CesareRaf wrote: ↑30 November 2022, 15:20
cigma wrote: ↑26 November 2022, 11:12
CAN WAR BE A GAME?
In the year 2020 around 50.000 people* worldwide have been killed on direct violation in wars. Wars kill soldiers and civilians, make children orphans, lead to lifelong disabilities, leave families without breadwinners. Wars devastate the country, destroy homes, schools, hospitals, electricity and water supply, factories, all kinds of infrastructure. Wars bring millions of suffering, physical and emotional. Wars destroy the livelihood of at least one generation. On both sides.
WAR IS NOT A GAME. WAR IS DEADLY SERIOUS.
This is not against BGA or any game designer, publisher, developer, or player. I just want you to be fully aware what you are doing when you choose to „play“ war.
- - -
* Source:
https://ourworldindata.org/war-and-peace
This is by far the most useless and pathetic post I have ever read on BGA. It is on the same level of Helen Lovejoy pleading randomly "Will someone please think of the children?" in The Simpsons (I hope you get the reference!). How can you not distinguish between play and reality?
And to think that I had opened the post hoping for news about recently added wargames...
I disagree with you that this post is useless and pathetic.
I do agree with cigma that war is atrocious, horrible and should be avoided.
However I do play war games, the main reason I am on BGA is that Memoir’44 has been implemented here.
Memoir’44 is not only a great game (my opinion
) but it also wants to remind us of the people who gave their lives for our freedom in the Second World War. We should remember all those lives lost in WWII and in wars before and after. And we should be aware that war is hell.
Why do I still play war games? War games have been around since the dawn of time examples like chess, checkers and go all revolve around battle and area control against your opponent. They also allow us to pit our wits against other players and sharpen our minds. In our community (Memoir’44) we have saying: we play war so we don’t wage war. I also want to say that so far the Memoir’44 community has been welcoming friendly and helpful. It was already spread across the globe (heavily favouring Us and France
), but I hope being on BGA can grow and strengthen our community even more and we can spread understanding across more people and countries.
I know I am a naive optimist when I say I think if more Russian Alexes had played more board games against Ukrainian Borisses maybe it would have been harder to go to war against each other. But still that is how I feel.
Another factor is, if we play against each other across borders, we can also inform each other better across borders. In most countries there are various forms of media control that disallows information to get through. Boardgame and other communities can spread more information across platforms and borders that are harder to control (I am aware that those channels can also be used to spread misinformation, but we as a community have a say in that.) on this forum there are topics doing just that.
More specific for Memoir’44
Recently I visited and played in the Memoir’44 Belgium Open. The theme was Belgian troops across WWII. The organisers did not shy away from difficult topics like Belgians that fought for the SS, deportation of Jews and our western presence in Africa. Yes, I did play a war game that weekend, and yes I did have (a lot) of fun. But I also learned new history and about some atrocities of war.