So, the Confederacy felt that it's best shot at independence was--once it was obvious that it was getting into a big war--to get international recognition, and preferably some heavy-duty diplomatic intervention up to and including military aid, much like the colonist rebels got in the American War of Independence.
Both the USA and CSA expended considerable effort to achieve their desired outcomes. However, historians today generally believe that there was no way England and France (the only two powers that mattered) were going to throw their weight behind the Confederacy. Just none. There was too much else going on in Europe, they consumed too much USA wheat, they'd get the cotton just the same if the North won, etc etc etc.
Which leads to an interesting game problem: Assuming the historians are correct, should foreign intervention be possible in a good wargame on the Civil War?
I've always argued that it should. I've seen wargames as trying to recreate the mindset of the relevant historical actors (at least kind-of), and players should be induced to act based on the perceived reality of the time.
Yesterday I was showing my burgeoning collection of ACW games off to some non-gamer historian friends, and this was met with howls of derision. Intervention was impossible in reality, it should be impossible in the game, and if you make it possible in the game you're teaching falsehoods.
Nobody's studied this, and it'd be a pain in the butt for me to study it, but I have a feeling that there are serious disconnects between the way gamers approach history as it should exist in games, and how historians would approach it. It's reasonably well known that the two camps like different kinds of book; this takes it the other way.
Historians have long given helpful suggestions to movie makers--who have not read these suggestions--about how historical movies should be made. Civil War historians have recently taken to telling artists what to paint. Nobody (except me, a little) has told game designers how to design their games, likely because nobody cares.
Anyway, it'd be interesting to sit down with historians of the Civil War, describe the whole boardgame concept in a few sentences (I've gotten good at this), and see what they think of some of the major design challenges ACW game designers face--like foreign intervention. I'm too close; I'm too much of a gamer. (Even though I've played one ACW game once in the past eight years, and it was solitaire.) But I'm becoming curious about the gap between historians and games, just like in movies and art.
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