Sid Meier’s Gettysburg<\/em> was our poison of choice. In one very hard fought battle, my mostly green Union troops were being battered by his Rebel forces, with only our strong position and the fact he had to advance slowly through a forest keeping me in the game. As the time started ticking down, I was pushed from the hill. And then I got notice of reinforcements. I force marched them out of his line site and hit his now tired troops in the back, reclaiming victory at the last second.<\/p>\nThe reinforcements were only a turning point because I made them one. I force marched along the stream. I turned them into battle lines at just the right point to cause maximum panic in his troops. It wasn’t scripted beyond the scenario generator saying “You now have more men.” <\/p>\n
Some games have turning points you can see building hours in advance. Civilization II, in all its simplicity, made clear who hated you and would be your rival. While the game added a full year to my PhD, I suspect, it also gave the game where long tension between my Babylonians and the neighboring Carthaginians led to a heavily fortified border. Carthage had its main cities on my continent and six more on a large island to the west. As I saw Carthage build tank after tank, I built forts right along the border area and manned them. Remember that in Civ 2, entire stacks were eliminated once the strongest defending unit in that stack was killed – unless the stack was in a fort. So I built forts, and Carthage had forts and before long it looked like the 38th parallel waiting for someone to snap.<\/p>\n
Ultimately, it was my navy that won me that war since I could intercept any reinforcements from the other continent. But it was the war that everyone saw coming and that secured victory in the game for me. Sure, Japan would be trouble and I ended up planting nukes in all of their cities. (I am much nicer now than I was.)<\/p>\n
It’s not simply that the drama is not scripted; there is a certain amount of improv to all great strategy and wargames, but they always have pretty firm limits on what can and cannot be done. It’s that the drama has a genuine arc to it.<\/p>\n
In high school, we were always taught that stories had a climax and then a denouement. We were often asked to identify what the climax was, which sometimes felt a little silly since the stories we read were generally pretty crappy and even when they weren’t, there would be multiple climaxes. The way action games and RPGs are structured, with mission after mission and boss fight after boss fight, it often feels like there are multiple climaxes.<\/p>\n
When I talk about stories in game with some of my former colleagues, we sometimes wonder if a game that has a great and well scripted ending, like Red Dead Redemption, for example, earned the ending. Is it a denouement that makes sense in light of everything the player controlled Marston had seen and done? For some of my friends, the ending justifies itself; for others any ending that wants to be considered part of a good story has to fit within that story.<\/p>\n
That’s never an issue for strategy games. Nine times out of ten you get the story and the ending you deserve because you were the author. In a great session of Civ<\/em> or Operational Art of War<\/em> or Rise of Nations<\/em>, you can often pin point when victory was achieved and when you made the change from general to god-king, controlling events instead of simply reacting to them. There may still be multiple climaxes, but that’s not because the story is a bad one, it’s because the story is constantly being rewritten according to your whims and your priorities.<\/p>\nNo action game has ever made me want to be a writer. Some strategy games have.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Though I love RPGs, one reason I can’t really get into a lot of the current story\/action genres that top the charts is narrative related. I love a well-told story with well-realized characters as much as the next guy raised on library cards and soap operas. But so few game stories are able to walk […]<\/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-OL","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/flashofsteel.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3147"}],"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=3147"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/flashofsteel.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3147\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":3148,"href":"https:\/\/flashofsteel.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3147\/revisions\/3148"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/flashofsteel.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=3147"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/flashofsteel.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=3147"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/flashofsteel.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=3147"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}