{"id":2802,"date":"2010-12-07T13:09:56","date_gmt":"2010-12-07T18:09:56","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/flashofsteel.com\/?p=2802"},"modified":"2010-12-07T13:25:45","modified_gmt":"2010-12-07T18:25:45","slug":"world-enough-and-time","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/flashofsteel.com\/index.php\/2010\/12\/07\/world-enough-and-time\/","title":{"rendered":"World Enough And Time"},"content":{"rendered":"

Bruce’s recent post on Soldiers of Anarchy<\/a> and my half-formed rant about tutorials<\/a> are certainly products of our age and experience. It’s not that we are wiser – my list of follies in the past twelve months would be great fodder for Renaissance woodcarvings. It’s more a realization that time is short and games should have gotten better at not making us do what often feels like busy work.<\/p>\n

Last night, I got a Formspring question about Field of Glory<\/em><\/a>, Slitherine\/Matrix\/Hexwar’s great miniatures wargame. What I don’t think I really addressed in the answer is just how easy it is to sit down and play and figure things out as you go. Scenarios run from the small to the huge, the system makes an intuitive sense that you often cannot get in wargames from later periods (flanking, skirmishing, and the like are easy to understand) and there are really no barriers to eventually understanding the battle system once you get past the basics.<\/p>\n

The strange thing about time, though, is that once you have invested it, the pay off never really stops. Take the Paradox super big strategy games – I got into them when I had more time than I will ever have again, so it takes very little for me to get a new one and pick up where I left off unless the system is especially obscure. Someone my age with no pressure to learn these games will be at a loss for a while unless they can find the time to learn them. Divine Wind<\/em> will change a dozen systems in Europa Universalis 3<\/em> that I have mastered (and I dread that) but I know I will get them. Someone just making the effort of learning EU 3 in the last month will have wasted all that time and might struggle a bit with the Paradox way of doing things.<\/p>\n

The irony, of course, is that I love games and systems that require study. I want to get better at games but not just master them in the first week. The exploration and experimentation that comes with a good game, be it a real time game like Starcraft 2<\/em> or a turn based game like Civ, are very important to me. One of the many reasons Disciples 3<\/em> was so terrible was that there was no payoff for sticking it out longer; the game never really got better or more interesting after I had invested hours and hours.<\/p>\n

But then, this is my job. If I find it hard to get into a game or to make time for its crap then I am not doing it well. I sometimes wonder if one reason strategy games have fallen of the front page is that the generation that went to school with them hasn’t the time to keep up or teach their own children, who are now able to get the instant gratification.<\/p>\n

What does this mean for games like, for example, Imperialism<\/em> – the greatest slow burn in strategy gaming history? You would watch numbers change and adjust sliders and then all of a sudden dramatic things would happen. I hate to be pessimistic, since I believe the strategy genre is as rich and diverse as it has ever been, and the move to the console and mobile space has led to a lot of creativity. But I can swear that if I were not paid to play Patrician IV<\/em> – another slow burn, I would not have found time for it.<\/p>\n

Part of the reason I am trying to introduce some non-strategy gaming friends to the genre is to understand how and why the genre still works, where the appeal is for people who were not schooled in it or whose gaming experiences are more frenetic. The more I love strategy gaming, the more I want to understand why that is.<\/p>\n

Man, I should write a book.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Bruce’s recent post on Soldiers of Anarchy and my half-formed rant about tutorials are certainly products of our age and experience. It’s not that we are wiser – my list of follies in the past twelve months would be great fodder for Renaissance woodcarvings. It’s more a realization that time is short and games should […]<\/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":[9,21],"tags":[],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p5GFeQ-Jc","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/flashofsteel.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2802"}],"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=2802"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/flashofsteel.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2802\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2804,"href":"https:\/\/flashofsteel.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2802\/revisions\/2804"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/flashofsteel.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2802"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/flashofsteel.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2802"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/flashofsteel.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2802"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}