Grok My Enthusiasm (45)

By: Joe Alterio
November 16, 2016

One in a weekly series of enthusiastic posts contributed by HILOBROW friends and regulars.

Pictured above is novelist HG Wells, regarded by some as the father of miniature wargaming. It’s not accidental that he spent his professional life world-building, and his leisure life playing in invented worlds.

I don’t bet. On anything. I don’t play the lottery or Powerball. I won’t bet you on whether you can get it in the trash bin. I find no joy in friendly 25-cent poker nights. I view the very act of gambling dimly, a fetishized ritual I am too bright for. I have a preening and self-regarding sense of superiority around this.

But I will lose hours, nights, weeks, months of productive work to the movement of imaginary men around a gameboard in pursuit to a non-existent goal.

Tabletop gaming is surely as symbolic a product as any of the industrialized 20th century, an era most famous for streamlining the destruction of other human beings.

Unlike other board-games, tabletop gaming eschews anything approaching symbolism. These games often cloak themselves in arcane language and striated rules sets within sub-rules sets, different dice for each roll, modifiers and penalties, classes and subclasses, all worthy of inclusion in Philosophiae Naturalis Principia Mathematica. It is knowledge and detail and project-planning and worry, a crash-course in late-stage modern life.

The game of chess still carries the whiff of the ancients, and derives its elegance not only from the simplicity of rules but the archetypal symbols of the pieces – the castle, the horse, the ruler. Checkers and Go have even more simplistic representations of game pieces, and skew further towards abstraction as the ultimate distillation of simplistic beauty and tactical focus.

But if Go is an unadorned tuna nigiri, then tabletop wargaming surely must be two chilidogs wrapped in bacon and a fried egg. Where more traditional strategy games value universalist truth of rationality and humility, tabletop wargaming is the ultimate overwhelming fantasy-fulfillment of every disenfranchised human — the ability to be God, to pick up a tree, to fire a cannon.

These games can carry involved levels of combat and rules for engagement, most often mirrored in popular culture as stand-ins for a real-life battle plan. But not every game’s main purpose is battle, nor is it ever really the most satisfying part.

These is a heady rush that each of these games carry that is recognized only tangentially in practice, but is unavoidable upon even casual examination – these are games about being able to land hands on a tiny world, and to control it totally.

In this regard, if strategy games of old are about complex tactics from a simple era, then tabletop gaming is surely the opposite – complexity and complication as complement, a refuge to control on a planet gone mad. As the world became more abstracted to average humans, we began to find solace in a world we could wrap our hands around. This is the goal at the end of this long wish-fulfillment. Mastery of the world, control in a tiny window, shielded from the tremendous mess that hovers, everywhere, just six inches away from each board edge.

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MORE POSTS by JOE ALTERIO: QUALITY JOE: sketches vs. finished drawings | ROBOTS & MONSTERS series | Q&A with Gary Panter and Charles Burns | CABLEGATE COMIX | KIRB YOUR ENTHUSIASM: Black Panther | KIRK YOUR ENTHUSIASM: Kirk vs. Gorn | KERN YOUR ENTHUSIASM: Akzidenz-Grotesk | GROK MY ENTHUSIASM: Million Year Picnic | and HILO HERO items on Winsor McCay, Django Reinhardt, Wendy Pini, and many others.

MORE ON H.G. WELLS & TABELTOP GAMING: Josh Glenn’s WAR & PEACE GAMES

MORE ENTHUSIASM at HILOBROW

Grok My Enthusiasm (45)

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