Should historians play counterfactual games?  Are computer strategy games good tools for would-be politicians, generals and diplomats?  These are some of the questions that Clive Thompson asks in an interesting article on his Wired blog today.

Niall Ferguson, a TV historian of some repute, has been playing Making History, a historical simulation of WWII.  And loving it.  Thompson asks:

Is it possible that when today’s teenagers enter the workforce — and become tomorrow’s historians, politicians and Pentagon war fighters — that they’ll have reclaimed the ability to think counterfactually? Will all those years of gaming have trained them to imagine the many different ways a crisis can evolve?

Certainly, the military play wargames all the time. It was a wargame that determined Von Schlieffen’s plan for conquering France in the First World War.  Oddly, history turned out different from the game.  I suspect that the whole neocon project is founded on a kind of counterfactual future history.  Similarly, I’m sure that the Pentagon wargamed the latest gulf war.  The battle more or less went to plan but did anyone run a peacegame about the post-war situation?  I doubt it.

I feel pretty well-qualified to discuss this, having trained at Oxford as a historian and, at the same time, programming a counterfactual wargame about the Vietnam war. If you’re feeling brave and bored, you can download it. ‘Nam 1965-1975.  As a game it’s not that great and it’s nearly 20 years old now, but hey!  I also designed, SimIsle which is an ecological simulation.  Also available online. Again, not a great game but kinda fun and interesting.

The big problem with counterfactual games is they are very sensitive to starting conditions and the rules built into the model. It comes back to assumptions. For example, if you assume that tanks are only efficient in combination with infantry (the British assumption before WWII) then your wargame rules will be very different than if you assume they should be used independently as spearheads (the German assumption).  Or perhaps you assume you will be hailed as liberators rather than occupiers when you invade a country.

Writing counterfactual history is entertaining.  As a kid, I enjoyed Gen. Hackett’s books about a hypothetical Third World War.  But the real joy in history, for me, lies in the imaginative reconstruction of what actually happened, the people involved and the causes that drove them.  I’m just reading NAM Rodger’s The Safeguard of the Sea and the chapter on the Spanish Armada is inspiring.  He takes apart the traditional analysis and gives a compelling new explanation of what happened and why.  The Reason Why did the same job on the charge of the Light Brigade. 

The practice of history is full of contradictions.  Individuals are vital (Churchill’s war memoirs) and yet irrelevant (Overy’s “Why the Allies won”).  My tutor once said, I think in earnest, that battles don’t matter - everything is decided before they armies arrive in the field.  But where does that leave victories against the odds such as Agincourt or pyrrhic victories like The Tet Offensive?  Then there are the battles that didn’t happen - read The Kennedy Tapes for the inside story on the Cuban Missile Crisis.  Some say that history starts from the evidence and builds a theory. Others, for example Marxist or Whig historians, start with the theory and then look for the evidence.

All of this is to say that history is a subtle and marvelous training for the mind.  What history teaches is the intricacy of cause and effect and the power of chance. Good history depends on judicious handling of data, clear writing and a sympathetic imagination.  These skills may be useful in the creation of strategy games but they aren’t important when playing them.

Much as I love strategy games, I’m not convinced that playing them will make better historians.  Equally, I’m not convinced that politicians, diplomats and generals would be better off playing them either.  I have a much better suggestion. I read in the New Yorker that only 2% of American undergraduates study history.  My proposal is simple and good for the planet: double the number of historians in America.

Technorati Tags: History, Niall Ferguson, Clive Thompson, Wired