You're listening to episode 186 of three moves ahead, the once-cent future official podcast of Flashsteel.com, coming to you on the idle thumbs network. I'm your host for this week, Troy Goodfellow, and with me today is one of my regular panelists, my dear friend, Dr. Bruce Garrick. Hello, how are you? Would you like some coffee?

I would, actually. I just had one Red Bull, and I'm still fading. It's been one of those weeks.

I should have gotten a coffee, but you're not going to make that happen, right?

I can make that happen by having you go get one.

That's not very helpful at Auburs.

Sorry. Best I can do.

That's okay. With us this week is John Peterson, who wrote a book playing at the world, which I blogged

about and have written about a couple of times on the blog, a book that I am a huge fan of,

and we're having him on to talk about a couple of the sections of the book, specifically,

on the history and evolution of wargaming, and hopefully we can tie it into the legacy of wargaming. And John, I really appreciate you doing this. I was actually quite short notice. It was, actually, but it's a Saturday. I have nothing better to do on a Saturday other than hang out on podcasts, so it's my pleasure to be here. So I guess I'm going to start with, I guess, the kind of the obvious question.

Before you ended talking about the history and the evolution and all this really,

really neat stuff you discovered in the book and your research, is what was your motivation

for writing this book in the first place?

Because a lot of this information is in a thousand other places and it's scattered, but if you

wanted to find it, you could find it. But this is really a great, huge, massive synthesis of a lot

of this material, some of it original, some of it not ended, but what was your motivation for

actually getting all this stuff together?

Well, I wouldn't say that a lot of this was easily available when I started anyway.

I mean, a lot of the sources that I had to hunt down for this, I went to some trouble to get. But I mean, really, I looked at what some of the histories were online of gaming,

and I just kind of wasn't satisfied in general with what they said.

So I thought I could do better. I thought it could be better research. So I

just dove in. Yeah, I wouldn't characterize this. I was one of the things I want to point out

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