ABSTRACT
This chapter examines the early dialectic between rational strategizing and emotional investment and between education and entertainment that also structure contemporary virtual reality training scenarios. It thereby seeks to complement the widespread understanding of the wargame as a tool of reason. The chapter shows how this understanding relies on a set of assumptions about the nature of the military map that the widespread mapping endeavors around 1800 brought to the fore. It then considers the wargame as an emotional technology by examining the contextual traces in documents that evince the guiding intentions behind the games as well as the actual praxis of playing them. Maps and games served primarily as tools of reason, but they also conjured the emotions as a vehicle of learning and as objects in their own right. Symbolic tools of navigation and long-distance management, military maps, and their graticules seem to block out any kind of emotional investment.
