NINE
Contests for Meaning
Playing King Philip’s War in the Twenty-First Century
Matthew Kirschenbaum
In a sense, King Philip’s War never ended. In other times, in other places, its painful wounds would be reopened, its vicious words spoken again.
—Jill Lepore, The Name of War
The historian Jill Lepore’s summation of King Philip’s War (1675–76)—a conflict many white Americans have never heard of—was again proven prescient in March 2010 when the Providence Journal in Rhode Island ran a seemingly improbable story about the plans of a small, Maryland-based board game publisher specializing in historical simulations to release a product based on this oft-overlooked episode in colonial New England history.1 King Philip was in fact Metacom, the Wampanoag sachem responsible for rallying the northeastern tribes in an ultimately failed attempt to resist increasingly aggressive colonial expansion; the widespread fighting that ensued, featuring scorched-earth tactics reminiscent of the European religious wars, engulfed four separate colonies and led to hundreds of Puritan and as many as five thousand Native American deaths, including that of Metacom himself. (So ferocious was the enmity that his severed hands were brought to the colonial seat of Plymouth for public display.)
The subsequent narration of the conflict was to be no less totalizing. None other than Increase Mather set the terms for how the war would be characterized in print: “That the Heathen people amongst whom we live, and whose Land the Lord God of our Fathers hath given to us for a rightfull Possession, have at sundry times been plotting mischievous devices against that part of the English Israel which is seated in these goings down of the Sun, no man that is an Inhabitant of any considerable standing can be ignorant.”2 These “mischievous devices” consisted in an unprecedented degree of coordination and common purpose among the native New England tribes, united by the charismatic person of Metacom. The two years of bitter warfare that resulted became instrumental in the construction of a nascent American identity, argues Lepore: “Not all colonists agreed about the causes of the war, or about how it should be waged, but most agreed about what was at stake: their lives, their land, and their sense of themselves.”3
The war thus defined relations between colonists and natives for generations to come, not only in its immediate political, military, and economic ramifications, but also culturally and indeed textually, through histories like Mather’s and the outpouring of other writings that followed (Mary Rowlandson’s captivity narrative is perhaps the most famous). The controversy I describe below will therefore be familiar to anyone who pays attention to ongoing projects of cultural identity formation and negotiation. Still, it is clear that the specific status of the artifact in question as a game was a major part of what was at issue, a new and (for some) needlessly cruel twist in the oft-contested histories of King Philip’s War (the name itself betrays the representational frames that quickly fell into place). Reaction to the Providence Journal story, which the vast majority of readers viewed online, was almost instantaneous. Native American groups were outraged, finding the notion of what was initially perceived to be a fun-for-the-whole-family treatment of the topic as gruesome as it was exploitative. John Poniske, the game’s designer (and a middle-school history teacher), and his publisher, Multi-Man Publishing, Inc., meanwhile maintained that they were simply interested in presenting the story of the conflict to a wider audience, and that the design was a fair and accurate portrayal of historical events based on appropriately studious research.
King Philip’s War (KPW) was published later in 2010 with some degree of reconciliation, Poniske with newfound sensitivities and the objectors acknowledging some of its educational potential (see figure 9.1). Its reception in the hobbyist community that was its target audience has ironically been lackluster, the consensus apparently being that it is a good but not great entry in the niche market for tabletop conflict simulations. (The average user rating on BoardGameGeek, the widely used hobbyist portal, is 7.01 out of 10 at the time of this writing, placing KPW well into the mid-list of the site’s rankings of thousands of published war games.) But why did the game arouse such passions in the first place? Does playing the past create expectations different from merely consuming it through books and film? What does the game as published actually teach us about King Philip’s War? And did it make a difference that it was a board game (with a paper map, dice, and cardboard unit tokens) that was causing all of the fuss, instead of a high-end computer game with sophisticated graphics and sound effects?
The Controversy
The public controversy began on March 15, 2010, when the Providence Journal published a brief item by a staff writer titled “King Philip’s War No Game to Native Americans.”4 It described a title currently up for “pre-order” with Multi-Man Publishing (MMP), which operates via a subscription model, meaning one of its board games is printed only when it accrues a certain number of pledges. While short on details, the piece limned the contours of the debate that would follow. “Colonial players win by gathering points or eliminating King Philip and other Indian leaders. Indian players win by accumulating points or seizing the settlements of Boston and Plymouth,” the article explained. Statements from tribal historians from the Narragansett and Nipmuc were included, invoking racism and race war: “The message seems to be, it’s still OK to kill Indians.” Paula Peters of the Mashpee Wampanoag tribe was quoted as saying that the game “seems to trivialize a very tragic event in our history.” Predictably perhaps, the terms of the discussion rapidly polarized: “Would we play a game called The Holocaust?” she added. Several statements are also included from the game’s designer, John Poniske, chief among them that he “immediately saw the gaming potential in the historical situation.” MMP’s Brian Youse is quoted to the effect that the game “tells a story that many people outside of New England don’t know.” By the end of the piece it also emerged that MMP is co-owned by former Boston Red Sox pitcher Curt Schilling.
Several factors that shaped subsequent discussion are worth pointing out here. The brief description of the game itself, with its emphasis on collecting “points,” seemed to lend credence to the charge that it was trivializing or exploiting a troubled and tragic history. Poniske, meanwhile, comes across as more opportunistic than scholarly, seeing mainly good “gaming potential” in the material. Even the improbable detail regarding Schilling seemed calculated to reinforce the binary between hegemonic American mass culture and Native American traditions routinely relegated to the regalia of mascotry.
The article was quickly noticed in the gamer community, where it spawned a lively discussion on Internet forums such as BoardGameGeek and ConSimWorld. Reaction in these venues was predictable. “I don’t see any harm in drawing attention to history, especially one in this time period where more people should be made aware these events even happened” is representative of the more measured strain that, like MMP itself, simply saw the game as a vehicle for historical education packaged in a recreational format.5 Other responses immediately dialed the rhetoric to an extreme, with foaming accusations of “political correctness” run amok and defiant claims that the best response was to double-down and place an extra order to get the game printed all the sooner (the preorder cost was around $30). Poniske, who remained levelheaded throughout, took the opportunity to offer a more extended statement:
As a teacher I know that people have different styles of learning. I take advantage of all styles and I firmly believe that simulation-gaming (recreating conflict via cardboard and paper) can turn players into learners. King Philip’s War is a case in point. I did not intend to sensationalize anyone’s suffering—the exact opposite. I designed the game to present to the world OUTSIDE of New England a tremendous conflict between American natives and the Puritan colonists who encroached on their tribal lands. . . . I love gaming and I love learning. I combined the two so that I could inform and educate, AND perhaps entice players into digging further into details of the conflict. I would submit that the term “game” in and of itself assumes that the topic is trivialized. On the contrary. There is a world of simulation gaming that allows players insight into the past that they might never otherwise obtain.6
The notion that conflict simulation gaming has the potential to offer worthwhile historical insights is one that is finding increasing traction in the literature. Philip Sabin, for example, professor in the War Studies Department at King’s College London, regularly uses games designed by himself and his students in his courses on military history. Ironically, as Sabin has argued, it is often the low-tech cardboard and paper-based games that provide a more nuanced experience. The computer games market is dominated by big-budget blockbuster productions: one does not play Call of Duty for any real insight into the Normandy landings, but students might very well turn to one of the many dozens of tabletop board games on the subject to help answer the question of why the Allies landed on the Cotentin peninsula and not somewhere else along the coast of France. Playing a game illustrates geography, distances, and variables related to such considerations as supply and the positioning of enemy forces more dynamically than a book or film. Playing a tabletop game in particular allows students to inspect the systems and processes that constitute the rules of the game, and thus its interpretation of the historical record. As Sabin notes, “Since I believe that designing simulations for oneself is a far better way of gaining insight into the dynamics of a real conflict than is simply playing someone else’s computer game on that subject, I see the much greater design accessibility of manual simulations as a major reason for their continued production and relevance.”7 Poniske and MMP’s claim that KPW offered a unique mode of engagement for illuminating this dark corner of New England history is therefore quite defensible, and Poniske has made a point of describing the game as a starting place rather than the final word on the topic.
Some objectors insisted that the game was nothing but an attempt to cash in. But while KPW was not going to make anyone rich (profit margins in this niche marketplace are generally slim), there were undeniably other motives at work. For instance, we can return to Poniske’s earlier comment that he saw “gaming potential” in the historical narrative. What can this mean? From the standpoint of military history and conflict simulation, the situation is indeed an interesting one, a classic case of asymmetrical warfare where an indigenous population confronts a militarily more powerful invader. This translates into different roles for each player and a richer range of decisions and strategies to explore. There was also a significant political layer to the conflict, with uneasy alliances between the New England colonies and the loyalty of various Native American tribes uncertain (the Mohawks, for example, have the potential to join either side—historically they were hostile to Philip). Moreover, the topic had never before been “gamed”; in a hobby that still manages to publish more than one hundred new titles every year for its enthusiasts, the search for novelty amid the reservoir of actual historical events is a factor that cannot be underestimated. (It is not unusual for a long-time war gamer, or “grognard,” to have a couple of dozen Bulge, Waterloo, or Gettysburg games on his shelves.) To stumble across a conflict of such scope and import as King Philip’s War without other treatments of it already in gamers’ hands was thus indeed a coup.
Following the publication of the Providence Journal article, events began to unfold quickly. The key figure to emerge at this point was Julianne Jennings, who is a member of the Nottoway Tribal Community in Virginia and, at the time of the controversy, held an adjunct appointment in cultural anthropology at Rhode Island College. She became a leading spokesperson on behalf of the protest effort. On March 20 she organized a street protest in Providence, drawing around seventy-five attendees as well as additional media coverage in the local papers (see figure 9.2). Signs carried by the protesters read “Stop Playing the Genocide Game” and “Would a Holocaust Game Be OK?”
A Facebook group entitled “Stop the release of King Philip’s War game” also went online, and quickly garnered several hundred members. The description read: “Stopping the production of this game is our focus, but the broader goals are raising awareness of Indians’ continued existence. And the multiracial and multicultural nature of this existence, especially on the East Coast.”8 By this point it was clear that there was a communications gap. Keeping in mind that the game was not yet in print, the objectors were acting at most on the advertising samples posted on the MMP website (which, amid previews of the artwork and map, enticed prospective players with “a momentous example of New England frontier savagery”). Clearly, the vexed connotations of “savage” in this context were not uppermost in the mind of whoever wrote the advertising copy. Still, as one forum poster put it, “When most people hear the word ‘board game’ they think Monopoly, Risk, Clue, or disposable games based on movie franchises.”9 This point is worth underscoring: as others in this volume have addressed,10 the term “game” in the popular imagining is generally synonymous with exactly these sorts of trivial pursuits. Concepts such as “serious games” and “meaningful play” were not part of the discourse as conducted in the streets of Providence. (One could productively answer the rhetorical question about playing a Holocaust game with Brenda Brathwaite’s Train, for example.)11 Other gamers’ reactions ranged from a kind of earnest piety (insisting they played games merely out of a love of history) which, while no doubt sincere as far as it went, generally failed to acknowledge that at the end of the day one also played games about warfare and violence for, well, for want of a better word . . . fun. The piety was also inevitably coupled with a seemingly contradictory outrage, with numerous posters insisting that KPW was “just a game” and that the protestors should find a more urgent cause to which to devote themselves. Regardless, preorders saw a sharp uptick following the publicity, and KPW was quickly slotted into the MMP production queue. By August it was in gamers’ hands. So, what does it actually mean to play King Philip’s War?
Playing the Game
While doubtless appearing formidable to the uninitiated, KPW is a game of only low to middling complexity by the standards of the conflict simulation hobby. There are about a dozen pages of rules to absorb before beginning, and the game takes around three hours to play to completion. It is set on a map of historical New England featuring colonial settlements and native villages, as well as relevant geographical features such as rivers that affect the course of play. Each player has a number of 5/8-inch square cardboard tokens, called “counters,” representing companies of colonial soldiery and “war bands” of Native Americans. Counters are also included for prominent leaders on each side such as Metacom and Benjamin Church; other counters represent assets such as muskets or the presence of scouts or a lurking spy.
The game is structured by turns, each denoting a calendar season between 1675 and 1676, nine total. Each turn consists of a strict sequence of steps (“phases”) that must be completed in order. Since many readers will be unfamiliar with conflict simulations, it is worth reproducing the sequence of a turn in full in order to give a sense of the conduct of the game. I have added brief glosses to each.
Church/Allied Indian Roll. To add interest, the key personage of Benjamin Church enters the game randomly, determined by a die roll. Once he does small groups of Native American fighters may join the settlers, also determined by a die roll. Church’s presence significantly boosts the military capacity of the colonial side, but no player knows exactly when he will come into play.
English Reinforcements. New companies of soldiers appear to replace losses. Each colony contributes soldiers in accordance with its population, with Massachusetts having the most to field.
Indian Diplomacy. Philip may attempt to convince additional tribes to join the war on his side. The outcome of these efforts is determined by his success in the game to that point, with a winning campaign spurring additional tribes to action. The powerful Mohawk nation is a special case whose allegiance is determined by a die roll; Philip may attempt to entice them to intervene on his behalf only to have them instead join with the colonists (as happened historically).
Indian Reinforcements. Similar to phase 2 above; the Native American player places new groups of “warriors” on the map.
Indian Movement. The settlements and villages on the map are connected by a network of trails and watercourses. Unlike a game such as chess, players may generally move as many of the units on their own side as they like each and every turn. Restrictions on the range and extent of movement are imposed by the terrain and by the presence of enemy forces.
Indian Combat. Warfare in the game consists of both attacks against enemy combatants and attacks against villages or settlements. The process is described in more detail below. In order to reflect the operational tempo of a preindustrial military campaign waged in the wilderness, there are arbitrary limitations on the number of combats that can take place each turn.
English Movement. Similar to above. Until Benjamin Church enters the game, the English are forbidden from moving along the waterways.
English Combat. Similar to above. Note that the sequence of play dictates that the English player will usually occupy a reactive posture, responding to movement and combat on the part of the Native American player earlier in the turn.
Winter Attrition. In the winter turn only, units are removed from play as a function of how many settlements or villages that player has lost to enemy activity.
Check Victory Conditions. The game can end either upon conclusion of the final (ninth) turn, or by fulfilling certain specified criteria sooner, as described below. If neither player has won the game in the course of the turn and if there are still remaining turns to play, then the sequence is reset and the next turn begins.
It should be obvious that playing a game like KPW is a highly structured and regimented activity, the rigid sequence of play belying the chaos and uncertainty that attends any military conflict. But while the game does ensure that actions will occur in predictable patterns, chance and randomness are introduced through the vagaries of die rolls, which influence key events ranging from combat to the arrival of reinforcements. As with most conflict simulations, these die rolls are rarely straight heads or tails win or lose propositions. Instead, most tabletop conflict simulation is an exercise in Monte Carlo modeling, a Cold War technique in which the probabilities of complex events are distributed along a randomized spectrum influenced by relevant variables and inputs. While in chess a pawn can always take a queen in the correct circumstance, in a typical war game a smaller force attacking a larger one that is also ensconced on good defensive terrain (like a hilltop) may have only one chance in six of success. In this way a player can make reasonable judgments as to likely outcomes while still preserving the elements of fate and chance that are ineluctably an element of any military action (perhaps that small force has discovered a hidden trail around the back of the hill . . . etc.).
As a war game, armed conflict is obviously at the center of KPW and so it is worth a closer look at exactly how the game represents the fighting. Generally, combat is a function of the presence of opposing forces in adjoining spaces on the map. Each side performs a calculus of “strength points,” which are accumulated through the presence of soldiers or warriors, as well as leaders, fortifications, and muskets (for the Native Americans). Each side then rolls its own six-sided die simultaneously, and consults a “Combat Results Table” that cross-indexes the result of the die roll with its total number of strength points; the numerical result indicates the number of losses inflicted on the enemy and, depending on the proportion, the attacker either advances to claim the space or is rebuffed. If the die rolls from both sides happen to come out equal, however, then a special third die is consulted: a custom so-called Battle Die included with the game, whose six faces are occupied by pictographs with results like Ambush, Spy, Reinforcements, Massacre, Panic, and Guide. The effects vary: Ambush, for example, means that the combat is resolved sequentially rather than simultaneously, so one player may eliminate the other without loss. Spy and Guide both confer special abilities to that group of units, potentially aiding them in further actions. Massacre, oddly, has only the effect of providing one of the players with an additional unit of reinforcements, presumably an abstract representation of the response to an atrocity somewhere in the vicinity.
In addition to battles between rival units, both players may also utilize the combat procedure to attack unguarded English settlements and Native American villages with the objective of razing them. This is a key element of the game, as the number of settlements and villages destroyed is a variable in turn impacting the rate at which reinforcements are acquired, which tribes join Philip in his campaign (or drop out of it), how much each side suffers during the winter months, and finally, the determination of victory. (Historically, hundreds of settlements and villages were attacked by both sides during the war, with numerous unarmed inhabitants slaughtered.) While players can also win by razing the two major colonial settlements of Boston and Plymouth or capturing Philip and a second sachem, Canonchet, such outcomes are rare given competent play. Much of the game therefore consists of players waging a campaign of destruction against opposing settlements and villages, with the major strategic questions being how much effort to expend defending one’s own territory versus attacking the enemy’s, and to what extent to engage the military forces being fielded by the opposing side in an open battle (see figure 9.3).
So where (a reader might be forgiven for wondering) is the fun in all this? For all of the emphasis on violence, it is a very different kind of pleasure or satisfaction than one derives from a first-person shooter, where the real-time pace keeps the gamer on a constant stimulus-response treadmill, adrenalin and dopamine flooding bloodstream and brain stem. Playing KPW is a much more sedate experience; players are not going to shout or flinch or pump their fists in the air. Gameplay becomes about resource management and risk taking, features characteristic of a great many games of all types. But if the appeal to such classic ludic traits is to serve to remediate the game in the eyes of the skeptical, then it must also expose the potential downside of conflict simulation: for many players, I suspect, the semiotic particulars of the Puritan soldiery and Native American warriors, and the burning villages and settlements collectively recede as the physical components of the game become absorbed through familiarity. Players, it is true, are not deriving much vicarious pleasure from razing a village, an action operationalized in the game by nothing more visceral than a die roll, a chart look-up, and the placement of a marker counter. By the same token, however, the acceptance and inevitable absorption of the game’s semiotic field means that the historical particulars are to some extent supplanted by the more abstract strategy and decision making that comes to characterize the immersive experience of the game.
As a brief example to make the point, consider the role of muskets. Both the English and the Native American troop counters are illustrated with figures carrying firearms, implying their relative ubiquity, but the Native Americans also have the opportunity to acquire additional Musket counters as part of their reinforcements. During certain specified turns of the game these counters may be placed with any war band that is currently occupying a riverine or coastal space on the map, lending it an additional strength point in any combat situation in which it becomes embroiled. In gaming parlance this is “chrome,” a small detail meant to solidify the theme or atmosphere of the game. Here the muskets reflect the technology transfer that typically characterizes what would today be dubbed a “counterinsurgency operation” by the modern military. In fact, however, the Native American firearms trade was symptomatic of the extent to which the indigenous population had become imbricated in colonial economic systems, a reality reflected in the game by the mandate that the recipients of the muskets be in a waterside space conducive to commerce. By virtue of their +1 strength point bonus they confer, the Musket counters then function as a commodity token in the probabilistic economy of the game’s predominant subsystem, its combat procedures. Meanwhile, though, the awkward semiotic doubling that comes from placing the additional Musket marker on top of figures already depicted as carrying firearms perhaps serves to reveal the manner in which whole systems of economic relations are subsumed by the simple physical representations of the game—in this instance a cardboard token that (rather inelegantly) must either sit on top of the unit and thereby obscure it or else be placed underneath, where it may be overlooked in the heat of gameplay.
Airwaves and Wires
On March 27, less than two weeks after the onset of the public controversy, designer John Poniske and Julianne Jennings appeared together on air at the invitation of Spooky Southcoast, a paranormal-themed AM radio talk show hosted out of Fairhaven, Massachusetts.12 (The “spooky” connection was apparently the plethora of New England ghost stories spawned by the events of King Philip’s War.) This event was the culmination of what had by all accounts become a rather remarkable back-channel conversation among Poniske, the principals at MMP, and Jennings and others within the protest movement. Despite much of the public vitriol (whether aggrieved gamers going to the mat against political correctness or objectors insisting that the game was merely a pretense for race war) a genuine dialogue had begun between the two sides, with an honest exchange of communication and grudging respect for one another’s positions. One key point focused around the usage of the word “eliminated” in the description of the forthcoming game to describe the fate of Metacom and the Wampanoag. The concern was the implication that the native peoples were completely eradicated, with surviving tribal culture and communities rendered invisible by this textual representation. The language was revised by MMP as a result of that back-channel conversation. In the discussion that ensued on Spooky Southcoast, Jennings and Poniske engaged in a thoughtful, mutually respectful dialogue for nearly an hour. The concern over the effacement of present-day tribal community emerged as quite real: in the course of the discussion, Poniske himself freely acknowledged it never occurred to him to contact descendants of the original native population. “Many people think of history as static, [as] there being one history; there’s no such thing,” he concluded.13
Despite this seemingly amicable outcome, the controversy had not yet run its course. On April 15 the Associated Press picked up the events with a story that was distributed globally.14 “Schilling pitches bloody board game,” read one headline, seemingly unperturbed by the fact that despite his nominal stake in MMP the major leaguer’s involvement with the design and production of the game was nil. More helpfully, the AP story noted that “the pushback to the game reflects a broader, continuing effort by Native American tribes to challenge images in society, whether they’re school logos bearing the likeness of scowling warriors or names of professional sports teams that they deem as offensive or connoting hostility.” Unlike the initial spate of reporting, it also manages to convey the genuine interest in history and simulation that motivated the game, as well as a conciliatory if somewhat resigned statement from Jennings: “We’re not going to stop this game from coming. . . . If we can’t stop it, why not try to contribute to the content?”
In the designer’s notes included in the rulebook to the published game, Poniske acknowledges the controversy, but adds that subsequent to the AP wire story attempts were made to contact tribal councils to arrange a demonstration of the game but to no avail: “It would appear that media hype has poisoned the opportunity for any possibility of further discussion,” he writes, but adds: “In publicizing King Philip’s War, perhaps we, MMP, native protesters and myself, will raise awareness and understanding of the continuing and vital native cultures in our country.”15 He also furnishes a bibliography for further reading, which includes Lepore’s book alongside others, as well as the PBS documentary We Shall Remain. But as statements from Jennings and other tribal authorities repeatedly made clear, the issue for them was as much the game itself as its contribution to the ongoing cascade of Westernized Native American representations. While King Philip’s War is an earnest effort to responsibly represent military and political aspects of the conflict and perhaps spur those who play it to further study, it ultimately fails to fully reconcile itself to the complexities of its own status as a representational artifact in a semiotic environment still charged nearly three and a half centuries after Increase Mather first put quill to parchment.
Contests and Meanings
If war games are to be taken seriously as educational as well as purely recreational pursuits, something that Poniske, Sabin, and others (including myself) advocate, then designers and publishers must become more attuned to the semiotics of their promotion and production.16 As the historians Ronald Smelser and Edward J. Davies have shown, even a topic as seemingly remote in Western contexts as the Eastern Front in World War II can function as a semiotically replete conduit for mythos, the heroic (read white and Westernized) Wehrmacht facing off against the anonymous hordes of the Red Menace. They convincingly argue that this particular narrative of the Eastern Front has become engrained in the popular imagination through a range of media, including memoirs by the German generals, pulp novels, comics, films, and, finally, tabletop war games.17 War gamers, themselves overwhelmingly white and male, tend to be impatient with such critiques: the debates quickly become polarized, or in Internet parlance “Godwinized.” There is a vociferous resistance to any suggestion that “history” is being sanitized or whitewashed out of deference to anything perceived as “political correctness.”18
As Smelser and Davies acknowledge, selecting a certain sort of cover imagery for a war game or a book or a film poster does not make one a Nazi sympathizer; but it does indicate that one has unconsciously accepted a particular ideological construct of a historical event and, by dint of naturalizing it as “just an image” or “just a game,” allowed the representation to become a relay station for that ideology’s ongoing propagation. In the case of King Philip’s War, Lepore makes the point that narrativizations, images, and commemorations of the war have all fed the cultural economy of its ongoing representation, one that is dependent on technologies of inscription and representation that underwrite the dominant white frameworks for interpreting the past. The response on the part of some gamers to defiantly order an extra copy has everything to do with asserting authority over the means of cultural production (and having the disposable income at hand by which to do so). As Lepore writes, “If war is, at least in part, a contest for meaning, can it ever be a fair fight when only one side has access to those perfect instruments of empire, pens, paper, and printing press?”19
Adding the D6 (the six-sided die) to this litany is perhaps a bit much, but that the game operates within Westernized frameworks of cultural production and consumption is undeniable. The artwork on the box depicts colonial soldiers but no Native American fighters. More tellingly perhaps, it inadvertently underscores the authority of textualized narratives of the conflict through the faded manuscript page presented as a backdrop to the cover art and, especially, the depiction of a quill pen and inkwell on the back cover beside a sheet of parchment with the words “King Philip’s War” (see figure 9.4). The history the game seeks to deliver is thus underwritten via exactly the instruments of empire Lepore enumerates. That the “natural” semiotic choice for lending a historical veneer to the game’s artwork turns out to be originally European contrivances for the transmission and codification of narrative merely reinforces the concerns of Native American spokespeople like Jennings that, regardless of intentions, the game cannot help but operate within Western frameworks of representation, truth, and authenticity. (By contrast, the Battle die described in the previous section, with its clip-art pictographs [see figure 9.3], is perhaps an absent-minded attempt at inclusion of an alternative sign system, tellingly as the harbinger of “chance” and “fate.”)
Conflict simulation gamers tend to be well educated, curious, and serious about their devotion to history. They buy books, compare notes, argue over interpretations, show up at lectures to wrestle academic historians to the mat, and sometimes even conduct original archival research on topics that interest them. There is no doubt that the publication of King Philip’s War succeeded in bringing attention to the conflict, and that it led some of those who bought the game to read further. Even without any additional study players of the game will have understood that at some point in the colonial New England past there was a bitter ethnic war characterized by the killing of noncombatant natives and settlers alike, the large-scale destruction of homes and property as a matter of organized military policy, and massacre and atrocity throughout the region. They will have understood that allegiances on both sides were fragile, that nationalized identities we now take for granted were still in their formative stages. And they will have doubtless grasped, even if unaware of the 2010 controversy, that they are skimming the surface of events vastly more nuanced and complex than ludic systems and procedures can represent. All of that is to the good. But history, as the saying goes, is written by the victors. In this case it is also undeniably being played by the victors. And that makes it a very delicate game indeed.20
NOTES
1. King Philip’s War, Board Game, Designed by John Poniske (Millersville, Md.: Multi-Man Publishing, 2010).
2. Increase Mather, A Brief History of the Warr with the Indians in New-England (Boston, John Foster, 1676), 9, Online Electronic Text Edition, http://digitalcommons.unl.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1008&context=zeaamericanstudies.
3. Jill Lepore, The Name of War: King Philip’s War and the Origins of American Identity (New York: Knopf, 1998), xiii.
4. Paul Davis, “Philip’s War No Game to Native Americans,” Providence Journal, March 15, 2010, A1.
5. Comment available at BoardGameGeek, accessed July 31, 2012, http://boardgamegeek.com/article/4777506#4777506.
6. “King Philip’s War,” accessed July 31, 2012, http://boardgamegeek.com/article/4778339#4778339.
7. Phillip Sabin, “The Benefits and Limitations of Computerization in Conflict Simulation,” LLC 26, no. 3 (September 2011): 326.
8. As of this writing the Facebook group is inactive and slated for archiving, accessed July 31, 2012, http://www.facebook.com/#!/group.php?gid=111132838897207.
9. Comment available online, accessed July 31, 2012, at http://boardgamegeek.com/article/4796597#4796597.
10. See especially chapter 6.
11. See http://playthisthing.com/train (accessed November 19, 2012) for commentary on Train, a brilliant and emotionally shattering game that asks players to route railroad cars filled with prisoners to concentration camps.
12. Spooky Southcoast, radio broadcast, March 27, 2010.
13. A recording of the show is available at the Spooky Southcast archives, accessed July 31, 2012, http://www.spookysouthcoast.com/Archive/Archive2010.html.
14. E. Tucker, “Settlers-vs.-Indian Board Game Rankles Tribes,” Associated Press, April 15, 2010.
15. Poniske, 16.
16. See my blog essay “War, What is it Good For?” accessed July 31, 2012, www.playthepast.org/?p=1819.
17. Ronald Smelser and E. J. Davies, The Myth of the Eastern Front: The Nazi-Soviet War in American Popular Culture (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008).
18. See David Hughes, “Sleeping with the Enemy: Pro German Bias in WW2 Wargaming,” Battles 5 (December 2010): 53–55.
19. Lepore, xxi.
20. This note is to acknowledge that I am credited as a playtester in the King Philip’s War rulebook. At a convention in January 2010, prior to the advent of the public controversy, I played the game a single time under Poniske’s supervision. I subsequently offered some brief feedback via email. This is the extent of my personal involvement with the design and production of KPW. For comments on drafts of this essay, I am grateful to Jennifer Guiliano and David Hughes.
