Partner Choices and Social Connections Among American Wargamers

Abstract

Wargames are games that present conflicts, usually historical and military, using game tokens that represent specific participants in the conflict, interacting on a map or other representation of the conflict in ways described by a set of rules that provides deterministic or randomized outcomes for each interaction. They have been important for military strategy since the nineteenth century, and the study of wargames has focused on their military applications. The civilian hobby version of wargaming that developed in America in the 1950s has received less attention. My literature review showed that little is known about the relationships of wargame players and how they network with each other. I also found that studies of player networks in online multiplayer games have applications for understanding user behaviors and how players value and curate their relationships. Applying a similar approach to player networks in analog games offers the chance to gain new insights from a very different set of relationships. I decided to interview individuals who participated in the wargaming hobby between the mid-1950s and the late 1970s. My aim was to document their experiences and their interactions with other wargamers to understand how they established, maintained, and valued relationships with other players. I conducted 18 semi-structured interviews during 2020, then applied thematic analysis to find common elements in their play histories and relationships. The research showed that the informants' experiences fell into two different groups that reflected cultural changes in America from the 1950s to the 1970s. The informants' stable player networks were small collections of relationships that the informants valued heterogeneously, and their closest relationships extended beyond gameplay to involve emotional compatibility as much or more as utilitarian benefits. The results suggest that the intimate nature of face-to-face board game play may have an impact on how wargamers manage their relationships, and that design ...