Agon und Ares: Der Krieg und die Spiele

This review by Bernd-Peter Lange assesses Ernst Strouhal's edited volume "Agon und Ares. Der Krieg und die Spiele" (Campus Verlag, 2016), a collection of essays arising from a 2015 symposium at the Internationales Forschungszentrum Kulturwissenschaft in Vienna. The volume examines war-themed games across cultures and centuries, from early modern military simulations and interwar war games to Soviet, Israeli, and Japanese examples and contemporary computer games. Its theoretical frame draws on Huizinga's view of play as a source of culture and on Roger Caillois's typology, with particular attention to agonistic games and the cultural history of board games, which Strouhal identifies as a neglected field.

The collection is organized into thematic sections covering anthropological foundations, game theory's influence on military game design, war games from the First and Second World Wars, games from specific national contexts, and digital war games. Contributors include historians, media theorists, designers, and computer scientists, and the reviewer notes that the volume is unusually coherent for a conference proceedings, with strong visual documentation. Among the more discussed contributions are the analysis of Schoenberg's "Koalitionsschach," the history of military planning games, and Mathias Fuchs's critique of "ludic mobilization" and the gamification of contemporary culture.

The reviewer also observes limitations. Strouhal's central claim that chess and war are not deeply congruent, since chess pursues planning while war is contingency management, is treated as a useful starting point, and several essays show how chess structures and military metaphors nonetheless shaped game design. Some abstract arguments, particularly on gamification, lack empirical grounding and leave questions about counterstrategies open. The review concludes that the volume is a readable and stimulating resource for anyone studying war games, especially in the context of contemporary computer games, which so often feature military themes.