Missing in Action: Professional Wargaming in Game Studies

This paper argues that professional wargaming, the institutionalized use of games by militaries and defence organizations, is a major yet underexamined object of game studies inquiry. While game studies has extensively analyzed how entertainment games depict war and intersect with the military-entertainment complex, it has largely neglected the formal games that armed forces use for officer education, operational planning, capability development, procurement analysis, and strategic forecasting. The author positions this neglect as a significant gap, since these games do more than represent conflict; they shape how future conflicts are imagined, prepared for, and managed, functioning as artefacts that encode assumptions about rationality, technology, identity, and geopolitical order.

The paper is an argumentative, agenda-setting intervention rather than an empirical study. It does not present new data on any specific military institution. Instead, it reframes professional wargaming as a legitimate and necessary subject for game studies and acknowledges the methodological challenges posed by access restrictions, while maintaining that meaningful analysis remains feasible through varied methods and materials.

To operationalize this reframing, the paper proposes six research trajectories: examining wargames as pedagogical and identity-forming tools in professional military education; analyzing the epistemologies embedded in models, abstractions, and rule systems; conducting design-oriented analyses of mechanics and scenario structures; producing cultural and discursive critiques of how wargames frame conflict and actors; adopting institutional and ethnographic approaches to wargaming practice; and undertaking historical and comparative studies of national wargaming traditions. Together these directions aim to extend game studies' established concern with how games operate within and shape structures of power into the domain of professional defence practice.