How To Spot You're Playing a Wargame

I have a very clear-cut definition in my head of what constitutes a wargame. It's a conflict game which has either a historically accurate or historically plausible setting and the mechanics of which aim to produce some form of simulation, even if very low level. However it's obvious to me that this isn't actually everyone's definition of a wargame, as evidenced by the frequent inclusion on wholly unhistorical games such as OGRE in discussions of good introductory wargames. Ameritrash games are usually conflict based, and sometimes have historical settings and occasionally even make some sort of vague attempts at simulation. During my exploration of wargames I've started to see that there are in fact some fairly serious qualitative differences in the game experience that wargames offer and that it's this, rather than history, that a lot of people seem to be basing their definition of a wargame on. So I thought I'd use this weeks' slot to explore what some of those differences might be.