Though I love RPGs, one reason I can’t really get into a lot of the current story/action genres that top the charts is narrative related. I love a well-told story with well-realized characters as much as the next guy raised on library cards and soap operas. But so few game stories are able to walk that ever so weird line between telling me a tale I am already comfortable with and surprising me with new language or new shocking betrayals.

I often return to the idea of strategy game as story telling, as one of a handful of genres where the outcome is not known and where, even if you are very good a game, you can spin a yarn about the struggles that got you to the top.

The more I think on it, the more I think that it often comes down to turning points. All us amateur historians love the idea of turning of points in history. These are those moments on which the destinies of nations and men and women turn, where if the outcome had gone another way the entire course of history would have been different. Creasy’s Fifteen Decisive Battles and all that rubbish.

I often remember and talk about a wargame I was playing with my friend Kevin (who reviewed Star Ruler on this site.) We used to play a lot of wargames against each other, and at this time Sid Meier’s Gettysburg was our poison of choice. In one very hard fought battle, my mostly green Union troops were being battered by his Rebel forces, with only our strong position and the fact he had to advance slowly through a forest keeping me in the game. As the time started ticking down, I was pushed from the hill. And then I got notice of reinforcements. I force marched them out of his line site and hit his now tired troops in the back, reclaiming victory at the last second.

The reinforcements were only a turning point because I made them one. I force marched along the stream. I turned them into battle lines at just the right point to cause maximum panic in his troops. It wasn’t scripted beyond the scenario generator saying “You now have more men.”

Some games have turning points you can see building hours in advance. Civilization II, in all its simplicity, made clear who hated you and would be your rival. While the game added a full year to my PhD, I suspect, it also gave the game where long tension between my Babylonians and the neighboring Carthaginians led to a heavily fortified border. Carthage had its main cities on my continent and six more on a large island to the west. As I saw Carthage build tank after tank, I built forts right along the border area and manned them. Remember that in Civ 2, entire stacks were eliminated once the strongest defending unit in that stack was killed – unless the stack was in a fort. So I built forts, and Carthage had forts and before long it looked like the 38th parallel waiting for someone to snap.

Ultimately, it was my navy that won me that war since I could intercept any reinforcements from the other continent. But it was the war that everyone saw coming and that secured victory in the game for me. Sure, Japan would be trouble and I ended up planting nukes in all of their cities. (I am much nicer now than I was.)

It’s not simply that the drama is not scripted; there is a certain amount of improv to all great strategy and wargames, but they always have pretty firm limits on what can and cannot be done. It’s that the drama has a genuine arc to it.

In high school, we were always taught that stories had a climax and then a denouement. We were often asked to identify what the climax was, which sometimes felt a little silly since the stories we read were generally pretty crappy and even when they weren’t, there would be multiple climaxes. The way action games and RPGs are structured, with mission after mission and boss fight after boss fight, it often feels like there are multiple climaxes.

When I talk about stories in game with some of my former colleagues, we sometimes wonder if a game that has a great and well scripted ending, like Red Dead Redemption, for example, earned the ending. Is it a denouement that makes sense in light of everything the player controlled Marston had seen and done? For some of my friends, the ending justifies itself; for others any ending that wants to be considered part of a good story has to fit within that story.

That’s never an issue for strategy games. Nine times out of ten you get the story and the ending you deserve because you were the author. In a great session of Civ or Operational Art of War or Rise of Nations, you can often pin point when victory was achieved and when you made the change from general to god-king, controlling events instead of simply reacting to them. There may still be multiple climaxes, but that’s not because the story is a bad one, it’s because the story is constantly being rewritten according to your whims and your priorities.

No action game has ever made me want to be a writer. Some strategy games have.

One of the great things about working at home is that if I want to take an hour in the middle of the day to run errands or play a game, then I can do that with a clear conscience if I can make up the hour later in the day or on the weekend. So when Bruce Geryk emails to ask if I want to play something on Brettspielwelt and chat, I can usually accept.

Last week it was a game of Dominion, one of my favorite card/pattern based games, but a number of expansions have come out since we last played it in earnest. And, of course, half the card piles were things I had never seen or heard of before. How do treasures work? Am I reading the Peddler text correctly? There are Colony victory points now? Bruce is a busy man, so it wasn’t surprising that he was almost as lost as I was. So we did what any good gamer does in that situation – we mostly stuck to the cards that fit patterns we recognized and understood – those with bonuses for actions, cards and coins. The Market pile drained very quickly.

It’s not that the new cards were hard to understand as much as it is that we have a system in mind when we play Dominion and it takes a while for us to absorb whether introductions to the system make any sense, are superior to the old way of doing things and if they are well integrated into the rest of the game we know well. Every expansion to Dominion changes the way people play just enough to make it a little bit confusing if you have a strategy and plan that you have become accustomed to.

Few genres systematically remold themselves in updates and expansions as much as strategy games. It doesn’t take much for a developer or designer to upset the apple cart of player planning and sometimes the real test of an update or expansion is how well the changes fit with the old understanding. It is sometimes easier to learn a new system from scratch than it is to accept major changes to an assumed one.

In some ways, it’s a lot like life, so I hope you’ll excuse the personal detour here as I try to underline the point a bit. As readers and listeners know, my past year has been a bit of a mess. The decline and collapse of my marriage undermined many of my understandings of who I was and how the world worked; my previous beliefs in the connection between is and ought and the revelation that Stoicism is a really shitty philosophy for handling this kind of thing contributed to a cognitive dissonance that brought me as close to a total breakdown as I ever want to get.

Now, I’ve always been fortunate in my choice of friends, and they were there for me even when I said and did things that made me hard to like sometimes. But, as good as they were at listening and sticking with me, they didn’t know the system I was in and couldn’t really help me understand what I should have been doing to make things better. However, now that my life is in a new phase where I have to build a new system, they’ve been crucial in helping me get to sanity quickly – living alone, getting into shape, healthy diet, staying social, slowly learning a new job…the new system has been easier to pick up because I can learn each element from someone in my support network.

To bring this back to gaming, there is a distinction between learning to love and appreciate a new system like Civilization V (in spite of all the problems the game has) and accepting how a tacked on mechanic doesn’t quite fit, like the espionage system introduced to Civilization IV. In Civ 5, there is an a priori assumption that things will change from the previous game, so you as the player will need to unlearn some things first. In Civ 4, espionage fit poorly with how players understood the diplomatic matrix, the UI clues were terrible and there was little clarity on where and when you should direct your spy energy. In the same expansion, however, corporations made sense because they mimicked the established religion mechanic; the scaffolding for understanding and interpretation was already there.

The Sims games probably have the biggest hill to climb here, because each expansion can introduce entire new worlds for your sim to explore and master. With so many adventures and education opportunities now available to your sim, the domestic drama that is the core of the game play can sometimes feel lost. New rules for dating, new ways to climb the career ladder, supernatural elements to appeal to Twilight and Harry Potter fans, etc. As sturdy as the core Sims‘ system is, piling on new elements sometimes distracts and detracts from the core time/resource management game that I love so much.

There is a tendency among developers to make system changes that are introduced in updates and expansions the new stars of the show. New rules for governing some of the Asian nations in Europa Universalis 3: Divine Wind were dramatic, and became central to the PR push for the game. But these governing rules were limited to a handful of nations and made both China and Japan much more frustrating to understand whether you controlled them or played against them. New rules about building construction, however, were perfectly integrated into established systems and I think are the best part of Divine Wind. If your update or expansion loses sight of what makes your game so amazing (like the sorry campaign add on for the otherwise super brilliant Gratuitous Space Battles), then you risk misdirecting future energies as you try to right a listing ship.

I am sure that I will eventually work out a way to figure out which of the new Dominion cards fit my understanding of the game. (For the record, I beat Bruce for the first time in ages.) But it will require something pretty dramatic, I think, like a stack draw that is 75 or 80 per cent things I have never seen before; at that point it becomes a new system to learn and I can’t just fall back on the way I have always played the game.