacks that were called off due to possible bad weather. I’d wager there are tons of events that didn’t happen that were more likely to have happened than something like the Lost Orders 191 mess. So maybe it’s worthwhile to add in events that didn’t happen, but were likely to. I know one game that does this. Death in the Trenches has hundreds of events, some that happened, some that didn’t. The ones that didn’t are generally given a low chance of happening (rolling boxcars or the like), but they can still happen and change a bit of the course of WWI. 

Like I said, there’s a fine distinction that I think most gamers make when it comes to how far off the course of history they’ll tolerate. On the one hand we have games that almost run on rails and don’t permit much, and on the other we have sandboxes that set us up with the starting orders of battle and then everything else is up to us. I probably lean a little more to the sandbox side, but I’m pretty wide open in what I’ll tolerate. The only time I get bored is if a game is so on the rails that I don’t feel like I’m making meaningful decisions. In that case, I’d rather read a book.