War/Game: Studying Relations Between Violent Conflict, Games, and Play

Abstract

Games and war have always stood in a close relationship to one another. From the ancient Chinese Go, via various iterations of chess to contemporary digital simulation games, or from classical Roman gladiator battles, via martial-arts competitions to today’s first-person shooters, the skills employed and the structures limiting participants’ actions and perceptions point to a variety of equivalences and connections between the two fields of practice.