Precisely because they in general do not deliberately inflict physical harm, yet do, as van Creveld has observed, exhibit some common traits with warfare, games appear well fitted for the purpose of military planning, testing, and training. After all, besides the elements of rules and competition, a lack of serious consequences is one cornerstone of many attempts to define games and play, from Huizinga (1955, p. Even though a representational layer may suggest that the small figures placed on a map or the actual players moving through a landscape constitute soldiers engaged in fierce battles, hardly anyone is ever killed or seriously wounded playing a war game. With a few exceptions, such as medieval jousting competitions or the gladiator games mentioned above, most acts of play do not willfully inflict bodily harm. The main point asserted by van Creveld is that both war games and warfare are planned competitive interactions between opponents that are (more or less) structured by rules, and that stretch over time. In this regard, it does not matter if this opponent is a human being, an institution, or an algorithm. Both, he states, are constituted in and through an “interplay between… two sides” that is “strategic” in kind, that means the aim is “to achieve your objective in the face of an opponent who thinks and acts” (p. As van Creveld (2013) observes in his history of war games, games and war exhibit certain similarities. From the ancient Chinese Go, via various iterations of chess to contemporary digital simulation games, or from classical Roman gladiator battles, via martial-arts competitions to today’s first-person shooters, the skills employed and the structures limiting participants’ actions and perceptions point to a variety of equivalences and connections between the two fields of practice. Games and war have always stood in a close relationship to one another. Special Issue - War/Game: Studying Relations Between Violent Conflict, Games, and Play by Holger Pötzsch, Philip Hammond Approaching the War/Game Nexus
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