Michael Howard, Liberation Or Catastrophe? Reflections on the History of the Twentieth Century, (London, Hambledon Continuum, 2007; ISBN: 9781847251596).
Before I start this review I have to point out a couple of things. This is the first time that I’ve been sent a review copy of a book rather than reviewing something that I’ve bought myself. For some bloggers this situation is an ethical dilemma, but I’ve had enough experience of PR from the other side (the thankless task of sending CDs to fanzines who ignore you or slag you off) that I wouldn’t hesitate to kick the author and publisher in the teeth if I thought that the book was a load of rubbish. I know that I’m doing them a favour even by mentioning the book on a highly Google ranked blog, and that no review is ever so bad that you can’t get a good selective quote out of it.
Second, this book is by Michael Howard the eminent military historian and founder of the War Studies department at Kings College London, not Michael Howard the former Tory leader.
(more…)
Gary at Victoria’s Cross linked to yet another piece of lazy journalism about computer games. This is the other side of the coin from why aren’t there any World War I games: Why Are There So Many World War II Games? There are so many things wrong with this article that it should have been easy to knock up a critique of it in a few minutes, but I’ve been too busy with other things so I’ve only just got round to it. Anyone with half a brain might want to skip the rest of this post. Lazy blogging which just points out the obvious errors of lazy journalism in far too much detail is arguably as bad as the lazy journalism itself.
(more…)
Still catching up on things that I meant to write weeks ago. Last month there was a post at Glod’n'Epix about First World War computer games. Esther linked to this Guardian article about a planned WWI FPS and was rightly critical of its assumptions that there aren’t any WWI games and the spurious reasons for that. As she points out, there are loads of First World War games, but I’m going to attack from a different angle.
(more…)
Brett at Airminded has produced statistical evidence to show that Investigations of a Dog is the third most popular military history blog. It’s nice to be popular, but beware of the truth effect. As Brett says, the figures have their limitations, and a lot depends on how you define a military history blog. I’m all too aware that this could make me complacent. When I started this blog last year I worked really hard to build up a reputation, but recently I haven’t been posting much because I’ve been busy moving websites to a new server, setting up the Military History Carnival, writing an actual article for an actual real journal, and various other things. But when I haven’t got much to write about, I can always fall back on computer games…
Just after Christmas I wrote about Brothers In Arms: Road To Hill 30, a World War 2 first person shooter which is, unsurprisingly, an incremental improvement over Call of Duty. After finishing that (only on “normal” difficulty though — “authentic” must be insanely difficult!) I moved on to the next instalment: Earned In Blood. In a lot of ways it’s the incremental improvement over Road To Hill 30 which I was expecting, but the designers also did some surprising things with narrative.
(more…)
Last week I played and finished Brothers In Arms: Road To Hill 30, yet another First Person Shooter set in the Second World War. It focuses on a squad of the 101st Airborne Division over a period 8 days in Normandy in June 1944. From what I’d heard about the game before I bought it, I was expecting it to be very different from Call of Duty and Medal of Honor. The biggest difference is that it’s a tactical shooter in which the player has to command a squad rather than doing everything single handed. In some ways Brothers In Arms lived up to my expectations, but in other ways it didn’t.
(more…)
A link posted at Cliopatria by Oscar Chamberlain led me to an article by Larry Kahaner, promoting his new book about the AK-47 assault rifle. In order to dispel the myth of objectivity and neutrality, I have to make it clear that I’m prejudiced against journalists (Natalie Bennett is a notable exception, who couldn’t ever be accused of being lazy), and even more prejudiced against management consultants. Also much of the evidence I present here is based on things that I studied 10 years ago, so the details might be vague or wrong. The first point I want to make is that the AK-47 was not the first assault rifle, because the Germans got there first with the SturmGewehr 44. This isn’t a major point. “First in the world ever” is one of the genre conventions of popular history, which helps to draw people in so that you can make them read what you really have to say. What Kahaner really has to say is convincing: that the AK-47’s cheapness, reliability, and ease of use changed warfare in a way that more temperamental weapons like the StG 44 or M-16 couldn’t have done. You can read all about the strengths and weaknesses of the StG 44 in this Wikipedia article, which seems to be mostly reliable. Both the Wikipedia article and Kahaner’s article refer to something called “Blitzkrieg”. This is even more tangential to Kahaner’s argument, but it’s something I want to take issue with as it leads into some wider points about a disparity between popular and academic military history, and about popular perceptions of war.
(more…)
Since last week I’ve been playing the demo of Making History: The Calm and the Storm. My first impressions are that it’s a good game, but it is very much a game and not a simulation. It’s hard to believe that this is what Niall Ferguson was getting so excited about, or that he could be in awe of anyone who has won as Germany. If you approach the game on its own terms (as I suggested in my first post about games and simulations), the initial strength of Germany and the inherent weaknesses of Artificial Intelligence make it quite easy to win.
(more…)
The free demo of Making History: The Calm and the Storm 2.0 is now out, but be warned it’s 251MB! I talked about the game and Niall Ferguson’s view of it it two previous posts (games and simulations, and more games and simulations). Now I can try it out for myself, so expect to see another post when I’ve played it.
Other news:
Children’s history writer and researcher Gary Smailes has started a blog at Breathing History, which is well worth reading.
History Carnival XLIII is now up at Axis of Evel Knieval (clearly the best name for a blog ever). Next edition is on 1st December at Barista. Submit posts about any aspect of history using the submission form.
Since my previous post about Niall Ferguson’s article on computer games and the Second World War I’ve had some more ideas and found some new information. While I was searching Google for something else, I came across the article Theatres of War: The Military-Entertainment Complex by Tim Lenoir and Henry Lowood. This article looks at the development of computer simulations for training the US military, and the relationship between the defence industry and the games industry. It includes a particularly interesting account of an attempt to reconstruct a battle from the 1991 Gulf War.
(more…)
Esther MacCallum Stewart has recently started a new blog at Glod’n'Epix which covers her work on computer games (in addition to her First World War stuff at Break of Day in the Trenches). Reading this has made me realise that I have no reason to be ashamed of liking computer games. Gaming isn’t a waste of time and can even be a valid subject for academic study. Meanwhile, Jeremy Boggs at Clioweb posted a link to an article by Niall Ferguson about a computer simulation of the Second World War. This led me to think about how games can be used by historians, and what they can and can’t tell us. It’s probably no surprise that I don’t agree with Niall Ferguson on this (or lots of other things).
(more…)
