Daily Content: Year Six
By Mike Bennighof, Ph.D.
November 2010

Every so often, I’ll get an e-mail or run across an online posting that calls wargames “works of history.” Sometimes these will call a game the equivalent of a well-research monograph (what academics call a book focused on one topic) and marvel over the breadth of research and analysis that goes into them.

Those always remind me of a distinguished historian I knew, Gunther S. Rothenberg, who died a few years ago. Well-respected as a military historian, he was somehow talked into participating in a game of historical miniatures and dutifully purchased and painted an army of 1790s Austrians. On the afternoon of his game, the troops lined up to re-fight the Battle of Valmy, and the first French die-roll was a disaster. The French player promptly picked up his general figure, placed it in a tiny guillotine, and chopped its head off.

“It wasn’t even funny, it was pathological,” Gunther told me later. “Why do you waste your talent on such idiocy?”

Good thing he never read Internet discussion boards, or he’d have found out that I have no talent, only idiocy.

Most of our games are based on historical events, and the research behind them can approach the level of an academic study — but in no way are they the equivalent as a work of history. Some of them, like Battles of 1866: Frontier Battles, are the result of extensive study. But I also knew a game designer who would crow about his ability to foist what he calls “one-weekend wargames” on his customers — and I’m well aware that few people can tell the difference. (Not that I haven’t crafted one-weekend products my ownself; Panzer Grenadier: Indian Unity comes to mind.)

So to show off the history behind our games, and to poke a finger in the eye of the One Weekenders, and just to show off sometimes, I like to write game-related historical content for our website. Long ago we discussed publishing a magazine that would have historical articles and other materials, but magazines are very difficult to do well. I had reservations about our ability to do that, and Doug McNair suggested we create a web magazine instead. At the time, this would have put us on the cutting edge of publishing innovation, but the thought of electrons instead of ink provoked what Doug would later christen an Ego Explosion. After much screaming and crying, the project died stillborn.

That was a huge lost opportunity, one of many in the company’s history, and it was a few years later when we actually stumbled into a web magazine of our own. Daily Content began in November 2004 as a means of luring customers back to the website every day during our Black Friday promotion that year. It worked. So we kept doing it or more correctly, I kept doing it mostly out of obsession.

Now that we’re about to start our seventh year of Daily Content, we have real data to look back on and can see a very definite cause-and-effect relationship between content and traffic, and in turn between traffic and sales. Unfortunately, we can see the trend because we fell into a number of lapses during Year Six, when we went days without a content posting. Once we let you get out of the habit of coming here every day, you tend not to start coming back regularly for a while.

“The ultimate question for a responsible man to ask is not how he is to extricate himself heroically from the affair, but how the coming generation shall continue to live.” — Dietrich Bonhoeffer

I think the best new piece we ran in Year Six was David Meyler’s look at Dietrich Bonhoeffer. Making it even slightly game-related bothered me and I thought hard about cutting out Dave’s last paragraph; the “a1 blurb” (the intro we run on the front page of the website) didn’t mention a game at all, which is rare for us.

A lot of our 2010 Content concerned new products, as we finally got untracked after the dreadful Moving Year of 2009 and began to get games and supplements published and on their way to publication. That trend will probably continue well into 2011; while the historical background is the core of Daily Content, we also need to use it to show off and describe game components and describe game play.

We’ll also start following a suggestion from one of those internet boards: running new Content for old games. Even though games like Alamein and Tiger of Malaya are gone forever from our warehouse shelves and webstore, that doesn’t mean your copy suddenly turned into dust like one of Buffy’s victims. They won’t show up very often, but we’ll try to occasionally freshen up the older games with background or variants or both.

It’s also been suggested that we just abandon Daily Content and focus all of our resources on new product. That’s certainly a tempting path — we’ve reduced staff considerably in the past few years and may have to do so again. The marketing benefit remains very real, however, and it does mark us out as unique in the gaming world. Another suggestion has been to put the Daily Content behind a paywall, at least when it’s new, and limit access to members of our Gold Club. That’s also tempting, as we want to increase the value of the Gold Club without taking on new production burdens we can’t meet. I don’t think we will any time soon, if only because the technical aspects of such a move are kind of daunting — the current, ancient website package won’t support it, and we just don’t have the time to move to a new software package right now. We’re going to have to eventually and the wall might be an option then.

So for the near future, at least Daily Content will continue as it has for the last six years: free to all, posted every weekday. Keep reading and we’ll keep posting.