The after action report has probably been around in one form or another since the beginning of video games. Though telling you friend how you schooled a rival in Pong is not exactly an AAR, the need to share our gaming experiences goes back pretty far in gaming history.

AAR’s don’t really work, of course, for games where the core experience is always the same. Writing an AAR or live blog of an RPG or shooter with a rail thin plot or whose branches and choices will be the same no matter who goes down them is a pretty ridiculous endeavor. As much as I love Divinity 2 or Mass Effect 2, walking you through what happened to me is a silly idea since if you play you will almost certainly experience the game in the same way. You may have different feelings about Mordin bursting into song, but he will – me pointing this out in a the course of describing what happened to me as I played the game doesn’t make a lot of sense. Plus, there is always the risk of spoilers.

AARs work best with non-linear games (some RPGs, sandbox games, sports games, etc.) and have acquired a special place within the strategy genre. There are at least three different approaches to the strategy AAR.

Explanation: The explanatory AAR serves as a supplemental tutorial or walkthrough. It goes through game mechanics, discusses decisions made in some detail with reference to the rules, and is often written with an eye to the future – the author(s) already know more about the game outcome than they are letting on and are able to highlight decisions that made the world turn out the way it did by the end. The board game AARs I wrote with Bruce Geryk tried to take this route, explaining beyond the rules as we played; there was no real need to go into a lot of detail, but it was important to talk about strategies and plans and why we would take a specific action at a specific time. The ongoing wargame focused Battle of the Blogs between Ian Bowes and Fog of War Games is a great new example.

Entertainment: This is a broad term, but what I mean in particular is that the AAR is written in the voice of the author(s) with no real purpose beyond amusing the reader. There is an assumption that the reader knows enough about the game to make sense of what is happening, and if not broad outlines will be drawn. Tom vs Bruce (now reborn as Tom vs Kelly) is the gold standard here. The only thing these guys want is to keep you amused; if you learn anything about the game, fine. But that’s incidental.

Role Playing: This sort of thing is popular on the Paradox forum. The author(s) assume a character and try to play out a strategy game as the character would. Sometimes this means limiting goals that are achievable in game because they are historically implausible. Sometimes this can include suggestions from readers about what should happen next. Though these also seek to entertain readers, the main purpose it seems is to create a faux history and exercise those fiction muscles that almost everyone thinks they have.

I don’t write many AARs and never have. This is probably rooted in the same reason that I don’t take good screenshots. I get very wrapped up in what I am doing when I play and don’t always pay attention to the very important notes I should be taking. I assumed Bruce’s role in one Tom vs Bruce before the magazine went kablooey and I had to work hard to explicitly note turn numbers, what I was doing and why.

For the last year I’ve been banging around the idea of a collaborative AAR with a colleague that would focus more on the personal experience of play and less on the “and then this happened” that characterizes most AARs. Life and distractions and work we knew we had to do got in the way, though I haven’t really given up on the idea.

The reason I thought it was such a great concept is that the AAR has often put the game at the center of the story and not the gamer. The big reason for this is that AARs have historically been written by people talking about games that they know well, not about games they are new to. This is understandable. You can’t really emphasize what is important in a game session unless you understand what is important in a game design. Maybe we’ll still get that going…

I don’t read many AARs, of course. Too many go down the fiction role-playing path and though some are excellent as that, I am far too literal minded in my games writing to see them as AARs. I am really enjoying the Battle of the Blogs linked above, though. It’s something you should all follow and support if you like wargames.

If you have personal favorites or examples of your own work, please link in the comments.