How gruesome should our gaming be?

[Colonel Kilgore]

We've occasionally had discussions here on how our hobby is just a game, but how the game has a gruesome setting that most of us would happily avoid in real life.

Which logically extends into a discussion of the figures used, and inevitably casualties (used for all PP games). I was interested in the strong reactions that PP's new destroyed US half-track gave rise to on TMP: http://theminiaturespage.com/news/talk/msg.mv?id=946986757

I see that Sean has already commented there, and I'm very much in line with his remarks. Without wishing to create a big ethical debate (but fearing I may be a little late on that; I'll carry on regardless!) - how realistically gruesome do you like your toys to be?

Simon

[Lluis of Minairons]

I don't waste my time in blood stained corpses - that red paint hopefully saved for more red coats

[sukhe_bator (Neil)]

Felice Beato was arguably the first 'war correspondent' to accurately capture the immediate aftermath of a battle c.1860 (Taku Forts for example). His images show the debris of battle and casualties but being black and white images they are somehow more remote. As are most of the WW1 and WW2 images. Colour sketches of the brutal action around the Sikh Guns during the Sikh Wars in the late 1840s seem to have more effect being in colour...
Perhaps painting in the more muted tones of dust and debris act as a discreet veil, recognising the results of the fighting but not glorifying the horror. That for me strikes the right balance... blood never stays red for long...

[martin goddard]

If it is Ok in a film I watch then it is Ok on my game table.

Do I want a film/game to give an impression of warfare? Yes please.
Do I want a film/game to be historically accurate?  Yes please.
Do I think a film/wargame is the same as real life? Of course , it is exactly the same.



Shaka Zulu raped, butchered and slaughtered his way across Africa. At the same time slaughtering any of his own families and tribesmen that disobeyed or failed in their task. He committed atrocities by the thousand. Maybe a good man misunderstood?


martin

[Sean Clark]

Personally, casualties serve a purpose in our games.

I'll admt that I enjoyed painting my Viking casualties which are in various stages of death. The casualty figure in the AK range where someone has been squashed by a tank is one of my favourite dead figures.

But I'm  able to distance my tabletop gaming from the real world. The reality of a squashed person in real life is another matter entirely.

I liked the person who commented that the soldiers in the back of the half track may just be drunk from finding a cellar full of French wine.

[Colonel Kilgore]

I've been giving this some consideration, and have concluded that I probably think of my little lead men similarly to cartoon characters. In cartoons - an abstraction of real life - it's fine to blow things / people up, cut off bits etc.

I understand that the infamous (?) AK47 squashed casualty may shock some, but also find that it fits in well with the tongue-in-cheek ethos of the AK47 game. And it's very clear that this casualty figure is no longer a threat to any other figures on the table, as well as being a talking point for passers-by.

Similarly, I enjoyed the comic touch of the arm sticking out of the coffin in the PP resin barricade model, and then painting that detail.

I do like the fact that RFCM rules have casualties in the first place as an integral part of the game. Fallen figures don't miraculously and instantaneously disappear off the table, but are there to sap morale and make you think twice before losing any more.

Simon

[pbeccas (Paul)]

It's that whole argument, I don't play SS, but I will play Japanese.  Or I will play Wehrmacht.  Or Fallschirmjager.  Cherry picking one murderous army over another one and virtue signalling over the internet for likes while sipping a soy latte.

[Sean Clark]

Well said Paul.

[sukhe_bator (Neil)]

I had some internal discussions before I embarked on my Russian Civil War in Central Asia - particularly after reading Jamie Bisher's 'White Terror' and various biographies of Baron Ungern v Sternberg, not lightly called 'The Mad baron'. His psychotic rampages in E Siberia took over Mongolia and pitted his troops against Warlord Chinese and Russians. The prospect of world-building such an unusual landscape and creating such unusual forces won out...

The Mongols and Huns are popular wargaming armies yet people don't seem to mind that their mass extinctions of the populations in the swathes they cut across Asia, Europe and the Middle East were greater than more recent atrocities and the effects still impact the landscape centuries later...

Another controversial army I have is a Wahhabist arab one to pit my Egyptian-Ottoman forces against. The banners in their case may be green not black yet the essence of their conflict remains as topical today as it was in 1811-1815. It shaped modern Saudi Arabia and Middle Eastern politics. I would hesitate to give them a public airing...

I'd still personally feel a little uncomfortable fielding an army from a conflict within the likely lived experience of real people but in the end as an historian they are all abstract representations of historical events for good or bad and deserve to be seen.

Neil

[Sean Clark]

It is a personal choice what we game and what we are ccomfortable with.

Was it Bruce Quarrie who wrote a set of WW2 rules but didnt include flamethrowers because of how terrible a weapon they were?

Personally theres no conflict I wouldnt game if there is interesting history attached to it and the gale is engaging. Oddly though, when i saw a game at Partizan representing football hooligans ramapaging around some streets, I was utterly turned off by the idea.

[John Watson]

I don't wargame anything post 1945 because I lived through most of it (admittedly at the viewing end of a TV). I guess it is for the very reasons that you have discussed above. These recent wars are too fresh, whilst the older ones are, literally, history. I accept that the war crimes committed in the 21st century are in essence the same as those committed in the 11th century, but history somehow dims the sharpness of the blade.
John

[Panzer21]

The argument that anything that's recent history is too close to reality is often put forward; however conversely veterans of Afghanistan have been known to take part in wargames set there.
The current conflict in Ukraine is as close as you can get to recent events, yet I know of one blogger who is building up wargames armies for it and haven't Osprey or Helion just released a book?
Personally, I think debating the morality of war and whether wargames are consequently morally repugnant is without future.
There has been a long history of arguing against war toys as somehow glorifying war, hence bans on scenes of violence on box art and specific political censureship over swastikas on planes.
Yet, toy soldiers have been around for a long time. Adults playing with them was championed by that known pacifist HG Wells.
I know of no studies that suggest Hitler, Stalin or Putin spent excessive time playing with toy soldiers which led to their warlike behaviour.
Thus, I suspect any moral outrage and questions of good taste are more to do with the subject's ambiguities about playing with toy soldiers and games about war.
Games don't generally result in death or injuries and however graphic our models are it doesn't compare with the real life degradation and charnel house of a battlefield. Even images of the real thing distance and desanitise us and most people have never seen a dead body.
Thus, being confronted with something that brings the real world closer in our games with toy soldiers, makes some people uncomfortable and hence hold forth on whether such models are "acceptable" or not. What we are debating is more about our own moral compass ; I'd like to hope no-one is crass enough to create a "game" based around genocide (although some sci-fi games get close involving "alien" species - analyse that if you will), but it's a small step to refusing to play with SS or whatever due to associations with unpalatable events in our recent past, while accepting Mongols as OK due to distance.
It is possible to have model SS soldiers and simultaneously hold their beliefs and actions as morally repugnant; it would be difficult to play games set in Arnhem without them (where a British sniper was incredulous to be challenged for shooting wounded Germans).
I play with toy soldiers. The closest I have come to a moral question was seeing the columns of burned out Iraqui vehicles in the Gulf War and being reminded of a micro armour game where poor tactics on the part of an opponent had led to something similar in miniature.
However, they are not the same thing and have only a superficial connection.
If it bothers you, play games set in imaginary countries with armies that never existed in reality. It's the only sure way to distance yourself between reality and playing with toy soldiers.....
Neil

[Colonel Kilgore]

Oh dear, I have opened a can of worms here - apologies!

I should perhaps have been clearer on my original question, triggered by some folk on TMP objecting to the dead / injured / sleeping / drunk bodies adorning Martin's latest wrecked vehicle models.

I really wanted just to discuss the casualty figure part of the game, not the wider "do I feel comfortable gaming this particular war or force?" element that has been widely discussed here and elsewhere.

Can we gently steer the conversation back to that "injured lead figures" part of the discussion?

Thanks,

Simon

[Nick]

I like the PP casualty figures and have no problem using any of them.

Nick

[Leman (Andy)]

I use casualty figures as morale markers and in other circumstances, as in some of my WotR winning the fight markers. It is a battlefield after all.