{"id":1698,"date":"2009-08-13T19:26:10","date_gmt":"2009-08-14T00:26:10","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/flashofsteel.com\/?p=1698"},"modified":"2009-08-13T19:26:10","modified_gmt":"2009-08-14T00:26:10","slug":"the-problem-with-counting-and-the-return-to-ww2","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/flashofsteel.com\/index.php\/2009\/08\/13\/the-problem-with-counting-and-the-return-to-ww2\/","title":{"rendered":"The Problem with Counting and the Return to WW2"},"content":{"rendered":"

Given our recent discussion on TMA<\/a> about WW2, I was struck by Scott Sharkey’s attempt<\/a> to count the number of videogames associated with each 20th century war.<\/p>\n

His results aren’t really surprising. WW2 wins by a billion points.<\/p>\n

I’m not precisely clear on what he is counting. He mentions mostly shooters but he’s talking console games, I assume, because he only finds one Korean War game and MASH<\/em> doesn’t sound like a shooter. He’s clearly leaving out PC games since there have been flight sims and wargames that dealt with this war. Microprose’s 1984 Mig Alley<\/em> for example. A game with the same name came out ten years ago.<\/a><\/p>\n

So while his final conclusion is certainly valid – no one much cares to make Iraq or Korean War themed games when WW2 is out there – I think that a little more clarity about where he’s getting his stats and what (besides Snoopy v the Red Baron<\/em>) doesn’t count would be nice.<\/p>\n

Note that the theories he puts forward about why the Second World War is so popular are very different from the ones that Tom, Julian and I advanced. Sharkey suggests that the clarity of the enemy, the certainty of action and the fact people hate Nazis. These are all factors you want to think about when you want to personalize the game play – make the player the soldier and not the general. <\/p>\n

So the fact that you get big tank battles and that you are on the cutting edge of a thousand technological revolutions and that almost the entire globe gets involved and that you have to mobilize an entire nation…all those things that are big deals for strategy gamers like me are mostly irrelevant once you think about the war in the terms of pretending you are carrying a gun.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Given our recent discussion on TMA about WW2, I was struck by Scott Sharkey’s attempt to count the number of videogames associated with each 20th century war. His results aren’t really surprising. WW2 wins by a billion points. I’m not precisely clear on what he is counting. He mentions mostly shooters but he’s talking console […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_is_tweetstorm":false,"jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","enabled":false}},"_links_to":"","_links_to_target":""},"categories":[19],"tags":[],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p5GFeQ-ro","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/flashofsteel.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1698"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/flashofsteel.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/flashofsteel.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/flashofsteel.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/flashofsteel.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1698"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/flashofsteel.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1698\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1699,"href":"https:\/\/flashofsteel.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1698\/revisions\/1699"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/flashofsteel.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1698"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/flashofsteel.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1698"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/flashofsteel.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1698"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}