Caveat: Whilst I know a reasonable amount about wargaming, I am a complete novice when it comes to psychogeography … so if I’ve have misunderstood aspects of the latter, please will my regular blog readers bear this in mind when it comes to any comments they might wish to make. I always welcome constructive and informed criticism … but not the other sort!
I became interested in psychogeography because I had watched John Rogers’s YouTube videos, listened to him discussing psychogeography with Ian Sinclair, and discovered that Guy Debord had been both an early advocate of psychogeography as well as being a wargame designer.
At first, I could not see any other links between psychogeography and wargaming … and then began to look at how the former looks at maps and terrain. Guy Debord was a Situationist, and one of their approaches involved what is known as dérive, which can best be defined as being an unplanned journey through a landscape. I suspect that wargamers would consider what they do to be the opposite of this; in other words, they plan their journeys through the landscape.
So, it seems that psychogeographers and wargamers look at landscape in diametrically opposed ways … but do they?
When a wargamer looks at the terrain they a going to fight a battle on, the rules they are likely to use will include penalties or bonuses that relate to that terrain. For example:
- Hills: Give units on them better visibility of the surrounding terrain and a bonus if they must defend it.
- Forests and woods: Provide cover to units in them but reduce the mobility of units moving through them.
- Rivers: Are obstacles to movement.
- Roads: Increase the mobility of units moving along them.
- Built-up areas: May be an objective that must be retained or captured as well as providing cover to units in them.
- Railways: Provide strategic mobility and act as supply routes.
Applying psychogeography to these same features, questions arise that are not incompatible with wargaming. For example:
- Hills: Will a unit that occupies a hill for where they can see their hometown experience enhanced morale?
- Forests and woods: Are enemy units concealed therein, and therefore should they be avoided?
- Rivers: Is the small bridge over this river the only place for miles where an army can cross unhindered?
- Roads: Is this road sufficiently robust to allow heavy vehicles to use it?
- Built-up areas: A city contains a cathedral that is of great historical importance. Should it be defended – and thus exposed to the possibility of destruction – or should the city be declared ‘open’ in the hope that it will be preserved intact?
- Railways: Can our railway locomotives and rolling stock use this railway or is it the wrong gauge?
In other words, terrain has meaning as well as military characteristics.
It is important at this point to consider maps as interpretations of terrain and that they are not neutral objects. For example:
- A military map will emphasise road networks, hill gradients, and the location of bridges and settlements.
- A political map will emphasise local, regional, and national borders.
- A railway map will emphasise the rail routes that are available, the location of stations and depots, and interchanges between different rail networks.
Psychogeography challenges the idea that there is such a thing as a ‘correct’ map … and wargamers tend to do the same thing.
For example, if you give three players with different roles maps of the same country:
- The army commander will want a map that shows roads, rivers, the height of hills, bridges, and built-up areas.
- The railway logistician will want a map that shows railway routes, the location of sidings, depots, and workshops, and the gradient of railway lines.
- A local resistance commander will want a map that shows unused footpaths and the location of sympathetic villages, potential hiding places, police stations, and abandoned buildings.
They are geographically the same country but in wargame terms they are three completely different landscapes.
This appears – to me – to be close to psychogeographical thinking.
The Situationist dérive – which forms part of the thinking behind psychogeography – involves moving through a place without following a normal, predetermined route and seeing where the environment leads you.
There is an obvious wargaming equivalent to this … running a campaign or fighting a battle in terrain that is poorly surveyed … if it has been surveyed at all!
For example, a player might record the following the following in their campaign diary:
- Left the country’s capital by the northern road.
- The road was excellent as far as the provincial capital.
- Local people warned us about the nearby forest.
- The bridge across the main river appears weak and will need strengthening if we intend to use it as a major supply route.
- The country beyond the provincial capital feels increasingly hostile and villagers have refused to supply even basic foodstuffs.
In this instance, the player’s mental map of the terrain is developing alongside the physical map they are using. Some of the information they garner will be factual; some of it will be rumours; some will reflect prejudices; and some of it may simply be wrong.
Things are now beginning to resemble how historical commanders understood campaign geography, and one is drawn to the conclusion that campaign narratives naturally embrace psychogeography.
A long-running wargame campaign generates something similar without anyone consciously designing it. Locations become memorable because of a campaign event that occurred there. The physical terrain hasn’t changed … but its psychological geography has.
There is also an interesting link between psychogeography and nineteenth-century Kriegsspiel.
In a traditional Kriegsspiel, the umpires deliberately restrict what opposing commanders know. As a result, the players manipulate units on an incomplete map. They also receive reports and issue orders based upon incomplete information. Consequently, the commanders operate partly within an imagined landscape that is inside the commander’s head.
Psychogeography suggests that it might be able to take this further and create a psychogeographical campaign system where every important location has three characteristics:
- Physical value: what the terrain does.
- Perceived value: what a particular army believes about it.
- Emotional value: what previous events have caused it to mean.
After several campaign turns, the campaign map accumulates memory … and that is psychogeography emerging through play. It also suggests something potentially quite powerful: the campaign map itself could change according to what happens in the campaign without the physical geography changing at all.
I have seen this happen in several Matrix Games and RPG campaigns, and on reflection it would seem to me that many wargamers have been including psychogeography in their games without realising it.
These are my thoughts so far, and I would welcome comments on what I have written.
