I'm Starting a Wargaming PhD

 

OK, this was a fairly weird week, but possibly symptomatic of the weeks to come. I only had 3 things to do:

• Wargame for a hobby
• Wargame for work consultancy
• Wargame for a PhD!

Yep, I've taken the plunge and applied to, and been accepted by, Bath Spa University to study for a PhD with the provisional title of Wargaming Urban Conflict. I'll be studying under John Curry (of History of Wargaming Project fame) and he has a great group of students already doing wargame PhDs with him.

I've been thinking about doing a PhD for at least a decade, and until about 18 months ago I thought it would be on virtual humans in some way. But when I saw John's note in the Nugget that he was looking for new candidates for a wargaming PhD I thought it had to be.

I've set up a Wiki to support the PhD, and will post major bits of work, AARs, presentations etc to that. I'll also cross-post key bits here with links to the wiki, but otherwise keep the blog for the recreational side.

The Wiki already has the introductory presentation I gave at VCOW2022 if you want a better idea of what I'm after doing.

Why urban conflict? Three main reasons I think:

• The indications are that most future conflicts will have a significant, possibly dominant, urban component
• I've spent the last 18 months or so supporting the British Army on their Ex Urban Lion wargames to study urban warfare, so am already "in the groove"
• John thinks that there's still a lot of scope for original study and research in the use of wargames to study urban problems, and study how wargames deal with the urban environment.

As a first task I've pulled together a database of Urban Wargames (manual not computer) and it's available at: https://airtable.com/shreVPHaoJBpxGzFj

I'm sure it's far from complete, so if you know of any games I've missed then let me know in the comments. Note that I'm only including miniatures rules where they have something different to say for urban (other than a +2 for hard cover!)

So that's me sorted for the next 5 years - wargaming from dawn to dusk (or pre-dawn to just before pre-dawn!)