Playing wargames

Last saturday I participated in an event which, if organized by a school or university in Germany, would probably lead to a medium-sized federal scandal. Okay, maybe I’m exaggerating a little bit…but still, I doubt it would ever happen: Our department organized a wargame. Since it sounded like fun and was (as usual) very cheap me and my friends signed up.

The bus took us to a remote training area somewhere in the New Territories where we were equiped with a uniform, a protection mask, a BB-gun replica of a Heckler&Koch MP-5 (!!), one magazine and ammunition. The latter was a plastic bottle filled with tiny, 6mm plastic bullets. After some warm-up games and shooting practice we were split up into 4 groups and went to the theme zones. Initially two groups played each other in one theme zone of which 3 existed: one area consisting of trenches, one of shallow hills and trees and a third of a "building" surrounded by all kinds of junk (cars, barrels etc). Lead by some experienced players we practiced basic tactics and learned some fundamental concepts. Sounds very militaristic? It was

The games where a whole lot of fun though and really exhausting. Under the full body gear and the mask necessary to protect the players from injuries, sweat poured in streams. From all the crouching, robbing, ducking and jumping we all got several bruises, (extremely) sore legs and plenty of scratches. The bullets actually were the least problem when it comes to injuries and pain .

After the lunch break – food was included – we began to play more serious and complex scenarios. In computer game language you could call it "assault" and "capture the flag". Game time rose considerably and the challenges were quite a bit harder. One group of players, mainly consisting of lecturers (oO), obviously did wargames for a hobby on a regular basis and brought their own gear including own weapons all of which were some kind of stunningly realistic replicas. Overall they left the impression of real soldiers and they changed weapons for every scenario depending on their tactics. All this made them a hard nut to crack and in a final game they were hidden around the area and all the students left – about 30 or so – had to "search and destroy" them…after maybe half an hour "we" won…with 6 men left . We got home totally exhausted but had a great day of fun.

What I think about this? Well, I can’t quite understand why we make such a fuzz about something like this in Germany. I tend to believe it’s only due to historic reasons and can’t really be explained by anybody. It most definately is a physically demanding sport and I don’t see why it should be worse then kids staying at home watching TV (which is mostly crap in Germany anyway). In a context of the greatly criticized "killer games" my opinion is that a wargame like the one we played takes away a lot of the "abstractness" of a computer game. You don’t care about getting hit in a pc game but when you get hit by a BB you suddenly think "oh, in reality I would’ve lost my finger right now" or "I would be laying around with a bullet in my leg…for hours". I’m sure there are negative aspects to it as well and probably an age limit would be recommendable (it’s 18 years over here) but I don’t think it should be categorically condemned as something "negative"…Germany is the only country in Europe where softair weapons are not categorized as toys.

Afterall the organizers, being lecturers from the department, explained their reasons for doing this event. In their opinion it trains and teaches teamwork and decision making in uncertain conditions. There are even some logistical problems to it: For example the ammo bottles I mentioned earlier. At the end of the day some of us were running out of BBs while others still had half of their bottle filled. One lecturer mentioned that this was a serious problem in real warfare since soldiers tend to use up all their ammunition if you give them an unlimited amount of it thereby wasting valuable resources. On the other hand they try to spare every single bullet if you only give out a very limited amount which might keep them from using every given opportunity. So maybe we actually learned something by playing this wargame…but I won’t try to judge this.