{"id":629,"date":"2007-04-16T12:43:01","date_gmt":"2007-04-16T16:43:01","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/flashofsteel.com\/index.php\/2007\/04\/16\/world-war-i-and-game-design\/"},"modified":"2008-05-14T13:04:53","modified_gmt":"2008-05-14T17:04:53","slug":"world-war-i-and-game-design","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/flashofsteel.com\/index.php\/2007\/04\/16\/world-war-i-and-game-design\/","title":{"rendered":"World War I and Game Design"},"content":{"rendered":"

My homeland is going through another spasm of celebration of its grand nation building moment<\/a>. For Canada, this isn’t the 1867 Confederation or even the completion of the transcontinental railway that linked East and West. Instead, the First World War is oft cited as the point when a Dominion with no independent foreign policy took its place alongside the powers of the world.<\/p>\n

The 90th anniversary of Canada’s victory at Vimy Ridge<\/a> is the occasion for this celebration. For Canada – a nation largely free of military adventures – Vimy is sort of Valley Forge, Tours and Marathon all wrapped up in one glorious package. A German outpost that resisted both British and French attacks succumbed to a Canadian assault. Victoria Crosses were passed out and Canada had a clear victory to balance the Pyrrhic moments of Passchendaele and the Somme. At Versailles, Prime Minister Borden could point to Canada’s role in the Great War and demand a seat at the peace table, joined by the other Dominions who had paid so much to support the Empire. By 1931, Canada was freed from British control over its own territory and foreign policy. Future triumphs on Juno Beach or liberating The Netherlands have much less weight in the Canadian consciousness than the Vimy victory, mostly forgotten by the rest of the world.<\/p>\n

The Western Front of World War I has resisted good game design, for a couple of reasons. First, the front was largely devoid of what one could call “battles”. For every major moment like the Miracle on the Marne or the Spring Offensive of 1918, there are dozens of identical pushes using the same failed strategy over and over again. The first few years of World War I in the West defy the conventional wisdom that most battles are tremendously lopsided affairs. Your choices are to model the beginning of the war, or the end.<\/p>\n

One of the biggest true design problems is the players already know what not to do. Trench warfare is the classic wargamer dilemma where the historically proper option is immediately ruled out because only an idiot or a Haig would send hundreds of thousands of troops into a machine gun kill zone. You can model D-Day by having the German order of battle reflect the diversion of resources to Calais. You can model Cannae by accurately reflecting the mobility of the Numidian horsemen. But if you give a gamer an historically accurate posture where the attacker suffers overwhelming losses in the first action phase, the first thing he\/she will do is look for another way.<\/p>\n

To some extent, the resulting stasis models the Western Front quite well. Both sides sit and wait for their moment – either the rolling barrage or reinforcements from the East. Or, if it’s a strategy game and research is an option, they put everything into tanks or air power. In short, knowledgeable players think they know what they need to win, so they play the system until the solution shows up. <\/p>\n

If you limit the scope of the battle to just the trenches of 1915-1917, you avoid this sitzkrieg mentality, but the resulting game isn’t much fun. The manpower needed to push more than a few hexes away is not available without weakening the entire front. Victory becomes a matter of who killed the most clueless volunteers or hasty conscripts. Maybe there can be bonus points if you manage to rub out Corporal Hitler.<\/p>\n

Could the best alternative in this case be a more stylized wargame? The introduction of card game mechanics (like those in Koios Works’ Tin Soldiers<\/em> games) could see “weather”, “political interference” or “inbred general” force the player to deal with historically appropriate mechanics without removing them from the game altogether. A board game like timer could coerce the player into attacking at least once every so many turns, making the choice about when and where to attack even more important.<\/p>\n

The emphasis on realistic postures and OOBs in most wargames, I think, can detract from the power of the medium to represent not just what things looked like on a map before the shooting started but also to capture the logistical, tactical and micro-political factors of the time.<\/p>\n

Fill the comment space with any ideas you might have.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

My homeland is going through another spasm of celebration of its grand nation building moment. For Canada, this isn’t the 1867 Confederation or even the completion of the transcontinental railway that linked East and West. Instead, the First World War is oft cited as the point when a Dominion with no independent foreign policy took […]<\/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":[9,10,119],"tags":[],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p5GFeQ-a9","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/flashofsteel.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/629"}],"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=629"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/flashofsteel.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/629\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/flashofsteel.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=629"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/flashofsteel.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=629"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/flashofsteel.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=629"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}