What is My Ultimate Goal?

To recap today's topic:

How I Play Games
My Character Files - The Templates
My Character's World
The Character Sheet - Details
The World Folders

Now we come to what my ultimate goal is.

My ultimate goal is to have gone through "the pageant of history." To have played a computer war game set in every period of time on earth and in space, from 4000 BC to 40K AD and beyond. To have see the long tangled skein of technology's advance. To have become a sort-of time traveler myself. My goal is the goal of the more noble of my mercenaries. It is a quest for knowledge. A desire to know what is human, and what Human is.

Can't I have done that playing economic games? To be sure I have done that too.(See Trade Empires). But economics does not make for interesting heroes. Economics is about the safe and basic stuff. Food, clothing, shelter. Even animals do some of that. War, horrible as it is, seems to be what chiefly distinguishes us from animals. While animals do have colony warfare (ants and simian packs, for example), and ritualized mating combat, these are instincts. Only man, consciously and with the full weight of his mind and spirit, kills the fellow members of his species in a highly organized manner.

But war is not always strictly about material things. Joshua Lawrence Chamberlain, the Union hero of the battle of Gettysburg, once wrote: "But we can hold our spirits and our bodies so pure and high, we may cherish such thoughts and such ideals, and dream such dreams of lofty purpose, that we can determine and know what manner of men we will be, whenever and wherever the hour strikes and calls to noble action."

Shelby Foote had a story about one of the Confederate soldiers who participated in Pickett's Charge at that battle. That soldier knew something that Gen. Robert E. Lee did not. He knew that he and his fellows were all going to be killed in the charge and that it would fail. As a rabbit ran by him and away from the battle, he said "Run away old hare, run away. That's what I'd do if I was an old hare." He knew he was going to die, and yet he still went forward with Pickett's division. The only time an animal does something like that is when a mother is defending her young, or a pack is defending its survival.

To be human is to fight and risk death over ideas, dreams and hopes. That is spiritual, however unspiritual those ideas, dreams and hopes may be. And that is one of the major things that makes us human. Even Chris Hedges - no friend of war - has written that "war is a force that gives us meaning." He is a witness to the evil of war. And to read him is to be realistic about war and its consequences. But even he is aware that something vital to the human spirit goes on during war, even as war is being destructive to the human spirit.

Robert E. Lee seems to have had the right of it when he said, "It is well that war is so terrible - otherwise we would grow to too fond of it."

Do I learn all that from playing war games? Only a little. What playing war games on the computer really does for me is stimulate me to educate myself about a historical time period and its people. A war game is a stimulus to education.

When I've played a war game about a period, I have a better notion of what was going on and what the people involved were trying to accomplish and what their constraints were. Playing a war game gives me a better notion of what alternatives were available. This makes history a living history that is a record of only one set of alternatives coming to pass. Most people do not like learning history because it is passive. It is what has already happened. You can only read about it. A war game, and even an economic game, is history made active. History in the making.

So that's my ultimate goal. Education through game play.