Games with military themes date back to antiquity, and yet they are curiously neglected in much of the academic and trade literature on games and game history. This volume fills that gap, providing a diverse set of perspectives on war-gaming's past, present, and future. In Zones of Control, contributors consider war-games played for entertainment, education, and military planning, in terms of design, critical analysis, and historical contexts. They consider both digital and especially table-top games, most of which cover specific historical conflicts or are grounded in recognizable real-world geopolitics. Game designers and players will find the historical and critical contexts often missing from design and hobby literature; military analysts will find connections to game design and the humanities; and academics will find documentation and critique of a sophicated body of cultural work in which the the complexity of military conflict is represented in lucid systems and procedures. Topics include the history of playing at war; operations research and systems design; war-gaming and military history; war-gaming's ethics and politics; gaming irregular and non-kinetic warfare; and war-games as artistic practice.

Foreword : The paper time machine goes electric / James F. Dunnigan -- Part I. Paper wars : A game out of all proportions: how a hobby miniaturized war / Jon Peterson -- The history of wargaming project / John Curry -- The fundamental gap between tabletop simulation games and the "truth" / Tetsuya Nakamura -- Fleet admiral: tracing one element in the evolution of a game design / Jack Greene -- The wild blue yonder: representing air warfare in games / Lee Brimmicombe-Wood -- Historical aesthetics in mapmaking / Mark Mahaffey -- The "I" in team: war and combat in tabletop role-playing games / A. Scott Glancy -- Part II. War engines : War engines: wargames as systems from the tabletop to the computer / Henry Lowood -- The engine of wargaming / Matthew B. Caffrey, Jr -- Design for effect: the "common language" of Advanced squad leader / J.R. Tracy -- Combat commander: time to throw your plan away / John A. Foley -- Empire of the sun: the next evolution of the card-driven game engine / Mark Herman -- The paths of glory lead but to the gaming table / Ted S. Raicer -- A new kind of history: the culture of wargame scenario design communities / Troy Goodfellow -- Part III. Operations : Operations research, systems analysis, and wargaming: riding the cycle of research / Peter P. Perla -- The application of statistical and forensics validation to simulation modeling in wargames / Brien J. Miller -- Goal-driven design and Napoleon's triumph / Rachel Simmons -- Harpoon: an original serious game / Don R. Gilman -- The development and application of the real-time air power wargame simulation Modern air power / John Tiller and Catherine Cavagnaro -- Red vs. blue / Thomas C. Schelling -- Hypergaming / Russell Vane -- Part IV. The bleeding edge : Wargaming futures: naturalizing the new American way of war / Luke Caldwell and Tim Lenoir -- Creating Persian incursion / Larry Bond -- Modeling the second battle of Fallujah / Laurent Closier -- Playing with toy soldiers: authenticity and metagaming in World War I video games / Andrew Wackerfuss -- America's army / Marcus Schulzke -- We the soldiers: player complicity and ethical gameplay in Call of duty: modern warfare / Miguel Sicart -- Upending militarized masculinity in Spec ops: the line / Soraya Murray -- Part V. Systems and situations : Wargames as writing systems / Sharon Ghamari-Tabrizi -- Playing defense: gender, just war, and game design / Elizabeth Losh -- Debord's nostalgic algorithm / Alexander R. Galloway -- The Ludic Science Club crosses the Berezina / Richard Barbrook -- War games / David Levinthal -- Troubling the magic circle: Miniature war in Iraq / Brian Conley -- Part VI. The war room : Wargames as an academic instrument / Philip Sabin -- Lessons from the hexagon: wargames and the military historian / Robert M. Citino -- Simulation literacy: the case for wargames in the history classroom / Rob MacDougall and Lisa Faden -- The amateur designer: for fun and profit / Charles Vasey -- Struggling with deep play: utilizing Twilight struggle for historical inquiry / Jeremy Antley -- Model-driven military wargame design and evaluation / Alexander H. Levis and Robert J. Elder -- Part VII. Irregularities : Gaming the non-kinetic / Rex Brynen -- Inhabited models and irregular warfare games: an approach to educational and analytical gaming at the US Department of Defense / Elizabeth M. Bartels -- Chess, go, and Vietnam: gaming modern insurgency / Brian Train and Volko Ruhnke -- Irregular warfare: the Kobayashi Maru of the wargaming world / Yuna Huh Wong -- A mighty fortress is our God: when military action meets religious strife / Ed Beach -- Cultural wargaming: understanding cross-cultural communications using wargames / James Wallman -- Part VIII. Other theaters : Wargaming (as) literature / Esther MacCallum-Stewart -- Tristram Shandy: Toby and Trim's wargames and the bowling-green / Bill McDonald -- Third Reich and The Third Reich / John Prados -- How Star fleet battles happened / Stephen V. Cole -- Total global domination: games workshop and Warhammer 40,000 / Ian Sturrock and James Wallis -- When the drums begin to roll / Larry Brom -- War recreated: twentieth-century war reenactors and the private event / Jenny Thompson -- Part IX. Fight the future : War, mathematics and simulation: drones and (losing) control of battlespace / Patrick Crogan -- How to sell wargames to the non-wargamer / Michael Peck -- Wargaming the cyber frontier / Joseph Miranda -- The unfulfilled promise of digital wargames / Greg Costikyan -- Civilian casualties: shifting perspective in This war of mine / Kacper Kwiatkowski -- Practicing a new wargame / Mary Flanagan.