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October 12, 2025: Nine years ago, the U.S. Department of Defense called for increased use of wargames to better examine an increasingly uncertain future. There was a sense of déjà vu in all this because using wargames to assist defense planning has gone in and out of fashion in the United States several times since the late 19th century. The problem is that wargames often depict, quite convincingly, outcomes that are unwelcome to some government or military leaders. Worse, these wargames were sometimes corrupted, tweaked to achieve desired results and eventually collapsing into useless chaos.

While American officers first encountered wargames after the Civil War due to the success of the complex German Kriegsspiel wargames, they fell into disfavor after World War II, and nothing effective replaced the still-valid German approach. What revived wargaming in the Department of Defense was the emergence of commercial hobby wargames in the 1950s. These caught the attention of younger troops and eventually senior officers, who advocated their use in the Army, then the Marines, and then the Air Force in the 1970s. The civilian wargames sold quite well until the 1980s, when they were largely replaced by computerized versions.

These commercial wargames were found to be remarkably useful for military professionals and played a major role in reviving interest in wargaming in the Department of Defense, throughout NATO, and then worldwide. While it was easy to maintain integrity with manual wargames, once they were computerized, military games started to become less useful for their users and often too expensive to fix.

Although hobby and professional wargamers share many of the same techniques and often the same games, there are significant differences between the two groups. These differences explain much of the variation in attitudes and accomplishments of the two groups. In short, these differences are:

Professional wargamers are, well, professional. They get paid for it. To many professional wargamers, it’s just a job. For hobby wargamers, it’s an avocation and an unpaid one at that. While there are many enthusiastic professional wargamers, all hobby wargamers are deeply passionate about what they do. Often, professional wargamers began as hobby wargamers and continue using both professional and hobby wargames. These are the troublemakers who noted that the military’s development of computerized wargames after the 1990s often made wargames less, not more, useful.

Professional wargamers cannot freely discuss their work. Most classified wargaming work is severely restricted in terms of who can talk about it and where. Hobby wargamers speak freely about their games, and this torrent of comment and criticism makes hobby-oriented games much better for it. This became even more valuable in the late 1990s as Internet use spread and professional wargamers followed discussions and debates among hobby wargamers, especially when they involved games on contemporary or future military situations.

There is another important difference between the pros and the hobbyists. Professional wargamers do not prioritize validation. This means ensuring their games represent reality as much as possible, the way hobby wargamers do. Most hobby games are historical games, which, to work, must be capable of recreating the historical event they are based on. This ability to recreate the historical event is also called validation. Hobby wargamers take it as a given that if a game cannot be validated, it’s not worth bothering with. Nearly all professional games focus on wars not yet fought, so validation in the classic sense becomes moot. However, there is a tendency for professional wargamers, or at least their senior officers, to make up their future history on the spot. This often leads to major errors, which are then exacerbated when similar hobbyist games turn out to have been much more accurate predictors of the future.

Another problem is that professional wargamers serve many masters, while hobby wargamers serve only themselves. Because professional wargamers are paid, they must be responsive to whoever is paying them. Often, this involves not just one boss but an array of officials, all of whom want something from the professional games, and often these demands are contradictory.

Professional and hobby wargamers have somewhat different backgrounds. Until the 1980s, most professional wargamers had a computer and Operations Research (OR) background. Hobby wargamers had a strong interest in history and technical subjects, including science, engineering, medicine, law, OR, and computers. After the 1980s, professional wargamers were encouraged to pay more attention to history, and many did. But professional wargaming organizations were dominated by techies, not all of whom were interested in much besides new and exciting hardware and software. To these people, history was boring, but for the troops, history was often a matter of life or death in combat.

Professional and hobby wargamers have different experiences with games and simulations. Hobby wargamers nearly all have experience with general board games, such as chess, Monopoly, Risk, and so on. Naturally, hobby wargamers are familiar with commercial board wargames and, increasingly, commercial computer wargames. Hobby wargamers are rarely familiar with non-commercial professional wargames. Professional wargamers are usually familiar with little else, except some general board games.

Programming experience is much more common among professional wargamers, as most of their games are still run on computers. Military experience is quite common among hobby wargamers. Commercial games are more accessible than professional ones, with no security issues to worry about, allowing military personnel to openly address issues that concern them. Civilians with military experience are also more likely to use commercial games. In a tradition that is now over thirty years old, military personnel and civilians use commercial games to gain a deeper understanding of military affairs.

The major difference between hobby and professional wargamers is how they use the games. Hobbyists are interested in experiencing history, while professionals are more focused on conducting heavy-duty analysis using computers, as well as training. The current problems stem from the military wargaming culture often losing sight of the need to make games more accessible, realistic, and useful for their users.