{"id":3122,"date":"2011-05-17T11:42:24","date_gmt":"2011-05-17T16:42:24","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/flashofsteel.com\/?p=3122"},"modified":"2011-05-17T11:42:24","modified_gmt":"2011-05-17T16:42:24","slug":"who-are-you-what-do-you-want-why-are-you-here","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/flashofsteel.com\/index.php\/2011\/05\/17\/who-are-you-what-do-you-want-why-are-you-here\/","title":{"rendered":"Who are you? What do you want? Why are you here?"},"content":{"rendered":"

In a recent Three Moves Ahead<\/a>, I hailed the ability of Revolution Under Siege<\/em> to make me feel, as a Communist commander, that my decisions did have the future of the Revolution at stake. It really isn’t a role playing game or a true strategy game; it’s a wargame that is about supply lines and command structure and avoiding armored trains. (Sorry, I know they are real but I still think they are funny. Sue me. Maybe we need a “weird weapons” episode.)<\/p>\n

Some strategy games work because they let you make that psychic leap from counter pusher to commander. For a wargame to really do it is rare, but it’s not like it is very common even when your role is clear. Alpha Centauri<\/em> gave you a specific character and ideology to play, but could (before you mastered the math) suck you into its world. But for the most part, a good strategy game doesn’t really transport you into the mind of another.<\/p>\n

If you’ve been missing Bruce Geryk’s ramblings about War in the East<\/em><\/a> on Tom Chick’s Quarter to Three, then you’ve been missing what has proven to be an interesting investigation not just of the game, but of what a wargame represents. These have not all been at the forefront of Geryk’s usual genius mishmash of design analysis, history, and random shots at Romanians. But it’s a question that underlies most serious analysis of a game that pretends to represent something larger.<\/p>\n

Take the question of victory points. Like most wargames, War in the East<\/em> gives you locations to seize or hold and assigns points based on how well you do that. You have no choice in determining what the victory locations are; they are almost always based on an historical understanding of what either a king, general or historian decided the focus of the battle was. This is all well and good for pushing you to react to historical pressures, but a certain weirdness can set in.<\/p>\n

As Matt Kirschenbaum noted in his essay \u00e2\u20ac\u0153War Stories: Board Wargames and (Vast) Procedural Narratives\u00e2\u20ac\u009d in the game design anthology Third Person: Authoring and Exploring Vast Narratives<\/a>\"\"<\/em>:<\/p>\n

Who is the player in Afrika Korps? Are we adopting the identity of a theater commander like Rommel or Montgomery? This is what the box cover [YOU are in Command] would have us believe. Yet wargames routinely slide between macro- and micro- decision making, and the player’s role is further complicated by the presence of counters that embody the historical identities he or she is putatively assuming. So is the player Rommel or is “Rommel” the counter one is moving across the map?<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

If the player is Rommel or Montgomery instead of, at the upper level, Hitler or Churchill, then you at least sort of avoid the issue of how to define what victory is. These decisions are above your pay grade and you can shift the blame and move onwards. Because once you get beyond a certain level of command, there is little point in presuming that the victory points laid out are little more than historical abstractions. Leningrad mattered because High Command decided it mattered. If you are under the High Command level, not a problem. If you are the High Command level, then the idea that you can change everything about the war except your objectives makes the whole idea of being High Command a little silly.<\/p>\n

It’s a larger problem than the logical mazes that Kirschenbaum lays out. Though a clear identity like those you assume in Alpha Centauri<\/em> or Crusader Kings<\/em> or Solium Infernum<\/em> can help a lot, they aren’t quite enough. Take, for example, the Tropico<\/em> games, where I never really feel like a Latin American dictator as much as I feel like a gumball machine passing out the right goodies to placate the masses while I push towards the mission objectives. I would argue that as the Civilization<\/em> series became more complex and personalized around leaders it became even harder to maintain the fiction that you are the cosmic consciousness of a nation. The Total War<\/em> games work for breeding attachment to specific generals or units, but have never really carried me into that mental space where I feel like I am a king or daimyo. (Rome: Total War<\/em> would sometimes take me there, however.)<\/p>\n

Sometimes I think that the more alien and original the setting, the easier it is to feel like you are a part of it. No other game lets me be Trotsky, so there is a further incentive in Revolution Under Siege<\/em> to buy into the conceits of the role playing. The repetitiveness of traditional real time strategy, however, makes it hard to feel like I am a Zerg commander or Greek king or Russian general; the mechanics are too familiar to really get invested in the setting. This is probably one reason why RTSes include story based campaigns; there is a desire to build that connection between the world and the player.<\/p>\n

I’ve written before about how The Sims<\/em> has this effect on me<\/a>. It is probably one of the only strategy games where you can take on multiple roles and feel invested in every single one. It’s a game that defies the idea that clarity breeds connection. It remains a singularly amazing piece of game design that no one has really been able to ape successfully.<\/p>\n

So help me out, readers. When and why do you feel that connection between content, goals and role in a game? I refuse to believe it’s magic.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

In a recent Three Moves Ahead, I hailed the ability of Revolution Under Siege to make me feel, as a Communist commander, that my decisions did have the future of the Revolution at stake. It really isn’t a role playing game or a true strategy game; it’s a wargame that is about supply lines and […]<\/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],"tags":[],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p5GFeQ-Om","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/flashofsteel.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3122"}],"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=3122"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"https:\/\/flashofsteel.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3122\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":3134,"href":"https:\/\/flashofsteel.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3122\/revisions\/3134"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/flashofsteel.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=3122"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/flashofsteel.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=3122"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/flashofsteel.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=3122"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}