...or, if you will, "Playing the 'Rape of Belgium' Card."
About forty years ago, virtually all books on military history were set on the battlefield, which was neatly scrubbed and prepped before battle. Soldiers were important primarily as carriers of equipment, whose status could be determined neatly by "morale clocks" above each regiment. (He says, exaggerating for effect.) Since John Keegan's Face of Battle, change has come--and, indeed, has accelerated. War is now seen as a very large societal event, with much of the focus now on the individual soldier's experience, and how war affected civilians--those on the home front, and those in the path of war.
Wargames are still generally focused on the theater of battle (or war...), but in the last fifteen years or so, there has been a change similar in kind--if not in degree--as that which has taken place in military history scholarship. I'd like to spend a few blog posts--probably interspersed with other kinds of post--discussing how civilians have appeared in wargames. Sometimes they're represented in cardboard counters just like everyone else; sometimes they're more abstract.
This little project began as a seminar paper I wrote last semester; turning it into something larger (and scholarly) is on indefinite hold, so why not put it here? With any luck at all, it'll provoke at least one thought somewhere. And for an academic, that's a runaway success.
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