Investigations of a Dog

The next MHC will be hosted by Gary Smailes on 7th November. E-mail suggestions to garysmailes at gmail dot com or use our carnival submission form.

Earlier this year I posted about Your Archives, a wiki based site launched by the UK National Archives which allows users to contribute information and about, and transcripts of, documents held by the NA (and also information to supplement the National Register of Archives). Despite being excited about the possibilities of the site, I’ve been too busy to actually get involved. But today I finally registered and started contributing. I’m pleased to say that the terms of use now make it clear that restrictions on re-use of content don’t apply to transcripts of documents which are covered by waiver of Crown Copyright, and don’t apply to fair dealing under UK copyright law.

To start with I put up a transcript of a report on prisoner of war camps in the First World War, which you can see here. My first impression is that the site is very easy to use. Anyone who can use a web forum or a blog shouldn’t have any problems with it. The help pages are still very basic and there’s no style guide, but the easiest way to work out how to do things is to look at existing pages for examples.

I’ll be adding more contributions whenever I have time, and I’m also trying to encourage other people to contribute. I’ve posted on the Great War Forum asking people there to get involved. Between them forum members have a huge amount of relevant knowledge which needs to be more accessible. There have been some concerns raised on the forum that information is increasingly hard to find there because there’s so much of it. Your Archives could help to improve this situation, at least for the information which is within its remit, as a wiki based site would make the content much more accessible than a forum. It remains to be seen how many people will actually get involved. And if you’re reading this post and have any knowledge about TNA/PRO documents or other UK archives, go and sign up! Now!

The World Turned Upside Down is a very well-known pamphlet which crops up in many books about the English/British Civil War(s)/Revolution (”or whatever we are to call the blasted thing” - John Morrill). In fact it occurs so often that it’s a bit of a cliche. Despite/because of that, I’m going to use it in my forthcoming seminar paper on animals, authority and property rights. Although the image is very familiar, I didn’t know very much about the pamphlet until recently, and once I looked at it in detail it defied my expectations in some ways (this kind of relates to Rachel’s post about making the implicit explicit).

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Chris at Mixing Memory has posted about a psychology experiment which suggests that playing First Person Shooters improves spatial reasoning abilities, which also leads to improvements in mathematical skills. This is interesting in itself, but it also relates to his previous post about gender in maths, science and engineering, which looked at evidence for stereotype threat: the expectation that women are weaker in these areas causes them to perform below their potential, and this adds to the myth that women are actually worse, so the stereotype is perpetuated. There is plenty of evidence that on average women do worse at spatial reasoning than men, but the evidence from the experiment Chris cites strongly suggests that this is down to cultural factors rather than innate sex differences. A group of people who didn’t normally play FPS was made to play Medal of Honor, which resulted in a dramatic improvement in spatial reasoning abilities in both men and women. It seems likely that women have failed to benefit from this effect in practice because the perception that FPS games are only for men puts them off.

Another Mixing Memory post on the subject of games mentioned an experiment which found that the amount of blood in Mortal Kombat affects the aggression of the players. I can see right-wing alarmists who hate games deliberately misinterpreting the word “arousal” to portray gamers as sadistic perverts,but it looks like an interesting piece of research. I don’t know if this research has anything to say about gender (I can’t get at the paper itself) but studies of aggression are highly relevant to investigations of the relationship between war and gender, such as Joshua Goldstein’s work (which I really want to finish reading when I’ve got out of the quagmire of English Civil War historiography!).

(I also regret deleting the Gender category. I wasn’t using it for anything that wasn’t also covered by women’s history, but it would be quite useful here.)

1. Joshua S. Goldstein, War and Gender (CUP: Cambridge, 2003).

This week I’m going through some anthologies of important articles about the English Civil War, still looking at definitions of war/revolution and approaches to allegiance. This post is a brief summary of some of the articles in Peter Gaunt’s The English Civil War: The Essential Readings (2000). Despite the title, Gaunt acknowledges in the introduction the problems of defining and naming whatever it was that happened in the 1640s and 1650s. However, he doesn’t pay much attention to the problems of defining when in 1642 war broke out, just asserting that it was the raising of the standard at Nottingham in August which marked the official start of the war. It’s interesting that Gaunt pays some attention to the neglected question of how and why the First Civil War ended as it did, attempting to redress the balance in the historiography which has been far more concerned with why it started.

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One year ago today I made my first post to Investigations of a Dog. Although there were some slow periods earlier this year I’ve kept it going for a whole year, and it should be easier to carry on now that I’ve got some other distractions out of the way (and failed to get a job!). I posted some reflections on blogging after 6 months, and things haven’t changed too much since then. I’ve slipped from 3rd to 4th place in Brett Holman’s ranking of military history blogs, and since September my Technorati rank has gone down to 140,824 despite increased frequency of posting.

Although I posted a lot in September it was mostly on one quite esoteric topic: the historiography of the English/British Civil War(s)/Revolution/Whatever. I know I have at least two readers and fellow bloggers (Christopher Thompson and Mercurius Politicus) who are very interested in this, but a lot of other regular readers might not be. This series of posts is a new departure as it’s based on the background reading for an article I’m writing and is meant more for my own reference than for the entertainment of anyone else. Strangely one of these posts attracted the first really negative reaction to my blogging as some anti-intellectuals at another blog described it as “academic nonsense”. I wasn’t really sure what to make of this incident. If I was Tim Burke I could have made a reasonable and thoughtful post about the gap between academic and non-academic cultures. If I was Adam Kotsko I could have revelled in the prospect of a vicious flame war. As it was I just ignored it.

At the 6 month point I’d just started the Military History Carnival. I wondered if it would die after the initial enthusiasm wore off but it’s now been going for 7 editions and I have hosts lined up into next year. The only potential worry is that the number of submissions is often disappointing but I think that’s a problem with carnivals in general. With regular calls for posts at History Carnivals Aggregator, Cliopatria and Blog Them Out of the Stone Age, as well as here and the host blogs, it’s hard to see how publicity could be much better. Worries that we might be swamped with American Civil War posts turned out to be unfounded to the extent that I’m wondering how we can encourage more participation from ACW bloggers, who dominate the military history blogosphere.

There’s an interesting article about Real Time Strategy games over at God Is In The TV (mainly a music zine, but they cover all kinds of culture). This piece is much better than some of the drivel written about gaming by professional journalists. It suggests that the conventions of the RTS genre are changing, with resource management increasingly going out of fashion.

It’s a couple of years since I was heavily involved in RTS gaming, but my experiences tend to agree. I noticed this trend when I made the switch from Star Wars Galactic Battlegrounds (which might better have been called Age of Star Wars - it was basically Age of Kings with a Star Wars skin on it!) to Warhammer 40,000: Dawn of War. In SWGB there were 4 resources, and managing their extraction and use was a major part of the game. The first 10 minutes or so of game time (less in real time as it was commonly played at double speed!) were mostly spent gathering resources, building, and making more workers. Nobody who knew what they were doing would advance to tech level 2 before they had at least 20 workers. If the game wasn’t ended by a rush in level 2 or 3 it turned into an attritional grind. At maximum population in tech level 4 it was best to have about 60% workers and 40% military units. DoW was a very different kind of game. There were only 2 resources and the main one accumulated by taking and holding strategic points rather than extracting it with workers. Even with their special abilities it was rarely worth having more than 10% of your population slots filled by workers. However, tactics needed to be more sophisticated than in SWGB and units had to be micromanaged a lot to get the best out of them.

I don’t know whether these changing fashions are driven by the game developers or by demand from gamers, or whether it’s a bit of both. It’s hard to say whether these changes are making RTS games more or less realistic. As I’ve said before, strategy games always reflect arbitrary decisions made by their designers more than they reflect real life. But it’s maybe more important to note that changes in gameplay might be related to changing perceptions of war. The old style games which encouraged resource management tend towards a John Childs view of war: that war is attritional and usually ends with the exhaustion of one or both sides. The newer style with less resource management tends towards a Malcolm Wanklyn view which makes tactical contingency and innovation more important than a determinist emphasis on resources. (Maybe there are better examples but I’ve picked two early modern historians whose work I’m familiar with.)

I’m not sure how significant this all is. As far as I know RTS isn’t a very large genre. If the tastes of RTS players are changing that doesn’t necessarily say anything about changes in popular attitudes to war. As a final thought it’s interesting to note that the reduction of resource management in RTS gaming is going on at the same time as increasing anxiety in real life about global warming and peak oil. Things would always get tricky in SWGB when the nova crystals ran out late in the game, and I remember one game where carbon became ultra-rare because we’d used up every tree and rock on the map! Is the new style a way of escaping from these issues rather than confronting them?

The 7th Military History Carnival is now up at Airminded. Thanks to Brett for his excellent work.

The next Military History Carnival will be hosted by Gary Smailes on 7th November. Please send him suggestions at garysmailes at gmail dot com or use the form.

The next Military History Carnival will be at Airminded on 14th October. Send submissions to $bholman$@$airminded$.$org$ (without the dollar signs) or use the submission form.