I spent last week working my way through Spartacus: Blood and Sand, the Starz TV series from earlier this year that is equal parts soapy fun and ridiculously overdone spectacle. The first couple of episodes are terrible, and it never really rises above “good”. But the pacing is excellent with some great “what the hell just happened?” moments.

I talked to a friend about the historical Spartacus and some of the problems he posed for Rome and that he still poses for historians. It led me to think about one of the issues that made the slave rebellion so successful so quickly – Rome underestimated the size of the problem, even though it had faced a rather large revolt in Sicily a generation earlier.

Guessing wrong is one of the great joys of strategy gaming, but one that is difficult to pull off well. In the ideal design, the player would encounter an unforeseen situation, misjudge how to deal with it, face further setbacks, but then be able to come up with a workable solution. The player will have been challenged, suffered near defeat, but learned valuable lessons. A good strategy game should always give you the impression that nothing is certain.

This is hard to do for a number of reasons. First, strategy gamers tend to embrace the Powell Doctrine – use overwhelming force to subdue an enemy. Underestimation is hard to work into a design if players use their biggest and best army to crush the tiniest speck. Second, a lot of strategy gamers have embraced the narrative of eternal forward progress. Suffering a near crippling loss can get in the way of this upward momentum story, so people reload games or quit if things start falling apart. Third, good gamers are much less likely to guess wrong consistently, especially once they’ve learned how to read the system.

Some of my favorite gaming moments have come when my own hubris has gotten in the way. The Civilization game where I was loved by all but one rival, and that tiny war I started still spiraled into a World War because I misjudged my enemy’s diplomatic strength. The Europa Universalis game where my Muscovite empire though a weakened Lithuania would be a pushover, leading to a bloody war of attrition that took me 50 years to recover from – to win the game and teach those Lithuanians a lesson. The wargame where I rushed my armor ahead to seize an objective, but was then forced to extricate them from an encircling enemy because I scouted poorly.

It is important to note that I take responsibility for those errors. That is the fourth and hardest part of designing recovery from error. If the player feels that he/she can blame the game for his/her mistakes or chalk it all up to bad luck, then there isn’t a lot of joy in undoing the damage or in rebounding from folly. Being an idiot and learning from it is a big thing, and the stories you get from those experiences are better than the inevitable march of the Aztecs, or whatever alternative there is.