The Art of Wargaming is a fascinating book, a compendium of advice and key questions that remains relevant almost 30 years later. Perla is an academic who designs and runs professional wargames for the Naval War College, and an ardent hobbyist gamer who can speak about the difference between Avalon Hill and SPI games and the biases of various trade publications. Perla (likely, I can't say for sure) wrote this book as an academic career building block, to bulwark up a small professional wargaming community in his interest, and a direct response to Allan's War Games. In many ways, the books compliment each other. Perla has a narrower focus on US Navy wargaming and an agenda to push, but he also has much deeper knowledge and clear perspective.

The first third of the book is a history of wargames, stretching from Sun Tzu and various European forms of "battle chess", to classic Prussian General Staff kriegspiel, to the heydey of American hobby wargaming in the 60s and 70s, as well as the Naval Electronic Warfare Simulator, a 60s era mainframe monstrosity that let virtual fleet clash in real time. Allan has a better view of seminar gaming and RAND's political simulations, but Perla can talk about the hobby, and the relatively simple Avalon Hill games against the "monsters" that SPI made, and how most games are rarely played, or played solo.

The second and third sections concern Perla's perspective as a game designer, and the role that wargames can play in a professional environment. Wargames are distinct from training exercises, which are tightly constrained to speed learning the proper execution of necessary skills, and operations research, which seek analytic mathematical models. Rather, a wargame is a sequence of decisions made by players, under pressures of time and imperfect information, with rule-bounded consequences, in order to develop the intangible strategic skills of leadership. A wargame is a conversation between its developers and its players, and the most important question is "why": why did the players make their decisions; why did the designers embed these assumptions.

Perla includes several lists of questions to help guide vital debriefings (I refuse to call the post-wargame discussion a 'hot washup') and game design. These lists seem like enumerated common sense, which is high praise. I have to say that Perla and I share many biases as gamers, even if we come from entirely different gaming traditions, in preferring games that abstract away the "weeds" in favor of key decisions, and which look towards the player's process as the key element of gameplay, as long as outcomes are not distinctly immersion breaking in anachronism. Though he has a grognard's disdain for TSR and the goblins and elves of fantasy roleplaying games, he seems the acme of his ambition as the commander's viewpoint game: fully encompassing the fog of war and uncertainty in action, and predicting a bright future for computer aided gaming tools.

I do wish that Perla had written a little more on applications, provided a deconstruction of a few games, or more examples of how he'd build a game to his specifications. The futurism is well... predicting the future is hard, and this book came out a few years before Real Time Strategy emerged as a genre, or before eurogames revitalized board-games for adults. But one of the advantages of the lost time is that Perla isn't thinking about the debates in realism and interfaces and fun in the same terms we are, and that in some sense he's closer to the important issues of information, decision, and action (shades of the OODA loop there) than we are today.

I'd love to see what he thinks of Command: Modern Air Naval Operations as a computerized version of what he does for a living, or of the COIN games (A Distant Plain, Fire in the Lake, etc) as modern representations of asymmetric warfare, or of the Paxgames community. And given that last I googled, he's still around, I may do that.