Miniatures Wargaming, Television, and Just How Do You Make it Seem Fun and Dynamic?

Miniatures Wargaming is Visually Dynamic

Miniatures wargaming is a wonderful collection of hobbies that has broad, and seemingly increasing, appeal to table top gamers. That collection of hobbies includes tactical skirmish gaming, grand strategic gaming, modeling, figure painting, and crafting. Yes, crafting. I don’t know about you, but some of the best wargaming supplies I own were purchased at a Michael’s Arts and Crats store and every time I see an empty egg carton I have three or four ideas about what terrain I can build with it.

One of the things that unifies these hobbies is that they can be very visually interesting. If you like tactical skirmish gaming or grand strategic battles, moving the figures around the table is extremely stimulating and it sparks the imagination. Your mind’s eye can see the Cowboys and Earps battling it out in the O.K. Corral or Henry V commanding his yeomen to fire upon the French Aristocracy at Agincourt. The mind’s is aided in this by the use of wonderfully sculpted miniature figures. For many, like me, those figures are unpainted or have a mere basecoat, but when they are fully painted they create beautiful panoramas that often recruit spectators when played in public. There’s a reason Games Workshop wants games played in their stores. They are not just fun to play, they are fun to watch in person.

Just as there are actual play channels for role playing games, there are actual play channels for table top miniatures game and a lot of them are very fun to watch. I’ve long been a fan of Little Wars TV, who do a great job of combining history and gaming and of portraying the actual play of wargames in a relatively exciting manner.

The hobby also sparks artistic creativity. One of my daughters’ (both of them) favorite YouTubers is the art streamer Jazza. He’s a talented artist who engages in a number of artistic challenges and shares the experiences and lessons he learns with viewers. Often, his videos include wargaming related challenges that demonstrate not only his skill but how visually engaging miniatures gaming can be.

On a side note, when my daughters started watching Jazza’s early videos, they didn’t know he did table top gaming stuff and I (who had only watched Jazza on his wargaming terrain channel) didn’t know that he had a general art channel too. I walked in on my daughters watching one of his videos and said, “Is that Jazza? He makes great gaming terrain!” My daughters were surprised I knew who Jazza was and were delighted to see that he also had a gaming related channel. This was a few years ago when Jazza’s art and table top channels were more segregated from one another, so it was a really cool moment.

All of this is to say two things:

1. I love miniatures based wargaming and I think it is cool as hell. I mean, Peter Cushing was a miniatures wargamer and to a Hammer Films fan, Cushing is the king of cool.

2. I think that miniatures based wargaming is an engaging and visually exciting hobby.

If Miniatures Wargaming is Cool and Visually Dynamic, Why Do TV and Film Do Such a Bad Job Making it Look Cool and Visually Dynamic?

I’ve played in a lot of great gaming groups over the years, but the best and longest lasting game group I played in was the one that started when my wife was in film school at USC. The film department was filled with people who loved role playing games and table top miniatures gaming and I soon learned that D&D was where a lot of Hollywood writers cut their teeth in learning storytelling techniques. Hollywood creatives loved D&D an table top gaming and based on past television shows and movies, they always have. Not just Peter Cushing, but everyone.

While Hollywood has been able to make role playing games look like fun since the early days of the hobby, they have never been able to capture that in the same way with wargames. Say what you want about Maze & Monsters or Skullduggery, they made playing role playing games look awesome.

I know the above screen capture is very blurry (my copy is SD and it’s from my monitor), but just look how moody Maze & Monsters makes D&D look. Rona Jaffe may have known nothing about D&D, but I want to play this game. It gets even more interesting as things move forward. Steven Spielberg’s E.T.: The Extra-Terrestrial featured D&D play at the beginning of the movie and the classic Cloak & Dagger, which I mentioned in a prior Weekly Geekly, has my all time favorite representation of role playing games in film to date. The tumbling d12s, a reference to Raiders of the Lost Ark, is amazing.

All of this was long before Stranger Things, Critical Role, The Gamers, GOLD, and a host of other role playing related films that made (and make) role playing look fun and exciting.

If Hollywood (and ITV/BBC) can make role playing games look great, why can’t they do it with wargames? After all, wargames are a combination of visually dynamic hobbies and they served as the foundation for role playing games?

I don’t know why, but I do know that they have tried.

Below is a list of some attempts by creators to make wargaming look interesting to viewing audiences.

Callan

Callan was a British spy genre television series that aired between 1967 and 1972. It was produced by Thames Television, who also produced the excellent Tomorrow People, for ITV and starred Edward Woodward as the eponymous Callan. It’s a great show and in many ways can be viewed as a prequel to the American television series The Equalizer. In the series (read season) three episode “An Act of Kindness,” Callan visits a wargaming event as a part of his investigation. The screenplay has Callan engage in playing a wargame on screen, and the segment is a couple of minutes long, in order to demonstrate his keen mind and to demonstrate to his target that he’s not a person to be trifled with. It’s a narratively important scene, and I really like it, but it lacks visual appeal.

As much as I like ITV productions, if it’s a good British show and not Doctor Who it tends to be ITV and not BBC, this episode has all the hallmarks of England’s lower production values in the 1980s and earlier. British television has always been well written and performed, but the sound and cinematography were historically sketchy compared to American productions. This is no longer the case, shows like Shetland or Murder in Provence exceed many American shows, but it was at the time and Callan suffers in spades.

Callan in An Act of Kindness

As a wargamer, I love this scene. As a struggling terrain maker, I adore the scene as it demonstrates more realistic terrain for an average home game than we often see. If I wasn’t a wargamer though, I think I’d wonder what the appeal is. Edward Woodward was an avid wargamer himself, as we’ll see below, so this is an episode done out of love. I just wish it enthralled more.

Columbo

Just as I believe that Jane Austen is the greatest novelist in the English language because she captured the best “romantic formula,” I think that Columbo established the best visual murder mystery formula possible. What makes Columbo such a great show is that it doesn’t try to outwit its audience by seeing if they can guess who the murderer is. That’s a recipe for potential failure and disappointment in the mystery genre that is exaggerated in a one hour show. Poe tried to outwit his audience in his Dupin stories and those stories were written as puzzles to be solved.

Can you solve faster than the master? That’s one of the joys of written mysteries. However, if a mystery is well written, that is to say that all the clues are actually present in the book, then the puzzle isn’t much of a challenge and if the purpose of the mystery was the puzzle it can disappoint. Poe’s purpose wasn’t the puzzle. His purpose was to shock with the eventual details of the murder. Similarly, Agatha Christie’s tales are more about relationships (taking a nod from Austen) than about the murder puzzle. That is one of the reasons she has endured. Too many mysteries lack that human component and focus on the puzzle and if all the pieces are there, which they should be if it’s well written, then all one is really doing is seeing how long it takes to see the whole picture and if the picture is dull then the mystery fails.

Columbo spins that on its head completely. You know from moment one who the killer is and how they did it, and often why, but what you don’t know is how Columbo is going to catch them. That’s the fun of the episode. Watching hypothesis after hypothesis revealed through a compelling interlocutor. It’s masterful. Psych put a nice twist on this having its investigator stumble through red herrings for humorous effect. The mysteries aren’t a surprise, but the motives and solutions are. Sheer genius.

Columbo, in the Grand Deceptions episode, takes on a military veteran who is an avid wargamer. Over the course of the episode Columbo learns more and more about the subject, and the subject of the wargame, and uses that information to solve the mystery. Sadly, we never see the wargame as anything more than a diorama. The prop is extremely beautiful and well made and I would have loved to have Columbo asking questions about game mechanics. I actually think that would have worked and been an opportunity for the arrogant officer to be put in his place. Sadly, that was not to be.

Columbo Grand Deceptions

Battleground

Okay, if it is hard to make wargames visually interesting within narrative constraints, what about by showing game play? Edward Woodward partnered with Peter Gilders, who met on the set of Callan, to create a television series that used wargame rules to re-enact famous conflicts. I find the show engrossing, but I don’t think people who aren’t already interested in wargaming will. In the case of Battleground, I think the major flaws are two fold. First, the show suffers from the same production value complaints I had earlier. More importantly though, I think that the show should have been more tightly edited. There is a lot of shoe leather here and I think a focus on key moments would have worked better. If you compare these to the Little Wars TV episode above, you’ll see the difference.

The Game of War

As with Association Football, England is the true creator of the recreational wargame. The origins of proto-football lie either in Celtic or Germanic roots, but the formal game? That’s all England and Scotland. The Germans may have invented the professional wargame, but the British mastered the recreational. From Robert Louis Stephenson and H.G. Wells to Donald Featherstone, Tony Bath, and Rick Priestley (to name but three of hundreds), the aisle of Britain has produced some wonderful advocates (and rules) for wargaming. Maybe that’s why they’ve tried again and again to have a television show devoted to using wargames to teach history. In 1997, that attempt was Game of War and as a wargamer I love it, but it would not have recruited me into the hobby. The combination of static visuals and arcane mechanics just don’t quite mesh for an exciting production…for a general audience. Me? I love it.

Time Commanders

Okay, maybe using miniature figures and arcane mechanics doesn’t make the cut. What if we used video games, which have transparent game mechanics, as the engine to show our educational historical wargames? Maybe then professional entertainment producers could create an engaging show for wide audiences. That’s exactly what Time Commanders attempted to do and with predictable results. It just doesn’t work and I cannot help but wonder why.

The Amateurs

While elite professional entertainment producers have had a difficult time bringing the magic of wargaming to the visual medium, the amateurs haven’t. I think a part of the reason is that they have the experience of seeing the failures of the professional attempts and they were able to build on the successful narrative descriptions of wargame writers like Rick Priestley and others in Battle Reports in old issues of White Dwarf. They paid attention to these lessons and made compelling content. I’ve already included a video from Little Wars TV, who I think are great at this, but on the more recreational side Guerilla Miniature Games does a great job of creating regular content that is engaging and informative.

As good as all of the amateur content is at inspiring people to play wargames is, there probably is no better introductory video to the hobby than Bardic Broadcasts’ video “What Makes Heroquest So Great?” Even with relatively primitive production values, the combination of humor and insight makes this the single most appealing recruitment tool for wargaming I’ve ever seen.

What are your thoughts? Have you seen wargaming presented in popular entertainment in an engaging way? Am I completely off base here?