There is an interesting distinction between what the actual professional military people want out of these games and what they find successful in them, and the kinds of things that hobbyists pursue in wargames.
Clara: The hunger for wargaming fell off after World War I and World War II. You also make this point about that one thing pushing Dungeons & Dragons, which comes from the same lineage as wargames, in the direction of the medieval and fantasy setting is that there’s a lot of anti-war sentiment because of Vietnam in the 1960s and 1970s. D&D was instead an escape from the reality of modern war.
Jon: It was a time when the counterculture was really concerned about the war mongers, and that colored their perception of wargames. This is something [D&D co-creator] Gary Gygax came down very hard against early on, suggesting that, in his experience, most hobby wargamers were strictly anti-war. The wargames market was basically inaccessible to people that were part of the anti-war movement, unless it was couched in a way that wasn’t revisiting the atrocities that people were seeing on TV coming out of Vietnam.
Diplomacy Shift
Angela: I’m curious about the shift from these wargames that focus on individual battles to more political games like Risk and Diplomacy. What happened there?
Jon: Diplomacy is a huge part of it. I view Diplomacy — although Allan B. Calhamer, its inventor, would vehemently disagree with me — as obviously an offshoot from the operational research sorts of games that were developed by RAND.
Clara: I was waiting for you to get to the RAND part of the story.
Jon: There's just too much of the system in common for that not to be the case. I really view Diplomacy as the forerunner to all the things we call 4X games, in the sense that it was a game where you start out with a few bases, and your job is to capture supply centers, because with each new one that you expand into, you can then exploit it to have a new army that's on the field, and that then gives you a bigger army to go and capture more things and so on. A lot of the 4X mechanics come from that, and they're even more explicit in a lot of the Diplomacy variants.
Diplomacy looks back into history again a bit nostalgically, at a simpler era than the nuclear era of the RAND games, but it really takes the approach that what matters in a world of mutually assured destruction is more political maneuvering than actually what your forces do on the battlefield.