The downsides of computer games
Patrick
my share of complaints about them--and I still do. How do you deal
with the following:
1. What's behind the interface? When I played board wargames or
miniatures games, I always knew just what was going on--because I had
to do everything myself. If I wasn't sure how to handle something, I
had to look it up in the rulebook; and if it wasn't there, I had to
make a house rule to cover it. But computer games are often poorly
documented; and even when they're well documented, the player doesn't
*have* to study the rules. So, either for lack of documentation or
laziness about paying attention, computer wargames often become
something of a clickfest. I find myself just pushing pieces around and
seeing what happens. But most of the time I really don't know *why*
things are happening--and I don't have the patience or interest to slow
down and find out.
2. Obsolescence. Back when Panzer General was new, I thought,
"Wow--this is it. They'll keep expanding and improving this game, and
it'll satisfy me for life." Now I can barely get PG to run on any
system I have, and when I do it's a joke. I wonder what I ever saw in
it. *Everything* has advanced--computers, game design, AI, and all.
Back in the heyday of Avalon Hill and SPI, I griped about the release
of more wargames than I could possibly keep up with--and the
discontinuation of some of my old favorites. Nothing has changed,
except that in this home-computer age people seem to *expect* every
game to become obsolete before long--or at least to be surpassed by
something newer and better.
3. Complexity creep. The Squad Leader/ASL phenomenon illustrates how
ever-increasing complexity can finally kill a game--or at least
necessitate a complete revision. Before ASL came along, the SL modules
had become too complicated for anybody to play. It made some of us
long for the good old days when wargames were simpler. But with PC
games, much of the complexity is hidden--handled by the computer. So,
we end up with games that would ordinarily be too complicated to play,
but with the help of the computer we play them anyway. This leads back
to point 1 above--the phenomenon of not really knowing what's going on
.
4. Screen limitations. Thumbnail maps help, and we've all gotten used
to scrolling around maps. But zooming and scrolling are still a pain
in the neck compared to having everything laid out on a physical
mapboard or tabletop.
5. Glitz and dazzle. Many PC wargames aim to delight the user with
eye and ear candy--sound effects, musical scores, animation, graphic
detail, and so forth. Apparently the goal is to make the player feel
like he's really there on the battlefield. Unfortunately, the more a
game succeeds at that, the less I like it. I really don't *want* to be
on a battlefield. I don't want to see all the blood and guts and
terror; I don't necessarily even want to hear the clash of steel. I'm
an armchair general, not a real-life general. I want to experiment
with strategy and tactics and military maneuvers *without* going
anywhere near real war.
6. The lure of convenience. Five years ago, I was packing to move,
and I dragged all my old board wargames down out of the closet. Though
they brought back fond memories, I realized there was no way I'd ever
play any of them again. Just setting one up seemed like a monumental
task. Re-learning the rules was an unwelcome burden. In short, I'd
been thoroughly spoiled by computer games. Instant setup, no need to
learn the rules, ability to save and reload games--it's all so very
easy. Too easy. Pretty soon I'm just mindlessly clicking, staring at
the screen, enjoying the show--but really having little idea what's
going on. Back to point 1 above again.
Despite all these downsides, originally there was one big upside to
computer games for me. Before the home-computer age, I found myself
playing solitaire most of the time, for lack of opponents and because I
liked playtesting games at my own pace. Suddenly I could play wargames
on the PC anytime I liked, without having to play both sides against
each other. That was a real dream come true. And computer AI got
better and better--until the Internet came along. Now some designers &
developers figure a mediocre AI is sufficient, since hardcore wargamers
will play each other online or PBEM. So, I've bought a couple PC
wargames that were a waste of time to play solitaire.
The more I play PC wargames, the more I miss board wargames and
miniatures. Only in my mind, though. In reality, I'd never have the
patience to go back to them.
--Patrick
Joseph...@yahoo.com
wrote:
Patrick, I could not agree with you more
ray o'hara
"Patrick" <patrick5...@yahoo.com> wrote in message
news:1142737488....@u72g2000cwu.googlegroups.com...
> Though PC wargames are getting better all the time, for years I've had
> my share of complaints about them--and I still do. How do you deal
> with the following:
>
> 1. What's behind the interface? >
as long as it models reality in a way i think is oay it doesn't matter.
2. Obsolescence.
i think of this when following the DG copy protection controversy.
some go on about the game being unplayable if the server is closed by the
company going bust in a few years. i have plenty of obsolete games that
didn't need the company to go bust to become unplayable.
those old C-64 floppies didn't even have a port in my last two puters.
>
> 3. Complexity creep. . But with PC
> games, much of the complexity is hidden--handled by the computer. So,
> we end up with games that would ordinarily be too complicated to play,
> but with the help of the computer we play them anyway. This leads back
> to point 1 above--the phenomenon of not really knowing what's going on
> .
and as i said,. it doesn't matter if it s mice running in a wheel. as long
as it works.
>
> 4. Screen limitations. Thumbnail maps help, and we've all gotten used
> to scrolling around maps. But zooming and scrolling are still a pain
> in the neck compared to having everything laid out on a physical
> mapboard or tabletop.
>
more fog of war. while TSS and LBDLM looked great. neither meade/lee nor the
emperor/kutosov could ever see the whole battle
> 5. Glitz and dazzle. Many PC wargames aim to delight the user with
> eye and ear candy--sound effects, musical scores, animation, graphic
> detail, and so forth.
yet UV and others do fine, a pretty map goes a long way.
> 6. The lure of convenience. Five years ago, I was packing to move,
> and I dragged all my old board wargames down out of the closet. Though
> they brought back fond memories, I realized there was no way I'd ever
> play any of them again. Just setting one up seemed like a monumental
> task. Re-learning the rules was an unwelcome burden. In short, I'd
> been thoroughly spoiled by computer games. Instant setup, no need to
> learn the rules, ability to save and reload games--it's all so very
> easy. Too easy. Pretty soon I'm just mindlessly clicking, staring at
> the screen, enjoying the show--but really having little idea what's
> going on. Back to point 1 above again.
>
yeah, those dusty piles of board games take up space. but i found that
during a yard sale i was loathe to sell them.
set up is much easier. a PC game doesn't render a room useless for other
pursuits for months,
PBEM keeps the game going, it is not always easy to make time to visit, and
my cat hasn't disrupted a game in years.
> Despite all these downsides, originally there was one big upside to
> computer games for me. Before the home-computer age, I found myself
> playing solitaire most of the time, for lack of opponents and because I
> liked playtesting games at my own pace. Suddenly I could play wargames
> on the PC anytime I liked, without having to play both sides against
> each other. That was a real dream come true. And computer AI got
> better and better--until the Internet came along. Now some designers &
> developers figure a mediocre AI is sufficient, since hardcore wargamers
> will play each other online or PBEM. So, I've bought a couple PC
> wargames that were a waste of time to play solitaire.
>
i marvel that AI can put up any kind of fight. i consider it the most
difficult task a designer faces.
> The more I play PC wargames, the more I miss board wargames and
> miniatures. Only in my mind, though. In reality, I'd never have the
> patience to go back to them.
>
> --Patrick
>
i still play naval miniatures. nothing can ever beat the appeal of the
little ships.
folk who walk in and see me playing a PC ame might go "thats cool" and then
wander into the next room looking for something of interest.
people who come upon a miniatures game go" OH WOW! WHAT ARE THOSE, CAN I
PLAY"
JeF
Very good analysis.
I always hesitated in buying any mini rule or board wargames for the
lack of opponent problem. We have some strategy games at home, but the
closer to a wargame are HeroScape and ( -urgh- ) Risk. As you said,
computer wargames are instantly set-up (5 minutes at most) and there is
a decent opponent available.
For the record, I tried to get to SL one day. I borrowed the game to a
collegue of mine. I played solitaire for an hour or two per evening
during a couple of weeks. I stopped when the amount of rules to study
and the set-up time would prevent me to play a decent turn within the
given timeframe. And I was not far in the scenario lists : Hill 621.
This game is certainly not for me.
I agree with you about the screen limitation. It's not easy to gras
the situation at hand. Game interfacesare more and more decent though.
Finally, the tendency to show bloods and guts with terrific sound
effects is somewhat disturbing. This is why I tend to play some more
abstracted games (like HttR or BiN). Even CM does not show blood,
though it's been regularly asked in the forums...
Cheers,
JeF.
Giftzwerg
patrick5...@yahoo.com says...
> 1. What's behind the interface? When I played board wargames or
> miniatures games, I always knew just what was going on--because I had
> to do everything myself. If I wasn't sure how to handle something, I
> had to look it up in the rulebook; and if it wasn't there, I had to
> make a house rule to cover it. But computer games are often poorly
> documented; and even when they're well documented, the player doesn't
> *have* to study the rules. So, either for lack of documentation or
> laziness about paying attention, computer wargames often become
> something of a clickfest. I find myself just pushing pieces around and
> seeing what happens. But most of the time I really don't know *why*
> things are happening--and I don't have the patience or interest to slow
> down and find out.
Who cares what's behind the interface?
So long as the system lets you do things that accurately reflect
military reality in a realistic way, why would you even want to know
what's going on behind the scenes? Personally speaking, I'd go a step
further and say that the less I know about how the system "works," the
more I can just concentrate on whatever task I'm trying to accomplish -
and the better I can immerse myself in the fun of the simulation.
For example, when I move Montcalm's army down Lake Champlain in BIRTH OF
AMERICA, the game calculates hundreds of factors: supply, generalship,
weather, units involved, path, etc, etc. But all I care about is how
long it's going to take to move the forces, and what route I'm setting;
the fact that the game system handles all these other things invisibly
is a *feature*, not a *bug*.
> 2. Obsolescence. Back when Panzer General was new, I thought,
> "Wow--this is it. They'll keep expanding and improving this game, and
> it'll satisfy me for life." Now I can barely get PG to run on any
> system I have, and when I do it's a joke. I wonder what I ever saw in
> it. *Everything* has advanced--computers, game design, AI, and all.
> Back in the heyday of Avalon Hill and SPI, I griped about the release
> of more wargames than I could possibly keep up with--and the
> discontinuation of some of my old favorites. Nothing has changed,
> except that in this home-computer age people seem to *expect* every
> game to become obsolete before long--or at least to be surpassed by
> something newer and better.
Hmmm. This is bad?
> 3. Complexity creep. The Squad Leader/ASL phenomenon illustrates how
> ever-increasing complexity can finally kill a game--or at least
> necessitate a complete revision. Before ASL came along, the SL modules
> had become too complicated for anybody to play. It made some of us
> long for the good old days when wargames were simpler. But with PC
> games, much of the complexity is hidden--handled by the computer. So,
> we end up with games that would ordinarily be too complicated to play,
> but with the help of the computer we play them anyway. This leads back
> to point 1 above--the phenomenon of not really knowing what's going on
Sure, but good technology is *all* like this. I have only the vaguest
notion of how a global cellular telephone network operates, but so long
as when I tap in my wife's number, her voice comes out of a little
speaker ... who cares?
> 4. Screen limitations. Thumbnail maps help, and we've all gotten used
> to scrolling around maps. But zooming and scrolling are still a pain
> in the neck compared to having everything laid out on a physical
> mapboard or tabletop.
...until you have to take out or put away the 200 fussy little counters
it takes to play a middlin' game of ASL.
> 5. Glitz and dazzle. Many PC wargames aim to delight the user with
> eye and ear candy--sound effects, musical scores, animation, graphic
> detail, and so forth. Apparently the goal is to make the player feel
> like he's really there on the battlefield. Unfortunately, the more a
> game succeeds at that, the less I like it. I really don't *want* to be
> on a battlefield. I don't want to see all the blood and guts and
> terror; I don't necessarily even want to hear the clash of steel. I'm
> an armchair general, not a real-life general. I want to experiment
> with strategy and tactics and military maneuvers *without* going
> anywhere near real war.
The problem I have with glitz and dazzle is that, too often, designers
neglect realism and AI and opt for G&D.
> 6. The lure of convenience. Five years ago, I was packing to move,
> and I dragged all my old board wargames down out of the closet. Though
> they brought back fond memories, I realized there was no way I'd ever
> play any of them again. Just setting one up seemed like a monumental
> task. Re-learning the rules was an unwelcome burden. In short, I'd
> been thoroughly spoiled by computer games. Instant setup, no need to
> learn the rules, ability to save and reload games--it's all so very
> easy. Too easy. Pretty soon I'm just mindlessly clicking, staring at
> the screen, enjoying the show--but really having little idea what's
> going on. Back to point 1 above again.
Again, though, *everything* is like this. I have an attic full of
film/chemical photography gear, and that's where it's going to stay - at
least, until I get around to selling it at bargain-basement prices. But
unless I define photography as fucking around with a bunch of chemicals
- instead of producing images that evoke emotional reactions in the
viewers - I come back to *my* point one above:
Who cares?
Technology that frees the user from the tedious, pure-mechanical aspects
of an activity isn't a *bad* thing, unless you're confusing the process
with the craft.
> Despite all these downsides, originally there was one big upside to
> computer games for me. Before the home-computer age, I found myself
> playing solitaire most of the time, for lack of opponents and because I
> liked playtesting games at my own pace. Suddenly I could play wargames
> on the PC anytime I liked, without having to play both sides against
> each other. That was a real dream come true. And computer AI got
> better and better--until the Internet came along. Now some designers &
> developers figure a mediocre AI is sufficient, since hardcore wargamers
> will play each other online or PBEM. So, I've bought a couple PC
> wargames that were a waste of time to play solitaire.
Some designers figure this. Not all of 'em.
> The more I play PC wargames, the more I miss board wargames and
> miniatures. Only in my mind, though. In reality, I'd never have the
> patience to go back to them.
My boardgames occupy pride-of-place in my attic, right along with my
darkroom gear.
--
Giftzwerg
***
"Let's see. What are Muslims raging, seething, and murdering people
about today? Ah. Yes. Cartoon drawings. Islam means peace, eh?"
- Giftzwerg
Oleg Mastruko
<giftzw...@NOSPAMZ.hotmail.com> wrote:
>In article <1142737488....@u72g2000cwu.googlegroups.com>,
>patrick5...@yahoo.com says...
>
>> 1. What's behind the interface? When I played board wargames or
>> miniatures games, I always knew just what was going on--because I had
>> to do everything myself. If I wasn't sure how to handle something, I
>> had to look it up in the rulebook; and if it wasn't there, I had to
>> make a house rule to cover it.
>
>Who cares what's behind the interface?
>
>So long as the system lets you do things that accurately reflect
>military reality in a realistic way, why would you even want to know
>what's going on behind the scenes? Personally speaking, I'd go a step
>further and say that the less I know about how the system "works," the
>more I can just concentrate on whatever task I'm trying to accomplish -
>and the better I can immerse myself in the fun of the simulation.
Absolutely 110% true.
Yes I know "me too" posts are lame. I wanted to write something
similar myself, but now it has been formulated by Giftz I choose to
post "me too" note to it. :o)
O.
GJK
that I've been enjoying a renewed interest in boardgames played on the
computer via VASSAL (www.vassalengine.org).
Your point #1 was my biggest complaint about computer wargames. Just
what the heck is going on? What is the status of my units - after a
dozen turns of mindless clicking, I don't know who's fatigued or
rallied or down to their last man unless I click on each unit between
every turn. Those are just some examples, but yes, the feeling was
that I just was connected to the game.
The neat thing about VASSAL - the super neat thing - is that now you
can play the classics online against others. Or you can pbem the game
or solitaire it if you choose. I *never* thought that I'd learn to
play ASL. Well, with VASL (www.vasl.org) and the great community
there, and with the help of the ASL Starter Kits initially, I was able
to learn ASL (still working on the tanks, but that'll come!). Cool
thing: you're playing live with a buddy or someone you just met and you
have a rules question? There's almost always someone in the "room"
with you who will answer the question.
Using Skype and VOIP really takes it to the next level as well. It's
as close to playing ftf as you can get without actually setting up the
games.
I find that I enjoy designing VASSAL game modules almost as much as I
enjoy playing the games. I've done the modules for some of the Civil
War Brigade Series (The Gamers) games, Fire in the Sky, The Mighty
Endeavor (both of those new from Multiman Publishing - who now have
exclusive publishing rights for ASL), I did a module for an obscure
game that I thought I'd never play - "Texas Revolution" done in 1981 by
a fellow here in Austin Texas. Now, I'm playing that game via email
with a guy in Chicago who has become very interested in Texas HIstory.
Screen realestate is probably the biggest downside - yes, there will be
scrolling and zooming. My fix for it was to set up dual monitors. I
went cheap with a 21" and 19" CRT monitors. I can put the map on the
21" and have the chat window and other game controls on the 19". It's
been working just fine for me.
VASSAL (and to a lesser extent for me, Cyberboard) have brought back my
interests in my old boardgame collection and has actually gotten me to
start collecting again. My collection is larger than it was when I was
17 in 1981 and playing the hell out of those things. Surprisingly,
there's a bunch of new boardgames out now, and still coming out - and
the quality is just great. The artwork has really come a long ways and
with sites like consimworld.com and boardgamegeek.com, chances are, you
can talk directly to the designer of the game in one of the forums.
I know that I sound like a damn info-mercial for the thing, but Rodney
Kinney has given me back the glory days of wargaming and I can't thank
him enough. I've been having a great time playing games that I never
thought I would.
Here's a screenshot from the module that I did for "In Their Quiet
Fields II", by The Gamers. We just started this one up pbem. My
Confederates are here defending "the cornfield":
http://www.garykrockover.com/uploads/ITQF2-Screen2.jpg
I'd highly suggest checking it out. Check out the "getting started"
wiki that I wrote, that might help you get started with it - see if you
like it:
http://wiki.vassalengine.org/doku.php?id=getting_started:getting_started
Hope to see you online playing some day!
Werewolf
> Patrick, I could not agree with you more
And you had to quote the whole diatribe to say that...
Paul Synnott
> In article <1142737488....@u72g2000cwu.googlegroups.com>,
> patrick5...@yahoo.com says...
>
I might be wrong here, but I have a feeling that this wanting to know
what's behind the interface is what happens when someone misses having a
CRT and various other tables to refer to during play like they usually
have with boardgames. Not only would I agree that this this information
shouldn't be needed, I'd atually go so far as to say that it *should* be
hidden.
When I first got into board wargames, starting with AH's Russian Front
and SL/ASL, I rememember eagerly grabbing copies of The General for
strategy tips, and being very disappointed to find that the articles
largely seemed to concern themselves with statistical probabilities and
means by which favourable odds ratios might be arrived at. Relevant, I
suppose, but it often seemed to be more of an exercise in accounting
than generalship.
To this day I shy away from games where the units have
morale/movement/combat factors visible in the interface. ACOW was
perhaps an exception to the rule, because although the numbers were
visible, they only gave a rough idea of what the unit might actually
achieve, the calculations behind the scenes being so complex.
In my experience, and as far as I can remember,the games that have done
the best job in this regard have been Combat Mission and Highway to the
Reich. Both hide the detail sufficiently to force the player to think
about what to do in terms of real life rather than in terms of achieving
the most favourable odds on the CRT.
HTTR, which I've just recently started playing, gives you the makeup of
the unit in weaponry and manpower and an indication of such factors as
fatigue and morale, but nothing you could use with any mathematical
precision. When you want to take an objective, you look at what you've
got, what you think the enemy has got, and make the best decision you
can as to how to do it, pretty much as Gavin and Urqhuart would have had to.
Combat Mission only showed what firepower a unit could lay down at
various ranges and I even would have preferred to see that left out. It
was interesting to see a number of requests on the Battlefront forums
for the internal tables to be published. I got the impression that,
without factors and stats to number-crunch, these players were at a loss
to know what to do.
As an aside, I'm also not 100% convinced by some games' attempts to
model real-world physics. If using a set of combat/hit/kill tables
(hidden from the player and unpublished, of course) gives you a
realistic outcome, why not put the effort saved into producing a more
"intelligent" AI (which seems to be something of a rarity)?
Paul
Epi Watkins
Me too.
I would like to add that I was always able to play The Operational Art
of War much more by feel than many other games. Actually I play them
all by feel, but I was much more successful doing this with TOAW.
--
Epi
----
Is there a way to make tech. support read more than
the subject line on the first email?
----
http://www.curlesneck.com
Patrick
> I might be wrong here, but I have a feeling that this wanting to know
> what's behind the interface is what happens when someone misses having a
> CRT and various other tables to refer to during play like they usually
> have with boardgames. Not only would I agree that this this information
> shouldn't be needed, I'd atually go so far as to say that it *should* be
> hidden.
I can certainly understand that POV, but taste-wise I have to strongly
disagree with it.
For my taste, nothing should ever be hidden--not even for the sake of
realism. In board wargames and miniatures games, hidden movement is
such a pain in the neck that it often doesn't happen--and some people
have always complained about how unrealistic that is. Computer
wargames almost always have hidden movement, because it's easy to
do--and because almost all wargamers consider it realistic.
But the thing is, I've never wanted that kind of realism. What I've
always especially liked about wargames is the way they let me have a
bird's-eye view of a battlefield and let me in on information that
on-the-spot commanders could never have. I really like being "in the
know," and I really hate being taken by surprise--or even taking the
other guy by surprise.
I dunno--maybe it's the code of the Old West, where you're supposed to
face off with your opponent in a stand-up fight instead of resorting to
bushwhacking. For whatever reason, I like wargames where I get to see
just what's going on everywhere. And I don't care if a real-life
commander couldn't see all that; I'm not role-playing a battlefield
commander anyway--I'm just playing a wargame.
I do, however, like command-control rules. Another thing that's
terribly unrealistic about old-fashioned wargames is that the player
can micromanage things way beyond what any real-life commander could
do. And I eventually got tired of that. So, I don't mind rolling dice
to determine whether my units will obey my orders or take off on their
own. That adds a measure of interest to the game and suits me just
fine--as long as I get to hover over the battlefield and observe
everything that's going on.
I suppose it boils down to the kind of game one prefers. There are
perfect information, deterministic games like chess; perfect
information, dicey games like backgammon; limited information, chancey
games like poker; and limited information, deterministic games like
duplicate bridge. I've always preferred games like backgammon myself.
I don't mind tossing the dice, but I definitely want to see everything
that's going on.
--Patrick
Mike Kreuzer
news:1142737488....@u72g2000cwu.googlegroups.com...
> my share of complaints about them--and I still do. How do you deal
> with the following:
>
Some games tell you, some don't. Some gamers want this; some don't. You've
already heard from some of the don't-wanters, so I'll pipe up.
If you don't already know about them, SSG's games give you this kind of
info, sounds like you'd like them. Dockal's games over at Schwerpunkt,
ditto.
Shameless plug: Afrika will too, when it's finished. An early screen shot
(this dialogue's changed a little since then) shows the CRT on the game's
combat results screen:
http://www.mikekreuzer.com/pix/screens/combatScr2.png
>
> 2. Obsolescence. [snip]
Fair point, but as Gifty said, what's not like this nowadays? Pick
developers who support their games over a reasonable (with the definition up
to you) period of time.
> 3. Complexity creep. The Squad Leader/ASL phenomenon illustrates how
> ever-increasing complexity can finally kill a game-- [snip]
SL & ASL are both boardgames killed by being too complex to play as board
games. Now, there are some computer games that are arguably too complex to
play too, but there aren't that many, and they all come from the one
designer so avoiding them should be pretty easy. <g>
> 4. Screen limitations. Thumbnail maps help, and we've all gotten used
> to scrolling around maps. But zooming and scrolling are still a pain
> in the neck compared to having everything laid out on a physical
> mapboard or tabletop.
>
[snip]
I agree up to a point, but when the physical map for Fire in the East covers
most of your lounge room floor & you have to deal with a spouse & children
who'd like to use that space for frivolously walking around, well the
convenience of the format begins to wane.
Somebody'll think of something better with regard to scrolling & zooming
though, give us some more time on this one. <g>
> 5. Glitz and dazzle. Many PC wargames aim to delight the user with
> eye and ear candy--sound effects, musical scores, animation, graphic
> detail, and so forth.
[snip]
Some wargames do, most to my mind don't, but maybe that's got more to do
with our own personal definitions of what constitutes a wargame.
> 6. The lure of convenience.
[snip]
You say it yourself, you don't play these sorts of games as boardgames any
more because of the inconvenience, that puts you in the same boat as the
rest of us here, I expect. If you want games with CRTs and tables that you
can look up, but without the hassle of putting counters in matchboxes
afterwards, well such beasts exist. For many of us they're the best of both
worlds.
Regards,
Mike Kreuzer
www.mikekreuzer.com
"Over the years, the inter-agency system has become so
lethargic and dysfunctional that it materially inhibits
the ability to apply the vast power of the U.S. government ..."
General Wayne Downing
Giftzwerg
holdit...@THEindigoCAPS.ie says...
> > Who cares what's behind the interface?
>
> I might be wrong here, but I have a feeling that this wanting to know
> what's behind the interface is what happens when someone misses having a
> CRT and various other tables to refer to during play like they usually
> have with boardgames. Not only would I agree that this this information
> shouldn't be needed, I'd atually go so far as to say that it *should* be
> hidden.
Agreed. Even in games where this kind of information is available, I
eschew it. I don't mind it being available, because clearly many gamers
like having the extra info (Example: That "Combat Advisor" gizmo built
into KP/BIN/BII...), but I find that knowing all the nuts, bolts, and
charts jars me back into the sense I'm playing a game.
> When I first got into board wargames, starting with AH's Russian Front
> and SL/ASL, I rememember eagerly grabbing copies of The General for
> strategy tips, and being very disappointed to find that the articles
> largely seemed to concern themselves with statistical probabilities and
> means by which favourable odds ratios might be arrived at. Relevant, I
> suppose, but it often seemed to be more of an exercise in accounting
> than generalship.
And, ultimately, it's gamey. I loath games where a rules-lawyer can
wring ankle-biting little advantages out of every chart, rule, subrule,
and abstraction.
> In my experience, and as far as I can remember,the games that have done
> the best job in this regard have been Combat Mission and Highway to the
> Reich. Both hide the detail sufficiently to force the player to think
> about what to do in terms of real life rather than in terms of achieving
> the most favourable odds on the CRT.
Agreed. Exactly. TACOPS is another example.
cwie
> I'm not role-playing a battlefield commander anyway--I'm just
> playing a wargame.
A distinction that is too often blurred/ignored. For my tastes, I prefer to
'feel' the subject matter, but never lose sight of the fact that it's just a
game. But that's probably why turn-based, hex-map WW2 monster games work
for me! I've tried HOI (more than once) but just can't get my head into a
game that so often seems to be playing itself (with occasional interference
from me).
[Giftwerg wrote]
> And, ultimately, it's gamey. I loath games where a rules-lawyer can
> wring ankle-biting little advantages out of every chart, rule, subrule,
> and abstraction.
This is the biggest potential downfall of having knowledge of the
"internals" - humans are just too damn quick to twist any loophole to their
advantage.
[Mike Kreuzer wrote]
> Somebody'll think of something better with regard to scrolling & zooming
> though, give us some more time on this one
Well, CWiE-II is adding a slight variation to try and help with this. We've
got user defined displays where the player can create up to 16 different
views of the overall map, each with it's own set of customised overlays
(supply, ZOC, air range, etc). Switching between views is a single click or
keypress. So if the German wants to keep an eye on the fighting in the
East, the Italian front, and the Normandy landings, he simply creates 3
'views', and then switches between them when required. Each view can be
scrolled, and has a 'home' location that can be returned to with a single
click.
Mike Kreuzer
news:OClTf.10556$dy4....@news-server.bigpond.net.au...
[snip]
> [Mike Kreuzer wrote]
>> Somebody'll think of something better with regard to scrolling & zooming
>> though, give us some more time on this one
>
> Well, CWiE-II is adding a slight variation to try and help with this.
> We've got user defined displays where the player can create up to 16
> different views of the overall map, each with it's own set of customised
> overlays (supply, ZOC, air range, etc). Switching between views is a
> single click or keypress. So if the German wants to keep an eye on the
> fighting in the East, the Italian front, and the Normandy landings, he
> simply creates 3 'views', and then switches between them when required.
> Each view can be scrolled, and has a 'home' location that can be returned
> to with a single click.
>
Sounds good. There was a competition at gdevnet last month [1] for a game
design that presented two simultaneous views of the same world. You could
have blown their minds with sixteen. <g>
[1] http://www.gamedev.net/community/contest/seeingdouble/
Epi Watkins
> 'feel' the subject matter, but never lose sight of the fact that it's just a
> game. But that's probably why turn-based, hex-map WW2 monster games work
> for me! I've tried HOI (more than once) but just can't get my head into a
> game that so often seems to be playing itself (with occasional interference
> from me).
One reason I like Hearts of Iron so much is that it feels so much like
I'm running a country during the war, instead of just playing a game.
cwie
> I'm running a country during the war, instead of just playing a game.
I still plan on giving HOI (1 or 2) some more time. But for some reason
each time I've approached it, I end up feeling like I watch more that I
decide. Perhaps I'll find the time in the second half of this year to
finally get my head into the HOI mindset.
On the other hand, Battles In Italy was a simple pickup! But then again I'm
an SSG junkie from wayback.
cwie
> presented two simultaneous views of the same world. You could have blown
> their minds with sixteen.
Just checked the comp rules ... they wanted simultaneously displayed views.
CWiE-II has an overview showing the whole 160x135 hex map, and then anywhere
from 1 to 16 player defined 'closeup' views of the overall map. But only
one view is available at a time. The other views are just a click away
though!
Arjuna
Great discusion topic. Well done and thanks.
One thing though I had a chuckle to myself when I read your comment
about wanting to know what was going on under the hood and then your
later point about avoiding complexity. I think if you saw the
complexity that was under the hood, certainly in games such as our HTTR
and COTA, you would eschew that desire. To simulate realism in one of
the most complex of activiites - ie military conflict - you have to get
your hands dirty and delve into the complexities. Assuming we were
willing to publish our code ( and we're not just for the record ) how
many people would spend the time to wade through over half a million
lines of code. That's about the equivalent of a 15,000 page novel.
Besides as others have noted here is that what you really play wargames
for. One of the reasons I got into designing them in the first place
was that I thought few if any I had played - and I had played a lot -
ever came close to providing the player with a realistic experience of
what a real commander does. My own limited military experience and all
the reading I had done convinced me that no commander sits down with
his calculator and says that if I can get that extra unit there with
those two extra armour points I'll have enough to push me into the next
CRT column. It just doesn't work like that.
Sure commanders try to maximise their chance of success and they
realise the need for applying the different types of capabilities their
units provide to their best advantage but so much of it relies on
instinct. So much is intuitive. So much is on how they feel and smell
the battle. That is probably why few good field commanders make good
accountants and vice versa. I don't mean any disrespect to any
accountants, god only knows a good one is worth their weight in gold.
But it's a different realm.
A good commander needs to know that if he bombards a particular area
with a battalion of 105s he should be able to suppress whatever enemy
are in the bombardment zone and that with a bit of luck ( ie he catches
them undeployed ) that he will also have a good chance of inflicting
some casualties. He knows that there will be dozens of other factors
beyond his current awareness or knowledge that will impact on the
effect of that bombardment - eg enemy morale, training, posture,
deployment etc. These he cannot know nor influence in any direct way.
However, he knows he needs to suppress the enemy there and that his
best bet is to bombard them. So he orders the bombardment.
So before I get too much into this - there's something else everyone
keeps telling me to do - I would argue that if the simulation feels
right, if it on average it produces a realistic outcome then run with
it. Sure you don't want to have cases where 100 x 20mm AT guns can have
enough firepower to destroy a King Tiger, but assuming the system
handles that type of thing correctly then the real test as to whether
it is worth playing is if it provides a realistic and enjoyable
simulation of being a commander. If it satisfies these two criteria
then go for it.
John Secker
Giftzwerg <giftzw...@NOSPAMZ.hotmail.com> writes
When you had to do all the calculations yourself, you were aware of the
factors which were influencing the result. If the stack you are moving
includes artillery, which is particularly badly affected by the muddy
roads in winter, then you knew this. You could leave the guns behind, or
wait for spring. But when the mechanics are all handled by the computer,
it is very easy to just try things, without properly understanding the
important influences. Very lazy, no doubt - but in my personal
experience, hard to resist. Especially in the bigger games - BV, for
example (don't mention WitP). That stack looks pretty big, let's attack
over there against that small stack. Ooops! Ideally, of course, the
factors which were making a difference would be brought to your
attention, without your having to understand the actual mechanics behind
them.
--
John Secker
Giftzwerg
jo...@secker.demon.co.uk says...
Try this thought-experiment, though. Suppose we create the *perfect*
wargame, that simulates the job of a regimental commander with 100%
fidelity. It can calculate every leaf, every branch, every bullet,
every man, every breath of air in a regimental action - and presents an
interface that features 100% accurate maps, perfect holographic digital
actors playing the subordinate and superior officers and staff, and
real-time FOW concerns and delays.
If this game were *perfect*, it could even survive a Turing test, with a
real regimental commander unable to tell if he was participating in a
simulation, or fighting a real battle.
The point is that we could take a *real* regimental commander and drop
him into our perfect wargame, and he wouldn't need to know *anything*
about how the system worked. He could just command his regiment the way
he'd been trained to do, and let the system worry about the nuts & bolts
details of all the zillions of things that have to happen before his
order - "howitzer platoon to shell enemy position at map reference
Baker" - is translated into reality.
This is wonderfully realistic, in that the real regimental commander -
if he was *insane* - might want to oversee every facet of how his order
is translated into reality. He might want to "look under the hood" of
his own regiment. But he can't. In battle, he can't pull out his
nifty-neat Attack Factor Measurement Tool and run a series of
calculations resulting in a neat chart of percentages corresponding to
his proposed company assault at Phase Line Montana. All he can do is
figure the percentages in his head, based on his experience and
intelligence, and go from there.
Of course, none of our wargames are "perfect," but some of them are
pretty good. In HTTR, the best example I've seen yet, I delight in the
fact that I don't need to know Thing One about how Panther built the
thing. I don't care! The only thing I need to know to play HTTR - and
play it pretty well - is how real battalions can be used in reality.
Perhaps Oddball, the tank commander from "Kelly's Heroes," said it best.
When asked why he wasn't helping his crew repair the damaged Sherman, he
replied, "I just ride in 'em. I don't know what makes 'em work."
That's the way I want my wargames.
--
Giftzwerg
***
"To be honest, I'd trust Dubai with my ports
before I trust Congress with my wallet."
- Gregory Scoblete
Patrick
> One thing though I had a chuckle to myself when I read your comment
> about wanting to know what was going on under the hood and then your
> later point about avoiding complexity. I think if you saw the
> complexity that was under the hood, certainly in games such as our HTTR
Oh, I'm sure I'd be flabbergasted by all that's "under the hood" of a
good computer wargame these days. But I'm not saying I want to know
that; I'm just saying I prefer games which are not so complex that a
player can't handle knowing what's under the hood.
Squad Leader/ASL got too complex for many players to handle. Then the
PC came along and gave us a tool that can handle all that complexity
and much more besides. But what I'm saying is that I prefer not to
have that kind of complexity even if I do have a tool that makes it
manageable.
> Besides as others have noted here is that what you really play wargames
> for. One of the reasons I got into designing them in the first place
> was that I thought few if any I had played - and I had played a lot -
> ever came close to providing the player with a realistic experience of
> what a real commander does. . . .
Aha! See--right there is where you and I differ. I don't *want* the
game I'm playing to be a "realistic experience of what a real commander
does."
Real commanders have to put up with fog of war, "friction," and
countless other headaches; and even when the engagement is over, they
may have only a fuzzy idea of what actually happened. As a wargamer, I
don't want any of that.
What I want is to be able to sort of hover over a battlefield, seeing
and knowing what all is going on, getting a sense of how things work.
I don't want to see the engagement from a commander's limited point of
view; I want to see it from the POV of an Olympian god--from those
ancient Greek myths where the gods would sometimes amuse themselves by
meddling in the affairs of men.
Mind you, I want to *see* it from that POV; I do NOT want to *control*
it with all the omnipotence of an Olympian god. That'd be too easy;
it'd take all the challenge and interest out of it. So, I do like
command-control rules.
Games like "Battle Cry" (Hasbro/AH) and DBA suit me just fine. "Up
Front" was a bit like this too. Apparently the Two-Hour Wargames are
also designed in this spirit (though I have very little experience with
them as yet). Everything's out in the open, but the players are NOT
free to determine the actions of all their own units, as in chess; the
game pieces sort of have minds of their own--governed by
command-control mechanisms.
IMO, this simulates such things as "friction" and "fog of war"
*without* depriving the player of full awareness as to what's going on.
> My own limited military experience and all
> the reading I had done convinced me that no commander sits down with
> his calculator and says that if I can get that extra unit there with
> those two extra armour points I'll have enough to push me into the next
> CRT column. It just doesn't work like that.
Nor would I want it to in a game, even if it did work that way in real
life. I *am* fed up with the kind of micromanagement we used to see in
old-fashioned wargames.
In fact, I still remember the very moment I finally got fed up with it.
I was playing a solo game of ASL, considering whether to break a squad
down into half-squads and send a hero around the side of a building
with a demo charge while my machine-gunner tried to suppress the enemy
occupants of that building. And all of a sudden, I caught myself and
said, "This is ridiculous! No real-life commander could ever possibly
make such detailed decisions in the space of two minutes or less (turn
length)--*and* see his orders carried out precisely as he gave them."
That's when I started work on some command-control house rules for ASL,
in an effort to make it more realistic. I never finished them, though;
I gave the game up as way too complex instead.
> Sure commanders try to maximise their chance of success and they
> realise the need for applying the different types of capabilities their
> units provide to their best advantage but so much of it relies on
> instinct. So much is intuitive. So much is on how they feel and smell
> the battle. That is probably why few good field commanders make good
> accountants and vice versa. I don't mean any disrespect to any
> accountants, god only knows a good one is worth their weight in gold.
> But it's a different realm.
True enough. But IMO, playing a wargame is also a different realm from
commanding troops in battle.
When I sit down to enjoy a good game, I want basically the same kind of
pleasure as I can get from chess, backgammon, poker, or Stratego (to
name four distinctly different kinds of games). Classic games like
those have proven themselves to be interesting, enjoyable, challenging,
and entertaining. And I'll bet they'll still be around--and be widely
popular--*long* after "Highway to the Reich," "Hearts of Iron, " "Rome:
Total War," and other PC wargames have been forgotten.
When wargamers and wargame designers talk about their ongoing quest for
"realism," what I hear is that they want to change wargames from being
chess-like to being poker-like. That is, instead of a
perfect-information, deterministic game (like chess), they want to
create a limited-information game with a randomizer (like poker). In
their view, this will force players to adopt a perspective similar to
that of battlefield commanders--and somehow everybody automatically
agrees that's a good thing.
Well, everybody but me, that is. I've never liked poker, and I
generally dislike limited-information games. I don't like having to
guess or make deductions. So, when I play a wargame, I really don't
want to be stuck role-playing a real-life commander.
In short, I'd rather see wargames change from being chess-like to being
backgammon-like. The idea of a randomizer (dice) to limit a player's
*control* appeals to me. But I still want a perfect overview of
everything that's going on. And I don't care how "unrealistic" that
might seem to anyone else.
After all, I'm not training myself to be a general. I'm just trying to
enjoy a fun game.
> . . . the real test as to whether
> it is worth playing is if it provides a realistic and enjoyable
> simulation of being a commander. . . .
I disagree. As a longtime wargamer, I couldn't care less about
role-playing a military commander. I just love reading about battles
and campaigns, poring over the maps in my books on military history
while enjoying the narrative; and I also love it when a game I'm
playing has similar maps, and where the course of the game pretty well
matches the kind of battle narrative I find in my books.
Tear me away from my maps and books and force me onto a simulated
battlefield where I can only see as much as a real-life commander would
see, and you've put me in a very *uncomfortable* and unwelcome
position. Such a wargame is not going to be entertaining or enjoyable
for me; it's going to be unpleasant. Basically, you're taking an
enthusiastic backgammon player and forcing him to play poker.
Well, of course you're not *forcing* anything. You're just designing
games. And games are a matter of taste. Lots of people love poker;
it's one of the most popular games in the world. Likewise, many
wargamers love the computer wargames that are coming out these days.
And that's a good thing.
All I'm saying is that it's not quite to my taste, FWIW.
--Patrick
Giftzwerg
patrick5...@yahoo.com says...
> > Besides as others have noted here is that what you really play wargames
> > for. One of the reasons I got into designing them in the first place
> > was that I thought few if any I had played - and I had played a lot -
> > ever came close to providing the player with a realistic experience of
> > what a real commander does. . . .
>
> Aha! See--right there is where you and I differ. I don't *want* the
> game I'm playing to be a "realistic experience of what a real commander
> does."
Aha! See - right there is where you stop being a "wargamer," and start
being another sort of gamer entirely.
I read through the rest of your post, and that's the only reasonable
conclusion I can draw; you want some other sort of game than a wargame,
but you'd like it to feature little men and tanks.
You want your game bone-simple, with no terrible complexity. You want
it simple even if the oversimplification compromises realism. You want
an absolute, Godlike point of view and to know anything and everything
about the system and the situation - but you also want some very simple
and possibly unrealistic mechanism to make sure your pieces don't always
do what you want. You want it not like chess or poker or chess with
elements of poker ... but like backgammon.
<tilt>
Your post puts me in mind of that episode of "The Simpsons" where Homer
designs His Perfect Automobile. It didn't seem all that perfect to
anybody but Homer.
GJK
"Tactical Combat Series" (WWII/Korea) games might appeal to you. For
the CWBS games, you as the Army Commander actually write the orders for
your Corps. Then you take the turns to have the orders delivered
(unless you are present together in council) and then when the order
arrives, you check to see if the order is accepted as is, distorted,
delayed or just plain lost. It's interesting trying to coordinate your
attacks with some of your Corps in compliance while others just sit
there.
Paul Synnott
> Oh, I'm sure I'd be flabbergasted by all that's "under the hood" of a
> good computer wargame these days. But I'm not saying I want to know
> that; I'm just saying I prefer games which are not so complex that a
> player can't handle knowing what's under the hood.
>
that you'd prefer computer games to be pretty much ported versions of
not-too-complex wargames, where the presentation is the same (i.e. no
hidden movement or fog-of-war but the odd chance for things to go awry
anyway).
I'd agree with Giftzwerg in the sense that it does seem a step removed
from what I would term wargaming...not playing the boardgames, mind you,
but the desire to eschew realism to the extent that your point suggests.
When I think about wargaming, I'm thinking of what motivated the
members of the Prussian Kriegsakademie who first started it, as a learning
and training tool and as a means of reproducing similar
choices and thought processes to those made by real-life commanders on the
spot. That is why I avoid games that detract from those elements of the
experience.
I'm conscious, however, of appearing to take an elitist view, which is
certainly not what I intend. What you're describing is merely boardgames
with simple mechanics ported to the PC with no fog-of-war. If that's
wargaming when you're playing the boardgame, it's still wargaming if
it's on a computer. Hell, I've come across minitaures gamers who seem to
think that wargaming isn't wargaming unless you're painting and mounting
figures and would view us all here as mere dilettantes.
> Squad Leader/ASL got too complex for many players to handle. Then
> the PC came along and gave us a tool that can handle all that
> complexity and much more besides. But what I'm saying is that I
> prefer not to have that kind of complexity even if I do have a tool
> that makes it manageable.
>
This is the bit I find most difficult to understand, though. If the
computer can
handle the complexity, wouldn't you rather it did so for the sake of a
more realistic game? Remember, realism doesn't just encompass the
player's experience and decision cycle; it'd also about producing at
least plausible combat results. Do they get sacrificed too in the name
of retaining a mental grasp of the "rules"? If so, to what extent? Sure
you can do away with ASL's To Hit with modifiers for calibre/Russian or
minor nation ordnance/hull down/sleep gunk in the gunners eye modifiers
and the To Kill/Turret Armour/Hull Armour/chance of hitting the rusty
spot by the commander's seat modifers and replace them with a simple
competitive die roll. That would be a nice and simple game mechanic,
but could it really be claimed to be modelling WW2 armoured combat?
>
> True enough. But IMO, playing a wargame is also a different realm
> from commanding troops in battle.
Of course playing a wargame isn't the same as commanding in a real
battle, but that doesn't mean that designers should abandon all attempts
to make the gaming experience at least resemble the reality to some
degree. Playing flight simulators isn't the same as flying a real plane,
but that doesn't mean that the designers should abandon all attempts to
model the physics of flight.
>
> When I sit down to enjoy a good game, I want basically the same kind
> of pleasure as I can get from chess, backgammon, poker, or Stratego
> (to name four distinctly different kinds of games). Classic games
> like those have proven themselves to be interesting, enjoyable,
> challenging, and entertaining. And I'll bet they'll still be
> around--and be widely popular--*long* after "Highway to the Reich,"
> "Hearts of Iron, " "Rome: Total War," and other PC wargames have been
> forgotten.
I'm note sure the comaprison is all that valid. You could say the same
for Scrabble, but it doesn't matter because it's not a wargame. Likewise
for chess, sure it's sometimes referred to as a "war game" but most of
the people who play it wouldn't have an interest in military history,
unlike most wargamers. Chess doesn't purport to model anything; it's
"just a game". These games stand up on their own as games and are much
longer established. Wargames are newer and evolve at a much faster rate,
but that to me is not indicative on any kind of quality differential. I
say this as someone who's played chess at club level, still plays online
and has a shelf of opening, ending, strategy and tactics books behind me
right now...prehaps one day I'll get round to actually reading them...
>
> When wargamers and wargame designers talk about their ongoing quest
> for "realism," what I hear is that they want to change wargames from
> being chess-like to being poker-like. That is, instead of a
> perfect-information, deterministic game (like chess), they want to
> create a limited-information game with a randomizer (like poker). In
> their view, this will force players to adopt a perspective similar
> to that of battlefield commanders--and somehow everybody
> automatically agrees that's a good thing.
I'm not sure about the more "poker-like" part but I do agree that most
people appear to agree that unpredictability and limited point-of-view
are "good things" in a wargame. This isn't just because such factors are
seen to be the flavour-of-the-month; there is, in my opinion, sound
reasoining at work here. Most wargamers are dabblers to a greater or
lesser degree in military history - some are even qualified historians.
Most will know from their exposure to military history that war is an
unpredictable and untidy business where, even in these days of high tech
communications and surveillance equipment, there is never enough
information and often the information the commander does have obscures
more than it illuminates.
Going back to our friends in the Kriegsakademie, they knew this too, and
wanted to teach their officers how to handle it:
"May I ask your excellency," replied Reisswitz, " to provide us with
general and special ideas for manoeuver, and to choose two officers to
be the commanders for both sides. *Also it is important that we only
give each commander in the special idea the information he would have in
reality*." [Emphasis mine] (http://www.hmgs.org/history.htm)
So when you say "In their view, this will force players to adopt a
perspective similar to that of battlefield commanders--and somehow
everybody "automatically agrees that's a good thing.", you appear to be
dismissing the quest for a more realistic command experience as some
kind of fad. I would argue that this is far from being the case, since
it goes to the heart of (a) the command experience itself and (b) the
reason the wargame as we know it was created to begin with.
Regards,
Paul (who thoroughly enjoys both chess and poker).
John Secker
Giftzwerg <giftzw...@NOSPAMZ.hotmail.com> writes
experience, to tell him all the things he needs to consider when he
chooses a course of action. I don't. Even if the wargame is "perfect" in
the sense you describe, I do not have the same background as our
putative commander. He knows, from long experience, that it is foolish
to include artillery in a column moving in winter. In a game where the
mechanics are exposed, I can see the same thing, from the -5 on the
movement dice. When the mechanics are concealed, I have to learn it in
some other way. And of course there will be many other examples much
less obvious than this one.
>Of course, none of our wargames are "perfect," but some of them are
>pretty good. In HTTR, the best example I've seen yet, I delight in the
>fact that I don't need to know Thing One about how Panther built the
>thing. I don't care! The only thing I need to know to play HTTR - and
>play it pretty well - is how real battalions can be used in reality.
>
>Perhaps Oddball, the tank commander from "Kelly's Heroes," said it best.
>When asked why he wasn't helping his crew repair the damaged Sherman, he
>replied, "I just ride in 'em. I don't know what makes 'em work."
>
>That's the way I want my wargames.
>
them, and I dreamed for decades of having a computer to take away the
tedious calculations in "manual" wargames. But I do recognise the
downside which Patrick describes.
--
John Secker
Arjuna
Thanks for your candid reply.
As you say this is basically a subjective matter. I tend to favour the
quest for realism while you prefer the quest for a more simple, self
evident god-like game. That's fair enough. Each to their own.
All the best.
Giftzwerg
jo...@secker.demon.co.uk says...
> >This is wonderfully realistic, in that the real regimental commander -
> >if he was *insane* - might want to oversee every facet of how his order
> >is translated into reality. He might want to "look under the hood" of
> >his own regiment. But he can't. In battle, he can't pull out his
> >nifty-neat Attack Factor Measurement Tool and run a series of
> >calculations resulting in a neat chart of percentages corresponding to
> >his proposed company assault at Phase Line Montana. All he can do is
> >figure the percentages in his head, based on his experience and
> >intelligence, and go from there.
> >
> Indeed - and he has years, decades, of training and real life
> experience, to tell him all the things he needs to consider when he
> chooses a course of action. I don't.
Just a moment, though. You have a few advantages that he doesn't:
(1) You can't get killed.
(2) You can't get cashiered.
(3) You can fight more battles in a week than the average regimental
commander will ever fight.
(4) You can stop, start, restart, re-examine - or even fight the battle
*as the enemy*.
> Even if the wargame is "perfect" in
> the sense you describe, I do not have the same background as our
> putative commander. He knows, from long experience, that it is foolish
> to include artillery in a column moving in winter. In a game where the
> mechanics are exposed, I can see the same thing, from the -5 on the
> movement dice. When the mechanics are concealed, I have to learn it in
> some other way. And of course there will be many other examples much
> less obvious than this one.
Sure. But he learns these things the same way you do: practice,
practice, practice. In fact, he's going to be doing a great deal of
gaming in his professional career. He gets to work with real soldiers
and a real staff on exercise, but a wargamer has some serious
advantages, even here.
And if we had a *perfect* wargame...
> >Perhaps Oddball, the tank commander from "Kelly's Heroes," said it best.
> >When asked why he wasn't helping his crew repair the damaged Sherman, he
> >replied, "I just ride in 'em. I don't know what makes 'em work."
> >
> >That's the way I want my wargames.
> >
> Well I probably want mine that way too, I certainly buy them and play
> them, and I dreamed for decades of having a computer to take away the
> tedious calculations in "manual" wargames. But I do recognise the
> downside which Patrick describes.
Me, too. But I would express his point as, "I like my beer & pretzels
wargames as well as the next guy."
But we're on the verge of having our cake and eating it, too. I'm
already not sure whether to call something like HTTR a "serious" wargame
or a "beer & pretzels" wargame. So far as I'm concerned, it manages to
combine all the advantages of the two, and features few of the
disadvantages of either.l;
Giftzwerg
holdit...@THEindigoCAPS.ie says...
> > Squad Leader/ASL got too complex for many players to handle. Then
> > the PC came along and gave us a tool that can handle all that
> > complexity and much more besides. But what I'm saying is that I
> > prefer not to have that kind of complexity even if I do have a tool
> > that makes it manageable.
> >
> This is the bit I find most difficult to understand, though. If the
> computer can
> handle the complexity, wouldn't you rather it did so for the sake of a
> more realistic game? Remember, realism doesn't just encompass the
> player's experience and decision cycle; it'd also about producing at
> least plausible combat results.
Well put. And there's something else here, as well. Back in the 1980s,
there was much hand-wringing in US media circles over the burgeoning
complexity of weapons systems. Computers, lasers, thermal imaging, etc
- there were people who opined that soon the ill-educated youth of
America would simply be too dumb to fight on the modern battlefield.
What they were missing is that a tank cannon equipped with a ballistic
computer, a laser rangefinder, and a thermal imager was *easier* to
operate in a lethal manner than a tank gun using the old manual system.
The point is that given an interface that properly hides complexity and
presents the user with a well-understood and easily-solved problem, the
more "complicated" system can be the more easily comprehended and used
effectively.
> > True enough. But IMO, playing a wargame is also a different realm
> > from commanding troops in battle.
>
> Of course playing a wargame isn't the same as commanding in a real
> battle, but that doesn't mean that designers should abandon all attempts
> to make the gaming experience at least resemble the reality to some
> degree. Playing flight simulators isn't the same as flying a real plane,
> but that doesn't mean that the designers should abandon all attempts to
> model the physics of flight.
And, of course, a designer who can model an accurate and realistic
flight model for his sim can almost trivially build into the game an
"arcade" switch that throws out the fabulously intricate professional
routines and play a fun game of zooming about and shooting things.
Wargames are similar. I'm not sure I've ever seen, say, a wargame that
featured an information-hiding "fog-of-war" system and didn't let the
novice or casual player turn it off.
> > When wargamers and wargame designers talk about their ongoing quest
> > for "realism," what I hear is that they want to change wargames from
> > being chess-like to being poker-like. That is, instead of a
> > perfect-information, deterministic game (like chess), they want to
> > create a limited-information game with a randomizer (like poker). In
> > their view, this will force players to adopt a perspective similar
> > to that of battlefield commanders--and somehow everybody
> > automatically agrees that's a good thing.
>
> I'm not sure about the more "poker-like" part but I do agree that most
> people appear to agree that unpredictability and limited point-of-view
> are "good things" in a wargame. This isn't just because such factors are
> seen to be the flavour-of-the-month; there is, in my opinion, sound
> reasoining at work here.
Very sound. History is replete with examples of po' li'l helpless pawns
that managed - at the point a powerful rook charged into their square to
capture them - to shoot it to pieces and win the day.
Rourke's Drift, anyone?
> Most wargamers are dabblers to a greater or
> lesser degree in military history - some are even qualified historians.
> Most will know from their exposure to military history that war is an
> unpredictable and untidy business where, even in these days of high tech
> communications and surveillance equipment, there is never enough
> information and often the information the commander does have obscures
> more than it illuminates.
And let's be frank, here. In many games a "God's Eye View" would be the
fun-wise equivalent of turning to the last page in a mystery novel.
jeffc
"Patrick" <patrick5...@yahoo.com> wrote in message
news:1142737488....@u72g2000cwu.googlegroups.com...
> things are happening--and I don't have the patience or interest to slow
> down and find out.
Sounds more like a downside of Patrick than of computer games in general.
> 2. Obsolescence. Back when Panzer General was new, I thought,
> "Wow--this is it. They'll keep expanding and improving this game, and
> it'll satisfy me for life."
Kind of like your favorite board games? hee hee
> 6. I dragged all my old board wargames down out of the closet. Though
> they brought back fond memories, I realized there was no way I'd ever
> play any of them again. Just setting one up seemed like a monumental
> task.
Again, not sure how this is a downside of computer games.
> The more I play PC wargames, the more I miss board wargames and
> miniatures. Only in my mind, though. In reality, I'd never have the
> patience to go back to them.
Hmm, there's that patience thing again. In other words, you don't have
patience for games, period.
Patrick
> In article <1142874190....@i40g2000cwc.googlegroups.com>,
> patrick5...@yahoo.com says...
> being another sort of gamer entirely.
What--because I think Hasbro's "Battle Cry" is a very good, albeit
simplistic, wargame? Or because I appreciate the elegant simplicity of
Phil Barker's DBA?
I doubt that many people would say BC and DBA are not wargames.
(Though I don't doubt that many hardcore wargamers would dismiss them
as simplistic wargames.)
Just how complex does the model (simulation) have to be before it
passes your test of what a wargame is?
> I read through the rest of your post, and that's the only reasonable
> conclusion I can draw; you want some other sort of game than a wargame,
> but you'd like it to feature little men and tanks.
>
> You want your game bone-simple, with no terrible complexity. You want
> it simple even if the oversimplification compromises realism.
Sorry--I guess I hit the "simplicity" bit too hard. No, I don't want a
wargame to necessarily be as *simple* as BC or DBA; I'm just saying I
like they way those games model military engagements. If they were
much more complex, I'd probably like them more. (Actually, BC sits and
gathers dust in my closet because it's such a ludicrous presentation of
ACW battles IMO. I wish it were a more complex and accurate model.)
> You want
> an absolute, Godlike point of view and to know anything and everything
> about the system and the situation -
Yes--as much as possible. Of course, no one but God really knows
*everything,* so I'll settle for somewhat less. But I'd like to get
the same overview of a battle or campaign from a game I'm playing as
I'd get from a book I'm reading on the same subject.
> but you also want some very simple
> and possibly unrealistic mechanism to make sure your pieces don't always
> do what you want.
Oh, it doesn't have to be a "simple and possibly unrealistic"
mechanism; it just has to be a mechanism that works. Ideally, it
should work *realistically*--i.e., it should limit my control over my
units to the same degree, and in the same way, as a commander's control
would likely be limited.
> You want it not like chess or poker or chess with
> elements of poker ... but like backgammon.
Only in the specific sense that I want it to be a "perfect information"
game with a randomizer (dice). Not in any other sense. I don't want
it to be abstract like backgammon; I want it to be realistic enough to
convince me that it's modeling warfare. I don't necessarily want it to
be as simple as backgammon; it can be more complex--but it doesn't have
to be.
And again, it's just a matter of taste. I'm well aware that my taste
isn't shared by lots of other wargamers.
But as to my taste setting me up to be stripped of the title
"wargamer," I have to disagree with that. I recently read an article
where somebody complained that Gary Grigsby's "World at War" was not
really a wargame at all because it's too much like "Axis &
Allies"--which the author thought was *definitely* not a wargame.
Well, as far as I'm concerned, any game about war is a wargame. Risk,
Stratego, and Axis & Allies are all wargames--and "World at War" is
nothing but a somewhat more complex wargame.
--Patrick
Eddy Sterckx
news:1142958906.7...@i40g2000cwc.googlegroups.com:
> Giftzwerg wrote:
>> In article <1142874190....@i40g2000cwc.googlegroups.com>,
>> patrick5...@yahoo.com says...
>> Aha! See - right there is where you stop being a "wargamer," and
start
>> being another sort of gamer entirely.
>
> What--because I think Hasbro's "Battle Cry" is a very good, albeit
> simplistic, wargame? Or because I appreciate the elegant simplicity
of
> Phil Barker's DBA?
>
> I doubt that many people would say BC and DBA are not wargames.
> (Though I don't doubt that many hardcore wargamers would dismiss them
> as simplistic wargames.)
They are simple wargames (not simplistic), but that in itself is no
reason to dismiss them - and hardly anyone would.
> Just how complex does the model (simulation) have to be before it
> passes your test of what a wargame is?
In a boardgame the model is in your head, i.e. the rules *are* the
model. In a pc wargame this is not the case. The game in itself is a
kind of a black box, you don't realy need to know what goes on under the
hood.
As long as the output of the black box accurately reflects military
processes based on the user input you've got a wargame. The complexity
of the input / interface and the output / screenactions is no measure
for the complexity of the game itself.
Case in point : HTTR : the basic rules of the interface can be taught in
10 minutes. That and a solid understanding of WWII operational warfare
is all you need to play the game, yet there's a thousand and one things
going on "under the hood" making sure that the output i.e. what you see
on the screen, is accurate from a military pov. The complexity of HTTR
is not in the interface, it's in learning WWII operational level
warfare.
>> You want
>> an absolute, Godlike point of view and to know anything and
everything
>> about the system and the situation -
>
> Yes--as much as possible. Of course, no one but God really knows
> *everything,* so I'll settle for somewhat less. But I'd like to get
> the same overview of a battle or campaign from a game I'm playing as
> I'd get from a book I'm reading on the same subject.
Set FOW to off :)
>> but you also want some very simple
>> and possibly unrealistic mechanism to make sure your pieces don't
always
>> do what you want.
>
> Oh, it doesn't have to be a "simple and possibly unrealistic"
> mechanism; it just has to be a mechanism that works. Ideally, it
> should work *realistically*--i.e., it should limit my control over my
> units to the same degree, and in the same way, as a commander's
control
> would likely be limited.
Wouldn't a commander's knowledge about a unit not be limited too ? <evil
grin>
> But as to my taste setting me up to be stripped of the title
> "wargamer," I have to disagree with that. I recently read an article
> where somebody complained that Gary Grigsby's "World at War" was not
> really a wargame at all because it's too much like "Axis &
> Allies"--which the author thought was *definitely* not a wargame.
> Well, as far as I'm concerned, any game about war is a wargame. Risk,
> Stratego, and Axis & Allies are all wargames--and "World at War" is
> nothing but a somewhat more complex wargame.
As I said before : complexity is no measurement for deciding on what's a
wargame and what's not - reflecting military style decision making and
having a more or less valid / believable output is.
Greetz,
Eddy Sterckx
--
"Ceterum censeo Belgicam delendam esse."
(Cato, 'Pro Gerolphe')
Patrick
> I think I'm beginning to see where you're coming from. I get the feeling
> that you'd prefer computer games to be pretty much ported versions of
> not-too-complex wargames, where the presentation is the same (i.e. no
> hidden movement or fog-of-war but the odd chance for things to go awry
> anyway).
I guess I'm happy with computer wargames being what they are. They
seem to work well for most folks, and I wouldn't want to change
anything. I'm just saying that traditional wargames (e.g., The Longest
Day and ASL, to name two that just popped into my head) stopped
appealing to me years ago--and yet I have a lingering, lifelong
fascination with military history and wargaming. Books & videos partly
satisfy the military-history interest, but I also love the hands-on
experience of playing wargames.
However, I'm no longer willing to push a hundred unit-counters around
every turn--or even to issue a general order and watch the computer
push the units around for me. I much prefer a simpler model of
military engagements these days. Not less realistic, just
simpler--i.e., smaller, with fewer moving parts.
As to "fog of war," I've just never liked that. If I'm reading a book
about a battle, I expect to "see" all aspects of that battle; it would
annoy and frustrate me if the author only told me what one side's
commander witnessed. That's not enough. I want to have a complete
overview of the battle and get to see everything.
> I'd agree with Giftzwerg in the sense that it does seem a step removed
> from what I would term wargaming...not playing the boardgames, mind you,
> but the desire to eschew realism to the extent that your point suggests.
> When I think about wargaming, I'm thinking of what motivated the
> members of the Prussian Kriegsakademie who first started it, as a learning
> and training tool and as a means of reproducing similar
> choices and thought processes to those made by real-life commanders on the
> spot. That is why I avoid games that detract from those elements of the
> experience.
The thing is, few (if any) of us are in the Kriegsakademie, or anything
like it. We don't need to learn how to be military commanders, and we
probably never will be. We're just guys with an abiding interest in
things military--especially in learning about the battles and campaigns
of history.
When you start talking about "historical possibilities," you're on
shaky ground. History, strictly speaking, is the study of what
actually did happen. The moment we get into what-ifs (which is the
*only* thing wargames are about), we're exploring historical *fiction.*
We have no way of knowing whether anything that happens in a wargame
could truly have happened historically.
Alternate history is basically just a form of fantasy.
But the Kriegsakademie didn't deal with history; it dealt with the
present and future. And so do modern military simulations. Today's
armed forces rely on simulations to train leaders, just as the
Kriegsakademie once did. That's all well and good--but is it what we
civilian wargamers are involved in? I don't think so. We're just
having fun, aren't we? Who here expects to be commanding a brigade in
the next war?
> I'm conscious, however, of appearing to take an elitist view, which is
> certainly not what I intend. What you're describing is merely boardgames
> with simple mechanics ported to the PC with no fog-of-war. If that's
> wargaming when you're playing the boardgame, it's still wargaming if
> it's on a computer. Hell, I've come across minitaures gamers who seem to
> think that wargaming isn't wargaming unless you're painting and mounting
> figures and would view us all here as mere dilettantes.
Thank you! I appreciate your open-mindedness. To me, broadly
speaking, any game about war is a wargame.
However, the realism-vs-playability debate has been raging forever and
has taken various forms over the years. IMO, "playability" has too
often been limited to meaning manageability. I think it ought to mean
enjoyability. Because that's one of the main things we all want from
games, isn't it--to enjoy them? And on the other end of the scale, we
also want our wargames to be realistic--i.e., credible representations
of military engagements.
Who outside the armed forces would really give a damn about a wargame
that's ultra-realistic but *not* enjoyable? Would you grit your teeth
and force yourself to play such a game just because you decide it's
somehow good for you? Or because you think you might be leading a
brigade in the next war, so you'd better practice?
In my experience, it's important to strike a good balance between
realism and enjoyability. But if the game designer or developer must
err, he'd better err on the side of enjoyability--or the game won't
sell or be played.
> > Squad Leader/ASL got too complex for many players to handle. Then
> > the PC came along and gave us a tool that can handle all that
> > complexity and much more besides. But what I'm saying is that I
> > prefer not to have that kind of complexity even if I do have a tool
> > that makes it manageable.
> >
> This is the bit I find most difficult to understand, though. If the
> computer can
> handle the complexity, wouldn't you rather it did so for the sake of a
> more realistic game?
Well, yes and no. I'm not sure how to articulate this, and maybe I
don't completely know my own mind. Basically I'm a low-tech kind of
guy; given a choice I'd prefer to live a computer-free life. But like
most people these days, I've been spoiled by these contraptions.
The main thing is this: To me, a wargame is a model of military
engagements; it's a dynamic way of demonstrating how battles or
campaigns work. That's something I'd like to understand, so it's
something I read a lot about. And besides reading, I like to sometimes
get my hands on a wargame and experiment with the model to get a better
sense of how things work.
A model does not have to be complex to be accurate. A simple model can
show the basic structure and workings of its subject. A more
complicated model can show more detailed structure and workings. But
either kind of model can be accurate.
One thing I like about simple models of warfare is that I can wrap my
mind around them more easily. If DBA is an accurate model of
ancient/medieval battle (as its designer seems to claim), then I can
get some good hands-on experience with ancient warfare by playing DBA.
And because all the information is out in the open, I'm conscious of
it; thus I'm learning how these battles work.
In contrast, if I'm playing a very complex computer wargame--especially
one with so-so documentation--the part of the model I'm conscious of is
like the tip of an iceberg. I can play all day and have certain
experiences, which might be valid, but I'll never wrap my mind around
the whole model and understand how everything works. At best, I'll
gain some sense of what kind of decision making real military
commanders do. But for me that's not enough; I want to understand all
I can about how battles & campaigns work.
So, I don't like being limited to the "tip of the iceberg." I want the
whole enchilada. I like it when the model is designed in a way that's
suitable for an unaided human mind to grasp.
> Remember, realism doesn't just encompass the
> player's experience and decision cycle; it'd also about producing at
> least plausible combat results. Do they get sacrificed too in the name
> of retaining a mental grasp of the "rules"? If so, to what extent? Sure
> you can do away with ASL's To Hit with modifiers for calibre/Russian or
> minor nation ordnance/hull down/sleep gunk in the gunners eye modifiers
> and the To Kill/Turret Armour/Hull Armour/chance of hitting the rusty
> spot by the commander's seat modifers and replace them with a simple
> competitive die roll. That would be a nice and simple game mechanic,
> but could it really be claimed to be modelling WW2 armoured combat?
Realism is important; I won't argue with that. If realism weren't
important to me, I'd go play backgammon and forget about wargames
altogether.
I do have a taste for realistic games--games which model, or represent,
or even simulate warfare. In fact, the more realism the better--as
long as the model doesn't get too big for the unaided human mind to
grasp, and as long as the game is still enjoyable.
> Of course playing a wargame isn't the same as commanding in a real
> battle, but that doesn't mean that designers should abandon all attempts
> to make the gaming experience at least resemble the reality to some
> degree. Playing flight simulators isn't the same as flying a real plane,
> but that doesn't mean that the designers should abandon all attempts to
> model the physics of flight.
Right. But what I was trying to get at was the concept of
enjoyability.
A designer should, and must, do his best to make a game realistic. But
at the same time, it's still a game--and people only play games because
they're enjoyable.
So, anytime a designer allows realism to spoil enjoyability, he has
failed, IMO (unless he's designing a simulation for actual training
purposes).
> > When I sit down to enjoy a good game, I want basically the same kind
> > of pleasure as I can get from chess, backgammon, poker, or Stratego
> > (to name four distinctly different kinds of games). Classic games
> > like those have proven themselves to be interesting, enjoyable,
> > challenging, and entertaining. And I'll bet they'll still be
> > around--and be widely popular--*long* after "Highway to the Reich,"
> > "Hearts of Iron, " "Rome: Total War," and other PC wargames have been
> > forgotten.
>
> I'm note sure the comaprison is all that valid. You could say the same
> for Scrabble, but it doesn't matter because it's not a wargame. Likewise
> for chess, sure it's sometimes referred to as a "war game" but most of
> the people who play it wouldn't have an interest in military history,
> unlike most wargamers. Chess doesn't purport to model anything; it's
> "just a game". These games stand up on their own as games and are much
> longer established. Wargames are newer and evolve at a much faster rate,
> but that to me is not indicative on any kind of quality differential. I
> say this as someone who's played chess at club level, still plays online
> and has a shelf of opening, ending, strategy and tactics books behind me
> right now...prehaps one day I'll get round to actually reading them...
I agree that chess is not actually a wargame. What I'm saying is that
"Highway to the Reich" *is* still a game. That puts chess and HttR in
the same category--the category of things we do for fun, for amusement,
for enjoyability.
No, you can't strip all the realism out of a wargame, turn it into
something like the children's card game "War," and still call it a
wargame. Without the realism, it's not a wargame anymore. But it's
still a game.
And for us civilians, it's a game more than a serious simulation.
Enjoyability is the key factor, because without that it doesn't matter
what we call the thing--nobody's going to be playing it anyway.
In my case, a wargame loses a lot of enjoyability when the model gets
so complex that I can't wrap my mind around it anymore. It loses more
enjoyability when the design blinds me to much of the information and
forces me to guess or make deductions. And it loses a *lot* of
enjoyability when the game is so big or complicated or time-consuming
that it becomes more work than play.
> > When wargamers and wargame designers talk about their ongoing quest
> > for "realism," what I hear is that they want to change wargames from
> > being chess-like to being poker-like. That is, instead of a
> > perfect-information, deterministic game (like chess), they want to
> > create a limited-information game with a randomizer (like poker). In
> > their view, this will force players to adopt a perspective similar
> > to that of battlefield commanders--and somehow everybody
> > automatically agrees that's a good thing.
>
> I'm not sure about the more "poker-like" part but I do agree that most
> people appear to agree that unpredictability and limited point-of-view
> are "good things" in a wargame. This isn't just because such factors are
> seen to be the flavour-of-the-month; there is, in my opinion, sound
> reasoining at work here. Most wargamers are dabblers to a greater or
> lesser degree in military history - some are even qualified historians.
> Most will know from their exposure to military history that war is an
> unpredictable and untidy business where, even in these days of high tech
> communications and surveillance equipment, there is never enough
> information and often the information the commander does have obscures
> more than it illuminates.
Yes, those are aspects of war that *can* be simulated by a given model
(wargame). But do they *have* to be? Obviously not, considering that
hundreds, if not thousands, of wargames have been produced which do not
model those aspects of war.
No model is ever comprehensive. A model only simulates *some* aspects
of its subject. The designer has to be selective. A designer who sets
out to model *everything* about war is probably doomed from the
beginning. First off, nobody even knows *everything* about war--so how
can it possibly be completely modeled?
The reason I brought up games like chess, backgammon, poker, and
Stratego is that I think they're all abstract models that wargames
*could* be built upon. Most traditional wargames have, in fact, been
built on the bare bones of chess: perfect information, deterministic.
Then, for the sake of "realism," dice began to be incorporated,
blurring the deterministic feature. And in the case of games like
Kriegspiel (blind chess), limited information was also factored in,
altering the chess model somewhat.
The only wargame designer I know of who's *consciously* trying to make
a shift from the chess model to the poker (limited information with
extensive randomizer) model is Bob Jones, author of the Piquet
miniatures rules. Most other designers seem to be unaware of any
underlying game models; they're just imitating and improving upon the
wargames they've seen.
But at the root of every wargame is a *game.* IMO it's a gross error
to assume that military science is at the root of wargames. Military
science is only the "chrome" that's layered onto the basic "game
chassis" to flesh out something realistic-looking.
I'm not saying that shouldn't be done. It *has* to be done, if we're
to have wargames, because wargames have to be credibly realistic.
I'm just saying that when all is said and done, we're basically talking
about *games* here.
> Going back to our friends in the Kriegsakademie, they knew this too, and
> wanted to teach their officers how to handle it:
>
> "May I ask your excellency," replied Reisswitz, " to provide us with
> general and special ideas for manoeuver, and to choose two officers to
> be the commanders for both sides. *Also it is important that we only
> give each commander in the special idea the information he would have in
> reality*." [Emphasis mine] (http://www.hmgs.org/history.htm)
>
> So when you say "In their view, this will force players to adopt a
> perspective similar to that of battlefield commanders--and somehow
> everybody "automatically agrees that's a good thing.", you appear to be
> dismissing the quest for a more realistic command experience as some
> kind of fad. I would argue that this is far from being the case, since
> it goes to the heart of (a) the command experience itself and (b) the
> reason the wargame as we know it was created to begin with.
Yes, I'm sure it does. But I still say that the reason I play wargames
today has little or nothing to do with what the officers at the
Kriegsakademie did. They were trying to learn their trade, and the
wargame was a tool to help with that--just as modern simulations are
used by today's armed forces.
Thirty years ago, I was in training to be a military commander. Today
I'm not. When I sit down to play a wargame today, I'm doing it for
exactly the same reason I might sit down to read Military History
Quarterly or watch a TV documentary or play backgammon: i.e., for
*enjoyment.* Yes, there's an educational aspect to the enjoyment, and
I do like learning things. But the bottom line is still enjoyment.
In short, a game is a game--even if it happens to be a wargame.
--Patrick
Giftzwerg
patrick5...@yahoo.com says...
> > Aha! See - right there is where you stop being a "wargamer," and start
> > being another sort of gamer entirely.
>
> What--because I think Hasbro's "Battle Cry" is a very good, albeit
> simplistic, wargame? Or because I appreciate the elegant simplicity of
> Phil Barker's DBA?
Here's the problem. You see those unrealistic abstractions that wargame
designers have traditionally been forced to embrace as *desirable
features* to be sought out, instead of bugs to be stamped out as soon as
technology makes it practical to do so.
For example, the "God's eye view" you favor isn't something that board-
wargame designers *wanted* in their games - it's something they were
forced to include because the alternative was either umpired games or
some Byzantine mountain of hidden movement rules. Nowadays, fog of war
routines are common and can be incorporated into wargames almost as a
matter of course; why continue to pine away for an *abstraction* when
you can something far closer to reality?
> I doubt that many people would say BC and DBA are not wargames.
> (Though I don't doubt that many hardcore wargamers would dismiss them
> as simplistic wargames.)
>
> Just how complex does the model (simulation) have to be before it
> passes your test of what a wargame is?
It's not a matter of "complexity," but of fidelity to reality and
realism.
I would argue that a wargame that shows you a God's-eye-view of every
single unit and every single datum about them, all over the battlefield,
is *more complex* - from the player's standpoint - than one which simply
shows you only what a commander could realistically see and know. Thus
a good fog-of-war routine is simultaneously less complicated and has a
higher fidelity to reality.
> > I read through the rest of your post, and that's the only reasonable
> > conclusion I can draw; you want some other sort of game than a wargame,
> > but you'd like it to feature little men and tanks.
> >
> > You want your game bone-simple, with no terrible complexity. You want
> > it simple even if the oversimplification compromises realism.
>
> Sorry--I guess I hit the "simplicity" bit too hard. No, I don't want a
> wargame to necessarily be as *simple* as BC or DBA; I'm just saying I
> like they way those games model military engagements. If they were
> much more complex, I'd probably like them more. (Actually, BC sits and
> gathers dust in my closet because it's such a ludicrous presentation of
> ACW battles IMO. I wish it were a more complex and accurate model.)
Again, though, a computer and a well-designed interface can reduce an
almost insane level of complexity to a well-understood and easily-
managed system.
Why isn't this a good thing? I mean, I'm sure a modern game like COTA
has a zillion lines of code and makes a 4Ghz PIV scream for mercy. But
who cares? Ultimately, that's a problem for Arjuna and his henchmen,
not Giftzwerg. All I care about is that COTA presents me with a
reasonable simulation of the decisionmaking necessary to, say, defend
Malta from a German parachute assault.
> > You want
> > an absolute, Godlike point of view and to know anything and everything
> > about the system and the situation -
>
> Yes--as much as possible. Of course, no one but God really knows
> *everything,* so I'll settle for somewhat less. But I'd like to get
> the same overview of a battle or campaign from a game I'm playing as
> I'd get from a book I'm reading on the same subject.
The trouble with this is that nowhere is the Heisenberg Principle as
applicable than it is to wargaming; the mere act of being able to
accurately observe a battle must influence its outcome, and perhaps more
than any other factor. In other words, some scenarios - most of them,
maybe - play out completely differently when the participants have
perfect intelligence than they do when a realistic lack of information
exists.
Chancellorsville, for example. If Hooker had *known* that Lee only had
15,000 troops manning a three-mile front, he'd have squashed him like a
roach. Give a human player commanding the Union Army a God's-eye-view
of that scenario, and the battle will play out nothing like what
happened in actuality.
> > but you also want some very simple
> > and possibly unrealistic mechanism to make sure your pieces don't always
> > do what you want.
>
> Oh, it doesn't have to be a "simple and possibly unrealistic"
> mechanism; it just has to be a mechanism that works. Ideally, it
> should work *realistically*--i.e., it should limit my control over my
> units to the same degree, and in the same way, as a commander's control
> would likely be limited.
Sure, but the most accurate "limitation" on command and control is a
lack of information. Why build a realistic command-delay system that
means it takes 30 minutes to order the 505th Airborne to move out in a
game that let's me supply them with the precise, accurate-to-the-minute
location of the enemy battalion I want them to attack?
> But as to my taste setting me up to be stripped of the title
> "wargamer," I have to disagree with that. I recently read an article
> where somebody complained that Gary Grigsby's "World at War" was not
> really a wargame at all because it's too much like "Axis &
> Allies"--which the author thought was *definitely* not a wargame.
> Well, as far as I'm concerned, any game about war is a wargame. Risk,
> Stratego, and Axis & Allies are all wargames--and "World at War" is
> nothing but a somewhat more complex wargame.
"If everything is a wargame, then nothing is."
- Giftzwerg, *apres* Arendt
--
Giftzwerg
***
Giftzwerg
***
"[I] believe I speak for a lot of 'To Hell With Them Hawks' (and a lot
of other Americans, too) that the spectacle of Middle Eastern Muslims
slaughtering each other is one that I find I can contemplate with calm
composure."
- John Derbyshire
Frank E
wrote:
>> I doubt that many people would say BC and DBA are not wargames.
>> (Though I don't doubt that many hardcore wargamers would dismiss them
>> as simplistic wargames.)
>
>They are simple wargames (not simplistic), but that in itself is no
>reason to dismiss them - and hardly anyone would.
>
>> Just how complex does the model (simulation) have to be before it
>> passes your test of what a wargame is?
>
>In a boardgame the model is in your head, i.e. the rules *are* the
>model. In a pc wargame this is not the case. The game in itself is a
>kind of a black box, you don't realy need to know what goes on under the
>hood.
>As long as the output of the black box accurately reflects military
>processes based on the user input you've got a wargame. The complexity
>of the input / interface and the output / screenactions is no measure
>for the complexity of the game itself.
So if it doesn't accurately reflect reality it isn't a wargame?
>Case in point : HTTR : the basic rules of the interface can be taught in
>10 minutes. That and a solid understanding of WWII operational warfare
>is all you need to play the game, yet there's a thousand and one things
>going on "under the hood" making sure that the output i.e. what you see
>on the screen, is accurate from a military pov. The complexity of HTTR
>is not in the interface, it's in learning WWII operational level
>warfare.
>
OK, lets take HTTR, or rather RDoA since I don't own the sequel. The
combat engine couldn't realistically handle regimental sized units.
Does that prevent it from being a wargame?
And heck, that's a pretty minor example, I'm sure I could find
something similar in every wargame out there. What about Hearts of
Iron or Panzer General where combat really bears no relation to
reality. Is it still a wargame?
If I set realism as a benchmark to whether something is a wargame or
not, where do we draw the line? I submit that everyone here would draw
the line at a different place.
Rgds, Frank
Giftzwerg
fakea...@hotmail.com says...
> >As long as the output of the black box accurately reflects military
> >processes based on the user input you've got a wargame. The complexity
> >of the input / interface and the output / screenactions is no measure
> >for the complexity of the game itself.
>
> So if it doesn't accurately reflect reality it isn't a wargame?
Sure, since the alternative seems to be, "If the game shows us a man in
a green suit shooting a gun, it's a wargame."
I would argue that a wargame:
(1) Depicts a military topic.
(2) Does so seriously.
(3) Does so with enough fidelity to reality that doing realistic things
leads to realistic results.
If "reality, accurate reflection of" isn't a requirement for a wargame,
then any definition we come up with is essentially meaningless.
> If I set realism as a benchmark to whether something is a wargame or
> not, where do we draw the line? I submit that everyone here would draw
> the line at a different place.
So what? Everyone draws a different line everywhere with respect to
everything. But acknowledging that not everyone draws the same lines in
the same places doesn't involve the conclusion that, "There Are No
Lines."
--
Miowarra Tomokatu (aka Tomo)
<jo...@secker.demon.co.uk> wrote:
(Major Snippages)
>Even if the wargame is "perfect" in
>the sense you describe, I do not have the same background as our
>putative commander. He knows, from long experience, that it is foolish
>to include artillery in a column moving in winter. In a game where the
>mechanics are exposed, I can see the same thing, from the -5 on the
>movement dice. When the mechanics are concealed, I have to learn it in
>some other way. And of course there will be many other examples much
>less obvious than this one.
And therein lies the point that Eddy was making about HTTR, that
>The complexity of HTTR is not in the interface, it's in learning WWII operational level
>warfare.
As it is for every different era that we game.
To me (and this may be a slightly different emphasis on stuff that's
already been said) a game is an engine by which I can examine the
historical constraints (and no, they don't have to be seen as -5 on a
Terrain Movement Chart, just experiential within the context of the
game) which required the original outcome on the day. Whether it's the
need for Fred the Great's armies to garrison up with secure supplies
for winter or the effect of disease as force attrition during the
seige of Badajoz that precipitated the storming or the effect of
volley fire on the impis at Rourke's Drift or........
Each environment requires me to read the history, the history gives me
insights into the game environment, the game experience fleshes out
the history.
Playing Shogun:Total War with its visual and auditory enhancements
lets me feel empathy for the dismounted French knights slogging their
way through the mud towards the archery lines at Agincourt, as does
the Branagh/Brian Blessed depiction of that scene in Henry V.
This means that I can be thrashed by an AI and still enjoy a game
because each time there's another facet of the history that is
forcibly brought to my attention ("Attack uphill over open ground at
1:1 odds? Yessir, Get Stuffed - Sir! - we're going round the back
after sniping the officer and a few NCOs. See you at the top of Vimy
Ridge")
----------------------------------------------------------------
.
.
I spent a lot of money on booze, fast cars and women - the rest I squandered.
- George Best
Frank E
<giftzw...@NOSPAMZ.hotmail.com> wrote:
>
>I would argue that a wargame:
>
>(1) Depicts a military topic.
>(2) Does so seriously.
>(3) Does so with enough fidelity to reality that doing realistic things
>leads to realistic results.
I'd argue that here we're talking about historical wargames. ... or
would you not allow anything based in a science fiction setting to be
considered a wargame?
>If "reality, accurate reflection of" isn't a requirement for a wargame,
>then any definition we come up with is essentially meaningless.
Yup, that was my point. Since we all have a different definition of
'accurate' in this context, it really is meaningless.
>> If I set realism as a benchmark to whether something is a wargame or
>> not, where do we draw the line? I submit that everyone here would draw
>> the line at a different place.
>
>So what? Everyone draws a different line everywhere with respect to
>everything. But acknowledging that not everyone draws the same lines in
>the same places doesn't involve the conclusion that, "There Are No
>Lines."
Back when I used to lurk on this NG, there were endless (useless)
discussions about 'you can't discuss this game here, it's not a
historical wargame'. The only 'line' is the broadest possible
definition since that's the only thing we could reach a consensus on.
Trying to define a historical wargame is like trying to define porn. I
know it when I see it but I couldn't expain it. <g>
Rgds, Frank
Giftzwerg
fakea...@hotmail.com says...
> >I would argue that a wargame:
> >
> >(1) Depicts a military topic.
> >(2) Does so seriously.
> >(3) Does so with enough fidelity to reality that doing realistic things
> >leads to realistic results.
>
> I'd argue that here we're talking about historical wargames. ... or
> would you not allow anything based in a science fiction setting to be
> considered a wargame?
I'd say "fidelity to reality" covers Klingon battlecruisers as well as
Challenger II tanks; if you can show me a real D7VK, I'll be happy to
compare it to the one in STARFLEET COMMAND and let you know if it's
historical or not.
> >If "reality, accurate reflection of" isn't a requirement for a wargame,
> >then any definition we come up with is essentially meaningless.
>
> Yup, that was my point. Since we all have a different definition of
> 'accurate' in this context, it really is meaningless.
Yeah, but at some point such observations degenerate into the merest
sophistry. People make distinctions; not everybody agrees on the
distinctions, and sometimes the arguments get hot and heavy, but that
doesn't mean that distinctions are all "meaningless" unless 100% perfect
agreement can be achieved.
I mean, we'd all probably define physical beauty in a different way -
but if your standards lead you to conclude that Helen Thomas is more
beautiful than Courtney Cox, then you've incorporated some fundamental
fuckup into your belief mechanism.
> >So what? Everyone draws a different line everywhere with respect to
> >everything. But acknowledging that not everyone draws the same lines in
> >the same places doesn't involve the conclusion that, "There Are No
> >Lines."
>
> Back when I used to lurk on this NG, there were endless (useless)
> discussions about 'you can't discuss this game here, it's not a
> historical wargame'. The only 'line' is the broadest possible
> definition since that's the only thing we could reach a consensus on.
>
> Trying to define a historical wargame is like trying to define porn. I
> know it when I see it but I couldn't expain it. <g>
Porn is sexually-themed material that people sell to people who want to
jerk off, or buy in order to jerk off.
What's so difficult about that?
John Secker
Giftzwerg <giftzw...@NOSPAMZ.hotmail.com> writes
>In article <pwfsTNDB...@secker.demon.co.uk>,
>jo...@secker.demon.co.uk says...
>
>> >This is wonderfully realistic, in that the real regimental commander -
>> >if he was *insane* - might want to oversee every facet of how his order
>> >is translated into reality. He might want to "look under the hood" of
>> >his own regiment. But he can't. In battle, he can't pull out his
>> >nifty-neat Attack Factor Measurement Tool and run a series of
>> >calculations resulting in a neat chart of percentages corresponding to
>> >his proposed company assault at Phase Line Montana. All he can do is
>> >figure the percentages in his head, based on his experience and
>> >intelligence, and go from there.
>> >
>> Indeed - and he has years, decades, of training and real life
>> experience, to tell him all the things he needs to consider when he
>> chooses a course of action. I don't.
>
>Just a moment, though. You have a few advantages that he doesn't:
>
>(1) You can't get killed.
>
>(2) You can't get cashiered.
>
>(3) You can fight more battles in a week than the average regimental
>commander will ever fight.
>
>(4) You can stop, start, restart, re-examine - or even fight the battle
>*as the enemy*.
>
And he has years of doing it as his profession. I only have my spare
time.
>> Even if the wargame is "perfect" in
>> the sense you describe, I do not have the same background as our
>> putative commander. He knows, from long experience, that it is foolish
>> to include artillery in a column moving in winter. In a game where the
>> mechanics are exposed, I can see the same thing, from the -5 on the
>> movement dice. When the mechanics are concealed, I have to learn it in
>> some other way. And of course there will be many other examples much
>> less obvious than this one.
>
>Sure. But he learns these things the same way you do: practice,
>practice, practice. In fact, he's going to be doing a great deal of
>gaming in his professional career. He gets to work with real soldiers
>and a real staff on exercise, but a wargamer has some serious
>advantages, even here.
>
>And if we had a *perfect* wargame...
>
>> >Perhaps Oddball, the tank commander from "Kelly's Heroes," said it best.
>> >When asked why he wasn't helping his crew repair the damaged Sherman, he
>> >replied, "I just ride in 'em. I don't know what makes 'em work."
>> >
>> >That's the way I want my wargames.
>> >
>> Well I probably want mine that way too, I certainly buy them and play
>> them, and I dreamed for decades of having a computer to take away the
>> tedious calculations in "manual" wargames. But I do recognise the
>> downside which Patrick describes.
>
>Me, too. But I would express his point as, "I like my beer & pretzels
>wargames as well as the next guy."
>
realism vs simplicity argument (or false dichotomy, imho). But my point
is slightly different - it is that the fact of computer moderation
allows you, if you let it, to turn a complicated, deep game, into beer
and pretzels. It was not possible to play, say, ASL in an unengaged,
superficial fashion. The fact that you had to run all the mechanics saw
to that. But you CAN do that with the deepest, most "realistic" computer
wargame, precisely because the mechanics are under the hood. The
professional soldier can't do this, because, whether he is on real-life
exercises or a training simulation, his instructors will ensure that he
gets the learning out of the situation. But there is nothing to stop me
just shoving stacks around the map and seeing what happens; and if it
works badly, then I can start again. Nothing "wrong" with that - if I
have paid for the game, then I can do whatever I like. But I have
certainly felt about some games that there was a lot more to them, if
only I had the energy or persistence to work at finding it out. With a
manual game, you either did the work and understood the mechanisms, or
you didn't play.
So the downside I am talking about is that computer moderation allows
you to be lazy, play the game superficially, and miss out on the
potential learning. And I repeat, it's not a complaint, any more than I
could complain about chocolate which "allows" me to be greedy. It's a
feature, almost the defining feature of the genre, but it is not an
unmitigated good.
--
John Secker
John Secker
Tomokatu (aka Tomo)" <n...@thistime.net> writes
>This means that I can be thrashed by an AI and still enjoy a game
>because each time there's another facet of the history that is
>forcibly brought to my attention ("Attack uphill over open ground at
>1:1 odds? Yessir, Get Stuffed - Sir! - we're going round the back
>after sniping the officer and a few NCOs. See you at the top of Vimy
>Ridge")
possible to throw a stack at the ridge, and have no idea why they
failed. Unless you are playing games a good deal more sophisticated than
the ones I buy, they do NOT give you feedback of the kind you suggested.
(The AI isn't good enough, for a start). With a manual wargame (board or
table) it IS forcibly brought to your attention, because you have to
crank all the numbers yourself. Of course the increased complexity that
the computer allows means that far more factors can be included, and so
it is (arguably) more realistic. But with a board game you know exactly
what is going on, and why, at least in game mechanic terms.
--
John Secker
Patrick
> Here's the problem. You see those unrealistic abstractions that wargame
> designers have traditionally been forced to embrace as *desirable
> features* to be sought out, instead of bugs to be stamped out as soon as
> technology makes it practical to do so.
>
> For example, the "God's eye view" you favor isn't something that board-
> wargame designers *wanted* in their games - it's something they were
> forced to include because the alternative was either umpired games or
> some Byzantine mountain of hidden movement rules. Nowadays, fog of war
> routines are common and can be incorporated into wargames almost as a
> matter of course; why continue to pine away for an *abstraction* when
> you can something far closer to reality?
Well, you're taking me back to the thread about "wargamer
personalities" now.
The first big distinction Dr. Keirsey makes between different kinds of
people is based on their "use of language." He says there are
basically two kinds of people in this regard: those who prefer to use
language (and think) concretely, and those who prefer to use language
(and think) abstractly.
You said you've tested out to be an ESTJ; that makes you a concrete
thinker/language user. I'm an INFP, which makes me an abstract
thinker/language user.
Of course, everybody's capable of doing both; but the theory is that we
each have a built-in *preference* for one or the other.
So, I can't answer your question except to say I prefer
abstractions--even when I'm dealing with a subject like war. I'm far
more interested in the underlying priniciples of warfare than I'll ever
be with the details of how many men were in a French Napoleonic
infantry battalion or how thick the frontal armor is on a
Panzerkampfwagen IV.
If the basic abstract principles of war can be credibly presented in
the form of a simple wargame like DBA, that's my game. I won't miss
all the many details that the model is too simple to explicitly
portray.
> > I doubt that many people would say BC and DBA are not wargames.
> > (Though I don't doubt that many hardcore wargamers would dismiss them
> > as simplistic wargames.)
> >
> > Just how complex does the model (simulation) have to be before it
> > passes your test of what a wargame is?
>
> It's not a matter of "complexity," but of fidelity to reality and
> realism.
>
> I would argue that a wargame that shows you a God's-eye-view of every
> single unit and every single datum about them, all over the battlefield,
> is *more complex* - from the player's standpoint - than one which simply
> shows you only what a commander could realistically see and know. Thus
> a good fog-of-war routine is simultaneously less complicated and has a
> higher fidelity to reality.
Yes, but that's almost a straw-man argument. I'm not talking about a
game that shows every single unit *in detail*; I'm talking about
wargames that let a player see the entire representation of the
battlefield insofar as the game portrays it.
The games Battle Cry or DBA, for instance--or any of the old
Smithsonian series AH games--afford an overview of the whole
battlefield and everything that's going on. But these games are very
simple.
How realistic they are is debatable. I suspect you'd consider them
pretty unrealistic, and I think that's because you want features that
they don't have. But "includes all the features I want" is too
subjective a definition of "realistic" to be very useful.
Since no model of warfare (i.e., wargame) can possibly be
all-encompassing, every model is bound to be limited to covering
certain features of warfare (while excluding or abstracting out many
other features).
So, the question is, which features does a wargame have to include in
order to be realistic by your standards? And why?
> Again, though, a computer and a well-designed interface can reduce an
> almost insane level of complexity to a well-understood and easily-
> managed system.
>
> Why isn't this a good thing?
Sounds like it *is* a good thing for you. And for everyone else who
enjoys computer wargames. Sometimes even for me, despite the
complaints and preferences I'm sharing in this thread.
The reason it's not *always* a good thing to me is that it means I
can't wrap my mind around the model of warfare. I don't get to have a
chance of fully comprehending how this model says warfare works.
Instead, I'm limited pretty much to an ongoing process of trial and
error. I can experiment with strategy & tactics & logistics & such all
I like and see what happens. Or I can role-play a military commander
and get a vague taste of what it might be like to stand in the shoes of
Wellington or Hannibal or Patton. But I can't clearly establish in my
mind an abstract model of how war works.
And that's what I mostly want, I guess. One of the best books I ever
read was "The Art of War in the Western World" by Archer Jones. What I
loved about it was that the author laid out basic abstract *principles*
of how military things work, then gave clear examples of those
principles from wars down through history. It's been years since I
read it, but I still have a clear picture in my mind of, for example,
how an antitank gun is the same in principle as a crossbow at Crecy.
I've always thought that if someone could design a wargame based on
that book, it'd be a dream come true for me. It'd be too abstract a
wargame for you, though. Heck, the same game piece might be used for
both a crossbow and an antitank gun. ;-)
> > Of course, no one but God really knows
> > *everything,* so I'll settle for somewhat less. But I'd like to get
> > the same overview of a battle or campaign from a game I'm playing as
> > I'd get from a book I'm reading on the same subject.
>
> The trouble with this is that nowhere is the Heisenberg Principle as
> applicable than it is to wargaming; the mere act of being able to
> accurately observe a battle must influence its outcome, and perhaps more
> than any other factor. In other words, some scenarios - most of them,
> maybe - play out completely differently when the participants have
> perfect intelligence than they do when a realistic lack of information
> exists.
>
> Chancellorsville, for example. If Hooker had *known* that Lee only had
> 15,000 troops manning a three-mile front, he'd have squashed him like a
> roach. Give a human player commanding the Union Army a God's-eye-view
> of that scenario, and the battle will play out nothing like what
> happened in actuality.
Sure. No doubt about that--*if* the designer leaves it wide open and
lets the player do as he pleases. But only a foolish designer would do
that.
Take the last edition of AH's Chancellorsville game, for instance.
IIRC, the Confederate side was frozen for the first few turns, to give
the Union player time to complete the flank march.
If I were designing a Chancellorsville game, I'd go further than that.
I'd break the battle down into phases and make players fight each phase
separately. As in the AH game, Hooker would be allowed to complete his
flank march, then the first phase of battle would begin. After so many
turns, it'd come time for Jackson's flank march--whereupon the game
would basically be taken down and set up historically again; and then
players could fight out Jackson's strike on the exposed Union flank.
IOW, the historical phases of the battle would *always* take place in
the game, and players could only try to outdo their historical
counterparts tactically *within* each individual phase.
I'm sure many wargamers would find that way too restrictive. But
you've gotta admit, it keeps the wargame in sync with what happened
historically!
In contrast, if you have a game that has no restrictions other than the
historical setup of May 5, 1863, IME you'll *never* see a game match
what happened historically. Doesn't matter whether there's "fog of
war" or not. Players just won't do what their historical counterparts
did.
And I'm not convinced that what happens in such a wargame would have
even been possible historically. Nobody knows what would have been
possible historically. What-if scenarios all boil down to a form of
fantasy.
> > > but you also want some very simple
> > > and possibly unrealistic mechanism to make sure your pieces don't always
> > > do what you want.
> >
> > Oh, it doesn't have to be a "simple and possibly unrealistic"
> > mechanism; it just has to be a mechanism that works. Ideally, it
> > should work *realistically*--i.e., it should limit my control over my
> > units to the same degree, and in the same way, as a commander's control
> > would likely be limited.
>
> Sure, but the most accurate "limitation" on command and control is a
> lack of information. Why build a realistic command-delay system that
> means it takes 30 minutes to order the 505th Airborne to move out in a
> game that let's me supply them with the precise, accurate-to-the-minute
> location of the enemy battalion I want them to attack?
I'll grant you that it gets ridiculous when the game includes that
level of detail. In fact, in every detailed wargame I've ever played,
there has come a time when I've wondered, "Why was this left out, when
everything else was put in?" Once you start adding detail to your
model, you have to keep *all* the details in balance. Otherwise
somebody's going to wonder why you left such-and-such out.
But if we're talking about a game like Battle Cry or DBA, the whole
game is pretty abstract to begin with. So, if someone asks why "fog of
war" isn't explicitly portrayed, the answer is that a *lot* of things
are not explicitly portrayed. FOW is factored into the activation
rolls and combat results. It's handled abstractly instead of
concretely.
> > But as to my taste setting me up to be stripped of the title
> > "wargamer," I have to disagree with that. I recently read an article
> > where somebody complained that Gary Grigsby's "World at War" was not
> > really a wargame at all because it's too much like "Axis &
> > Allies"--which the author thought was *definitely* not a wargame.
> > Well, as far as I'm concerned, any game about war is a wargame. Risk,
> > Stratego, and Axis & Allies are all wargames--and "World at War" is
> > nothing but a somewhat more complex wargame.
>
> "If everything is a wargame, then nothing is."
True, I guess, but it doesn't help us figure out where the line ought
to be drawn. It just says there ought to be a line. I don't think
anybody would disagree with that.
In another post, for example, I agreed that chess is not really a
wargame (though it's sometimes classified as one in books on board
games).
It'd be a little harder to convince me that Stratego is not a wargame,
but I might cave on that point.
As to Risk, I'm pretty sure it is a wargame. With armies out to
conquer the world, I don't know what else it could be but a wargame.
Once we get to Axis & Allies, or Battle Cry, or DBA, I don't even want
to hear anybody trying to claim they're not wargames. They obviously
are (IMHO).
--Patrick
Patrick
> Well this is exactly my point. With a computer game, it is entirely
> possible to throw a stack at the ridge, and have no idea why they
> failed. Unless you are playing games a good deal more sophisticated than
> the ones I buy, they do NOT give you feedback of the kind you suggested.
> (The AI isn't good enough, for a start). With a manual wargame (board or
> table) it IS forcibly brought to your attention, because you have to
> crank all the numbers yourself. Of course the increased complexity that
> the computer allows means that far more factors can be included, and so
> it is (arguably) more realistic. But with a board game you know exactly
> what is going on, and why, at least in game mechanic terms.
Yeah--that's what my complaint was. And *if* the board wargame is a
reasonably accurate model of warfare, you end up comprehending how
warfare works. You have to comprehend the whole model in order to play
the game.
I don't know how many times I've been frustrated with computer
wargames for exactly the reason you describe above. It's all trial and
error--and even after many trials, I still can't figure out what my
error might be.
Of course, just as often I'll accidentally succeed at something.
Voila! I made a brilliant breakthrough--but how? If I'm treating it
as just entertainment, I just pat myself on the back and continue on.
But usually there's a part of me that wants to learn something about
how war works. And I don't learn anything by just having seemingly
accidental successes and failures.
--Patrick
PS Same goes for the "fog of war" aspect. In a game with FOW,
sometimes the enemy swoops in out of nowhere and clobbers me--and I
have no idea how it happened. Or I get lucky and sneak around an enemy
flank without his noticing--but I'm not sure how I managed to pull it
off. Consequently, it often seems that things are "just happening" and
there's no way for me to figure out how or why.
Giftzwerg
jo...@secker.demon.co.uk says...
> Well this is exactly my point. With a computer game, it is entirely
> possible to throw a stack at the ridge, and have no idea why they
> failed.
Exactly! This is precisely what's wanted!
> But with a board game you know exactly
> what is going on, and why, at least in game mechanic terms.
Ugh. Wretchedly gamey, this.
Giftzwerg
jo...@secker.demon.co.uk says...
> >Just a moment, though. You have a few advantages that he doesn't:
> >
> >(1) You can't get killed.
> >
> >(2) You can't get cashiered.
> >
> >(3) You can fight more battles in a week than the average regimental
> >commander will ever fight.
> >
> >(4) You can stop, start, restart, re-examine - or even fight the battle
> >*as the enemy*.
> >
> But so can he - as you point out later, he also plays a lot of wargames.
> And he has years of doing it as his profession. I only have my spare
> time.
Sure, but what percentage of his total time is spent fighting battles,
or wargaming the fighting of battles ... as opposed to time spent
requisitioning toilet paper, inspecting latrines, writing meaningless
reports no one will read, etc, etc. I'm a professional systems manager,
and 90% of my time is spent on laughable bullshit that has nothing to do
with systems and everything to do with sorting out the stupidities of
everyone around me and paying homage to thankless tasks that no one can
remember the provenance of.
> >But I would express his point as, "I like my beer & pretzels
> >wargames as well as the next guy."
> >
> Hmm, this isn't quite my point. I know Patrick has gone off on the old
> realism vs simplicity argument (or false dichotomy, imho). But my point
> is slightly different - it is that the fact of computer moderation
> allows you, if you let it, to turn a complicated, deep game, into beer
> and pretzels.
Yes. Exactly. I agree 100%. HTTR, for example, is simultaneously
complicated, deep, yet lends itself to beer & pretzels play.
> It was not possible to play, say, ASL in an unengaged,
> superficial fashion. The fact that you had to run all the mechanics saw
> to that. But you CAN do that with the deepest, most "realistic" computer
> wargame, precisely because the mechanics are under the hood. The
> professional soldier can't do this, because, whether he is on real-life
> exercises or a training simulation, his instructors will ensure that he
> gets the learning out of the situation. But there is nothing to stop me
> just shoving stacks around the map and seeing what happens; and if it
> works badly, then I can start again. Nothing "wrong" with that - if I
> have paid for the game, then I can do whatever I like. But I have
> certainly felt about some games that there was a lot more to them, if
> only I had the energy or persistence to work at finding it out. With a
> manual game, you either did the work and understood the mechanisms, or
> you didn't play.
> So the downside I am talking about is that computer moderation allows
> you to be lazy, play the game superficially, and miss out on the
> potential learning. And I repeat, it's not a complaint, any more than I
> could complain about chocolate which "allows" me to be greedy. It's a
> feature, almost the defining feature of the genre, but it is not an
> unmitigated good.
Well said.
Giftzwerg
patrick5...@yahoo.com says...
> So, I can't answer your question except to say I prefer
> abstractions--even when I'm dealing with a subject like war. I'm far
> more interested in the underlying priniciples of warfare than I'll ever
> be with the details of how many men were in a French Napoleonic
> infantry battalion or how thick the frontal armor is on a
> Panzerkampfwagen IV.
But this is exactly my point; the first and most profound "principle of
warfare" is the plain fact that you cannot possibly have that God's-eye-
view of the battlefield. If you first grant yourself an omniscient
viewpoint, then you've at the outset abandoned any pretense of being
faithful to the underlying principles of warfare.
> > I would argue that a wargame that shows you a God's-eye-view of every
> > single unit and every single datum about them, all over the battlefield,
> > is *more complex* - from the player's standpoint - than one which simply
> > shows you only what a commander could realistically see and know. Thus
> > a good fog-of-war routine is simultaneously less complicated and has a
> > higher fidelity to reality.
>
> Yes, but that's almost a straw-man argument. I'm not talking about a
> game that shows every single unit *in detail*; I'm talking about
> wargames that let a player see the entire representation of the
> battlefield insofar as the game portrays it.
What's the difference? If you can watch, say, the progress of
"Nimitz's" little paper counters moving hex-by-hex to take up positions
to defend against your Japanese task forces moving towards Midway, then
the fact that you don't know every detail about the American fleet is
irrelevant; just knowing where they are is a profoundly battle-altering
tool.
> The games Battle Cry or DBA, for instance--or any of the old
> Smithsonian series AH games--afford an overview of the whole
> battlefield and everything that's going on. But these games are very
> simple.
>
> How realistic they are is debatable. I suspect you'd consider them
> pretty unrealistic, and I think that's because you want features that
> they don't have. But "includes all the features I want" is too
> subjective a definition of "realistic" to be very useful.
If the game in question simulates the commander of an ancient battle
force as being able to view the entire battlefield as if he had a
realtime video feed from a KH-11 spy satellite and lets him give orders
as if he and all his commanders had an encrypted cellphone with built-in
GPS ... well, the "reality" of this situation can be calculated with
great objectivity, in my book.
> Since no model of warfare (i.e., wargame) can possibly be
> all-encompassing, every model is bound to be limited to covering
> certain features of warfare (while excluding or abstracting out many
> other features).
That's fine to say. But we have to be careful we don't let the perfect
become the enemy of the good. In other words, no wargame is perfect -
but some are a helluva lot better, more realistic, and more accurate
than others.
> So, the question is, which features does a wargame have to include in
> order to be realistic by your standards? And why?
(1) Limited intelligence. Call it that or fog-of-war, but no game that
lets me see all your counters (or even my own, in many situations) can
be all that realistic.
(2) Command & control limitations. Orders take time to execute.
Somebody always doesn't get the word. Some subordinates are Stonewall
Jackson. Some are Ambrose Burnside. If I'm giving orders by telepathy
to robots, then that's not all that realistic.
(3) High-fidelity weapons systems simulation. A Panther isn't just a
yellowish Sherman with a bigger gun. A battleship isn't just a bigger,
heavier destroyer. Accurate performance of weapons systems - men and
machines - is essential to realism.
(4) Highly accurate research. The map needs to be right. The OOBs
need to be right. This seems an obvious point, but it gets done wrong a
lot.
> > Again, though, a computer and a well-designed interface can reduce an
> > almost insane level of complexity to a well-understood and easily-
> > managed system.
> >
> > Why isn't this a good thing?
>
> Sounds like it *is* a good thing for you. And for everyone else who
> enjoys computer wargames. Sometimes even for me, despite the
> complaints and preferences I'm sharing in this thread.
>
> The reason it's not *always* a good thing to me is that it means I
> can't wrap my mind around the model of warfare. I don't get to have a
> chance of fully comprehending how this model says warfare works.
> Instead, I'm limited pretty much to an ongoing process of trial and
> error. I can experiment with strategy & tactics & logistics & such all
> I like and see what happens. Or I can role-play a military commander
> and get a vague taste of what it might be like to stand in the shoes of
> Wellington or Hannibal or Patton. But I can't clearly establish in my
> mind an abstract model of how war works.
Good! Wellington, Hannibal, and Patton didn't have a Magic Slide-Rule
Of Winning Warfare, either.
> And that's what I mostly want, I guess. One of the best books I ever
> read was "The Art of War in the Western World" by Archer Jones. What I
> loved about it was that the author laid out basic abstract *principles*
> of how military things work, then gave clear examples of those
> principles from wars down through history. It's been years since I
> read it, but I still have a clear picture in my mind of, for example,
> how an antitank gun is the same in principle as a crossbow at Crecy.
I'm not sure I recall "Archer Jones" being in the pantheon of famously
winning warmakers, though.
Is that telling? I mean, I get the distinct impression that you're more
interested in a sort of academic, touristic experience here. This kinda
puts you at odds with wargamers and the ongoing trends in wargame
design.
> > The trouble with this is that nowhere is the Heisenberg Principle as
> > applicable than it is to wargaming; the mere act of being able to
> > accurately observe a battle must influence its outcome, and perhaps more
> > than any other factor. In other words, some scenarios - most of them,
> > maybe - play out completely differently when the participants have
> > perfect intelligence than they do when a realistic lack of information
> > exists.
> >
> > Chancellorsville, for example. If Hooker had *known* that Lee only had
> > 15,000 troops manning a three-mile front, he'd have squashed him like a
> > roach. Give a human player commanding the Union Army a God's-eye-view
> > of that scenario, and the battle will play out nothing like what
> > happened in actuality.
>
> Sure. No doubt about that--*if* the designer leaves it wide open and
> lets the player do as he pleases. But only a foolish designer would do
> that.
>
> Take the last edition of AH's Chancellorsville game, for instance.
> IIRC, the Confederate side was frozen for the first few turns, to give
> the Union player time to complete the flank march.
Gamey, gamey, gamey, gamey. Bad designer. Go to your room and think
about your felony crimes against reality.
> If I were designing a Chancellorsville game, I'd go further than that.
> I'd break the battle down into phases and make players fight each phase
> separately. As in the AH game, Hooker would be allowed to complete his
> flank march, then the first phase of battle would begin. After so many
> turns, it'd come time for Jackson's flank march--whereupon the game
> would basically be taken down and set up historically again; and then
> players could fight out Jackson's strike on the exposed Union flank.
I'd just build an accurate map, arm each player with accurate armies,
cover the battlefield with smoke and noise, fire wildly-conflicting and
often lamentably inaccurate reports at the player - and make sure that
it took *hours* to find out WTF was going on with anyone or anything.
> IOW, the historical phases of the battle would *always* take place in
> the game, and players could only try to outdo their historical
> counterparts tactically *within* each individual phase.
<retching sounds>
> I'm sure many wargamers would find that way too restrictive. But
> you've gotta admit, it keeps the wargame in sync with what happened
> historically!
So would reading a book or watching a documentary or looking at a model
of Chancellorsville built from Lego(tm) bricks. But those wouldn't be
wargames ...
... either.
> In contrast, if you have a game that has no restrictions other than the
> historical setup of May 5, 1863, IME you'll *never* see a game match
> what happened historically. Doesn't matter whether there's "fog of
> war" or not. Players just won't do what their historical counterparts
> did.
That's. The. Whole. Point. Of. Wargames.
C'mon, dude! If you just want a game that "does" what happened in
reality, you don't need an AI, or even a way to input orders, or even a
combat resolution system - you just need a Flash animation that moves
little symbols around the map until it's time for them to historically
disappear. No input necessary. Perfect historicity.
MEMO TO ARJUNA: I'm not going to pay $50 for Mr. Patrick's "game!"
> And I'm not convinced that what happens in such a wargame would have
> even been possible historically. Nobody knows what would have been
> possible historically. What-if scenarios all boil down to a form of
> fantasy.
That's. The. Whole. Point. Of. Wargames.
> As to Risk, I'm pretty sure it is a wargame. With armies out to
> conquer the world, I don't know what else it could be but a wargame.
How about COMMAND & CONQUER?
Wargame?
Patrick
> In article <1142990709.8...@t31g2000cwb.googlegroups.com>,
> patrick5...@yahoo.com says...
>
> > So, I can't answer your question except to say I prefer
> > abstractions--even when I'm dealing with a subject like war. I'm far
> > more interested in the underlying priniciples of warfare than I'll ever
> > be with the details of how many men were in a French Napoleonic
> > infantry battalion or how thick the frontal armor is on a
> > Panzerkampfwagen IV.
>
> But this is exactly my point; the first and most profound "principle of
> warfare" is the plain fact that you cannot possibly have that God's-eye-
> view of the battlefield. If you first grant yourself an omniscient
> viewpoint, then you've at the outset abandoned any pretense of being
> faithful to the underlying principles of warfare.
Nonsense. The trouble is, you're stuck in the mindset that when you're
playing a wargame, you *must* be role-playing a battlefield commander.
To me, that's BS.
To play a wargame, all you *have* to be doing is playing a game about
war. Period. The rest is icing on the cake and just a matter of
taste.
In DBA, one of the elements (units) has the side's General assigned to
it. That General is the battlefield commander. Not the player. The
player is just playing a wargame, not role-playing a commander.
How is "fog of war" handled? Abstractly. The terrain table (mapboard
equivalent) may or may not show precisely what's where. It
approximates the layout of the battlefield and serves as a reference
field on which to maneuver the armies. But when the Tenth Legion
clashes with Arminius's Horde on such-and-such a hill, who knows if the
hill looked the same to Caesar as it does to the player of the Roman
side? It's irrelevant. The point is, the player has sent the Tenth
Legion to attack Arminius, and if all goes well, that happens. On the
tabletop, it may look like it's happening on the hill; but in reality,
due to the "fog of war," the two units may have clashed before either
of them actually reached the hill. Who knows? You'd have to actually
be there in order to know for sure. But none of us can actually be
there. Only that General marker down on the tabletop is really
there--and we can only imagine what things might look like through his
eyes.
Yet, the *effect* of "fog of war" is incorporated into the activation
rolls and combat results. The reason the Tenth Legion had such an
overwhelming success *may* have been that Arminius's Horde got lost and
didn't actually reach the hill in time.
Part of any wargame always takes place in our imagination. Whatever is
not made explicit in the game can be explained with a bit of thought or
imagination.
When I play a wargame, I'm not assuming the role of battlefield
commander. I'm assuming the role of a student at the Kriegsakademie
exploring military what-ifs on the sandtable.
> > Yes, but that's almost a straw-man argument. I'm not talking about a
> > game that shows every single unit *in detail*; I'm talking about
> > wargames that let a player see the entire representation of the
> > battlefield insofar as the game portrays it.
>
> What's the difference? If you can watch, say, the progress of
> "Nimitz's" little paper counters moving hex-by-hex to take up positions
> to defend against your Japanese task forces moving towards Midway, then
> the fact that you don't know every detail about the American fleet is
> irrelevant; just knowing where they are is a profoundly battle-altering
> tool.
Only if you're certain that the positions of the American fleet on the
map really correspond to their real-life positions. They don't
necessarily.
And even if they do, the game can be designed in such a way that the
Japanese fleet is unable to take advantage of the player's knowledge.
Why? Because the player is not the Japanese admiral. The Japanese
admiral is down there on one of those ships and is *not* free to draw
upon the player's "omniscience."
The player can be "omniscient" while the commander is not.
> > The games Battle Cry or DBA, for instance--or any of the old
> > Smithsonian series AH games--afford an overview of the whole
> > battlefield and everything that's going on. But these games are very
> > simple.
> >
> > How realistic they are is debatable. I suspect you'd consider them
> > pretty unrealistic, and I think that's because you want features that
> > they don't have. But "includes all the features I want" is too
> > subjective a definition of "realistic" to be very useful.
>
> If the game in question simulates the commander of an ancient battle
> force as being able to view the entire battlefield as if he had a
> realtime video feed from a KH-11 spy satellite and lets him give orders
> as if he and all his commanders had an encrypted cellphone with built-in
> GPS ... well, the "reality" of this situation can be calculated with
> great objectivity, in my book.
I still say you're hopelessly stuck in that "role-playing the
commander" viewpoint. As long as you cling to that, you'll never be
able to see things from my POV.
I'll say again: there is no compelling reason why the player of a
wargame must "be" the battlefield commander.
> > Since no model of warfare (i.e., wargame) can possibly be
> > all-encompassing, every model is bound to be limited to covering
> > certain features of warfare (while excluding or abstracting out many
> > other features).
>
> That's fine to say. But we have to be careful we don't let the perfect
> become the enemy of the good. In other words, no wargame is perfect -
> but some are a helluva lot better, more realistic, and more accurate
> than others.
I agree. But I still don't agree that the player *must* "be" the
commander. If I wanted to play a role-playing game, I'd go for
something like Dungeons & Dragons.
I don't want to role-play a battlefield commander. I want to play a
wargame.
> > So, the question is, which features does a wargame have to include in
> > order to be realistic by your standards? And why?
>
> (1) Limited intelligence. Call it that or fog-of-war, but no game that
> lets me see all your counters (or even my own, in many situations) can
> be all that realistic.
>
> (2) Command & control limitations. Orders take time to execute.
> Somebody always doesn't get the word. Some subordinates are Stonewall
> Jackson. Some are Ambrose Burnside. If I'm giving orders by telepathy
> to robots, then that's not all that realistic.
>
> (3) High-fidelity weapons systems simulation. A Panther isn't just a
> yellowish Sherman with a bigger gun. A battleship isn't just a bigger,
> heavier destroyer. Accurate performance of weapons systems - men and
> machines - is essential to realism.
>
> (4) Highly accurate research. The map needs to be right. The OOBs
> need to be right. This seems an obvious point, but it gets done wrong a
> lot.
Thanks for sharing. Me, I'd rate points 2 and 4 a *lot* higher than
points 1 and 3.
>> . . . Or I can role-play a military commander
> > and get a vague taste of what it might be like to stand in the shoes of
> > Wellington or Hannibal or Patton. But I can't clearly establish in my
> > mind an abstract model of how war works.
>
> Good! Wellington, Hannibal, and Patton didn't have a Magic Slide-Rule
> Of Winning Warfare, either.
See--you're still hell-bent on "being" a battlefield commander. I'm
not.
> > And that's what I mostly want, I guess. One of the best books I ever
> > read was "The Art of War in the Western World" by Archer Jones. What I
> > loved about it was that the author laid out basic abstract *principles*
> > of how military things work, then gave clear examples of those
> > principles from wars down through history. It's been years since I
> > read it, but I still have a clear picture in my mind of, for example,
> > how an antitank gun is the same in principle as a crossbow at Crecy.
>
> I'm not sure I recall "Archer Jones" being in the pantheon of famously
> winning warmakers, though.
>
> Is that telling? I mean, I get the distinct impression that you're more
> interested in a sort of academic, touristic experience here. This kinda
> puts you at odds with wargamers and the ongoing trends in wargame
> design.
Duh! I'm well aware that I'm at odds with wargamers and current
trends. Most everything I've been saying makes that abundantly clear.
I don't expect to change your mind or change the trends. All I ask is
that the people reading this thread acknowledge my POV, strange as it
may seem.
> > Take the last edition of AH's Chancellorsville game, for instance.
> > IIRC, the Confederate side was frozen for the first few turns, to give
> > the Union player time to complete the flank march.
>
> Gamey, gamey, gamey, gamey. Bad designer. Go to your room and think
> about your felony crimes against reality.
Against reality? Come on, now. My rule faithfully re-creates the
historical facts of May 5, 1863, where the Confederate force was indeed
taken by surprise by Hooker's flank march.
The alternative you're suggesting would, IMO, be much closer to a
"crime against reality," since it would allow all kinds of
*ahistorical* things to happen. Furthermore, it would involve
replacing the minds and personalities of Hooker and Lee with the minds
and personalities of two wargamers.
And you dare to talk about reality?
Now, the "gamey" charge--that one might stick. In fact, I'll confess
to it. I have no compunction at all about admitting that when I'm
playing a wargame, I'm playing a game.
Why are you so loath to admit to playing a game?
> > In contrast, if you have a game that has no restrictions other than the
> > historical setup of May 5, 1863, IME you'll *never* see a game match
> > what happened historically. Doesn't matter whether there's "fog of
> > war" or not. Players just won't do what their historical counterparts
> > did.
>>
> > And I'm not convinced that what happens in such a wargame would have
> > even been possible historically. Nobody knows what would have been
> > possible historically. What-if scenarios all boil down to a form of
> > fantasy.
>
> That's. The. Whole. Point. Of. Wargames.
Ah, so now you've pulled back from your accusation about "felony crimes
against reality" and you're owning up to your brand of wargames being
pure fantasy.
Thanks for that.
Actually, at times I've despaired of ever being able to enjoy
historical wargames and have turned to sci-fi/fantasy games instead.
That way I didn't have to worry about the details being realistic (at
least in the sense of "historically accurate"); I could just play the
game and have fun with it.
I enjoyed Fantasy General more than Panzer General, for example.
> > As to Risk, I'm pretty sure it is a wargame. With armies out to
> > conquer the world, I don't know what else it could be but a wargame.
>
> How about COMMAND & CONQUER?
>
> Wargame?
Dunno; I've never played that one--though I've heard the name many
times.
--Patrick
Miowarra Tomokatu (aka Tomo)
<giftzw...@NOSPAMZ.hotmail.com> wrote:
>In article <aaiAJ2FI...@secker.demon.co.uk>,
>jo...@secker.demon.co.uk says...
>
>> Well this is exactly my point. With a computer game, it is entirely
>> possible to throw a stack at the ridge, and have no idea why they
>> failed.
>
>Exactly! This is precisely what's wanted!
>
>> But with a board game you know exactly
>> what is going on, and why, at least in game mechanic terms.
>
>Ugh. Wretchedly gamey, this.
I'm with Giftzwerg, here.
The situation's happened often enough that I KNOW that I *should* need
at least 3:1 (if I were careless or callous enough to try any sort of
uphill frontal assault) but "perhaps, this time, with the weather
fine, 2.75:1 with high morale AND that unit of {PzKwIIIs|pavise
crossbows|heavy cuirassiers} thrown in, we might manage it today and
if I can do it with fewer resources this time, then those withheld
resources will come in handy over there". That's the level of
nailbiting decision-making that I want to be faced with despite the
lack of precise factors on a CRT. That and the problems of marshalling
the resources in the right place in a timely fashion to be able to
attack|defend in the first place.
Not, "if I throw in this stack of 35 attack factors I'm just short
enough that I can add the 256th Armoured Field Brothel from this hex,
get a "surrounded" multiplier and the two attack factors make 4:1.
Let's Do It! "
Giftzwerg
patrick5...@yahoo.com says...
> > > So, I can't answer your question except to say I prefer
> > > abstractions--even when I'm dealing with a subject like war. I'm far
> > > more interested in the underlying priniciples of warfare than I'll ever
> > > be with the details of how many men were in a French Napoleonic
> > > infantry battalion or how thick the frontal armor is on a
> > > Panzerkampfwagen IV.
> >
> > But this is exactly my point; the first and most profound "principle of
> > warfare" is the plain fact that you cannot possibly have that God's-eye-
> > view of the battlefield. If you first grant yourself an omniscient
> > viewpoint, then you've at the outset abandoned any pretense of being
> > faithful to the underlying principles of warfare.
>
> Nonsense. The trouble is, you're stuck in the mindset that when you're
> playing a wargame, you *must* be role-playing a battlefield commander.
> To me, that's BS.
I'm not "role-playing" anything. I don't care what the commander's
"characteristics" are, not am I going to follow his career forward.
But a good wargame, these days, is more and more going to be designed
around an accurate representation of the place in the chain of command
occupied by the human player(s). Older, less capable wargames will
probably continue to abstract this by letting players micromanage all
their counters.
> To play a wargame, all you *have* to be doing is playing a game about
> war. Period. The rest is icing on the cake and just a matter of
> taste.
Ah. So DOOM is a wargame, since it's about a Space Marine assaulting a
variety of demons and monsters?
> In DBA, one of the elements (units) has the side's General assigned to
> it. That General is the battlefield commander. Not the player. The
> player is just playing a wargame, not role-playing a commander.
>
> How is "fog of war" handled? Abstractly.
Not for long. As I mentioned earlier, such abstractions are nothing
more than undesirable workarounds which address the need for fog-of-war
without the ability for the system to manage the complexity of it.
> > What's the difference? If you can watch, say, the progress of
> > "Nimitz's" little paper counters moving hex-by-hex to take up positions
> > to defend against your Japanese task forces moving towards Midway, then
> > the fact that you don't know every detail about the American fleet is
> > irrelevant; just knowing where they are is a profoundly battle-altering
> > tool.
>
> Only if you're certain that the positions of the American fleet on the
> map really correspond to their real-life positions. They don't
> necessarily.
Then what are you talking about? Either you have that "God's eye view"
of the battlefield *you mentioned*, or you don't.
> And even if they do, the game can be designed in such a way that the
> Japanese fleet is unable to take advantage of the player's knowledge.
TRANSLATION: "The game can be fudged in some gamey way to *mimic* a
real fog-of-war routine."
> > If the game in question simulates the commander of an ancient battle
> > force as being able to view the entire battlefield as if he had a
> > realtime video feed from a KH-11 spy satellite and lets him give orders
> > as if he and all his commanders had an encrypted cellphone with built-in
> > GPS ... well, the "reality" of this situation can be calculated with
> > great objectivity, in my book.
>
> I still say you're hopelessly stuck in that "role-playing the
> commander" viewpoint. As long as you cling to that, you'll never be
> able to see things from my POV.
>
> I'll say again: there is no compelling reason why the player of a
> wargame must "be" the battlefield commander.
Who do you want him to be? Tom Swift, eying the battle through his
MegaScope Space Prober?
> > That's fine to say. But we have to be careful we don't let the perfect
> > become the enemy of the good. In other words, no wargame is perfect -
> > but some are a helluva lot better, more realistic, and more accurate
> > than others.
>
> I agree. But I still don't agree that the player *must* "be" the
> commander. If I wanted to play a role-playing game, I'd go for
> something like Dungeons & Dragons.
>
> I don't want to role-play a battlefield commander. I want to play a
> wargame.
Unfortunately - and this trend is crystal clear - those soothing
abstractions you're so desperately clinging to (that is what your
argument amounts to...) are all going to go away as wargame designers
improve their code and techniques.
The first PC wargames were little more than boardgames where you could
play the computer. But as systems improved, better designers started
chucking out all those lame board and miniature gaming conventions that
were necessary to keep a paper system manageable, but which a PC can
handle in a much more complex and realistic fashion.
Even PC games with retain the form of a boardgame (SSG's latest efforts)
feature stunningly complex calculations and comprehensive fog-of-war
routines. More and more, designers are going to question the need for
these conventional abstractions when they find that they can do things
realistically.
> >> . . . Or I can role-play a military commander
> > > and get a vague taste of what it might be like to stand in the shoes of
> > > Wellington or Hannibal or Patton. But I can't clearly establish in my
> > > mind an abstract model of how war works.
> >
> > Good! Wellington, Hannibal, and Patton didn't have a Magic Slide-Rule
> > Of Winning Warfare, either.
>
> See--you're still hell-bent on "being" a battlefield commander. I'm
> not.
I'm not "hell-bent" on anything. I'm simply looking at the state of the
industry and pointing out that this is where things are heading. I
think it's an excellent development.
> > > Take the last edition of AH's Chancellorsville game, for instance.
> > > IIRC, the Confederate side was frozen for the first few turns, to give
> > > the Union player time to complete the flank march.
> >
> > Gamey, gamey, gamey, gamey. Bad designer. Go to your room and think
> > about your felony crimes against reality.
>
> Against reality? Come on, now. My rule faithfully re-creates the
> historical facts of May 5, 1863, where the Confederate force was indeed
> taken by surprise by Hooker's flank march.
So would a carving on a wax-tablet with a spoon. That wouldn't be a
wargame, either.
> The alternative you're suggesting would, IMO, be much closer to a
> "crime against reality," since it would allow all kinds of
> *ahistorical* things to happen. Furthermore, it would involve
> replacing the minds and personalities of Hooker and Lee with the minds
> and personalities of two wargamers.
That's. The. Whole. Point. Of. Wargames.
> And you dare to talk about reality?
>
> Now, the "gamey" charge--that one might stick. In fact, I'll confess
> to it. I have no compunction at all about admitting that when I'm
> playing a wargame, I'm playing a game.
>
> Why are you so loath to admit to playing a game?
What's to "admit?" That's clear. But I'm looking for a game that best
approximates a machine that would let me go back in time, take the place
of Fighting Joe Hooker, and see how well I could have done given the
realities of the battle situation he was facing.
That's the only reason I took up wargaming.
> > > And I'm not convinced that what happens in such a wargame would have
> > > even been possible historically. Nobody knows what would have been
> > > possible historically. What-if scenarios all boil down to a form of
> > > fantasy.
> >
> > That's. The. Whole. Point. Of. Wargames.
>
> Ah, so now you've pulled back from your accusation about "felony crimes
> against reality" and you're owning up to your brand of wargames being
> pure fantasy.
>
> Thanks for that.
Nice try, but there's not the slightest issue reconciling those
positions, and I ain't pulling back shit.
No wargamer - except you, perhaps - wants to just go through
predetermined historical motions like a robot; of *course* we want to
change things. But you don't need a wargame to just look on (like a
child watching "SpongeBob Squarepants") as history tediously repeats
itself; playing a wargame absolutely and inexorably involves changing
history.
That said, we do prefer not to change history to the point where
Hannibal is portrayed as having a satellite uplink to his subordinates,
or the Wicked Witch of the West's all-seeing crystal ball, or a nuclear
bomb.
That's what we mean when we say "we want realistic games," not that we
want robotic reiterations of reality.
> Actually, at times I've despaired of ever being able to enjoy
> historical wargames and have turned to sci-fi/fantasy games instead.
> That way I didn't have to worry about the details being realistic (at
> least in the sense of "historically accurate"); I could just play the
> game and have fun with it.
You can do that with MUPPET TREASURE ISLAND. But you're not playing a
wargame there, either.
--
Patrick
> In article <1143045111.0...@v46g2000cwv.googlegroups.com>,
> patrick5...@yahoo.com says...
>
> > playing a wargame, you *must* be role-playing a battlefield commander.
> > To me, that's BS.
>
> I'm not "role-playing" anything. I don't care what the commander's
> "characteristics" are, not am I going to follow his career forward.
You're still standing in his shoes. I don't envy that position.
> But a good wargame, these days, is more and more going to be designed
> around an accurate representation of the place in the chain of command
> occupied by the human player(s). Older, less capable wargames will
> probably continue to abstract this by letting players micromanage all
> their counters.
That's probably true. Which means that in my estimation, what others
see as "a good wargame" will more and more look like a *bad* wargame to
me.
> > To play a wargame, all you *have* to be doing is playing a game about
> > war. Period. The rest is icing on the cake and just a matter of
> > taste.
>
> Ah. So DOOM is a wargame, since it's about a Space Marine assaulting a
> variety of demons and monsters?
If DOOM is about war, it's a wargame. I haven't played it, so I don't
know if it's about war or if it's just a game about somebody shooting
monsters.
No, killing people or monsters isn't equivalent to war.
But if the premise of DOOM is that there's a human-vs-monster war going
on and the player is participating in that, then yeah--it's a wargame
of sorts.
> > In DBA, one of the elements (units) has the side's General assigned to
> > it. That General is the battlefield commander. Not the player. The
> > player is just playing a wargame, not role-playing a commander.
> >
> > How is "fog of war" handled? Abstractly.
>
> Not for long. As I mentioned earlier, such abstractions are nothing
> more than undesirable workarounds which address the need for fog-of-war
> without the ability for the system to manage the complexity of it.
The abstractions are not just "workarounds" to me, nor are they
undesirable. They're game features which provide me, the game player,
with the luxury of being free from the restraints of a commander's
limited POV.
> > And even if they do, the game can be designed in such a way that the
> > Japanese fleet is unable to take advantage of the player's knowledge.
>
> TRANSLATION: "The game can be fudged in some gamey way to *mimic* a
> real fog-of-war routine."
What the hell's a "real fog-of-war routine"? I've never read about
that in all my years of poring through military history. Sounds like
some "gamey" term to me.
All you're saying (repeatedly) is that you prefer your kind of wargame
to my kind of wargame--so much that you're not even willing to dignify
some of my wargames with that name.
> > I'll say again: there is no compelling reason why the player of a
> > wargame must "be" the battlefield commander.
>
> Who do you want him to be? Tom Swift, eying the battle through his
> MegaScope Space Prober?
Himself. I just want him to be himself--the game player. Nothing
more, nothing less.
> Unfortunately - and this trend is crystal clear - those soothing
> abstractions you're so desperately clinging to (that is what your
> argument amounts to...) are all going to go away as wargame designers
> improve their code and techniques.
>
> The first PC wargames were little more than boardgames where you could
> play the computer. But as systems improved, better designers started
> chucking out all those lame board and miniature gaming conventions that
> were necessary to keep a paper system manageable, but which a PC can
> handle in a much more complex and realistic fashion.
>
> Even PC games with retain the form of a boardgame (SSG's latest efforts)
> feature stunningly complex calculations and comprehensive fog-of-war
> routines. More and more, designers are going to question the need for
> these conventional abstractions when they find that they can do things
> realistically.
Yeah, I guess all that's happening. Too bad. Reminds me of something
Patton (George C. Scott) said near the end of the movie, when news
reporters asked him about the future of warfare--ICBMs and all that.
He said, "I'm sure glad I won't be around to see it."
I may be around awhile, but this new generation of wargames is likely
to appeal to me less and less.
> > >> . . . Or I can role-play a military commander
> > > > and get a vague taste of what it might be like to stand in the shoes of
> > > > Wellington or Hannibal or Patton. But I can't clearly establish in my
> > > > mind an abstract model of how war works.
> > >
> > > Good! Wellington, Hannibal, and Patton didn't have a Magic Slide-Rule
> > > Of Winning Warfare, either.
> >
> > See--you're still hell-bent on "being" a battlefield commander. I'm
> > not.
>
> I'm not "hell-bent" on anything. I'm simply looking at the state of the
> industry and pointing out that this is where things are heading. I
> think it's an excellent development.
It is, from your point of view. I can see that. It's a bright picture
of the future. (I'm just glad I won't be around to see it, so to
speak.)
> > > > Take the last edition of AH's Chancellorsville game, for instance.
> > > > IIRC, the Confederate side was frozen for the first few turns, to give
> > > > the Union player time to complete the flank march.
> > >
> > > Gamey, gamey, gamey, gamey. Bad designer. Go to your room and think
> > > about your felony crimes against reality.
> >
> > Against reality? Come on, now. My rule faithfully re-creates the
> > historical facts of May 5, 1863, where the Confederate force was indeed
> > taken by surprise by Hooker's flank march.
>
> So would a carving on a wax-tablet with a spoon. That wouldn't be a
> wargame, either.
You're clever with that "either" usage. Doesn't change the fact that a
game about war is a wargame by any reasonable definition.
> > Why are you so loath to admit to playing a game?
>
> What's to "admit?" That's clear. But I'm looking for a game that best
> approximates a machine that would let me go back in time, take the place
> of Fighting Joe Hooker, and see how well I could have done given the
> realities of the battle situation he was facing.
>
> That's the only reason I took up wargaming.
Not me. I always took that sort of thing as just advertising hype.
One of my first wargames was AH's Waterloo--and I never really imagined
myself "being" Napoleon or Wellington. I just hoped the game was an
accurate model of the battle so that the moves we were making amounted
to valid amateur military studies. It was interesting to see how far
Mont St-Jean was from Quatre Bras and how long it took (relatively
speaking) for an infantry unit to get from one place to the other. And
how effective cavalry was against infantry--that sort of thing.
Never bothered me a bit when I stopped and realized that Nappy &
Wellington never had the kind of overview I was enjoying. For me it
was a welcome luxury. I figured they might envy me--but it never
occurred to me to envy them.
I was playing a game and learning stuff about the Battle of
Waterloo--and that's all I cared about. It was fun and somewhat
educational too.
Today's computer wargame on Waterloo would blind me to most of what's
happening on the battlefield and maybe rush my decision making to boot.
You might call that more realistic, and in some sense I'm sure it is.
But to me it's more annoying and less enjoyable. Less educational too,
since I can't learn about what I can't see.
> You can do that with MUPPET TREASURE ISLAND. But you're not playing a
> wargame there, either.
Yeah, you're clever with that "either" trick (though it's getting a bit
monotonous). But behind all the verbiage, all you're saying is, "My
kind of wargame is a real wargame; your kind isn't."
Interesting that "my" kind of wargame used to be your kind too. How
much has your definition of "wargame" changed over the years?
Mine's still the same as it has always been: a wargame is a game about
war.
--Patrick
John Secker
Giftzwerg <giftzw...@NOSPAMZ.hotmail.com> writes
>In article <aaiAJ2FI...@secker.demon.co.uk>,
>jo...@secker.demon.co.uk says...
>
>> Well this is exactly my point. With a computer game, it is entirely
>> possible to throw a stack at the ridge, and have no idea why they
>> failed.
>
>Exactly! This is precisely what's wanted!
>
pointed out, you are assuming that the only purpose of the wargame is to
allow you to take on the role of the commander. The commander can throw
his troops at the ridge and not know why they failed, so the game
"should" allow you to do so as well.
Two points to make about this. First, in real life the commander would
very probably get some idea why the attack failed, from watching it, or
from the reports coming back. Few games that I know of will give you
feedback at a level which is realistic in this sense.
But the second point is that there are other motivations for playing a
wargame, beyond trying to recreate the experience of command. Patrick
has described his. Another one I have suggested is learning - it may not
be "realistic" for me as a commander to know why the attack failed, but
it may well educate me better in the realities of that particular war.
Personally, I have a different motivation for many of the wargames I
play, and that is the creation of a story, or more accurately perhaps a
history. I don't think that this is unique - the old Hyborea campaign
seems to me to be as much about creating a history as it is about
generating battles. In any case, this is a strong motivation for me, and
it is a reason I prefer campaign games to single battles - because at
the end you can look back on the progress of the whole thing. I love
those speeded up reviews of the game you get at the end of Civ, or
Railroad Tycoon.
Now you may have your views about this motivation - it clearly is
different from yours - but it is a powerful element in my enjoyment of a
game. And like an author, or a historian, I like to know what is going
on. The general may be surprised by the enemy attack from the side
valley and never know how it got there - but if I am playing in
"history" mode I want to know that the force found its way over a small
pass and around the flank guard in a forest by marching at night.
Of course there are ways to combine the two - play in "commander" mode
to get a feel for his problems, then review the course of the battle in
God mode. But the point is that there are more than one way to enjoy a
wargame, and different features will suit different people.
>> But with a board game you know exactly
>> what is going on, and why, at least in game mechanic terms.
>
>Ugh. Wretchedly gamey, this.
>
--
John Secker
Giftzwerg
patrick5...@yahoo.com says...
> > But a good wargame, these days, is more and more going to be designed
> > around an accurate representation of the place in the chain of command
> > occupied by the human player(s). Older, less capable wargames will
> > probably continue to abstract this by letting players micromanage all
> > their counters.
>
> That's probably true. Which means that in my estimation, what others
> see as "a good wargame" will more and more look like a *bad* wargame to
> me.
But that also means that from their perspective, the kind of game you
want to play doesn't look like a wargame at all.
> But if the premise of DOOM is that there's a human-vs-monster war going
> on and the player is participating in that, then yeah--it's a wargame
> of sorts.
Hehe. Love that "of sorts." A Yugo is a dump truck "of sorts."
> > > How is "fog of war" handled? Abstractly.
> >
> > Not for long. As I mentioned earlier, such abstractions are nothing
> > more than undesirable workarounds which address the need for fog-of-war
> > without the ability for the system to manage the complexity of it.
>
> The abstractions are not just "workarounds" to me, nor are they
> undesirable. They're game features which provide me, the game player,
> with the luxury of being free from the restraints of a commander's
> limited POV.
>
>
> > > And even if they do, the game can be designed in such a way that the
> > > Japanese fleet is unable to take advantage of the player's knowledge.
> >
> > TRANSLATION: "The game can be fudged in some gamey way to *mimic* a
> > real fog-of-war routine."
>
> What the hell's a "real fog-of-war routine"? I've never read about
> that in all my years of poring through military history. Sounds like
> some "gamey" term to me.
A real fog-of-war routine is one which only presents a wargamer with the
data that was or might have been realistically available to his
historical counterpart.
An example would be a subroutine that only draws an enemy unit on the
game map if its existence and location has been observed and reported by
one of the player's own units. Another example would be requiring a
delay in orders transmission circa 1815 simulating the need to dispatch
a messenger (rather than ring someone up on the Magic Telephone).
[And I'm pretty sure you're misusing "gamey" in this context. A
"gamey" tactic is one which allows a player to gain unfair advantage by
exploiting some layer of fudge in the rules. Like the PANZERBLITZ
player who blocks a crucial but narrow avenue of approach with a pile of
empty trucks.]
> > Unfortunately - and this trend is crystal clear - those soothing
> > abstractions you're so desperately clinging to (that is what your
> > argument amounts to...) are all going to go away as wargame designers
> > improve their code and techniques.
> >
> > The first PC wargames were little more than boardgames where you could
> > play the computer. But as systems improved, better designers started
> > chucking out all those lame board and miniature gaming conventions that
> > were necessary to keep a paper system manageable, but which a PC can
> > handle in a much more complex and realistic fashion.
> >
> > Even PC games with retain the form of a boardgame (SSG's latest efforts)
> > feature stunningly complex calculations and comprehensive fog-of-war
> > routines. More and more, designers are going to question the need for
> > these conventional abstractions when they find that they can do things
> > realistically.
>
> Yeah, I guess all that's happening. Too bad. Reminds me of something
> Patton (George C. Scott) said near the end of the movie, when news
> reporters asked him about the future of warfare--ICBMs and all that.
> He said, "I'm sure glad I won't be around to see it."
If you're planning to live into the first Hillary Clinton
administration, then you'll be around to see it.
> > So would a carving on a wax-tablet with a spoon. That wouldn't be a
> > wargame, either.
>
> You're clever with that "either" usage. Doesn't change the fact that a
> game about war is a wargame by any reasonable definition.
The point is that a static experience (like reading a book) isn't a
wargame. Wargames must be interactive. Even all the ones you like are
interactive, aren't they? Here I'm simply saying that the more you
channel a player rigorously into the "historical" development of the
battle, the more you remove the only possible reason for playing a
wargame in the first place.
> One of my first wargames was AH's Waterloo--and I never really imagined
> myself "being" Napoleon or Wellington. I just hoped the game was an
> accurate model of the battle so that the moves we were making amounted
> to valid amateur military studies. It was interesting to see how far
> Mont St-Jean was from Quatre Bras and how long it took (relatively
> speaking) for an infantry unit to get from one place to the other. And
> how effective cavalry was against infantry--that sort of thing.
>
> Never bothered me a bit when I stopped and realized that Nappy &
> Wellington never had the kind of overview I was enjoying. For me it
> was a welcome luxury. I figured they might envy me--but it never
> occurred to me to envy them.
>
> I was playing a game and learning stuff about the Battle of
> Waterloo--and that's all I cared about. It was fun and somewhat
> educational too.
>
> Today's computer wargame on Waterloo would blind me to most of what's
> happening on the battlefield and maybe rush my decision making to boot.
> You might call that more realistic, and in some sense I'm sure it is.
> But to me it's more annoying and less enjoyable. Less educational too,
> since I can't learn about what I can't see.
Come now. I've never seen a wargame that won't let you *turn off* the
limited intelligence subsystems. In fact, just about all wargames will
let you play both sides.
So if you just want to approach a battle as a sort of train set where
you can watch the various equipment do its thing, then even a fancy,
modern game like HTTR is entirely suitable; just set it running on a
two-system LAN and watch both monitors, pausing and giving orders and
measuring things as you like.
> > You can do that with MUPPET TREASURE ISLAND. But you're not playing a
> > wargame there, either.
>
> Yeah, you're clever with that "either" trick (though it's getting a bit
> monotonous). But behind all the verbiage, all you're saying is, "My
> kind of wargame is a real wargame; your kind isn't."
Nope. You said:
"Actually, at times I've despaired of ever being able to enjoy
historical wargames and have turned to sci-fi/fantasy games instead.
That way I didn't have to worry about the details being realistic (at
least in the sense of 'historically accurate'); I could just play the
game and have fun with it."
And I - quite accurately, I think - pointed out that you can have the
same sort of "fun" with MUPPET TREASURE ISLAND. In fact, I play all
sorts of games that aren't wargames, and they're great fun.
They might be wargames, but a war-historical newsgroup might be rightly
skeptical about the pedigree, say, of a game depicting a war between
goblins and flowers.
> Interesting that "my" kind of wargame used to be your kind too. How
> much has your definition of "wargame" changed over the years?
>
> Mine's still the same as it has always been: a wargame is a game about
> war.
MICROSOFT COMBAT FLIGHT SIMULATOR is about war. But it's only a
"wargame" if we use an overly-broad, near-worthless definition. So for
purposes of discussion, I'd call it an "air combat sim."
Patrick
> The situation's happened often enough that I KNOW that I *should* need
> at least 3:1 (if I were careless or callous enough to try any sort of
> uphill frontal assault) but "perhaps, this time, with the weather
> fine, 2.75:1 with high morale AND that unit of {PzKwIIIs|pavise
> crossbows|heavy cuirassiers} thrown in, we might manage it today and
> if I can do it with fewer resources this time, then those withheld
> resources will come in handy over there". That's the level of
> nailbiting decision-making that I want to be faced with despite the
> lack of precise factors on a CRT. That and the problems of marshalling
> the resources in the right place in a timely fashion to be able to
> attack|defend in the first place.
>
> Not, "if I throw in this stack of 35 attack factors I'm just short
> enough that I can add the 256th Armoured Field Brothel from this hex,
> get a "surrounded" multiplier and the two attack factors make 4:1.
> Let's Do It! "
That I agree with. I always found the latter method of "combat
calculation" ludicrous too.
But to me, the problem is that some wargames are too detailed or
specific for their own good in certain respects. When the game allows
you to micromanage a couple hundred unit-counters, it enables you to
shuffle those units around unrealistically to fit the right odds column
on the CRT. (I always hated it in ASL, when I had a 12-point stack of
infantry with a light machine-gun. Usually it was bad to actually use
the LMG because it wouldn't get you out of the 12-point column on the
Infantry Fire Table--and if you fire it, the LMG might break down.)
One way to correct the problem is just to *not* allow players to
micromanage their units to that degree. Or, maybe better yet, combine
those units into a handful of larger units so there's no spare "256th
Armoured Field Brothel" sitting around in the first place.
In DBA, there are exactly twelve elements (units) per side. That means
you have to pretty much treat each one very thoughtfully. If you lose
four of 'em, you lose the game. So, there's no shuffling little pieces
around to get the odds just right.
In computer wargames, the same ridiculous kind of "combat calculation"
often takes place; it just happens behind the interface where the
player can't see it. Are you really a whole lot happier if you're able
to leave the "256th Armoured Field Brothel" where it is and the
computer's AI penalizes you for not moving it up into position? Sounds
like you're saying ignorance is bliss. I don't buy that.
--Patrick
Giftzwerg
\
> >> Well this is exactly my point. With a computer game, it is entirely
> >> possible to throw a stack at the ridge, and have no idea why they
> >> failed.
> >
> >Exactly! This is precisely what's wanted!
> >
> Wanted by whom? You mean, that's what you want. Because, as Patrick
> pointed out, you are assuming that the only purpose of the wargame is to
> allow you to take on the role of the commander. The commander can throw
> his troops at the ridge and not know why they failed, so the game
> "should" allow you to do so as well.
Yes. A real commander might order an attack and see it fail without
knowing why it had failed. [This is a useful description of four solid
years of World War 1 combat...]
But this is much more than "allowing you to take on the role of the
commander." It's "affording you an accurate depiction of military
reality."
*Fantasy* is always knowing, in neat little rows of numbers, why
something succeeded or failed.
> Two points to make about this. First, in real life the commander would
> very probably get some idea why the attack failed, from watching it, or
> from the reports coming back. Few games that I know of will give you
> feedback at a level which is realistic in this sense.
Can you give me an example of a game which gives *none* of this
feedback? Even games with highly-turned FOW routines are chock-a-block
with reasons why an action fails.
[My first clue that an HTTR attack is failing is when a hard row of
black squares appears to my front, and my parachute units start to
positively boil with mortar blasts. At this point, I conclude - without
actually seeing the neat rows of numbers - that I ran into heavy
opposition in prepared positions and got clobbered. Ooooops.]
> But the second point is that there are other motivations for playing a
> wargame, beyond trying to recreate the experience of command. Patrick
> has described his. Another one I have suggested is learning - it may not
> be "realistic" for me as a commander to know why the attack failed, but
> it may well educate me better in the realities of that particular war.
Well, it might educate you as to how the bloke who designed the wargame
perceives that particular war; you'll certainly get a big dose of that
just in the abstractions and fudge factors he builds into the design.
But "reality?" I'd say you can only get that if the designer builds you
a *really accurate* wargame - and that's going to necessarily include
all the noise, blindness, and friction of war, particularly given the
number of times big historical events have turned on military ignorance
and total surprise.
> Now you may have your views about this motivation - it clearly is
> different from yours - but it is a powerful element in my enjoyment of a
> game. And like an author, or a historian, I like to know what is going
> on. The general may be surprised by the enemy attack from the side
> valley and never know how it got there - but if I am playing in
> "history" mode I want to know that the force found its way over a small
> pass and around the flank guard in a forest by marching at night.
Sure, but if you're like Patrick, you only "learn" that Stonewall
Jackson was able to outflank Hooker at Chancellorsville because *the
rules of the game froze the Union Army in place for three turns*!!!
Useless.
> Of course there are ways to combine the two - play in "commander" mode
> to get a feel for his problems, then review the course of the battle in
> God mode. But the point is that there are more than one way to enjoy a
> wargame, and different features will suit different people.
Don't most games *already* let you turn off any or all FOW routines?
Paul Synnott
> Paul Synnott wrote:
>
> The thing is, few (if any) of us are in the Kriegsakademie, or anything
> like it. We don't need to learn how to be military commanders, and we
> probably never will be. We're just guys with an abiding interest in
> things military--especially in learning about the battles and campaigns
> of history.
>
communications and intelligence restrictions in an environment that
yields realistic results, we are nevertheless following in the tradition
of those early kriegspeilers in the Kriegsakademie. That many of us will
live out our lives without ever having been in uniform is neither here
nor there.
> When you start talking about "historical possibilities," you're on
> shaky ground. History, strictly speaking, is the study of what
> actually did happen.
> The moment we get into what-ifs (which is the
> *only* thing wargames are about), we're exploring historical *fiction.*
That's an oversimplification. Refighting Waterloo and allowing for a
different outcome is still closer to history than it is to fiction. A
Napoleon-player, for example, may wish to test the claims of critics of
Napoleon's plan that he should have tried to turn one of Wellington's
flanks instead. In the wargaming environment (both your ideal model and
mine) this can be tried. The player might find that turning one flank
pushes Wellington closer to the Prussians and that turning the other
leaves Napoleon with the Prussians at his back. He may thus deduce that
a frontal attack, although unpleasant, may actually have been the most
viable plan after all. If he did so, he would in fact be echoing the
arguments of other historians. In both cases, a historical possibility
has been explored within the limits of historical parameters. It may not
be history in terms of what actually happened, but neither can it be
dismissed flippantly as mere "fiction".
> We have no way of knowing whether anything that happens in a wargame
> could truly have happened historically.
>
Of course we know what could have happened. What we can't claim to know
is what *would* have happened. This is not, however, an argument against
exploring possibilities. Various historians have suggested what else
Napoleon might have done at Waterloo, or have speculated how Wellington
might have given himself an easier time of it if he hadn't stationed
17,000 troops several miles away at Hal to counter an imaginary French
flanking move. Do you dismiss such hypothesising as "fiction" too? Yet
when the historian postulates in this maner, he is using educated
guesswork; the wargamer, on the other hand, may have actually tried it
out for himself.
> Alternate history is basically just a form of fantasy.
Rubbish. It's hardly fantasy to claim that the 1st British Airborne
division would have been in better shape if it hadn't dropped on top of
two panzer divisions. Neither is it fantasy to claim that Napoleon would
have been up shit creek if it wasn't for Desaix's timely arrival at Marengo.
>
> But the Kriegsakademie didn't deal with history; it dealt with the
> present and future.
Irrelevant. So do some wargames. That doesn't alter what they aim to
achieve.
> And so do modern military simulations. Today's
> armed forces rely on simulations to train leaders, just as the
> Kriegsakademie once did. That's all well and good--but is it what we
> civilian wargamers are involved in? I don't think so. We're just
> having fun, aren't we? Who here expects to be commanding a brigade in
> the next war?
That too is irrelevant. If we're pursuing a similar activity then it's a
similar activity. The purpose makes no difference if the experience
you desire is the same.
>
> Thank you! I appreciate your open-mindedness. To me, broadly
> speaking, any game about war is a wargame.
Well, I'm not *that* open minded. Commandos had no business being called
a wargame, and I don't believe it was marketed as such. Neither does
Medal of Honour.
>
> However, the realism-vs-playability debate has been raging forever and
> has taken various forms over the years. IMO, "playability" has too
> often been limited to meaning manageability. I think it ought to mean
> enjoyability. Because that's one of the main things we all want from
> games, isn't it--to enjoy them? And on the other end of the scale, we
> also want our wargames to be realistic--i.e., credible representations
> of military engagements.
But to many wargamers, the realism is also part of the enjoyment. Take
that away and you might have a fun playable game, but you won't have a
game that is a plausible representation of the period in question.
>
> Who outside the armed forces would really give a damn about a wargame
> that's ultra-realistic but *not* enjoyable? Would you grit your teeth
> and force yourself to play such a game just because you decide it's
> somehow good for you? Or because you think you might be leading a
> brigade in the next war, so you'd better practice?
Of course not, but this is still beside the point because you're
presenting a false dichotomy that it's either realistic or enjoyable but
it can't be both. Such a view is, quite frankly, bollocks, because as I
and others have testified, there are games that are both realistic *and*
enjoyable.
>
> In my experience, it's important to strike a good balance between
> realism and enjoyability. But if the game designer or developer must
> err, he'd better err on the side of enjoyability--or the game won't
> sell or be played.
That's probably true. But it doesn't invalidate anything I've said.
>
>>>Squad Leader/ASL got too complex for many players to handle. Then
>>>the PC came along and gave us a tool that can handle all that
>>>complexity and much more besides. But what I'm saying is that I
>>>prefer not to have that kind of complexity even if I do have a tool
>>>that makes it manageable.
And what I'm saying is that kind of view makes no sense to me
whatsoever, because it just comes across as being anti-realism. I've
heard people argue (convincingly) against excess realism that bogs down
gameplay. What I've never heard before is someone argue that they don't
want realism even when its out of sight and easily manageable. Hell, why
not just line up toy soldiers and flick marbles at them?
> One thing I like about simple models of warfare is that I can wrap my
> mind around them more easily.
If you've read up on the period you're gaming, which it sounds like you
do, and if the wargame is well designed and realistic but manageable,
then all you need to wrap your mind around is the history you're
studying anyway. Surely that's not too onerous a requirement?
>
> Realism is important; I won't argue with that. If realism weren't
> important to me, I'd go play backgammon and forget about wargames
> altogether.
Well that's the very impression you're putting across.
>
> I do have a taste for realistic games--games which model, or represent,
> or even simulate warfare. In fact, the more realism the better--as
> long as the model doesn't get too big for the unaided human mind to
> grasp, and as long as the game is still enjoyable.
>
The human mind doesn't have to grasp the model, though, it just has to
deal with it. This is the essential point you're missing. You don't need
to understand the workings of the internal combustion engine in order to
enjoy driving the car.
>
> A designer should, and must, do his best to make a game realistic. But
> at the same time, it's still a game--and people only play games because
> they're enjoyable.
>
> So, anytime a designer allows realism to spoil enjoyability, he has
> failed, IMO (unless he's designing a simulation for actual training
> purposes).
None of this is in disagreement with anything I've said. Unless you're
claiming that providing anything less than a God's-eye-view is an
example of "realism spoiling enjoyability". In which case I'd say (a)
nonsense and (b) as has been pointed out, in most games the
God's-eye-view is available as an option.
>
> And for us civilians, it's a game more than a serious simulation.
> Enjoyability is the key factor, because without that it doesn't matter
> what we call the thing--nobody's going to be playing it anyway.
Again, none of this is in disagreement with anything I've said.
>
> In my case, a wargame loses a lot of enjoyability when the model gets
> so complex that I can't wrap my mind around it anymore. It loses more
> enjoyability when the design blinds me to much of the information and
> forces me to guess or make deductions. And it loses a *lot* of
> enjoyability when the game is so big or complicated or time-consuming
> that it becomes more work than play.
>
> Yes, those are aspects of war that *can* be simulated by a given model
> (wargame). But do they *have* to be? Obviously not, considering that
> hundreds, if not thousands, of wargames have been produced which do not
> model those aspects of war.
>
> No model is ever comprehensive. A model only simulates *some* aspects
> of its subject. The designer has to be selective. A designer who sets
> out to model *everything* about war is probably doomed from the
> beginning. First off, nobody even knows *everything* about war--so how
> can it possibly be completely modeled?
It can't. But designers try to get as near as they can without spoiling
the experience, which I would much prefer to your approach which seems
to be "model bugger-all so I can keep the games rules straight in my head".
>
> The reason I brought up games like chess, backgammon, poker, and
> Stratego is that I think they're all abstract models that wargames
> *could* be built upon. Most traditional wargames have, in fact, been
> built on the bare bones of chess: perfect information, deterministic.
> Then, for the sake of "realism," dice began to be incorporated,
> blurring the deterministic feature.
Yes, because war involves neither perfect information nor necessarily
deterministic outcomes, it's quite right that such elements should be
blurred.
And in the case of games like
> Kriegspiel (blind chess), limited information was also factored in,
> altering the chess model somewhat.
Yes. But most chess players, not being wargamers, play a hell of a lot
more chess than kriegspiel - even blind players.
>
> The only wargame designer I know of who's *consciously* trying to make
> a shift from the chess model to the poker (limited information with
> extensive randomizer) model is Bob Jones, author of the Piquet
> miniatures rules. Most other designers seem to be unaware of any
> underlying game models; they're just imitating and improving upon the
> wargames they've seen.
>
And both are perfectly valid models of development.
> But at the root of every wargame is a *game.* IMO it's a gross error
> to assume that military science is at the root of wargames.
Is it, why? If you're referring to military science in terms of the "art
of war" then I would say that it's actually at the heart of wargames. As
it should be.
> Military
> science is only the "chrome" that's layered onto the basic "game
> chassis" to flesh out something realistic-looking.
Codswallop. The kind of "game chassis" I've seen in my years of
wargaming are utterly unlike any other kind of game model I've
experienced. You're effectively saying that all you need to make Barbie
a wargame is dress her in combats and give her a gun and that anything
else is just window dressing. That proposition is so unbelievably stupid
that I won't waste any more time on it.
>
> I'm not saying that shouldn't be done. It *has* to be done, if we're
> to have wargames, because wargames have to be credibly realistic.
You're disagreeing with youyrself here (see above).
>
> I'm just saying that when all is said and done, we're basically talking
> about *games* here.
Sure. But some games are more historical than others. What you're saying
is that being more historical doesn't mean they're not games. I'm
agreeing, and saying that just because they're games doesn't mean they
can't be historical or realistic.
>
> Yes, I'm sure it does. But I still say that the reason I play wargames
> today has little or nothing to do with what the officers at the
> Kriegsakademie did. They were trying to learn their trade, and the
> wargame was a tool to help with that--just as modern simulations are
> used by today's armed forces.
>
> Thirty years ago, I was in training to be a military commander. Today
> I'm not. When I sit down to play a wargame today, I'm doing it for
> exactly the same reason I might sit down to read Military History
> Quarterly or watch a TV documentary or play backgammon: i.e., for
> *enjoyment.* Yes, there's an educational aspect to the enjoyment, and
> I do like learning things. But the bottom line is still enjoyment.
>
That goes for us all. But a good many of us, if not most of us, do play
wargames for reasons that trace a direct line back to motivations of the
Kriegsakademie and also satisfy our requirements for enjoyment. I'm not
indulging in argumentum ad populum here, just expanding on my previous
point that if your model of wargaming works for you, go for it and have
fun, but don't kid yourself that everyone else is somehow missing the
point just because they don't see things the same way.
Paul
John Secker
Giftzwerg <giftzw...@NOSPAMZ.hotmail.com> writes
>Sure, but if you're like Patrick, you only "learn" that Stonewall
>Jackson was able to outflank Hooker at Chancellorsville because *the
>rules of the game froze the Union Army in place for three turns*!!!
>
>Useless.
>
life, but you don't want a Union right wing which does exactly what the
Union right wing did in real life? Discuss.
Presumably at some point along the continuum between a single tank and
an army, you wish to be able to "take control". Can you identify what
that point is, and does it make a difference to your view of a game? If
a Panther could move faster than a Spitfire, that would be fantasy. If
the Union flank could react to Stonewall's move, that would be "military
possibility". Where in between these two does it flip over?
--
John Secker
Patrick
> Patrick wrote:
> > The thing is, few (if any) of us are in the Kriegsakademie, or anything
> > like it. We don't need to learn how to be military commanders, and we
> > probably never will be. We're just guys with an abiding interest in
> > things military--especially in learning about the battles and campaigns
> > of history.
> >
> That's right, but its also irrelevant. Because most of us seek realistic
> communications and intelligence restrictions in an environment that
> yields realistic results, we are nevertheless following in the tradition
> of those early kriegspeilers in the Kriegsakademie. That many of us will
> live out our lives without ever having been in uniform is neither here
> nor there.
Why should I give a hoot what "many of us" do? If you think I'm
telling you or anyone else what to like, you're sadly mistaken. As I
made perfectly clear at the outset, I'm just saying how my preferences
in wargaming differ from "many of us."
The subject line of this thread is most certainly *not* meant to imply
that what I've been describing are *absolute* downsides to computer
games. They're just my own subjectively perceived downsides. What
else could I be talking about? I'm no expert on wargames or computer
games. I'm just me.
> > When you start talking about "historical possibilities," you're on
> > shaky ground. History, strictly speaking, is the study of what
> > actually did happen.
> > The moment we get into what-ifs (which is the
> > *only* thing wargames are about), we're exploring historical *fiction.*
>
> That's an oversimplification. Refighting Waterloo and allowing for a
> different outcome is still closer to history than it is to fiction. A
> Napoleon-player, for example, may wish to test the claims of critics of
> Napoleon's plan that he should have tried to turn one of Wellington's
> flanks instead. In the wargaming environment (both your ideal model and
> mine) this can be tried. The player might find that turning one flank
> pushes Wellington closer to the Prussians and that turning the other
> leaves Napoleon with the Prussians at his back. He may thus deduce that
> a frontal attack, although unpleasant, may actually have been the most
> viable plan after all. If he did so, he would in fact be echoing the
> arguments of other historians. In both cases, a historical possibility
> has been explored within the limits of historical parameters. It may not
> be history in terms of what actually happened, but neither can it be
> dismissed flippantly as mere "fiction".
I know a few very good historians who would strongly disagree with you
and state in no uncertain terms that those things *are* fiction. They
may be thoughts that everybody (including historians) entertains at
times, but they're still fiction when you get right down to it.
Not that there's anything wrong with fiction. I enjoy good historical
fiction as well as the next guy. I only object when people start
mistaking historical fiction for history--which you're on the verge of
doing above.
> > We have no way of knowing whether anything that happens in a wargame
> > could truly have happened historically.
> >
> Of course we know what could have happened. What we can't claim to know
> is what *would* have happened. This is not, however, an argument against
> exploring possibilities. Various historians have suggested what else
> Napoleon might have done at Waterloo, or have speculated how Wellington
> might have given himself an easier time of it if he hadn't stationed
> 17,000 troops several miles away at Hal to counter an imaginary French
> flanking move. Do you dismiss such hypothesising as "fiction" too? Yet
> when the historian postulates in this maner, he is using educated
> guesswork; the wargamer, on the other hand, may have actually tried it
> out for himself.
Strictly speaking, it's fiction. It may be a useful and interesting
exercise, and it may be the stuff wargaming is made of. But it's still
not history per se.
> > Alternate history is basically just a form of fantasy.
>
> Rubbish. It's hardly fantasy to claim that the 1st British Airborne
> division would have been in better shape if it hadn't dropped on top of
> two panzer divisions. Neither is it fantasy to claim that Napoleon would
> have been up shit creek if it wasn't for Desaix's timely arrival at Marengo.
Well, it's fantasy to claim that when you play the French side in *any*
wargame on Marengo, what you accomplish definitely could have happened
historically. That's rubbish.
Nobody, including you, knows whether what you accomplished in the game
could have happened historically. And I don't care how well designed
the game is. Models are all faulty, and there are countless factors
that can't even be known, much less simulated.
Whenever anybody thinks the wargame in front of him is a faithful,
comprehensive simulation of a historical military engagement, he's
dreaming. Period. At best it's a vague, distorted approximation of
the historical engagement.
And again, there's nothing wrong with that. But I think it's important
to be aware of.
> > But the Kriegsakademie didn't deal with history; it dealt with the
> > present and future.
>
> Irrelevant. So do some wargames. That doesn't alter what they aim to
> achieve.
What they *aim* to achieve and what they actually achieve are two
different things. Often two impossibly distant things.
> > And so do modern military simulations. Today's
> > armed forces rely on simulations to train leaders, just as the
> > Kriegsakademie once did. That's all well and good--but is it what we
> > civilian wargamers are involved in? I don't think so. We're just
> > having fun, aren't we? Who here expects to be commanding a brigade in
> > the next war?
>
> That too is irrelevant. If we're pursuing a similar activity then it's a
> similar activity. The purpose makes no difference if the experience
> you desire is the same.
The activity is similar only up to a point. The officers at the
Kriegsakademie were studying, not playing games. Training, not just
having fun.
If you're playing and having fun, it's a different experience than
studying and training.
> > Thank you! I appreciate your open-mindedness. To me, broadly
> > speaking, any game about war is a wargame.
>
> Well, I'm not *that* open minded. Commandos had no business being called
> a wargame, and I don't believe it was marketed as such. Neither does
> Medal of Honour.
Then I'm sorry to see you're so closed-minded. A game about war is a
wargame, and anybody who thinks otherwise is, IMO, too much a
specialist and possibly an elitist.
> > However, the realism-vs-playability debate has been raging forever and
> > has taken various forms over the years. IMO, "playability" has too
> > often been limited to meaning manageability. I think it ought to mean
> > enjoyability. Because that's one of the main things we all want from
> > games, isn't it--to enjoy them? And on the other end of the scale, we
> > also want our wargames to be realistic--i.e., credible representations
> > of military engagements.
>
> But to many wargamers, the realism is also part of the enjoyment. Take
> that away and you might have a fun playable game, but you won't have a
> game that is a plausible representation of the period in question.
As I've said repeatedly, realism is important. Vital even. However,
excessive detail is not important or vital. A wargame can be pretty
abstract and still be a game that's clearly about war.
> > Who outside the armed forces would really give a damn about a wargame
> > that's ultra-realistic but *not* enjoyable? Would you grit your teeth
> > and force yourself to play such a game just because you decide it's
> > somehow good for you? Or because you think you might be leading a
> > brigade in the next war, so you'd better practice?
>
> Of course not, but this is still beside the point because you're
> presenting a false dichotomy that it's either realistic or enjoyable but
> it can't be both. Such a view is, quite frankly, bollocks, because as I
> and others have testified, there are games that are both realistic *and*
> enjoyable.
I don't mean to present such a dichotomy at all. I agree that a
wargame has to be both realistic and enjoyable--and that the realism
contributes to the enjoyment.
I'm just saying that the *ways* many wargames attempt to be realistic
ends up making them unnecessarily detailed--and that's often annoying
(i.e., anti-enjoyable) to me.
> > In my experience, it's important to strike a good balance between
> > realism and enjoyability. But if the game designer or developer must
> > err, he'd better err on the side of enjoyability--or the game won't
> > sell or be played.
>
> That's probably true. But it doesn't invalidate anything I've said.
Well, good. I wouldn't want to invalidate what you're saying. I think
your points are valid too.
> >>>Squad Leader/ASL got too complex for many players to handle. Then
> >>>the PC came along and gave us a tool that can handle all that
> >>>complexity and much more besides. But what I'm saying is that I
> >>>prefer not to have that kind of complexity even if I do have a tool
> >>>that makes it manageable.
>
> And what I'm saying is that kind of view makes no sense to me
> whatsoever, because it just comes across as being anti-realism. I've
> heard people argue (convincingly) against excess realism that bogs down
> gameplay. What I've never heard before is someone argue that they don't
> want realism even when its out of sight and easily manageable. Hell, why
> not just line up toy soldiers and flick marbles at them?
I do want realism. I *must* have realism. What I don't want is
complexity that I consider unnecessary. And I want to avoid that
unnecessary complexity even if I happen to have a computer that could
handle most of it for me, leaving me to just do the high-level stuff.
I don't think you need a lot of detail to get realism. You just need a
select set of well-presented details, layered onto a solid model of
warfare.
> > One thing I like about simple models of warfare is that I can wrap my
> > mind around them more easily.
>
> If you've read up on the period you're gaming, which it sounds like you
> do, and if the wargame is well designed and realistic but manageable,
> then all you need to wrap your mind around is the history you're
> studying anyway. Surely that's not too onerous a requirement?
I don't follow what you're saying here. I was talking about
comprehending a model; you seem to be talking about something else.
> > Realism is important; I won't argue with that. If realism weren't
> > important to me, I'd go play backgammon and forget about wargames
> > altogether.
>
> Well that's the very impression you're putting across.
Sorry then; I must not have expressed myself very well. I hope the
above helps clear up my point of view.
> > I do have a taste for realistic games--games which model, or represent,
> > or even simulate warfare. In fact, the more realism the better--as
> > long as the model doesn't get too big for the unaided human mind to
> > grasp, and as long as the game is still enjoyable.
> >
> The human mind doesn't have to grasp the model, though, it just has to
> deal with it. This is the essential point you're missing. You don't need
> to understand the workings of the internal combustion engine in order to
> enjoy driving the car.
I understand that's how *you* see it. What you're missing is that
that's not my way of looking at it.
For my taste, it *is* necessary to be able to grasp the model with my
unaided mind. That's essential to my enjoyment of wargames.
Another essential factor in my enjoyment is realism. I insist on that
too.
Therefore, to satisfy me, a wargame must be simple enough to completely
comprehend (the way a chess player comprehends chess as he plays it),
yet realistic enough to be a credible model of the military engagement
it represents.
If the model is incomprehensible to me, that spoils the game (even if
it's a computer model and the interface *is* comprehensible to me).
If the game is unrealistic (either too abstract or so distorted as to
be ludicrously inaccurate), that spoils the game for me too.
> > A designer should, and must, do his best to make a game realistic. But
> > at the same time, it's still a game--and people only play games because
> > they're enjoyable.
> >
> > So, anytime a designer allows realism to spoil enjoyability, he has
> > failed, IMO (unless he's designing a simulation for actual training
> > purposes).
>
> None of this is in disagreement with anything I've said. Unless you're
> claiming that providing anything less than a God's-eye-view is an
> example of "realism spoiling enjoyability". In which case I'd say (a)
> nonsense and (b) as has been pointed out, in most games the
> God's-eye-view is available as an option.
All I'm claiming is what I said just above: that certain wargame
designs spoil *my* enjoyment--usually because of a misguided (IMO)
attempt to make the game more realistic.
I don't believe the model has to become incomprehensible in order to
make the game realistic. I believe the model can be very simple, and
still the game can be very realistic.
I'm also well aware that many other wargamers love detail to the point
where they relish incomprehensible models--and are therefore thankful
that modern computer wargames make those incomprehensible models
manageable and user-friendly. But I'm not one of those wargamers.
> > And for us civilians, it's a game more than a serious simulation.
> > Enjoyability is the key factor, because without that it doesn't matter
> > what we call the thing--nobody's going to be playing it anyway.
>
> Again, none of this is in disagreement with anything I've said.
Well, hey--I'm not just arguing for the sake of being difficult. I
really am trying to get a point of view across. :)
> > In my case, a wargame loses a lot of enjoyability when the model gets
> > so complex that I can't wrap my mind around it anymore. It loses more
> > enjoyability when the design blinds me to much of the information and
> > forces me to guess or make deductions. And it loses a *lot* of
> > enjoyability when the game is so big or complicated or time-consuming
> > that it becomes more work than play.
>
> >
> > Yes, those are aspects of war that *can* be simulated by a given model
> > (wargame). But do they *have* to be? Obviously not, considering that
> > hundreds, if not thousands, of wargames have been produced which do not
> > model those aspects of war.
> >
> > No model is ever comprehensive. A model only simulates *some* aspects
> > of its subject. The designer has to be selective. A designer who sets
> > out to model *everything* about war is probably doomed from the
> > beginning. First off, nobody even knows *everything* about war--so how
> > can it possibly be completely modeled?
>
> It can't. But designers try to get as near as they can without spoiling
> the experience, which I would much prefer to your approach which seems
> to be "model bugger-all so I can keep the games rules straight in my head".
My approach, as I tried to clearly describe above, is: keep the model
simple enough that the player's mind can completely grasp it--and while
doing that, make the game as realistic as possible.
Once again, I am *not* saying realism can be thrown out the window. On
the contrary, I've repeated several times that realism is essential.
It's just not (IMO) worth excessive detail or an incomprehensible model
(or one that requires a computer to comprehend).
<snip>
> > But at the root of every wargame is a *game.* IMO it's a gross error
> > to assume that military science is at the root of wargames.
>
> Is it, why? If you're referring to military science in terms of the "art
> of war" then I would say that it's actually at the heart of wargames. As
> it should be.
That's the attitude that leads (IMO) to excessive detail and
incomprehensible models of warfare.
When the designer realizes that first of all he's designing a *game,*
he can make up his mind how simple or complex he wants the underlying
model (game engine) to be. Then he can build a realistic wargame
around that.
But when a designer loses track of what he's doing (i.e., designing a
*game*), or dismisses that as a secondary concern, then his focus is on
the actual battle or campaign he's aiming to "simulate." The more he
learns about that battle or campaign, the more complex and detailed it
will become--and the more complex and detailed his design is apt to
become.
If that designer would pause and reflect a moment, he'd see that he's
not compelled to simulate *all* the detail of the original battle or
campaign, or even most of it. He can identify the salient factors and
find ways to work those into his game. And if he's creative and
selective about which factors to highlight and which to leave in the
background (i.e., abstract out), he can create a very *realistic*
wargame based on an elegantly simple "game engine" (underlying model of
warfare).
War is just too big to model in exhaustive detail. And anytime a game
aims at doing that, IMO it ends up being spoiled--at least to my taste.
> > Military
> > science is only the "chrome" that's layered onto the basic "game
> > chassis" to flesh out something realistic-looking.
>
> Codswallop. The kind of "game chassis" I've seen in my years of
> wargaming are utterly unlike any other kind of game model I've
> experienced. You're effectively saying that all you need to make Barbie
> a wargame is dress her in combats and give her a gun and that anything
> else is just window dressing. That proposition is so unbelievably stupid
> that I won't waste any more time on it.
Hate to have to point it out, but you're the one who made it stupid,
but misunderstanding and making up a stupid example.
DBA is an example of an elegantly simple wargame. Take a look at it
sometime. It's not a Barbie doll or anything like that. It's a
wargame by any reasonable definition, and it's based on a perfectly
comprehensible model or "game chassis."
Hasbro's "Battle Cry" is another example (though a poorer one, IMO).
It's a wargame, but you *could* strip away all the military "chrome"
and make it into a non-wargame.
> > I'm not saying that shouldn't be done. It *has* to be done, if we're
> > to have wargames, because wargames have to be credibly realistic.
>
> You're disagreeing with youyrself here (see above).
No, I'm not. I've said many times that wargames have to be realistic.
I just don't believe they have to be complex or detailed in order to be
realistic.
> > I'm just saying that when all is said and done, we're basically talking
> > about *games* here.
>
> Sure. But some games are more historical than others. What you're saying
> is that being more historical doesn't mean they're not games. I'm
> agreeing, and saying that just because they're games doesn't mean they
> can't be historical or realistic.
Then we're talking past each other, because I have no problem with a
game being historical or realistic; in fact, I insist on that in a
wargame.
What I have a problem with is the "simulation" aspect of a wargame
overwhelming the "game" aspect, rendering the wargame so excessively
detailed or incomprehensible as to be unenjoyable to me.
> > Yes, I'm sure it does. But I still say that the reason I play wargames
> > today has little or nothing to do with what the officers at the
> > Kriegsakademie did. They were trying to learn their trade, and the
> > wargame was a tool to help with that--just as modern simulations are
> > used by today's armed forces.
> >
> > Thirty years ago, I was in training to be a military commander. Today
> > I'm not. When I sit down to play a wargame today, I'm doing it for
> > exactly the same reason I might sit down to read Military History
> > Quarterly or watch a TV documentary or play backgammon: i.e., for
> > *enjoyment.* Yes, there's an educational aspect to the enjoyment, and
> > I do like learning things. But the bottom line is still enjoyment.
> >
> That goes for us all. But a good many of us, if not most of us, do play
> wargames for reasons that trace a direct line back to motivations of the
> Kriegsakademie and also satisfy our requirements for enjoyment. I'm not
> indulging in argumentum ad populum here, just expanding on my previous
> point that if your model of wargaming works for you, go for it and have
> fun, but don't kid yourself that everyone else is somehow missing the
> point just because they don't see things the same way.
I'm not kidding myself at all about that. I'm perfectly aware that the
views I've been expressing here are outside the mainstream. I don't
expect to change your mind or anybody's, and I'm pretty sure that what
I'm saying is going to zero impact on the future of wargaming.
All I ask is that my view of what a good wargame is be acknowledged. I
know it's just my own taste and nothing more. But I like to be
understood when I can.
--Patrick
Johnny Bravo
wrote:
>> 4. Screen limitations. Thumbnail maps help, and we've all gotten used
>> to scrolling around maps. But zooming and scrolling are still a pain
>> in the neck compared to having everything laid out on a physical
>> mapboard or tabletop.
>
>...until you have to take out or put away the 200 fussy little counters
>it takes to play a middlin' game of ASL.
On a related note, I've never had a cat jump on my monitor and knock 200
counters over on a game we left overnight to play in the morning.
Johnny Bravo
>> One reason I like Hearts of Iron so much is that it feels so much like
>> I'm running a country during the war, instead of just playing a game.
>
>I still plan on giving HOI (1 or 2) some more time. But for some reason
>each time I've approached it, I end up feeling like I watch more that I
>decide. Perhaps I'll find the time in the second half of this year to
>finally get my head into the HOI mindset.
Check out Gary Grigsby's World at War; the mechanics aren't complicated but
the interactions between units and strategies are.
Johnny Bravo
wrote:
>Agreed. Exactly. TACOPS is another example.
A perfect representation of the military maxim that what can be seen, can be
destroyed. :)
Giftzwerg
jo...@secker.demon.co.uk says...
> >Sure, but if you're like Patrick, you only "learn" that Stonewall
> >Jackson was able to outflank Hooker at Chancellorsville because *the
> >rules of the game froze the Union Army in place for three turns*!!!
> >
> >Useless.
> >
> Hmm. You want a Panther which does exactly what the Panther did in real
> life, but you don't want a Union right wing which does exactly what the
> Union right wing did in real life? Discuss.
Apples and oranges. A Panther tank is an easily-quantifiable physical
object. It has properties which are almost trivially described. You
could look at a thousand iterations of the PzKwV, and they'd all pretty
much have identical characteristics, in wargame terms.
The behavior of the Union right at Chancellorsville was a fabulously
complicated human endeavor involving the movement of thousands of troops
in conditions of often complete uncertainty, informed by perception and
error, and stupidity, and <any of a thousand other factors here>. You
could run through a thousand iterations of how the Union right got where
it did at Chancellorsville, and it wouldn't be the same twice.
But forget all that. The "Chancellorsville" argument supports my side
of the discussion, not yours. The Union Army was outflanked and
defeated *because the Union leaders didn't realize Lee was attacking
along a three-mile front with only 15,000 men*. They thought they were
facing his whole army. If Hooker has *known* that Lee was fighting a
sham offensive, he could have fallen on him like a 16-ton weight.
Build a game with the God's-eye-view that you and Patrick prefer in this
context, and you haven't a snowball's chance in hell of getting your
Stonewall Jackson Corps on my flank, because I can see your counters.
There they are. "Hey, you're holding a three-mile line with only 15,000
men. And your flanking force ain't in position yet!!! It's clobberin'
tiiiiime!" You're defeated piecemeal.
So in comes the fudge. You let me see your counters, but you don't
allow me to move for three turns. Gamey horseshit, this. It's
ridiculous.
And it's not what I want as the *Union* player. Every game has two
sides, and one of the draws to playing out the Union side at
Chancellorsville is to avoid being outflanked.
Duuuuh.
The point is that I don't particularly care if a battle develops along
"historical" lines. It might be completely different as fought between
myself and The Klingon Attack-Wedge Guy than it was between Lee and
Hooker. So what?
I mean, I don't object to some sort of setting that allows a human
player to constrain the AI to "historical" positioning, if he's into
that. For example, a France '40 scenario might have a button that
forced the Allied player into the Dyle Plan line. OK. Fine.
Most games allow this. What's the problem?
> Presumably at some point along the continuum between a single tank and
> an army, you wish to be able to "take control". Can you identify what
> that point is, and does it make a difference to your view of a game?
There is no "continuum" between the two. There's no uncertainty about a
type of tank. There it is. It is what it is. But there's fantastic
uncertainty about how a large and insanely complex agglomeration of men
called an "army" finds itself in a particular position at a specific
juncture in time. That's simply influenced by too many dynamic and
interactive factors to be roughly channeled into a specific line by
"special rules."
> If
> a Panther could move faster than a Spitfire, that would be fantasy. If
> the Union flank could react to Stonewall's move, that would be "military
> possibility". Where in between these two does it flip over?
But this is what I've been saying all along; if you intend to build a
system where the two digital armies simply act out their historical
roles precisely as they did in history, you haven't built a "game,"
you've built an "animation."
What if the Confederate player in your hypothetical doesn't want to
attempt Jackson's outflanking move? What if he believes he can improve
on history by some other prestidigitation of good generalship? Does
your game allow him to do this? Or does some other fudgey "special
rule" crop up to stymie him?
eddys...@hotmail.com
John Secker wrote:
> In message <MPG.1e8ba30c4...@news-east.giganews.com>,
> Giftzwerg <giftzw...@NOSPAMZ.hotmail.com> writes
> >Sure, but if you're like Patrick, you only "learn" that Stonewall
> >Jackson was able to outflank Hooker at Chancellorsville because *the
> >rules of the game froze the Union Army in place for three turns*!!!
> >
> >Useless.
> >
> Hmm. You want a Panther which does exactly what the Panther did in real
> life, but you don't want a Union right wing which does exactly what the
> Union right wing did in real life?
Exactly.
> Discuss.
> Presumably at some point along the continuum between a single tank and
> an army, you wish to be able to "take control".
Yup
> Can you identify what
> that point is
Certainly : that point is the focal point of the game - i.e. that what
it's trying to simulate. If your game is about putting the gamer in the
shoes of Wittmann (sp), then the gamer should be able to direct the
actions of a single tank. If the game is about putting you in the shoes
of Eisenhower you shouldn't have direct control of the actions of
company B, 2nd battalion, 101st airborne.
>, and does it make a difference to your view of a game? If
> a Panther could move faster than a Spitfire, that would be fantasy. If
> the Union flank could react to Stonewall's move, that would be "military
> possibility". Where in between these two does it flip over?
The wargaming hobby is all about exploring the border region between
history and fantasy. This border region is called "alternate historical
possibilities" or "what-if country". The border between history and
this is pretty clear, the border between what-if country and fantasy
less so, but that's an individual call. cfr the endless debates on
whether or not a Sealion is possible.
Greetz,
Eddy Sterckx
Patrick
> The behavior of the Union right at Chancellorsville was a fabulously
> complicated human endeavor involving the movement of thousands of troops
> in conditions of often complete uncertainty, informed by perception and
> error, and stupidity, and <any of a thousand other factors here>. You
> could run through a thousand iterations of how the Union right got where
> it did at Chancellorsville, and it wouldn't be the same twice.
On the contrary, it would be exactly the same every time--unless you
got your facts wrong.
The Union right got to where it did in one way--and one way only.
You're supposing it *could* have gotten there (or not) in a thousand
other ways. Prove it.
Common sense, you say? OK, let's say there really are many possible
ways the situation *could* have developed. Who has sufficient
information to document all those possibilities and turn them into a
simulation? Nobody. We have historical records, and beyond that we
have educated guesses--and that's all.
So, some game designer pores over the historical records, then uses his
imagination to knock together some kind of simulation of the battle.
And right away you're eager to call that "realistic." Why? It's most
definitely not historically accurate, even though to some degree it's
*based* on history. So, beyond your wanting to believe it, what's
driving you to call it realistic?
> But forget all that. The "Chancellorsville" argument supports my side
> of the discussion, not yours. The Union Army was outflanked and
> defeated *because the Union leaders didn't realize Lee was attacking
> along a three-mile front with only 15,000 men*. They thought they were
> facing his whole army. If Hooker has *known* that Lee was fighting a
> sham offensive, he could have fallen on him like a 16-ton weight.
>
> Build a game with the God's-eye-view that you and Patrick prefer in this
> context, and you haven't a snowball's chance in hell of getting your
> Stonewall Jackson Corps on my flank, because I can see your counters.
> There they are. "Hey, you're holding a three-mile line with only 15,000
> men. And your flanking force ain't in position yet!!! It's clobberin'
> tiiiiime!" You're defeated piecemeal.
>
> So in comes the fudge. You let me see your counters, but you don't
> allow me to move for three turns. Gamey horseshit, this. It's
> ridiculous.
Ridiculous, is it? And why is that? Several times now you've
complained about something being "gamey." And yet, when I asked why
you're so loath to admit you're playing a game, you denied that.
What the hell do you expect a game to be, if not "gamey"? Anybody with
half a brain would realize that any *game* is bound to be "gamey."
And that's just where we're differing here. You don't want a game; you
want something like a holodeck--where the artificial simulation is so
convincing and absorbing that you forget you're in a holodeck. You
forget you're playing a game, and you start half believing you're
really General Patton leading the Third Army.
Well, sorry--but a holodeck is just a holodeck; it's not a gateway into
another reality. Nor is a wargame--ANY wargame--ever anything but a
game.
> And it's not what I want as the *Union* player. Every game has two
> sides, and one of the draws to playing out the Union side at
> Chancellorsville is to avoid being outflanked.
>
> Duuuuh.
Hmm. Guess that's obvious to you. I don't think that would ever draw
me to play the Union side in a Chancellorsville game. Of course I'd
always prefer not to be outflanked in ANY wargame. But it sounds
pretty weird to me to say, "I want to play so I can try not to be
outflanked."
> The point is that I don't particularly care if a battle develops along
> "historical" lines. It might be completely different as fought between
> myself and The Klingon Attack-Wedge Guy than it was between Lee and
> Hooker. So what?
So nothing; that's the nature of wargames--i.e., historical fiction.
It's only a problem if you start really believing that what happens in
the game you're playing could definitely have happened historically.
There you're just dreaming. You're giving the game designer WAY too
much credit for knowing what happened and what could have happened and
putting all that together into the wargame.
> I mean, I don't object to some sort of setting that allows a human
> player to constrain the AI to "historical" positioning, if he's into
> that. For example, a France '40 scenario might have a button that
> forced the Allied player into the Dyle Plan line. OK. Fine.
>
> Most games allow this. What's the problem?
Well, for one thing, only the setup is historical (or stands much
chance of being historical). Everything else that happens is up to the
players and thus drifts off into "historical fiction."
So, unless the game designer exercised godlike powers and created a
wargame that really simulates all the "historical
possibilities"--without allowing in anything that, for some reason,
couldn't or wouldn't have happened--you're not learning much of
anything about history by playing the game; just the map and OOB, if
they're accurate.
One correction for that is to force history into the game--e.g., by
dividing the campaign into phases and requiring players to play out
each phase as a separate, linked game. This way, even though play will
cause things to get ahistorical, the mechanism of resetting the game
for each phase will bring things back in line with history.
Another option is to simply not make any such correction. Just shrug
off history and let players do as they like. I have no problem with
this; I've been doing it for decades. But unlike some people, I don't
fool myself into believing that what happens in the wargame I'm playing
could or might have happened in real life. To me, it's just a game.
> > Presumably at some point along the continuum between a single tank and
> > an army, you wish to be able to "take control". Can you identify what
> > that point is, and does it make a difference to your view of a game?
>
> There is no "continuum" between the two. There's no uncertainty about a
> type of tank. There it is. It is what it is. But there's fantastic
> uncertainty about how a large and insanely complex agglomeration of men
> called an "army" finds itself in a particular position at a specific
> juncture in time. That's simply influenced by too many dynamic and
> interactive factors to be roughly channeled into a specific line by
> "special rules."
All the more reason to doubt the accuracy or realism of wargames.
Suppose I hire you to design two detailed, accurate, comprehensive
simulations--one on the Panther tank, and another on the Battle of
Chancellorsville. Which simulation do you think you'd have to work
harder at, and which would be more reliable in the end?
I think it's pretty obvious that the Panther-tank simulation would be
much easier to get right. In comparison, the Battle of
Chancellorsville is so incredibly complex that you could devote your
whole life to simulating it and barely scratch the surface (and I won't
even go into all the missing data, since I've mentioned it above).
So, to my mind, if any wargame *needs* "special rules" to keep things
in line with historical reality, it's a wargame that covers something
as huge as Chancellorsville. Without "special rules," any such game is
certain to wander not only into "historical possibilities" but into
historical IMpossibilities.
A wargamer who's just having fun with the game might never notice that
he's doing something historically impossible. The game designer might
not notice either. In some cases, a good historian might be able to
expose the impossibilities. Other times the impossibilities might defy
detection--and then no one would ever know.
> > If
> > a Panther could move faster than a Spitfire, that would be fantasy. If
> > the Union flank could react to Stonewall's move, that would be "military
> > possibility". Where in between these two does it flip over?
>
> But this is what I've been saying all along; if you intend to build a
> system where the two digital armies simply act out their historical
> roles precisely as they did in history, you haven't built a "game,"
> you've built an "animation."
>
> What if the Confederate player in your hypothetical doesn't want to
> attempt Jackson's outflanking move? What if he believes he can improve
> on history by some other prestidigitation of good generalship? Does
> your game allow him to do this? Or does some other fudgey "special
> rule" crop up to stymie him?
You're right, of course: an animation of historical events is not a
game. If a so-called wargame literally forced players to make every
single move that actually occurred, the people moving the pieces would
not really be players, and they wouldn't be playing a game at all. So,
right away, we can toss that whole notion out the window.
But until you dragged it over to that extreme, I wasn't talking about
"animations"; I was still talking about games. Games like "History of
the World"--where no matter what the players do (and they can do LOTS
of different things), history generally unfolds just as it really did.
Or a game like Matrix's "Tin Soldiers: Alexander," where the player is
free to make any moves he likes, yet he's forced to follow Alexander's
historical campaign battle by battle and phase by phase.
In order for it to be a game at all, players *have* to be free to make
decisions and control things as they see fit. But in order for it to
be "realistic" (in the sense of "historically accurate"), the wargame
has to be faithful to history (or the novel it's based on, or whatever
the basis of the game is). Obviously there's tension between those two
requirements.
The game *has* to restrict players in many ways in order to be
realistic. For example, only the German side gets to use Panther
tanks, and those tanks cannot be allowed to move like Spitfires. For
another example, the two sides have to set up in historical positions
at the beginning of the game. And for another *possible* example, the
Confederate army has to be frozen for a few turns until the Union army
completes its surprise flank march.
At the same time, the game *has* to allow players to make decisions and
exert control. The German player gets to move his Panther tanks where
he wants them to go. Both sides can move beyond their historical
starting positions in any directions. The Union player can choose
which ford(s) to cross at and how to deploy on the other side of the
river. And so forth.
That's the nature of a wargame--i.e., a game about war. It's always a
*game,* so it has to have victory conditions and rules and allow
players to have control. But it's also *about war,* so it has to
restrict players in many ways based on the historical reality the game
is attempting to cover.
And as we all know, there's a wide spectrum of wargames around. Many
of them are more game than war; others appear to be more war than game.
That's where it becomes a matter of taste. Every wargame is a bundle
of compromises--so which things are you willing to compromise, and
where do you prefer to draw the line?
Me, I'm easy-going about things like "fog of war." You're not; you
don't want that compromised away, because to you it's essential to make
a wargame seem realistic.
OK--to each his own.
--Patrick
Patrick
> A wargamer who's just having fun with the game might never notice that
> he's doing something historically impossible. The game designer might
> not notice either. In some cases, a good historian might be able to
> expose the impossibilities. Other times the impossibilities might defy
> detection--and then no one would ever know.
But the one thing we always do know is what the historical record tells
us. That's why it works to break a battle or campaign down into phases
and require players to play out each phase separately. Each time you
reset the game to a new phase, you pull the situation back into line
with what actually happened historically.
Say you're playing a Chancellorsville game. In phase 2, after the
river crossing, the Union player tends to his right flank and makes
sure it's not exposed. That's something that was neglected
historically, but the player gets to do it in the game; so, fine--maybe
he gets some extra points for that. But in historical reality, Jackson
pulled off a flank attack against the Union right; and no one in the
world can *prove* that to have been preventable. So, in phase 3, we
reset the game to the historical situation later in the day, when the
Union right flank was open and Jackson had completed his march. Now
players have to play out phase 3 from there. Yes, the Union side will
likely suffer, as it did historically--but if the Union player does
better than Hooker did, he might still win phase 3 of the game in spite
of everything.
Yes, I know many players would whine about that kind of game. They'd
say they want to try pulling off a flank attack of their own and see if
they can make it work. Well, that's obviously possible: just *don't*
break the game down into phases; let players do as they please. But if
the game is designed that way, it ain't historical by any stretch of
the imagination. It wanders so far away from what we know, based on
the historical record, that it's almost certain many IMpossibilities
have crept into the simulation.
Besides all that, of course, there's the problem of hindsight. In May
1863, Hooker never guessed Jackson would strike the Union right through
those dense woods. But in March 2006, what Union player *wouldn't*
guess that and prepare for it? To make the game portray the successful
flank attack, you pretty much have to have some "gamey" rule to force
it to happen.
Me, I don't mind "gamey" rules. They're natural in games, and in
wargames they often serve to keep things in line with historical
reality--which makes the wargame more realistic. Playability *and*
realism--what a deal!
--Patrick
Giftzwerg
patrick5...@yahoo.com says...
> > The behavior of the Union right at Chancellorsville was a fabulously
> > complicated human endeavor involving the movement of thousands of troops
> > in conditions of often complete uncertainty, informed by perception and
> > error, and stupidity, and <any of a thousand other factors here>. You
> > could run through a thousand iterations of how the Union right got where
> > it did at Chancellorsville, and it wouldn't be the same twice.
>
> On the contrary, it would be exactly the same every time--unless you
> got your facts wrong.
> The Union right got to where it did in one way--and one way only.
>
> You're supposing it *could* have gotten there (or not) in a thousand
> other ways. Prove it.
It's called a "hypothetical," and it presumes that we can run another
iteration of history, where people make different decisions than they
made originally.
Don't *you* allow yourself, even in the wargames you prefer, to make
decisions that were not made in history? Wouldn't you allow a
Confederate player in a "Chancellorsville" scenario to experiment with
some other strategy than the historical one?
> Common sense, you say?
It's not even mere common sense. It's more fundamental than that. It's
the point I keep making - and you keep avoiding - that if you're not
going to allow a player to do anything except rigidly, woodenly act out
the exact historical moves in the game, then you might as well be
watching an animation.
The whole fucking point of playing wargames is to do something
differently than they did historically. Do you just *not understand
this*?
Or are you being intentionally obtuse?
> OK, let's say there really are many possible
> ways the situation *could* have developed. Who has sufficient
> information to document all those possibilities and turn them into a
> simulation? Nobody. We have historical records, and beyond that we
> have educated guesses--and that's all.
So what? Again, if you're just acting out history like a friggin'
ignorant drone, with little paper counters instead of real soldiers,
then you might as well read a good book about the battle for all the
benefit a wargame gives you.
> So, some game designer pores over the historical records, then uses his
> imagination to knock together some kind of simulation of the battle.
> And right away you're eager to call that "realistic." Why? It's most
> definitely not historically accurate, even though to some degree it's
> *based* on history. So, beyond your wanting to believe it, what's
> driving you to call it realistic?
Because Hitler wasn't *forced* by some inexplicable quirk of the
physical universe to attack at Kursk in June 1943. He could have done
something different. Historians and military scholars have made cogent
and compelling arguments that he *should* have done something different.
He could have stood pat and awaited a Soviet move; the "backhand"
strategy proposed by his greatest Field Marshal. He could have struck
earlier, before Soviet preparations were so far advanced; this was the
original plan. He could have altered the balance of forces. He could
have employed different tactics. He could have ...
The list goes on and on. Hitler or his high command *could* have done
any of these things - and wargame designers who choose Kursk as a topic
very often allow players to make different choices. They *all* allow a
player to make very different *tactical* choices. They *all* allow a
player to make decisions that are very, very, very much at odds with the
precise linear development of the battle historically.
Again, the point is that you don't seem to want a player to make any
decisions that cut against the precise grain of history. This leads me
to conclude that you'd be happy with an animation and dislike all that
decisionmaking a wargame presupposes.
> > Build a game with the God's-eye-view that you and Patrick prefer in this
> > context, and you haven't a snowball's chance in hell of getting your
> > Stonewall Jackson Corps on my flank, because I can see your counters.
> > There they are. "Hey, you're holding a three-mile line with only 15,000
> > men. And your flanking force ain't in position yet!!! It's clobberin'
> > tiiiiime!" You're defeated piecemeal.
> >
> > So in comes the fudge. You let me see your counters, but you don't
> > allow me to move for three turns. Gamey horseshit, this. It's
> > ridiculous.
>
> Ridiculous, is it? And why is that?
Uh, because the real General Hooker didn't have a Magic Eye in the sky,
and he wasn't prevented from moving by the a Magic Rule?
> Several times now you've
> complained about something being "gamey." And yet, when I asked why
> you're so loath to admit you're playing a game, you denied that.
It's not a matter of "admitting" anything. It's a matter of wanting the
game to be the closest approximation of military reality possible.
> What the hell do you expect a game to be, if not "gamey"? Anybody with
> half a brain would realize that any *game* is bound to be "gamey."
Somehow I think that most members of this group are going to disagree,
there. You just don't know what "gamey" means, even though it's been
explained to you.
> And that's just where we're differing here. You don't want a game; you
> want something like a holodeck--where the artificial simulation is so
> convincing and absorbing that you forget you're in a holodeck. You
> forget you're playing a game, and you start half believing you're
> really General Patton leading the Third Army.
Yes! A holodeck would be a *great* wargame! A glimmer of understanding
is beginning to intrude into your consciousness.
> Well, sorry--but a holodeck is just a holodeck; it's not a gateway into
> another reality. Nor is a wargame--ANY wargame--ever anything but a
> game.
If it was as well done as a holodeck, it would be.
[Of course, no one would use a holodeck for wargames - any more than
they'd use one to play out some lame detective story. Speaking for
myself, I'd travel back to "1965" and fuck Raquel Welch (and one of my
ninth-grade teachers...) all day long.]
> > And it's not what I want as the *Union* player. Every game has two
> > sides, and one of the draws to playing out the Union side at
> > Chancellorsville is to avoid being outflanked.
> >
> > Duuuuh.
>
> Hmm. Guess that's obvious to you. I don't think that would ever draw
> me to play the Union side in a Chancellorsville game. Of course I'd
> always prefer not to be outflanked in ANY wargame. But it sounds
> pretty weird to me to say, "I want to play so I can try not to be
> outflanked."
What would you do if called upon to play the Union side in a
Chancellorsville game?
> > I mean, I don't object to some sort of setting that allows a human
> > player to constrain the AI to "historical" positioning, if he's into
> > that. For example, a France '40 scenario might have a button that
> > forced the Allied player into the Dyle Plan line. OK. Fine.
> >
> > Most games allow this. What's the problem?
>
> Well, for one thing, only the setup is historical (or stands much
> chance of being historical). Everything else that happens is up to the
> players and thus drifts off into "historical fiction."
And you're *against* this?!?!?!?!
Dude. This is what wargamers do. They substitute their own decisions
for those that the real participants made in history.
That's. The. Whole. Point. Of. Wargames.
> > But this is what I've been saying all along; if you intend to build a
> > system where the two digital armies simply act out their historical
> > roles precisely as they did in history, you haven't built a "game,"
> > you've built an "animation."
> >
> > What if the Confederate player in your hypothetical doesn't want to
> > attempt Jackson's outflanking move? What if he believes he can improve
> > on history by some other prestidigitation of good generalship? Does
> > your game allow him to do this? Or does some other fudgey "special
> > rule" crop up to stymie him?
>
> You're right, of course: an animation of historical events is not a
> game. If a so-called wargame literally forced players to make every
> single move that actually occurred, the people moving the pieces would
> not really be players, and they wouldn't be playing a game at all. So,
> right away, we can toss that whole notion out the window.
Whoa! We can?
Sorry, but you can't just toss off this remark and dart away. You
already asserted that games which do *exactly* this to one extent or
another - like the rule in your "Chancellorsville" example which forces
the Union player to freeze for three turns - are what you're looking
for!
This puts you into the insane position where you're arguing that
*sometimes* players should be forced to do the rigorously historical
thing (sitting for three turns while he's outflanked at
"Chancellorsville") ... but sometimes a player *is* allowed to make a
decision which isn't absolutely congruent to historical fact?
This is nuts.
> But until you dragged it over to that extreme, I wasn't talking about
> "animations"; I was still talking about games. Games like "History of
> the World"--where no matter what the players do (and they can do LOTS
> of different things), history generally unfolds just as it really did.
> Or a game like Matrix's "Tin Soldiers: Alexander," where the player is
> free to make any moves he likes, yet he's forced to follow Alexander's
> historical campaign battle by battle and phase by phase.
Uh-huh. Okay, so you tell me; what decisions - *exactly* - are you
willing to allow a player in game like Chancellorsville? I guess the
Union player has to sit still and be outflanked by Jackson's Corps. But
is the Confederate player required to outflank him? Can he try
something else?
> In order for it to be a game at all, players *have* to be free to make
> decisions and control things as they see fit.
As Mr. Synnott already pointed out, you're arguing with yourself.
You can't have this both ways. Either you're willing to let players
make ahistorical decisions, or you're not.
Patrick
> You can't have this both ways. Either you're willing to let players
> make ahistorical decisions, or you're not.
Since you snipped the concluding paragraphs of my post, where I
addressed this very point, I'll quote it here so you can read it again:
<<In order for it to be a game at all, players *have* to be free to
make
requirements.
a wargame seem realistic.
<<OK--to each his own.>>
Thus, I'm not arguing with myself at all. I'm stating a coherent
position--i.e., that a wargame must, of course, be a game and must, to
some degree, be true to history (or whatever the game is based on) if
it's to be considered realistic. At the same time, a wargame can't be
*just* a game, nor can it be *rigidly* true to history--because in
either case, it's not a wargame anymore.
I don't imagine you'd disagree with that position. Unfortunately I so
far haven't been able to explain it in a way that has made it clear to
you.
And I think my mistake was in getting drawn into talking about specific
wargame features like "fog of war." Evidently that's a real important
feature to you, so you're shocked that it's something I'd just as soon
do without. But tying it in with what I quoted above, I'd be happy to
admit that FOW features *can* contribute to a wargame's realism; for
many people, and in many games, they do.
But if someone says a wargame *must* have a FOW feature in order to be
realistic enough to even be called a wargame--that I have to disagree
with. All a wargame *must* have is a set of features that convinces
the players that it's a game about war. Beyond that, it's simply a
matter of taste.
--Patrick
Mark Sterner
"Patrick" <patrick5...@yahoo.com> wrote in message
news:1143135164.5...@e56g2000cwe.googlegroups.com...
>
> So nothing; that's the nature of wargames--i.e., historical fiction.
> It's only a problem if you start really believing that what happens in
> the game you're playing could definitely have happened historically.
> There you're just dreaming. You're giving the game designer WAY too
> much credit for knowing what happened and what could have happened and
> putting all that together into the wargame.
>
> chance of being historical). Everything else that happens is up to the
> players and thus drifts off into "historical fiction."
>
> So, unless the game designer exercised godlike powers and created a
> wargame that really simulates all the "historical
> possibilities"--without allowing in anything that, for some reason,
> couldn't or wouldn't have happened--you're not learning much of
> anything about history by playing the game; just the map and OOB, if
> they're accurate.
Wow, I'm really agreeing with you right here, Patrick
I too believe that this notion of absolute realism in wargames is a holy
grail which simply is not possible to attain. Without rehashing this whole
argument thread, suffice it to say that
(1) All computer games are mathematics;
(2) War is only partially mathematical, many more things are subjectively
human and even the actual "math" involved is so massive and chaotic that it
cannot possibly be recreated in any wargame in a pristine fashion -- it's
beyond human capability to measure and recreate;
(3) A fortiori, any computer wargame, no matter how complex, is only a
rough mathematical system to model a small, probably infinitely small,
portion of its subject matter, such that it omits massive amounts of data
and measures that would be needed for "absolute realism". Without all the
input a real human in war receives, the wargame is not intuitive. The game
player needs to know the mathematical premises of the designer's model in
order to make ANY sense of the game. Thus, a game that "hides" its math
from the player is not "realistic", but is merely handicapping the player
from knowing the manner in which the designer interprets reality -- an
epistemological issue.
What Patrick seems to be saying -- with which I agree -- is that while many
posting here like the prospect of the *experience* of a real commander, it's
almost absurd to think any wargame, no matter how complex, can provide this
in a meaningful way.
A game can give you confusion; a game can hide data; a game can give you
limited access to information and a time limit for acting upon it, but aside
from highlighting one's supposed ability to act intelligently on limited
information, you still aren't fighting a battle, much less a war. There is
too much missing from the model to permit that. It's all in the act of
fantasizing, or what gamers call "immersion", that makes a person believe
they're really fighting a battle.
Of course, one can fantasize about a battle or war taking place without
having to believe he is the actual commander on the field. I believe this
is all Patrick is claiming. But whatever floats your boat, right?
Good discussion. BTW, I typically like "detail" and "realism" in my
wargames. I find, e.g., "Birth of America" to be an excellent game that
doesn't necessarily "make you a commander", but gives the player a realistic
(as opposed to "real" per se) level of command over the forces in the given
campaigns. It's a good mix of authentic limitations and a good abstract
game system. Too many games fail to limit the players' control, command
capabilities, or logistical limitations on their operations, in addition to
FOW. BoA seems to account for most of the major factors present in 18th C.
military campaigns, without making the game overly complex. A successful
formula, if you ask me. =)
Patrick
> > What the hell do you expect a game to be, if not "gamey"? Anybody with
> > half a brain would realize that any *game* is bound to be "gamey."
>
> Somehow I think that most members of this group are going to disagree,
> there. You just don't know what "gamey" means, even though it's been
> explained to you.
I know exactly what it means. It means that while you're making it
with Raquel in the holodeck (see below), you don't want the computer
announcing that you have ten minutes left before the program ends.
That'd be too "holodecky"--i.e., harsh reality would sneak in and spoil
your fantasy.
Likewise with a wargame. You don't want to be reminded that you're
just playing a game, because that'd spoil your immersion in the
"simulation."
What I'm saying is sorry, but you *are* just playing a game, like it or
not. Why not own up to that fact *instead* of getting lost in the
"simulation"? It's what I do, and I find it works surprisingly well.
As a matter of fact, I've come to see it as a more mature form of
wargaming--one where I'm experimenting with a "model of warfare" and
not just "playing with toy soldiers."
> > And that's just where we're differing here. You don't want a game; you
> > want something like a holodeck--where the artificial simulation is so
> > convincing and absorbing that you forget you're in a holodeck. You
> > forget you're playing a game, and you start half believing you're
> > really General Patton leading the Third Army.
>
> Yes! A holodeck would be a *great* wargame! A glimmer of understanding
> is beginning to intrude into your consciousness.
>
> > Well, sorry--but a holodeck is just a holodeck; it's not a gateway into
> > another reality. Nor is a wargame--ANY wargame--ever anything but a
> > game.
>
> If it was as well done as a holodeck, it would be.
>
> [Of course, no one would use a holodeck for wargames - any more than
> they'd use one to play out some lame detective story. Speaking for
> myself, I'd travel back to "1965" and fuck Raquel Welch (and one of my
> ninth-grade teachers...) all day long.]
You're exactly right. And that's exactly my complaint (though
apparently I'm alone in making it). If I were on that starship, I'd
avoid the holodeck like the plague, and I would think anybody who used
it would be ridiculed by the crew like a kid caught masturbating.
Likewise, I feel guilty when I play a wargame just to "immerse myself
in the simulation," because then I'm no different than a kid playing
army or playing in the sandbox with toy soldiers. To enjoy a wargame
these days, I have to believe it's based on a reasonably reliable
"model of warfare" and is thus an educational experience. As I learn
something about how war works, I'm comprehending principles that can be
indirectly applied to many areas of life. Thus, I'm doing something
vaguely worthwhile--and incidentally having some fun while I'm at it.
My way, the wargame becomes kinda like chess or poker or any other
"serious" game. Yeah, it's fun--but it's also worth reading books
about and practicing with a degree of dedication. It's worth wrapping
your mind around the game-model and grasping how it all works.
Your way, the wargame is just like a holodeck program--a fantasy to
escape into for a while. Worthless, unless you can justify it to
yourself as a stress reliever.
But then, some people have no qualms about spending time on worthless
activities. Sometimes I wish I were more like those people; most of
the time I'm glad I'm not.
--Patrick
PS Yeah, I know there are ways to be serious about detailed computer
wargames too. By playing Sid Meier's "Gettysburg," I felt I'd finally
caught on to what I'd been reading about in ACW books for years. I
just couldn't picture how the changes of formation worked on the
battlefield until I played that real-time game and saw them happen.
So, I have to admit that detailed computer wargames have some plus
sides too.
ray o'hara
> Giftzwerg wrote:
> > You can't have this both ways. Either you're willing to let players
> > make ahistorical decisions, or you're not.
>
> Since you snipped the concluding paragraphs of my post, where I
> addressed this very point, I'll quote it here so you can read it again:
>
> <<In order for it to be a game at all, players *have* to be free to
> make
> decisions and control things as they see fit. But in order for it to
> be "realistic" (in the sense of "historically accurate"), the wargame
> has to be faithful to history (or the novel it's based on, or whatever
> the basis of the game is). Obviously there's tension between those two
being able to move on the map at a rate that is historically sccurate is
realistic.
the union player eschewing the whole wilderness route and just attacking at
frederiscksburg is too.
slavishly doing what they did is not more realistic. the point of a wargame
is not to recreate history exactly as it happened but to explore what
happened and also to explore what could of happened, to explore what they
might have done differently.
allowing hooker to continue moving through the wilderness anf hitting lee
before jackson came up should be allowed. hell even allowing the confeds to
have longstreet back from suffolk in time should be explored.
the game you envision would suck.
ray o'hara
"Johnny Bravo" <baawa_...@yahoo.com> wrote in message
news:bei422hjjp4k0mjga...@4ax.com...
wargamers and cats seem to go together. we all have catquake stories but
i've never heard anyone complain about a dog eating their wargames.
Johnny Bravo
><<In order for it to be a game at all, players *have* to be free to
>make decisions and control things as they see fit. But in order for it to
>be "realistic" (in the sense of "historically accurate"), the wargame
>has to be faithful to history (or the novel it's based on, or whatever
>the basis of the game is). Obviously there's tension between those two
>requirements.
Faithful to history in possible outcome, not in actual outcome. Otherwise
you're not playing a game, you're moving counters around in a simulation which
has absolutely no chance of being any different than what really happened and
you're wasting several hours which could have been used to read a good book on
the subject.
><<The game *has* to restrict players in many ways in order to be
>realistic. For example, only the German side gets to use Panther
>tanks, and those tanks cannot be allowed to move like Spitfires. For
>another example, the two sides have to set up in historical positions
>at the beginning of the game. And for another *possible* example, the
>Confederate army has to be frozen for a few turns until the Union army
>completes its surprise flank march.
Why? You still haven't explained WHY this must occur. If you want a slavish
recreation of history why bother having a "game" at all. You just look at your
presupplied list of moves for each counter for each turn, and during the combat
phase you once again look at your list and remove the exact units which were
historicaly destroyed. Each side follows its "historic" script until the battle
ends.
Which is all well and good, but don't even think of calling that a wargame.
><<At the same time, the game *has* to allow players to make decisions
>and exert control. The German player gets to move his Panther tanks where
>he wants them to go. Both sides can move beyond their historical
>starting positions in any directions. The Union player can choose
>which ford(s) to cross at and how to deploy on the other side of the
>river. And so forth.
Yet the Union player can't exert the control required to start moving 3 turns
earlier.
What exactly is the dividing line between where you can and can't do what you
want with your forces?
><<That's the nature of a wargame--i.e., a game about war. It's always
>a
A wargame is more than "a game about war."
>*game,* so it has to have victory conditions and rules and allow
>players to have control. But it's also *about war,* so it has to
>restrict players in many ways based on the historical reality the game
>is attempting to cover.
What is the historical reality of not allowing the Union forces to move when
they wanted? Please explain the real world nature of the magical force that
kept them from moving.
Johnny Bravo
wrote:
>I too believe that this notion of absolute realism in wargames is a holy
>grail which simply is not possible to attain. Without rehashing this whole
>argument thread, suffice it to say that
Just because you cannot obtain it does not mean you should forget about making
the attempt. As the saying goes, perfection is a journey, not a destination.
> The game
>player needs to know the mathematical premises of the designer's model in
>order to make ANY sense of the game. Thus, a game that "hides" its math
>from the player is not "realistic", but is merely handicapping the player
>from knowing the manner in which the designer interprets reality -- an
>epistemological issue.
If real world tactics used in a game produce real world outcomes in the game
it doesn't matter at all how those outcomes are achieved.
The second that you try to work the system instead of the game you are not
playing a game any more, you're doing math homework.
>What Patrick seems to be saying -- with which I agree -- is that while many
>posting here like the prospect of the *experience* of a real commander, it's
>almost absurd to think any wargame, no matter how complex, can provide this
>in a meaningful way.
You might want to immediately get the phone number for the various simulation
commands in your nation's military; they don't seem to know this yet.
They make extensive use of computer games to teach many of the basics of
command, including fog of war, real world combat capabilites of the units they
will be commanding, delegation of authority and prioritizing decision making
fast enough to stay inside the Orient-Observe-Decide-Act loop. The worst
thing that can happen to a battlefield commander is that he falls behind in the
loop and gets paralyzed because every time he finally comes up with a plan,
enemy action has changed the situation enough that it's no longer valid.
Take a modern company commander, he doesn't have to know the exact armor
penetration capabilities of each of his weapons, he doesn't care. He just needs
to know roughly how far away he can kill the enemy from the front, sides and
rear. Back to that concept of limited time and limited information; a company
commander isn't going to be looking at tables of armor penetration or examining
in detail any enemy tank formations spotted during a battle. He's going to get
a report of enemy tanks at location X,Y and decide how to deal with them fast
enough that he can implement the plan before the situation has changed too much.
>A game can give you confusion; a game can hide data; a game can give you
>limited access to information and a time limit for acting upon it, but aside
>from highlighting one's supposed ability to act intelligently on limited
>information, you still aren't fighting a battle, much less a war.
For every battle's commander above platoon leader, every battle is acting on
limited information under time limts, that's one of the defining characteristics
of a battle.
>Good discussion. BTW, I typically like "detail" and "realism" in my
>wargames. I find, e.g., "Birth of America" to be an excellent game that
>doesn't necessarily "make you a commander", but gives the player a realistic
>(as opposed to "real" per se) level of command over the forces in the given
>campaigns. It's a good mix of authentic limitations and a good abstract
>game system. Too many games fail to limit the players' control, command
>capabilities, or logistical limitations on their operations, in addition to
>FOW. BoA seems to account for most of the major factors present in 18th C.
>military campaigns, without making the game overly complex. A successful
>formula, if you ask me. =)
At the level you are on in BoA, you tell your generals to go here or go there
how they fight the battles when they get there is up to them. In effect your
information about the low level details is extremely limited but at the speed
that messengers move relative to armies in BoA, the time pressure just isn't the
same. The closer you get to the sharp end of the spear the less time you will
have the more modern the conflict is. In the BoA period it could take 15
minutes to get a message to one of your flanks and another 15 minutes for them
to get organized enough to get ready to carry our your order and by that time
the battle might be over or changed so much that following the order would be a
huge mistake. Thus the reliance on prepared battle plans and battle lines
throughout much of history.
eddys...@hotmail.com
> wargamers and cats seem to go together. we all have catquake stories but
> i've never heard anyone complain about a dog eating their wargames.
No, but my dog keeps hogging the good computer to play HTTR :)
http://www.matrixgames.com/forums/m.asp?m=1067693&mpage=1&key=
Greetz,
Eddy Sterckx
Giftzwerg
patrick5...@yahoo.com says...
> > You can't have this both ways. Either you're willing to let players
> > make ahistorical decisions, or you're not.
>
> Since you snipped the concluding paragraphs of my post, where I
> addressed this very point, I'll quote it here so you can read it again:
I don't need to "read it again." The stuff you're reposting is so
obviously at odds with the actual example you proposed - your
Chancellorsville design which rigidly confines players to absolute
linear history, to the point that they can only made decisions about
small, tactical engagements, *not* the overall battle strategy - that it
simply leaves the reader wondering, "Were you bullshitting *then*, or
are you bullshitting *now*?"
You said:
**
"If I were designing a Chancellorsville game, I'd go further than that.
I'd break the battle down into phases and make players fight each phase
separately. As in the AH game, Hooker would be allowed to complete his
flank march, then the first phase of battle would begin. After so many
turns, it'd come time for Jackson's flank march--whereupon the game
would basically be taken down and set up historically again; and then
players could fight out Jackson's strike on the exposed Union flank.
IOW, the historical phases of the battle would *always* take place in
the game, and players could only try to outdo their historical
counterparts tactically *within* each individual phase."
**
You say, "The historical phases of the battle would *always* take place
in the game". That means that a player would *not* be free to try some
other strategy that didn't involve the neat little sub-phases you
propose to recreate so woodenly. The only free decision you're actually
willing to grant the player is the ability to game out small tactical
actions inside a completely rigid framework - and then, win or lose,
it's on to the next neatly pre-determined historical phase.
See, you can't trot out this example and then, when pressed, loudly
assert your dedication to allowing players freedom and flexibility to
make real decisions in your game design. You can either build games
that allow a player to make ahistorical decisions - and ahistorical
decisions about more than small, near meaningless tactical aspects of
the battle - or not.
You can't have it both ways.
> Thus, I'm not arguing with myself at all. I'm stating a coherent
> position--i.e., that a wargame must, of course, be a game and must, to
> some degree, be true to history (or whatever the game is based on) if
> it's to be considered realistic. At the same time, a wargame can't be
> *just* a game, nor can it be *rigidly* true to history--because in
> either case, it's not a wargame anymore.
I find nothing coherent about your position. It's surreal. You're
simultaneously arguing that a game design must be utterly linear and
follow history exactly - even breaking the battle into "phases" to
enforce this more completely - but also that a game design "can't be
just a game" and "can't be rigid."
Well. If you don't want your game to be so laughably rigid, then you'd
be ill-served to *design it that way*. Right?
> I don't imagine you'd disagree with that position. Unfortunately I so
> far haven't been able to explain it in a way that has made it clear to
> you.
I don't disagree with your new-found affinity for allowing a player to
make ahistorical decisions. I do disagree with your stated position
that it's A Good Thing to chop battles into neat little phases to make
sure players are boxed into doing only what happened historically.
Giftzwerg
patrick5...@yahoo.com says...
> What I'm saying is sorry, but you *are* just playing a game, like it or
> not. Why not own up to that fact *instead* of getting lost in the
> "simulation"? It's what I do, and I find it works surprisingly well.
> As a matter of fact, I've come to see it as a more mature form of
> wargaming--one where I'm experimenting with a "model of warfare" and
> not just "playing with toy soldiers."
What I'm saying is that since we *are* just playing a game, we might as
well play games that most closely resemble military reality.
> > [Of course, no one would use a holodeck for wargames - any more than
> > they'd use one to play out some lame detective story. Speaking for
> > myself, I'd travel back to "1965" and fuck Raquel Welch (and one of my
> > ninth-grade teachers...) all day long.]
>
> You're exactly right. And that's exactly my complaint (though
> apparently I'm alone in making it). If I were on that starship, I'd
> avoid the holodeck like the plague, and I would think anybody who used
> it would be ridiculed by the crew like a kid caught masturbating.
You mean, as if everybody doesn't masturbate? Come now.
[Pun intended.]
> Likewise, I feel guilty when I play a wargame just to "immerse myself
> in the simulation," because then I'm no different than a kid playing
> army or playing in the sandbox with toy soldiers. To enjoy a wargame
> these days, I have to believe it's based on a reasonably reliable
> "model of warfare" and is thus an educational experience. As I learn
> something about how war works, I'm comprehending principles that can be
> indirectly applied to many areas of life. Thus, I'm doing something
> vaguely worthwhile--and incidentally having some fun while I'm at it.
Oh, please. Wanting a wargame to offer high fidelity to reality isn't
some sort of juvenile personality flaw (nice try, though), it's the
widely-held consensus of *most wargamers*. Yes, we want games that
allow a player to make decisions under the same conditions of
uncertainty that exist in the real world. No, that doesn't mean we're
just jerking off with toy soldiers.
Giftzwerg
koval...@hotmail.com says...
> What Patrick seems to be saying -- with which I agree -- is that while many
> posting here like the prospect of the *experience* of a real commander, it's
> almost absurd to think any wargame, no matter how complex, can provide this
> in a meaningful way.
Nonsense. The only way to "experience" piloting a high-performance
military airplane is to join the air force and become a pilot.
But that doesn't mean that there aren't great flight simulators that
accurately model the business of flying a warplane. In fact, air forces
and airlines go to tremendous expense to *build* high-fidelity flight
simulators that are as realistic as possible.
Why do you think they do this, if no simulator, "no matter how complex,
can provide this in a meaningful way?"
> A game can give you confusion; a game can hide data; a game can give you
> limited access to information and a time limit for acting upon it, but aside
> from highlighting one's supposed ability to act intelligently on limited
> information, you still aren't fighting a battle, much less a war. There is
> too much missing from the model to permit that. It's all in the act of
> fantasizing, or what gamers call "immersion", that makes a person believe
> they're really fighting a battle.
Hmmm. So when the USMC conducts a wargame - and tries to make it as
realistic as possible, including the limiting of information to the
participants - they're all just fantasizing?
> Good discussion. BTW, I typically like "detail" and "realism" in my
> wargames. I find, e.g., "Birth of America" to be an excellent game that
> doesn't necessarily "make you a commander", but gives the player a realistic
> (as opposed to "real" per se) level of command over the forces in the given
> campaigns. It's a good mix of authentic limitations and a good abstract
> game system. Too many games fail to limit the players' control, command
> capabilities, or logistical limitations on their operations, in addition to
> FOW. BoA seems to account for most of the major factors present in 18th C.
> military campaigns, without making the game overly complex. A successful
> formula, if you ask me. =)
BOA is missing one thing; the fact that it should take as long to
transmit orders from General Amherst in New York to the garrison at Fort
William Henry as it does to march there. A truly realistic game would
represent the player as a theater-commander counter on the map, and
delay intelligence and orders with a travel-time routines to and from
his "headquarters."
eddys...@hotmail.com
> Likewise with a wargame. You don't want to be reminded that you're
> just playing a game, because that'd spoil your immersion in the
> "simulation."
Yes, so ?
> What I'm saying is sorry, but you *are* just playing a game, like it or
> not.
Well, like it in my case.
> Why not own up to that fact *instead* of getting lost in the
> "simulation"?
Because getting immersed in a wargame takes you away from the mundane
world and into a phantasy realm where you can explore historical
what-ifs. That is - we can - you're just re-enacting history in your
wargame-on-rails, not exploring alternate realities.
> It's what I do, and I find it works surprisingly well.
> As a matter of fact, I've come to see it as a more mature form of
> wargaming--one where I'm experimenting with a "model of warfare" and
> not just "playing with toy soldiers."
You're not experimenting with a model of warfare at all - you're
looking at a pre-determined movie.
> Likewise, I feel guilty when I play a wargame just to "immerse myself
> in the simulation," because then I'm no different than a kid playing
> army or playing in the sandbox with toy soldiers.
Aha, root cause of it all I'd say : guilt because you're playing a
"kid's game"
Well, I'm not.
Take any other hobby you like and take an objective look at it and
you'll find that it's *also* a totally ridiculous hobby.
Golf : searching a ball and when you find it hitting it into the bushes
again
stamp collecting : spend much money on printed pieces of paper - put
them in a book out of sight.
Hiking : getting dirty and wet with the final destination being your
point of departure - drive to that starting point in a 4x4 to increase
the ridicule factor.
...
Hobbies are meant to be engrossing, total immersion is what you're
looking for. Even more : total immersion is the ultimate goal for a
hobby.
Your subconscious is telling you : you're a grown-up, stop acting like
a kid, stop playing with toy soldiers and you feel guilty because you
*want* to play with toy soldiers. That's why you insist on historical
fidelity, because that way you're not playing with toy soldiers, but
studying history which is a mature pasttime. At least, that's what you
tell your subconsciousness.
My best advice would be : try to put the guilt behind you, start by
telling yourself that *all* hobbies are ridiculous to start with, that
since you are a grown-up you can decide for yourself what to do in your
spare time. Stop thinking that other people actually care what
ridiculous hobby you have - they don't. They probably have a ridiculous
hobby of their own. And having wargaming as a hobby of course allows
you to use that perfect pickup-line for woman : "do you want to come
upstairs and have a look at my toy soldiers ?"
Greetz,
Eddy Sterckx
Dan
Giftzwerg wrote:
>
> BOA is missing one thing; the fact that it should take as long to
> transmit orders from General Amherst in New York to the garrison at Fort
> William Henry as it does to march there. A truly realistic game would
> represent the player as a theater-commander counter on the map, and
> delay intelligence and orders with a travel-time routines to and from
> his "headquarters."
Here here.
But orders were carried by Daniel Day Lewis, who is fleet footed, brave
and cunning, would only take a couple scenes. :)
Actually - this is needed in the game, with the option to select the
level of delay encountered.
Briarroot
>
> Likewise, I feel guilty when I play a wargame just to "immerse myself
> in the simulation," because then I'm no different than a kid playing
> army or playing in the sandbox with toy soldiers.
There's the root of your problem. There is absolutely nothing
improper, and thus no reason to "feel guilty" about engaging in
childlike activities. Even were that not the case, there is little
that is childlike about the type of wargames preferred by most posters
in this forum. This has been repeatedly demonstrated by those members
who have tried to interest their own children in historical war games.
"It's boring, Dad" tends to be the universal refrain.
Games, of whatever type, are a healthy diversion for all age groups.
I consider them a necessary form of mental disengagement. Try not
sleeping for a week; the suffering you will experience goes well
beyond physical fatigue. The human mind must turn itself 'off' from
time to time. Sleep is one natural remedy, games are another. Beyond
simple enjoyment, the disengagement from the trials and tribulations
of everyday life derived by immersing oneself in games, can be both
healthy and relaxing - a form of recharging one's mental batteries, if
you will.
> To enjoy a wargame
> these days, I have to believe it's based on a reasonably reliable
> "model of warfare" and is thus an educational experience.
While I too, prefer wargames that are as historically accurate as
possible, I recognize that my preference is a minor form of egotism.
I want to see if *I* can do as well as Lee, or better than Hooker, at
Chancellorsville. I want to see I could perform as well as Rommel did
- or Patton - or Nimitz. That's the primary reason why I favor total
immersion, as well as why I demand accuracy; because I want to 'be'
there! The "educational experience" is certainly present but is of
secondary importance for me. I find nothing unhealthy about this
aspect of my character, nor do I feel "guilty" about it.
I've met people who can't enjoy recreational activities without
deceiving themselves into believing that thesse activities are also
"educational." They seem to be an unhappy lot, especially as they
find themselves surrounded by us ignorant troglodytes!
> As I learn
> something about how war works, I'm comprehending principles that can be
> indirectly applied to many areas of life. Thus, I'm doing something
> vaguely worthwhile--and incidentally having some fun while I'm at it.
Great. Perhaps some day you will come to the realization, that
"having fun" has a value all its own.
Rhetorical question:
When you make love to your 'significant other' do you do so only to
procreate, or to express your undying love, or out of a sense of duty?
Don't you sometimes do 'it' just to have fun?
JP
"Dan" <dl...@yahoo.com> wrote in message
news:1143209976....@z34g2000cwc.googlegroups.com...
Hehe, you have a copy of LOTM too, eh ? <g>
>
Patrick
> On 23 Mar 2006 14:52:15 -0800, "Patrick" <patrick5...@yahoo.com> wrote:
>
> ><<In order for it to be a game at all, players *have* to be free to
> >make decisions and control things as they see fit. But in order for it to
> >be "realistic" (in the sense of "historically accurate"), the wargame
> >has to be faithful to history (or the novel it's based on, or whatever
> >the basis of the game is). Obviously there's tension between those two
> >requirements.
>
> Faithful to history in possible outcome, not in actual outcome. Otherwise
> you're not playing a game, you're moving counters around in a simulation which
> has absolutely no chance of being any different than what really happened and
> you're wasting several hours which could have been used to read a good book on
> the subject.
IMO there is no such thing as "faithful to history in possible
outcome." That's the same thing as saying, "unfaithful to history" or
"historical fiction" or "fantasy." "Possible outcomes" are alternate
history--which is something you can find in the fantasy section of any
good bookstore. You can read about what would have happened if the
South had won the Civil War, or if Rambo returned to Vietnam and
rescued POWs.
I say again, so-called historical wargames are a long way away from
being historical. If you want a kind word for them, they're
"hypothetical" (borrowed that from Giftzwerg). Otherwise you can
choose one of my terms above.
And again, there's nothing at all wrong with that. Historical fiction
can be fun. I'm just trying to put things in perspective.
> ><<The game *has* to restrict players in many ways in order to be
> >realistic. For example, only the German side gets to use Panther
> >tanks, and those tanks cannot be allowed to move like Spitfires. For
> >another example, the two sides have to set up in historical positions
> >at the beginning of the game. And for another *possible* example, the
> >Confederate army has to be frozen for a few turns until the Union army
> >completes its surprise flank march.
>
> Why? You still haven't explained WHY this must occur. If you want a slavish
> recreation of history why bother having a "game" at all. You just look at your
> presupplied list of moves for each counter for each turn, and during the combat
> phase you once again look at your list and remove the exact units which were
> historicaly destroyed. Each side follows its "historic" script until the battle
> ends.
Where the hell do you people get the stupid idea that I'm advocating
some kind of "animation" instead of a game? It would be utterly
moronic to suggest that someone design a wargame where players are
required to simply copy all the historical moves and make no decisions
of their own. I have *never* suggested that, and I never would.
Please stop reading such idiocy into what I'm saying!
Note the word "possible" in what I wrote above. I even put asterisks
around it to emphasize it, and you still somehow missed it. It's *one*
way a wargame *could* handle the problem of demonstrating the Union
flank march; it's not the only way. It's *one* of the many ways a
wargame *could* stick closer to history, if some foolish designer chose
to include such a rule and piss off all the historical fantasy buffs.
> Which is all well and good, but don't even think of calling that a wargame.
A wargame, as I've had to say too many times, is simply a game about
war. Got a problem with that?
> ><<At the same time, the game *has* to allow players to make decisions
> >and exert control. The German player gets to move his Panther tanks where
> >he wants them to go. Both sides can move beyond their historical
> >starting positions in any directions. The Union player can choose
> >which ford(s) to cross at and how to deploy on the other side of the
> >river. And so forth.
>
> Yet the Union player can't exert the control required to start moving 3 turns
> earlier.
>
> What exactly is the dividing line between where you can and can't do what you
> want with your forces?
That dividing line could be anywhere. It's up to the designer and the
players. That's what I've been saying all along.
Me, I'm often content with "gamey" rules that restrict my play but keep
the wargame more in sync with history. Other wargamers can't stand
that; they want unrestricted freedom of play and don't care how far the
game drifts from history.
To each his own. Just don't try to convince me that the fact you drove
your German army through to Antwerp in your Battle of the Bulge game
means that at the end of 1944 the German army really *could* have taken
Antwerp--and would have if the armies had been managed the way you and
your partner did it in the game. That's pure BS.
> ><<That's the nature of a wargame--i.e., a game about war. It's always
> >a
>
> A wargame is more than "a game about war."
That's not very helpful. Wanna elaborate?
> >*game,* so it has to have victory conditions and rules and allow
> >players to have control. But it's also *about war,* so it has to
> >restrict players in many ways based on the historical reality the game
> >is attempting to cover.
>
> What is the historical reality of not allowing the Union forces to move when
> they wanted? Please explain the real world nature of the magical force that
> kept them from moving.
Geez. How many times do I have to repeat myself around here? I'm
beginning to think the skulls around here are so thick I might as well
just go beat my head against a brick wall.
A wargame is a *game.* Got that? A game. Games are artificial
contests with artificial rules and victory conditions and such. There
is absolutely nothing surprising or unusual about a game having a rule
which arbitrarily requires a player to do (or forbids a player from
doing) such-and-such. All games have such rules. ALL games, including
all wargames. You might not like it, but it's a fact of life.
If, in May 1863, the Union force found itself in "suspended animation"
for a period of time while Jackson completed his flank march, *that*
would involve some kind of "magical force." But we're not talking
about the actual battle; we're talking about a game *about* the battle.
No magical force is required to freeze the Union army in a game; all
that's required is a game rule.
And why should such a game rule exist? To keep the game in sync with
history in a certain respect. Historically, the Confederates
outflanked the Union army. So, if the game designer wants to represent
that in the game, he has to come up with some mechanism that achieves
it. Freezing the Union army, or requiring the game to be reset to the
actual positions just before the Confederate attack, are a couple of
the *many* ways this bit of "historicity" might be accomplished by the
game designer.
How would you do it?
My guess is that you wouldn't even try. You'd let both players do
anything they please.
Well, I'm here to tell you that "anything they please" includes an
unknown number of historical IMpossibilities as well as a few
historical possibilities. "Anything they please" is "hypothetical" at
best. IOW, historical fantasy.
Add all the simulational detail you like; you still can't cover up the
fact that a wargame is essentially a *game.*
--Patrick
Mark Sterner
"Giftzwerg" <giftzw...@NOSPAMZ.hotmail.com> wrote in message
news:MPG.1e8dc202...@news-east.giganews.com...
> In article <gt6dnc55xumIrr7Z...@adelphia.com>,
> koval...@hotmail.com says...
>
>> What Patrick seems to be saying -- with which I agree -- is that while
>> many
>> posting here like the prospect of the *experience* of a real commander,
>> it's
>> almost absurd to think any wargame, no matter how complex, can provide
>> this
>> in a meaningful way.
>
> Nonsense. The only way to "experience" piloting a high-performance
> military airplane is to join the air force and become a pilot.
>
> But that doesn't mean that there aren't great flight simulators that
> accurately model the business of flying a warplane. In fact, air forces
> and airlines go to tremendous expense to *build* high-fidelity flight
> simulators that are as realistic as possible.
Oh, I agree that flight sims can come close to modelling actual flight
characteristics of the aircraft, and even valid damage models, but the pilot
of the simulated craft gets a much less realistic experience. No
biofeedback from the forces felt in flight, no real fear... Sure the more
sophisticated flight simulators used in actual training go further in this
regard, but those aren't feasible for the average PC gameplayer. And even
with the best simulators, I'll wager that they're really good for teaching
only certain aspects of flight experience, not the whole enchilada.
Playing an air combat flight sim on a PC does little more, IMO, than
demonstrate that one is adept at playing a flight sim on a PC. But it's
still fun to imagine you're a real pilot, huh?
> Why do you think they do this, if no simulator, "no matter how complex,
> can provide this in a meaningful way?"
As I said, there are some flight matters that can be taught or perfected
with the use of a simulator. I doubt simulating flight can be a substitute
for actual flying lessons and, in the case of military pilots, actual flight
in simulated (or better, real) combat conditions.
>> A game can give you confusion; a game can hide data; a game can give you
>> limited access to information and a time limit for acting upon it, but
>> aside
>> from highlighting one's supposed ability to act intelligently on limited
>> information, you still aren't fighting a battle, much less a war. There
>> is
>> too much missing from the model to permit that. It's all in the act of
>> fantasizing, or what gamers call "immersion", that makes a person believe
>> they're really fighting a battle.
> Hmmm. So when the USMC conducts a wargame - and tries to make it as
> realistic as possible, including the limiting of information to the
> participants - they're all just fantasizing?
If you're talking about a real, live war game exercise with real troops,
it's clearly a different matter altogether. Still, they ARE by definition
"fantasizing" about the conflict they're simulating. But I know what you're
talking about. That's more akin to training exercises. They aren't
re-enacting battles from WWII and suggesting they are changing history (I
don't think even re-enactors assert this, either). Let's try not to stray
too far here from the garden variety board/PC wargame experience... :)
>> Good discussion. BTW, I typically like "detail" and "realism" in my
>> wargames. I find, e.g., "Birth of America" to be an excellent game that
>> doesn't necessarily "make you a commander", but gives the player a
>> realistic
>> (as opposed to "real" per se) level of command over the forces in the
>> given
>> campaigns. It's a good mix of authentic limitations and a good abstract
>> game system. Too many games fail to limit the players' control, command
>> capabilities, or logistical limitations on their operations, in addition
>> to
>> FOW. BoA seems to account for most of the major factors present in 18th
>> C.
>> military campaigns, without making the game overly complex. A successful
>> formula, if you ask me. =)
>
> BOA is missing one thing; the fact that it should take as long to
> transmit orders from General Amherst in New York to the garrison at Fort
> William Henry as it does to march there. A truly realistic game would
> represent the player as a theater-commander counter on the map, and
> delay intelligence and orders with a travel-time routines to and from
> his "headquarters."
Agree 100%. Command delay would enhance the game experience. Need a
protocol for independant initiative, though... Still, realism is always a
worthy goal in wargames no matter what one's view. As long as the benefit
outweighs the cost in terms of playability and enjoyment.
BTW, Patrick's complete view may be a little too far in the direction of
"realism as worthlessness" for me. However, I piped up b/c he's made, IMO,
some valid points about how "real" our games can actually be anyway, such
that at some level criticism of certain game mechanisms boils down to
matters of personal preference, not necessarily some grand divide between
reality and hogwash. We likely agree on many factors we want to see in
games, and pass on games that blatently omit common devices that are now
state of the art. Still, there are different reasons for one to play
wargames, and taking the role of a discrete commander (and only that
commander) is just one of them. Just like simulated flight, it's not really
a substitute for the real thing (actual command), but it can be fun to the
extent it has believability for the gamer. Perhaps a little like Patrick, I
have difficulty imagining myself as a real commander in any wargame, so this
doesn't work well for me, either.
I don't wish to get too deep into this b/c it gets to be philosophical and
many can and will differ with no real purpose or "right answer", but I do
find a ring of truth in many of Patrick's assertions.
Patrick
> In article <1143154335....@z34g2000cwc.googlegroups.com>,
> patrick5...@yahoo.com says...
>
> > > You can't have this both ways. Either you're willing to let players
> > > make ahistorical decisions, or you're not.
> >
> > Since you snipped the concluding paragraphs of my post, where I
> > addressed this very point, I'll quote it here so you can read it again:
>
> I don't need to "read it again." The stuff you're reposting is so
> obviously at odds with the actual example you proposed - your
> Chancellorsville design which rigidly confines players to absolute
> linear history, to the point that they can only made decisions about
> small, tactical engagements, *not* the overall battle strategy - that it
> simply leaves the reader wondering, "Were you bullshitting *then*, or
> are you bullshitting *now*?"
Neither. What I said both times is perfectly true and valid--and
you're *still* not getting it.
> You said:
>
> **
> "If I were designing a Chancellorsville game, I'd go further than that.
> I'd break the battle down into phases and make players fight each phase
> separately. As in the AH game, Hooker would be allowed to complete his
> flank march, then the first phase of battle would begin. After so many
> turns, it'd come time for Jackson's flank march--whereupon the game
> would basically be taken down and set up historically again; and then
> players could fight out Jackson's strike on the exposed Union flank.
>
> IOW, the historical phases of the battle would *always* take place in
> the game, and players could only try to outdo their historical
> counterparts tactically *within* each individual phase."
> **
>
> You say, "The historical phases of the battle would *always* take place
> in the game". That means that a player would *not* be free to try some
> other strategy that didn't involve the neat little sub-phases you
> propose to recreate so woodenly. The only free decision you're actually
> willing to grant the player is the ability to game out small tactical
> actions inside a completely rigid framework - and then, win or lose,
> it's on to the next neatly pre-determined historical phase.
Yes, that's true--of what I said I would do *if* I were a game designer
and were looking for a Chancellorsville game that stays in sync with
history instead of wandering off into ludicrously hypothetical
fantasies of "alternate history."
> See, you can't trot out this example and then, when pressed, loudly
> assert your dedication to allowing players freedom and flexibility to
> make real decisions in your game design.
Of course I can. Above, I'm just saying how I'd design a game to suit
myself and stick to history. Did I say ALL wargames ought to be
designed like that? Am I telling YOU to play games like that? No.
I'm just saying that when games are *not* designed as above, they're
not truly historical. I know that doesn't matter to a lot of folks,
but I'm pointing it out anyway.
> You can either build games
> that allow a player to make ahistorical decisions - and ahistorical
> decisions about more than small, near meaningless tactical aspects of
> the battle - or not.
>
> You can't have it both ways.
Sure you can. There ARE games out there that do it both ways! That's
why I keep reiterating that it's a matter of taste. I like "Tin
Soldiers: Alexander" because it sticks to the historical campaigns.
You like wargames that let you wander away from history and do your own
thing.
> > Thus, I'm not arguing with myself at all. I'm stating a coherent
> > position--i.e., that a wargame must, of course, be a game and must, to
> > some degree, be true to history (or whatever the game is based on) if
> > it's to be considered realistic. At the same time, a wargame can't be
> > *just* a game, nor can it be *rigidly* true to history--because in
> > either case, it's not a wargame anymore.
>
> I find nothing coherent about your position. It's surreal. You're
> simultaneously arguing that a game design must be utterly linear and
> follow history exactly - even breaking the battle into "phases" to
> enforce this more completely - but also that a game design "can't be
> just a game" and "can't be rigid."
>
> Well. If you don't want your game to be so laughably rigid, then you'd
> be ill-served to *design it that way*. Right?
The game I imagine designing above is NOT "laughably rigid." It's no
more rigid than published wargames like Matrix's "Tin Soldiers" series.
Players have plenty of tactical freedom while also being limited to
re-creating the broad strokes of history.
It's "laughably rigid" to you only because you don't personally like
it.
Obviously it's not absolutely rigid, or it wouldn't be a game. It's
just more rigid than you like, but not so rigid that I don't like it.
> > I don't imagine you'd disagree with that position. Unfortunately I so
> > far haven't been able to explain it in a way that has made it clear to
> > you.
>
> I don't disagree with your new-found affinity for allowing a player to
> make ahistorical decisions. I do disagree with your stated position
> that it's A Good Thing to chop battles into neat little phases to make
> sure players are boxed into doing only what happened historically.
Neither of those contentions is "new-found." I've said them all along.
You've just taken my incidental example of how I might design a
particular game and stretched it all out of proportion.
--Patrick
Johnny Bravo
>Johnny Bravo wrote:
>> On 23 Mar 2006 14:52:15 -0800, "Patrick" <patrick5...@yahoo.com> wrote:
>>
>> ><<In order for it to be a game at all, players *have* to be free to
>> >make decisions and control things as they see fit. But in order for it to
>> >be "realistic" (in the sense of "historically accurate"), the wargame
>> >has to be faithful to history (or the novel it's based on, or whatever
>> >the basis of the game is). Obviously there's tension between those two
>> >requirements.
>>
>> Faithful to history in possible outcome, not in actual outcome. Otherwise
>> you're not playing a game, you're moving counters around in a simulation which
>> has absolutely no chance of being any different than what really happened and
>> you're wasting several hours which could have been used to read a good book on
>> the subject.
>
>IMO there is no such thing as "faithful to history in possible
>outcome."
So you can't have a Civil War game about the battle of Antietam where it is
possible for the Union to lose 12,100 men and the Confederates to lose 10,700
but with skillful play and a bit of luck either side could do better?
ou can't even understand how bizarre your ideas about what is or isn't a
wargame. Medal of Honor is NOT a wargame, saying it is multiple times doesn't
make it so. Your other stupid ideas about there being no such thing as a
historical wargame unless presupplied move and combat results are followed are
arguing against the definitions of what a wargame is.
You want to argue around in circles and try to redefine the defintion of
wargame to suit you, fine, go right ahead. But don't expect me to believe that
you're not any combination of troll or stupid. Either way I'm done wasting my
time with you.
Johnny Bravo
wrote:
>You say, "The historical phases of the battle would *always* take place
>in the game". That means that a player would *not* be free to try some
>other strategy that didn't involve the neat little sub-phases you
>propose to recreate so woodenly. The only free decision you're actually
>willing to grant the player is the ability to game out small tactical
>actions inside a completely rigid framework - and then, win or lose,
>it's on to the next neatly pre-determined historical phase.
Which would make the entire battle even less historical if the player really
botched one of those phases. Suppose the flanking force was completely
destroyed in record time, what then, set up the main battle line with the forces
that fought on the flank out of the battle for the entire game simply because
they were occupied in reality?
Johnny Bravo
wrote:
>> You're exactly right. And that's exactly my complaint (though
>> apparently I'm alone in making it). If I were on that starship, I'd
>> avoid the holodeck like the plague, and I would think anybody who used
>> it would be ridiculed by the crew like a kid caught masturbating.
>
>You mean, as if everybody doesn't masturbate? Come now.
>
>[Pun intended.]
He'd be known as the creepy guy who wacks off in his bunk rather than bang
some hot starlet on the holodeck. He'd be the one in for a world of ridicule.
Johnny Bravo
<eddys...@hotmail.com> wrote:
>Stop thinking that other people actually care what
>ridiculous hobby you have - they don't. They probably have a ridiculous
>hobby of their own.
And the ones that say they don't have any hobbies are lying, it probably
involves body parts in the fridge. :)
Patrick
> On Thu, 23 Mar 2006 18:45:16 -0500, "Mark Sterner" <koval...@hotmail.com>
> wrote:
>
> >I too believe that this notion of absolute realism in wargames is a holy
> >grail which simply is not possible to attain. Without rehashing this whole
> >argument thread, suffice it to say that
>
> Just because you cannot obtain it does not mean you should forget about making
> the attempt. As the saying goes, perfection is a journey, not a destination.
The question is, *why* make the attempt? You make the "journey" sound
a lot like the quest for the holy grail. Aren't we just talking about
playing wargames here?
> > The game
> >player needs to know the mathematical premises of the designer's model in
> >order to make ANY sense of the game. Thus, a game that "hides" its math
> >from the player is not "realistic", but is merely handicapping the player
> >from knowing the manner in which the designer interprets reality -- an
> >epistemological issue.
>
> If real world tactics used in a game produce real world outcomes in the game
> it doesn't matter at all how those outcomes are achieved.
IOW, you're content with completely superficial "realism" even if
there's no true, deep-down realism.
> The second that you try to work the system instead of the game you are not
> playing a game any more, you're doing math homework.
Twisted terminology! What the hell is "the system" as opposed to "the
game"?
Let me translate: "The second that you work on playing the game *as* a
game, you are not immersed in the pseudo-military simulation anymore;
you're just playing a game."
Well, so frickin' what? I'm very happy just playing a game. It's been
my lifelong hobby. Wargames and other kinds of games.
> >What Patrick seems to be saying -- with which I agree -- is that while many
> >posting here like the prospect of the *experience* of a real commander, it's
> >almost absurd to think any wargame, no matter how complex, can provide this
> >in a meaningful way.
>
> You might want to immediately get the phone number for the various simulation
> commands in your nation's military; they don't seem to know this yet.
> They make extensive use of computer games to teach many of the basics of
> command, including fog of war, real world combat capabilites of the units they
> will be commanding, delegation of authority and prioritizing decision making
> fast enough to stay inside the Orient-Observe-Decide-Act loop. The worst
> thing that can happen to a battlefield commander is that he falls behind in the
> loop and gets paralyzed because every time he finally comes up with a plan,
> enemy action has changed the situation enough that it's no longer valid.
Ho-hum. This stupid line of argument is getting unbearable. Are you
in the military? When you play wargames, are you preparing yourself to
lead a brigade in the next war? Are you after all this realism so you
can make sure you're not "behind in the loop"?
Or are you just a guy having fun playing games like everybody else?
> >A game can give you confusion; a game can hide data; a game can give you
> >limited access to information and a time limit for acting upon it, but aside
> >from highlighting one's supposed ability to act intelligently on limited
> >information, you still aren't fighting a battle, much less a war.
>
> For every battle's commander above platoon leader, every battle is acting on
> limited information under time limts, that's one of the defining characteristics
> of a battle.
So once again, the "simulation" must rule--even though it's basically
just a game and many people would be perfectly happy with more game and
less simulation. Why are you imposing your preferences on the world?
As I keep saying, it's just a matter of taste. There are all kinds of
wargames for all kinds of people. Some of us like "Battle Cry" and
"DBA" and "Tin Soldiers"; others like "HttR" and "BoA" and such.
I've been wargaming since 1968 (before that if you count the likes of
Stratego and Risk), and I resent being told in this forum that I'm not
a "real wargamer" if I don't exalt simulational realism above game
quality.
I've gone through my phases of preferring ultra-realistic wargames. I
might cycle back into that preference someday. Right now, I'm finding
all the simulational aspects of wargames a pain in the neck--more
trouble than they're worth. So, at the moment I much prefer simple,
straightforward, comprehensible games about war than massively complex
simulations that only a military intelligence agency could appreciate.
After all, it all comes down to just playing games and having fun,
doesn't it? So, to each his own.
I happen to *like* seeing where all the game pieces are on the board;
that doesn't spoil the sense of realism for me, because the game has
other realistic features. I also happen to like it when I can look at
a CRT and find out exactly what happens in each case; it makes the game
comprehensible to me--I like the feeling of understanding what it is
I'm doing--and I don't care if that seems unrealistic to you, because
it doesn't to me.
--Patrick
Major H
> war. Got a problem with that?
As I've had to say too many times, the moon is made of cheese. Got a
problem with that? :)
Best regards, Major H.
tac...@mac.com
http://www.battlefront.com/
Patrick
>
> Your subconscious is telling you : you're a grown-up, stop acting like
> a kid, stop playing with toy soldiers and you feel guilty because you
> *want* to play with toy soldiers. That's why you insist on historical
> fidelity, because that way you're not playing with toy soldiers, but
> studying history which is a mature pasttime. At least, that's what you
> tell your subconsciousness.
There's a trace of that, but no--that's not what's the "root cause of
it all."
Few of us, I'd say, play wargames *just* for fun--or *just* for some
serious purpose. Wargaming is something in between. That's why my
antagonists here keep harping on the Kriegsakademie and professional
military simulations and such; they want some justification for
wargaming being a serious, mature pastime.
And it is. For one thing, it's not easy to play a wargame; it can be
as challenging as serious games like chess and bridge. Takes a bit of
maturity and intelligence to handle that.
Then there's the history aspect. Any wargamer who's into historical
games is sure to also have something of an interest in military
history. It may be an amateur interest, but it's nevertheless a
serious, mature, intelligent interest. It's not childish.
On the other side of the coin, yeah--it's fun to just push toy soldiers
and tanks around and blow stuff up. In that sense, there's a child in
all of us. I miss the sandbox as much as anybody else, and I'll
readily admit there are lots of times when I've loaded up a game like
"Red Baron" on my computer just for the juvenile thrill of buzzing
around blasting enemy planes.
So, wargaming is both childish and serious, in my estimation. And I
wouldn't have it any other way.
All I've been doing in this thread is trying to make three points:
1. Some wargamers are so thoroughly hoodwinked by the "simulational
realism" of modern computer wargames that they really believe the games
are true to history--that the outcomes of the games reflect actual
"historical possibilities." Once in a blue moon, that may accidentally
be true. The rest of the time it's BS. And one would be hard-pressed
to prove it either way.
2. In order to be a wargame, a game only needs to have *some*
"simulational realism." Just enough to convince players that it's a
game about war. Thus, simple games like Battle Cry and DBA are
wargames--and they may be just as historically accurate as wargames
with far more "simulational realism." Some of us prefer simpler
wargames and have a high tolerance for "gamey" rules; that doesn't make
us non-wargamers.
3. For my taste, a wargame has to be comprehensible by the unaided
human mind in order to be really enjoyable. It annoys me to have stuff
hidden behind the computer interface, especially if it's undocumented.
I want to know how the game I'm playing works. Yeah, I want some
"simulational realism" too--but not so much that it keeps me from
understanding how the game works. Furthermore, I want "how the game
works" to abstractly model how warfare works--so that my familiarity
with the game also amounts to familiarity with certain principles of
warfare.
That last bit might be asking a lot. But as someone keeps saying, it's
a worthwhile aim, even if it's currently unattainable.
--Patrick
Johnny Bravo
>> But orders were carried by Daniel Day Lewis, who is fleet footed, brave
>> and cunning, would only take a couple scenes. :)
>>
>> Actually - this is needed in the game, with the option to select the
>> level of delay encountered.
>
>
> Hehe, you have a copy of LOTM too, eh ? <g>
The music is pretty amazing as well, the main theme is a riff of Dougie
Maclean's "The Gael".
Johnny Bravo
<eddys...@hotmail.com> wrote:
A good dog is worth sharing your computer with. :)
Johnny Bravo
wrote:
>BOA is missing one thing; the fact that it should take as long to
>transmit orders from General Amherst in New York to the garrison at Fort
>William Henry as it does to march there. A truly realistic game would
>represent the player as a theater-commander counter on the map, and
>delay intelligence and orders with a travel-time routines to and from
>his "headquarters."
To be fair, the time required to send a messenger there. Armies, as a general
rule, tend to be very cumbersome to move about. One guy on a horse is a lot
faster, depending on the distance and a few changes of horses on the way it can
be several orders of magnitude faster. And given enough time per turn you might
be
Fastest messenger service is the legendary Pony Express took 10 days to travel
nearly 2,000 miles from St. Joseph, Missouri, and Sacramento, California and
only operated for 18 months from Apr 1860 to Oct 1861. The record was 7 days
and 17 hours, carrying Lincoln's Inaugural Address. The Pony Express officially
ended the day the Telegraph was completed on 24 Oct 1861.
On a side note it was a financial disaster. They were trying to win a million
dollar government contract, which was shelved at the outbreak of the civil war
and due to political pressure. They ended up $200,000 in the red.
Of course a military messenger isn't about to ride at Pony Express speeds
without killing his horse in extremely short order. But if the need were great
enough, and there were spare animals; a messenger could travel 100 miles per
day.
But a theatre commander isn't operating at a two-week delay from his low level
units, there are other commanders between the two. It would be interesting to
have a system where you give your subordinate unit orders, with a few
contingencies and he carries them out until you can get him new orders.
I seem to recall a computer wargame, Battlefront and the later expansions,
that did this to an extent (not over anything so large as a theatre though), you
gave orders to your subordinate HQ Corps and they moved their subordinate
batallions as the AI thought best to carry out your orders to the HQ. It
certainly lacked the control that many wargamers were used to and was certainly
ahead of its time but I found it great fun to play because I didn't have to get
into the endless detail of trying to keep track of the exact status of 20+
batallions. I just read the status reports of the Corps and decided if I wanted
them to move (which could put them into or withdraw them from the enemy if the
needed a rest), and what offensive or defensive posture I wanted the company in.
The company AI decided how to employ its subordinate units for maximum effect.
The AI wasn't amazing but it was certainly passable and made the game a lot
more fun than it would have been trying to micromanage everything.
Paul Synnott
> Why should I give a hoot what "many of us" do? If you think I'm
> telling you or anyone else what to like, you're sadly mistaken. As I
> made perfectly clear at the outset, I'm just saying how my preferences
> in wargaming differ from "many of us."
>
I understand that; I'm just pointing out that the attitude of the "many
of us" is nothing like as incomprehensible as you like to pretend, and
is actually quite logical.
> I know a few very good historians who would strongly disagree with you
> and state in no uncertain terms that those things *are* fiction. They
> may be thoughts that everybody (including historians) entertains at
> times, but they're still fiction when you get right down to it.
I doubt it, as I would imagine that most historians would have
sufficient command of the English language to know what the words
"fiction" and "fantasy" acually mean. I suggest you look them both up.
>
>>> We have no way of knowing whether anything that happens in a wargame
>>>could truly have happened historically.
>>>
Yes we do; we have the historical accounts to guide us and sometimes
also the reports of the commanders themselves. If I'm going to make
>
> Strictly speaking, it's fiction. It may be a useful and interesting
> exercise, and it may be the stuff wargaming is made of. But it's still
> not history per se.
>
A false dichotomy. Just because it didn't happen historically doesn't
bean it can be dismissed with a handwave as "fiction" or "fantasy".
>
> Well, it's fantasy to claim that when you play the French side in *any*
> wargame on Marengo, what you accomplish definitely could have happened
> historically. That's rubbish.
>
> Nobody, including you, knows whether what you accomplished in the game
> could have happened historically. And I don't care how well designed
> the game is. Models are all faulty, and there are countless factors
> that can't even be known, much less simulated.
Sorry, but it's your claim that's rubbish. The imperfection of the model
has no bearing on the possibility of the event. The event was possible
or impossible long before the model itself was invented.
Most Marengo wargames end up as victories for the Austrians. Now your
position is that this is mere fantasy because the French actually won.
Yet Napoleon didn't think the possibility that he might lose to be
fantastic when he summoned Desaix to return with all speed - he
considered it a distinct possibility. Melas certainly thought the
Austrians could win, leaving the field when he thought all that remained
was to send a column up the road in order to collect the win. Desaix
himself, on his arrival, announced that the battle as it stood was lost
"...but there is time to win another". Most historians and wargamers
would be in agreement about Marengo in saying that Bonaparte was very
lucky. Yet your model of what constitutes historical possibilities
dismisses the idea of a French loss as "fantasy".
Take Quatre Bras and Ligny as another example. It was possible at the
time that d'Erlon's I Corps might have arrived on either battlefield.
Ney certainly thought it was possible for d'Erlon to arrive at Quatre
Bras, because he ordered him there. Napoleon thought it possible for
d'erlon to arrive at Ligny, because that's what his orders specified.
d'Erlon himself thought both options were feasible, because he tried to
obey first the one order, then the other and then the original order
again. That he ended up spending the day marching and countermarching
and being of no help at either battle doesn't alter the fact that his
arrival at either was a possibility. It's something that *could* have
happened.
These examples concern themselves with not with "fiction" or "fantasy"
but with possibilities that actually weighed on the minds of the
commanders on the spot. Not only is it historically valid to explore
such possibilities (note: explore, not predict absolutely the outcome
thereof), but to do also throws the real historical events into sharper
relief, because what doesn't happen often has a bearing on what did happen.
> What they *aim* to achieve and what they actually achieve are two
> different things. Often two impossibly distant things.
I'm not sure what you mean heare. What do you see them as trying to
achieve and why is it impossible?
>
>
> The activity is similar only up to a point. The officers at the
> Kriegsakademie were studying, not playing games. Training, not just
> having fun.
When the player is assimilating the available information as best he can
and trying to win the battle by making the best decisions he can, he's
in exactly the same place as anyone carrying out a similar exercise. The
wider context in which that activity takes place has no bearing on the
experience itself, any more than a casual player's experience of tennis
is any less real than that of a professional on the Centre Court at
Wimbledon. Tennis is still tennis. Woodpusher or Grandmaster, chess is
still chess.
>
> If you're playing and having fun, it's a different experience than
> studying and training.
>
The Prussians were playing, the name kriegspiel itself acknowledges
this. And who says they weren't having fun?
>
> Then I'm sorry to see you're so closed-minded. A game about war is a
> wargame, and anybody who thinks otherwise is, IMO, too much a
> specialist and possibly an elitist.
Not too much a specialist because I don't exlusively play wargames. Not
an elitist, because I don't judge a game's quality on whether or not
it's a wargame, I do, however, make a judgement on what constitutes a
wargame, but thats a matter of definition, and nothing to do with elitism.
>
> As I've said repeatedly, realism is important. Vital even. However,
> excessive detail is not important or vital. A wargame can be pretty
> abstract and still be a game that's clearly about war.
>
Agreed.
>
>
> I'm just saying that the *ways* many wargames attempt to be realistic
> ends up making them unnecessarily detailed--and that's often annoying
> (i.e., anti-enjoyable) to me.
>
I agree. I've experienced games like that too and I don't play them.
> I do want realism. I *must* have realism. What I don't want is
> complexity that I consider unnecessary. And I want to avoid that
> unnecessary complexity even if I happen to have a computer that could
> handle most of it for me, leaving me to just do the high-level stuff.
>
> I don't think you need a lot of detail to get realism. You just need a
> select set of well-presented details, layered onto a solid model of
> warfare.
I'm glad to see we agree on realism then. Except for the fact that I
don't care how detailed the design is as long as its manageable and
gives an enjoyable game.
>
>>>One thing I like about simple models of warfare is that I can wrap my
>>>mind around them more easily.
>>
>>If you've read up on the period you're gaming, which it sounds like you
>>do, and if the wargame is well designed and realistic but manageable,
>>then all you need to wrap your mind around is the history you're
>>studying anyway. Surely that's not too onerous a requirement?
>
> I don't follow what you're saying here. I was talking about
> comprehending a model; you seem to be talking about something else.
What I'm saying is that if the game has sufficient realism, then all the
knowledge you should need to play it is already provided in the books
you read on the subject. A realistic design that is both manageable and
transparent to the player should yield satisfying results without the
need to know the underlying model. Wanting to know the underlying model
for its own sake is, of course, something else entirely.
>>Is it, why? If you're referring to military science in terms of the "art
>>of war" then I would say that it's actually at the heart of wargames. As
>>it should be.
>
> That's the attitude that leads (IMO) to excessive detail and
> incomprehensible models of warfare.
>
I don't see how that follows. Can you outline the process?
> All I ask is that my view of what a good wargame is be acknowledged. I
> know it's just my own taste and nothing more. But I like to be
> understood when I can.
>
I already did that some time ago.
Paul
cwie
> but
> the interactions between units and strategies are.
Yes, I have WaW on the hard disk. Not sure what I think - it's small/light
enough to play when there's ony a few hours to spend, and deep enough to
require real thinking. Yet it all feels a little too abstract. I like it,
but I'm not addicted.
Giftzwerg
koval...@hotmail.com says...
> > Nonsense. The only way to "experience" piloting a high-performance
> > military airplane is to join the air force and become a pilot.
> >
> > But that doesn't mean that there aren't great flight simulators that
> > accurately model the business of flying a warplane. In fact, air forces
> > and airlines go to tremendous expense to *build* high-fidelity flight
> > simulators that are as realistic as possible.
>
> Oh, I agree that flight sims can come close to modelling actual flight
> characteristics of the aircraft, and even valid damage models, but the pilot
> of the simulated craft gets a much less realistic experience. No
> biofeedback from the forces felt in flight, no real fear... Sure the more
> sophisticated flight simulators used in actual training go further in this
> regard, but those aren't feasible for the average PC gameplayer. And even
> with the best simulators, I'll wager that they're really good for teaching
> only certain aspects of flight experience, not the whole enchilada.
But ... herein lies my point. The problem with PC flight simulators is
that they're *not realistic enough*.
I mentioned at the outset the fact that a "perfect" wargame could pass a
Turing test, IE, the player would not be able to tell whether he was
playing a wargame or fighting a real battle. Patrick's position is that
a wargame that could pass a Turing test would be A Bad Thing, because
... well, I'm not sure what viewpoint he's about right not. But I think
a wargame so realistic, so "immersive" that the player has no way of
determining if it *is* even a wargame would be a fabulous development.
> Playing an air combat flight sim on a PC does little more, IMO, than
> demonstrate that one is adept at playing a flight sim on a PC. But it's
> still fun to imagine you're a real pilot, huh?
Just a moment, though. I've flown an actual airplane. Several of them,
in fact. And in some ways, flight simulators are *more difficult* than
real airplanes, because you can't "feel" the airplane at all.
> > Why do you think they do this, if no simulator, "no matter how complex,
> > can provide this in a meaningful way?"
>
> As I said, there are some flight matters that can be taught or perfected
> with the use of a simulator. I doubt simulating flight can be a substitute
> for actual flying lessons and, in the case of military pilots, actual flight
> in simulated (or better, real) combat conditions.
Sure, but I did one of those "Warbirds!" mock-combat flights in an AT-6
Texan two years ago, and it cost me almost a thousand bucks. It was a
blast, and I wouldn't have missed it for the world, but it still cost me
the price of twenty flight simulators ... and it was less than an hour
of actual flight.
In fact, I was kicking the snot out of the other jamoche who was playing
pilot that day. I credit my IL-2 experience with the fact I was able to
consistently wax his tail. My instructor/pilot told me that, as a
pilot, I was in the top echelon of the clueless idiots he was charged
with keeping alive through the experience so he could take our money.
> > Hmmm. So when the USMC conducts a wargame - and tries to make it as
> > realistic as possible, including the limiting of information to the
> > participants - they're all just fantasizing?
>
> If you're talking about a real, live war game exercise with real troops,
> it's clearly a different matter altogether. Still, they ARE by definition
> "fantasizing" about the conflict they're simulating. But I know what you're
> talking about. That's more akin to training exercises. They aren't
> re-enacting battles from WWII and suggesting they are changing history (I
> don't think even re-enactors assert this, either). Let's try not to stray
> too far here from the garden variety board/PC wargame experience... :)
<shrug>
I'm simply pointing out that Patrick's smarmy insinuation that there's
something weird or wrong with a realistic, "immersive" wargaming
simulator is itself a bit odd.
> BTW, Patrick's complete view may be a little too far in the direction of
> "realism as worthlessness" for me. However, I piped up b/c he's made, IMO,
> some valid points about how "real" our games can actually be anyway, such
> that at some level criticism of certain game mechanisms boils down to
> matters of personal preference, not necessarily some grand divide between
> reality and hogwash.
That's fine, but what distresses me about his argument is that he seems
to favor abstraction over genuine attempts to model reality - for no
better reason than he finds these conventional wargaming abstractions
easier to fathom, to "wrap his mind around."
I don't care about that. The reason designers - good designers - are
trending towards making fog-of-war and uncertainty routines the
centerpieces of their games is that uncertainty, fog-of-war, and
military friction are the primary driving forces in the outcome of most
historical actions.
> I don't wish to get too deep into this b/c it gets to be philosophical and
> many can and will differ with no real purpose or "right answer", but I do
> find a ring of truth in many of Patrick's assertions.
Me, too. But I've never seen a wargame that doesn't allow a player to
turn off the fog-of-war routines that Patrick primarily objects to.
This leads me to wonder exactly what he's on about.
Miowarra Tomokatu (aka Tomo)
<giftzw...@NOSPAMZ.hotmail.com> wrote:
>Sure, but I did one of those "Warbirds!" mock-combat flights in an AT-6
>Texan two years ago, and it cost me almost a thousand bucks. It was a
>blast, and I wouldn't have missed it for the world, but it still cost me
>the price of twenty flight simulators ... and it was less than an hour
>of actual flight.
>
>In fact, I was kicking the snot out of the other jamoche who was playing
>pilot that day. I credit my IL-2 experience with the fact I was able to
>consistently wax his tail. My instructor/pilot told me that, as a
>pilot, I was in the top echelon of the clueless idiots he was charged
>with keeping alive through the experience so he could take our money.
Damn! I'm envious, Gifty! ENVIOUS!! D'YOU HEAR!!
I keep seeing the ads in "Sky and Space" for experiences in Lim-2s
(Polish Mig 15s) and just don't I wish I could do that, and get into
some stick and string taildraggers (my period is WWI, really).
OOoohhh! I'm green, I tell you!!
----------------------------------------------------------------
.
.
I spent a lot of money on booze, fast cars and women - the rest I squandered.
- George Best
Miowarra Tomokatu (aka Tomo)
<giftzw...@NOSPAMZ.hotmail.com> wrote:
>> What I'm saying is sorry, but you *are* just playing a game, like it or
>> not. Why not own up to that fact *instead* of getting lost in the
>> "simulation"? It's what I do, and I find it works surprisingly well.
>> As a matter of fact, I've come to see it as a more mature form of
>> wargaming--one where I'm experimenting with a "model of warfare" and
>> not just "playing with toy soldiers."
>
>What I'm saying is that since we *are* just playing a game, we might as
>well play games that most closely resemble military reality.
That's the closest mention I've seen in this thread to "Boney"
Fuller's concept of Inherent Military Probability, which IMNSHO is the
only requirement for a wargame, whether it's Kingmaker or ASL
Miowarra Tomokatu (aka Tomo)
No, no, I really AM a chef, really!
Giftzwerg
patrick5...@yahoo.com says...
> > >I too believe that this notion of absolute realism in wargames is a holy
> > >grail which simply is not possible to attain. Without rehashing this whole
> > >argument thread, suffice it to say that
> >
> > Just because you cannot obtain it does not mean you should forget about making
> > the attempt. As the saying goes, perfection is a journey, not a destination.
>
> The question is, *why* make the attempt? You make the "journey" sound
> a lot like the quest for the holy grail. Aren't we just talking about
> playing wargames here?
<boggle>
Why attempt to build simulations so that they're as realistic as
possible?
> > If real world tactics used in a game produce real world outcomes in the game
> > it doesn't matter at all how those outcomes are achieved.
>
> IOW, you're content with completely superficial "realism" even if
> there's no true, deep-down realism.
Uh, can you show me an example of a hypothetical wargame that had valid
"superficial realism" but invalid "deep down realism?"
Remember that what Turing was addressing with his proposed test was
exactly this issue, and his take on it was that if an artificial system
offers enough "superficial" intelligence that an observer can't tell it
from a human intelligence, then it doesn't matter if some arbitrary
standard of intelligence ("deep-down intelligence") is met or not.
That's what I would argue here; if a system presents a perfectly
realistic facade, then it makes no difference if "deep-down" it's wired
with spit and bailing wire.
> > You might want to immediately get the phone number for the various simulation
> > commands in your nation's military; they don't seem to know this yet.
> > They make extensive use of computer games to teach many of the basics of
> > command, including fog of war, real world combat capabilites of the units they
> > will be commanding, delegation of authority and prioritizing decision making
> > fast enough to stay inside the Orient-Observe-Decide-Act loop. The worst
> > thing that can happen to a battlefield commander is that he falls behind in the
> > loop and gets paralyzed because every time he finally comes up with a plan,
> > enemy action has changed the situation enough that it's no longer valid.
>
> Ho-hum. This stupid line of argument is getting unbearable. Are you
> in the military? When you play wargames, are you preparing yourself to
> lead a brigade in the next war? Are you after all this realism so you
> can make sure you're not "behind in the loop"?
What's your argument here? That anyone who's not a military officer
should be satisfied with wretchedly unrealistic crap?
> Or are you just a guy having fun playing games like everybody else?
And this is similarly silly. One of the central tenets of our position
is that a realistic simulation of reality is *more fun* than wretchedly
unrealistic crap.
> > For every battle's commander above platoon leader, every battle is acting on
> > limited information under time limts, that's one of the defining characteristics
> > of a battle.
>
> So once again, the "simulation" must rule--even though it's basically
> just a game and many people would be perfectly happy with more game and
> less simulation.
Many people would be perfectly happy driving a Yugo. But the
proliferation of nicer, better, and more expensive automobiles leads me
to conclude that designers of motor vehicles are onto something when the
choose to produce BMWs instead of Pintos.
Wargame designers likewise. They aren't beavering away to incorporate
more accurate and more realistic constructs in their designs because
they're lunatics; they're doing this because their customers are telling
them that better, more realistic simulations = better games = more
sales.
> Why are you imposing your preferences on the world?
How is he doing that?
> I've been wargaming since 1968 (before that if you count the likes of
> Stratego and Risk), and I resent being told in this forum that I'm not
> a "real wargamer" if I don't exalt simulational realism above game
> quality.
Remove enough fidelity to reality from a wargame and at some point
you'll have something that is no longer a wargame. We can argue
endlessly about where the line is drawn, but that there's a valid
delineation out there somewhere is incontrovertible. So when you find
yourself arguing for *less* realism in wargaming, it's highly likely
that folks will understand you as wanting something other than a
wargame.