{"id":760,"date":"2007-09-13T12:55:49","date_gmt":"2007-09-13T16:55:49","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/flashofsteel.com\/index.php\/2007\/09\/13\/on-the-origins-of-species\/"},"modified":"2007-12-06T15:00:31","modified_gmt":"2007-12-06T19:00:31","slug":"on-the-origins-of-species","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/flashofsteel.com\/index.php\/2007\/09\/13\/on-the-origins-of-species\/","title":{"rendered":"On the Origins of Species"},"content":{"rendered":"

Via Scott Krol<\/a>, Gamespy has an article from John Keefer<\/a> about the wargames of the past and their connection to the cons we know and love.<\/p>\n

I was reading the article (and Krol’s fact checking) as I took a break from writing my review of Armageddon Empires<\/a><\/em>. Then it hit me why wargaming and serious strategy gaming is often pushed off the front page of gaming coverage.<\/p>\n

It has different parents. (WARNING: Gross oversimplification follows.)<\/p>\n

Think about it. How many articles or photo essays have you seen on the ‘”glories” of the arcades of the 1980s? This is the birthplace of the first person shooter, the platformer, the racing game, the action sports game and the flight sim. <\/p>\n

Role-playing games come from D&D, which came from a medieval wargame rule set married to geek icon Tolkien. <\/p>\n

Strategy games come from the board and war games of the 1970s and 1980s.<\/p>\n

Of course, most mainstream strategy titles have used the power of technology to almost entirely hide the board game origins, to the point where many RTS are as close to role playing games or platformers as they are to wargames. This merging of family trees is probably the root of much of the hardcore resentment of the RTS genre on one side and the spreadsheet accusations on the other.<\/p>\n

And it could be part of why there is so much resistance to the idea of strategy games on the console. The console market is the arcade of the new century. Even though the machines work fine for turn based strategy games (I love Catan and Carcassonne on my 360) the emphasis has been on developing titles that remind gamers of things they played on their first generation consoles which, in turn, reminded people of things they played on their Ataris which, in turn, were copies of things they played in the arcade. Action games have come a long way from the coin consumers of the past, but the general idea survives – you are an army of one killing waves of enemies, gobbling health packs and ammo crates.<\/p>\n

In this way, Armageddon Empires<\/em> is a throwback; a game that would really only be feasible on a computer but looks and plays like a card based wargame. And like many of the biggest Avalon Hill games, you really need a walkthrough to understand what you are supposed to do. But it wears its roots on its sleeve; I don’t know Vic Davis beyond the occasional forum comment, but I wouldn’t be surprised to find a strong board game background. If it’s true that game designers design games that they want to play, I think we can learn a lot about the evolution of computer game design by tracking game genealogies through CVs and the like.<\/p>\n

I’ve always liked the idea of game genealogy; the more I learn about games and game developers the more I appreciate the rare genius who can do dozens of original things in a lifetime (Reiner Knizia being the king of them all.) It’s too bad that the Mobygames credits are so incomplete. I’ve tried to update some from my own data, but then they wanted me to send scanned evidence of my changes, etc. and I didn’t get around to that.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Via Scott Krol, Gamespy has an article from John Keefer about the wargames of the past and their connection to the cons we know and love. I was reading the article (and Krol’s fact checking) as I took a break from writing my review of Armageddon Empires. Then it hit me why wargaming and serious […]<\/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":[9,99],"tags":[],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p5GFeQ-cg","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/flashofsteel.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/760"}],"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=760"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/flashofsteel.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/760\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/flashofsteel.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=760"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/flashofsteel.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=760"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/flashofsteel.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=760"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}