Geryk Analysis: Wargaming
Brooski - Columns - Comments - 10/03/05
I prefer simpler games. I have no problem with a game feeling “gamey” if it produces a lot of interesting choices that can take the game in multiple directions. For me, the best games are the ones that force you to make important decisions all the time. This is why Breakout: Normandy or Paths of Glory are so great: each turn you’re forced to decide what you want to do, what you can reasonably do, and what you need to do. There aren’t any moments of idle fiddling with some extra anti-tank battalions that don’t really need to go anywhere, because every unit needs to go somewhere.
I think traditional hex-based wargames – the kind where you just stack up units and count combat odds, or whatever – have gone about as far as they’re ever going to go. You can make the interface more useful and informative like SSG did with their excellent Decisive Battles of WWII series, but in the end, if you have counters with movement and combat factors on them, and they move around over hexes, there isn’t much else you can do to distinguish your game other than make it really, really big. And that pretty much ensures that you’re going to rob the game of what makes it a game, and turn it into a project.
War in the Pacific is my favorite example of a game that is really a project. I saw a post on a messageboard recently where an experienced player asserted that the first turn for the Japanese takes you eight hours to plan once you are familiar with the game. I haven’t found that it takes that long, myself, but if people are playing it this way, that pretty much removes it from any category of “game” that I can think of.
I’ll be really interested to see how people react to Down in Flames, because that’s like a poster child or Rosetta Stone or whatever something really good is called, for simplification in gaming. The problem is that it goes against everything people assume a computer game should be. It is highly abstract, and doesn’t make you feel like “you are there” or something. Which is fine with me. If you don’t mind me quoting myself again, I’ll just repeat something I said in my last Computer Gaming World “Inside Wargaming” column way back in December 2001:
I am not the general. I am some guy. I just want to play a game, at the end of which the person who performed the best game analysis without solving a third-order differential equation wins. I don’t want to be trained in modern military tactics, even though I know this will be important later when the United Nations invades and someone has to figure out how to recapture Cleveland. I want to have fun playing a game, and if the 180th Volkssturm Regiment couldn’t really get to Dinant and sometimes the Allies lose the war, I don’t feel hurt or disillusioned. I feel this way even though I know it means I’m crazy and a jerk. Thank you and good night.
Read Brooski’s wargaming column, Line of Attack, every month in Computer Gaming World magazine, and the companion blog at http://grognards.1up.com.
| | Previous | | | More Columns by Brooski |
|
|
