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You could dress up wargaming mechanics with more peaceful dressing. Renowned Explorers has a rock-paper-scissors system using brute force, taunting, and diploma
by indigochill 7y ago
You could dress up wargaming mechanics with more peaceful dressing. Renowned Explorers has a rock-paper-scissors system using brute force, taunting, and diplomacy, and each encounter can provide different rewards depending on which method was most heavily used, more or less.
There's something essentially analytical that underpins wargames and assessing, e.g. unit strengths and weaknesses, which is good mental practice for plenty of peaceful applications as well.
- ckozlowski 7y agoI've gotten the impression that in the academic use of the term "wargaming" encompasses this as well. For example, there's an article in the "Zone of Control" book I mentioned above titled "Cultural Wargaming: Understanding Cross-Cultural Communications Using Wargames". The emphasis being non-combat, non-conflict of course. There's other discussions of that in the book, though I haven't gotten that far into it yet. But wargaming issues such as diplomacy, geopolitical interactions, and the like I think all fall into this category as well. Even in IT, we tend to call operational exercises "wargaming". The Model U.N. conferences I did in high school I think fall into this category as well. I think you nailed it when you said that there's something "essentially analytical" that separates this sorta modeling from roleplaying, in that there's a system of rules which all parties have to abide by in order to help produce a realistic model. I think "Peace gaming" is absolutely part of this subject, and we might stick it under the "Wargaming" category for established convention purposes, it definitely belongs here.