This Veterans Day weekend was especially busy. It contained two Veterans Days — the observed day of Friday, which is the first day of my weekend, and the actual holiday, the 11th, this year falling on a Saturday, the second day of my weekend (because of the newsletter, Sunday is not the day of rest it used to be). Added to that the pressure of an electoral recount on Saturday triggered by a close election in my town, and what under different circumstances been a relaxing break was, instead, a series of obligations, one after the other.

What is a normal weekend like for me? A combination of reading, writing, chores, and — I must admit it — gaming. Board games if the family’s up for it, video games if they aren’t. 

I’ve learned a lot about the world through games, especially some of the more sophisticated video games that have come out over the last couple decades. When I was a kid, growing up, games were seen as childish diversions — distractions unworthy of serious attention. There was shame and stigma attached to playing them. Now, in adulthood, there is still some shame and stigma, but much less. And all of the intelligent and delightful people I know indulge in the odd round of Civilization or Call of Duty. Maybe it’s time to prod the military to do more to adopt or encourage formal game play among leaders.

THE BIG STORY

The Value of Video Games

Gaming is a fun distraction. It can also be a useful way to train people to think strategically and analytically.

During the pandemic, I listened to a lot of podcasts, and spent time on social media (too much time) engaging with people I heard or learned about. This is how I came across Bret Devereaux, PhD, the author of A Collection of Unmitigated Pedantry (ACOUP), a history and culture blog. 

Devereaux is a historian who specializes in ancient history. He must read (and have read) an astonishing amount, because the breadth and depth of his knowledge is extraordinary; furthermore, because he is so widely read, he’s able to draw connections between ostensibly unrelated phenomena and events, which is always impressive and insightful to readers (such as myself). 

Even more interesting to me is his embrace of pop culture in the form of movies and prestige television series, and board games and video games. And it is here that his knowledge of history is critical: he can explain why a certain element is realistic, which helps players decide where to invest their time in a game that could take days worth of hours of game play.

A game (or movie) can be untrue and still have value. On a certain level literary or televised fiction is only as compelling as the feasibility of plot and the psychological and anthropological truth underlying how characters and communities interact with each other. Alien is a predator and parasite, its motives are comprehensible. Predator is a hunter who has come to earth to hunt. Every community in a zombie apocalypse movie is too indulgent of families, who are invariably exploited by their zombified parent / child / spouse leading to the destruction of the community. Without this grounding in reality, none of these stories would make any sense, and nobody would watch or read them.

The Call of Duty series is famously unrealistic when it comes to the monotony of war, but somewhat better when it comes to the stress of actual combat — at least on a mechanical (if not emotional) level. Elder Scrolls: Oblivion has disturbingly rendered characters and a broken NPC AI that has led to some funny parodies over the years, but it also has an interesting and natural model for leveling characters up (through repetitive action rather than the accumulation of “experience”), and a truly fascinating model for interacting with characters that depends on a wheel by which one can threaten, praise, flatter, or joke in order to raise their opinion of you — a strange and cynical but not totally inadequate way of describing how interactions unfold at parties or gatherings.

Video games, well constructed, can teach useful information about the world. My favorite is a series of strategy games released by Paradox that takes players from the 9th century AD through the 1940s. I first played the last of the games, Hearts of Iron, when the original was released around 2002. It prides itself on accurately modeling, as much as possible, not only the experience of guiding a country or kingdom through a particular period of time, but what factors were most consequential during that time period. 

The games cover the following time periods: Crusader Kings, 867 - 1453. Europa Universalis, 1444 - 1821. Victoria, 1832 - 1936. And Hearts of Iron, 1936 - 1949.

I wouldn’t have bothered to play any of these games other than Hearts of Iron (these are what I would call “accessible” strategy games, which is to say, more in-depth than Civilization, but less exacting than some of the really precise turn-by-turn games mimicking actual historical battles) had I not read Devereaux’s thoughts about them, and then talked with him about them during a presentation I hosted at Yale Veterans Association. What’s extraordinary about them from a historical and pedagogical standpoint is not only that one comes to learn about the history of a place, but how the experience of history changes with each game.

The most important considerations with Hearts of Iron are securing resources for technology and manufacturing, and investing your manpower for war with one’s neighbors, which is seen as inevitable. The backdrop for HoI is WWII, and everything goes into preparing to fight it as a nation or alliance subscribing to fascism, communism, or liberal democracy. The considerations are massive, and an individual life counts for very little, although small decisions in the beginning can have big consequences later on. One can play as any country, and, for example, learn firsthand why a country like Spain was wise never to ally themselves with Italy and Germany (though one might have expected them to).

In Crusader Kings, on the other hand, one plays as the leader of a tribe or a kingdom, and the driving concern is not conquest — it’s pretty easy to seize land from a weaker neighbor — but inheritance — how to get what you take or conquer and pass it along safely to your heirs — and being part of an organized religion, which is key to entering the feudal era. Elections make the process of passing down titles slightly more dependable — not much, there isn’t a ton of faith in elections — as can other mechanisms — but, and I can’t stress this enough, the game is about legacy and inheritance. Much of the mechanics focus on the individual traits of each ruler; what they study, their physical characteristics, their emotional state — because that, in the Middle Ages, was the most important thing to the survival of a kingdom. Playing through the game, one cares far more about the age and health of a potential ruler, and the number of siblings they have, and their psychological makeup, than the health or population of one’s kingdom, which very much depends on that leader. In playing through I have lost a kingdom through intrigue and the ambitions of nobles only to rebound within a generation or two to found an empire. 

And in spite of having read many books on the subject in prep school and college, it wasn’t until I played through the game that I understood why a king might murder his siblings, why a dynasty would be outraged by legitimizing a bastard and granting them claims on a title, the logic behind disenfranchising an entire gender — why, in other words, personal considerations, when it comes to a king or kingdom, end up being paramount. And how fragile that all is, when compared to a modern democratic system. Most kings and queens were not leading kingdoms as much as they were trying to survive, personally, to pass their possessions on to their heirs; that act was also the act of protecting the country, and the cultures within, from hostile invaders on the hunt for weaknesses. And a strength in one generation (many children, by which one might form alliances with powerful neighbors) becomes a casus belli and vulnerability in the next, when the progeny of that alliance have claims on one’s titles. This, in short, is what led to the Hundred Years War and the War of the Roses, two of the most devastating conflicts in the medieval world.

If one wants to hear or read more about how Europa Universals and Victoria mirror their ages, and what one learns from playing through them, Devereaux is an excellent resource and I recommend poking around on his blog, which has dedicated numerous useful posts to the subject.

Elon Musk recently made one of his trademark controversial remarks — this one, about how he thinks chess is inferior to more complex board games and video games, because of its limited number of variables. I’m not sure that’s exactly right — any game that forces a person to think through and follow a strategy is useful, chess quite famously so. But he’s correct that the best board games and video games have the ability to teach strategy at the same time that they’re providing lessons about other subjects as well. In Victoria, according to Devereaux (I have never played it), the labor force is the same thing one draws on for the military, so depopulating one’s country through war makes it harder to develop the industry needed to fight and win later wars. In HoI, and in Europa Universalis “manpower” is a resource that is independent from the labor force; this has something to do with the dawn of the industrial era, and the need for large numbers of people in early factories. This is a lesson one could probably access in chess if one considered the role the pawn plays — lose all your pawns, and you lose the capacity to generate or regenerate queens — but this is abstract, not a great fit.

Meanwhile, there are many board games (such as Settlers of Catan) that incorporate some diplomatic component that is by its nature absent from chess, which teaches strategy and misdirection. Had I not been at war and seen how some people received assets while others did not, I would not have imagined how useful a skill it can be.

For officers and aspiring leaders who are interested in strategy and hope to understand the historical and practical basis of our modern world — where it comes from, how we got here and why — as well as some of the fundamental big-picture considerations that go into leading, there are some fantastic board games and video games out there to play as an individual or as part of a small group. It’s benefitted my professional education, and you could profit by it, too.

TOP READS IN MONEY & FINANCE

Crypto still has a lot of utility in the world of funding terrorism.

Nigeria is hoping that a robust program relaxing taxes on foreign companies and individuals will stimulate its economy.

Shipping container carriers have overinvested in supplies and capacity, and demand hasn’t kept pace. As a result, shipping is due to become cheaper in the next few years.

A slump in the market for copper is putting the squeeze on companies working to bring electrical vehicles and wind power to the public.

If you’re thinking about taking your retirement savings out of stocks and putting them into bonds, don’t do that. The stock market will eventually rebound and the bond market won’t stay hot forever.

TOP READS IN THE MILITARY & FOR VETERANS

The Space Force is launching another Space Force mission, which is cool.

A series on extremism published via Military.com in partnership with other publications, worth reading. Veterans will almost certainly not be surprised, for better and for worse.

President Biden is proud to have brought the PACT Act across the finish line, and will be talking about that with veterans groups. I’m not sure how much good it will do, but it is nice that this protection for injured vets is institutionalized… I myself could be affected one day, having spent a couple years on bases that used burn pits to dispose of everything you can imagine.

Live long enough and you’ll get free health care if you helped to defeat the last iteration of fascism!

TOP READS AROUND THE WORLD

Oregon is considering recriminalizing hard core drug use after three years of experimenting with the alternative. I’m not there so I don’t have a vote — I know some people who live there and really hate what’s happening — but I also feel that if you’re going to commit to a social experiment it needs more than a few years, and meaningful funding.

Another place where horrible war is leading to the deaths of at least thousands? Sudan.

Ukraine shifts over to the defensive, a strategy I always held they should maintain… it brings me no pleasure to say this!

HUMOR

The Navy SEALs have a woman and she wears Oakley sunglasses and is a huge jerk, per Duffel Blog.