If the game allowed stacking and made stacking an editable function…it would be darn near a perfect canvas.
That Bill Gray article does have a kernel of truth, I think, in that when you make a game the system or approach you use and the medium you use, while related, are not the same thing. And indeed, most of the computer wargames that seem to work are built around fairly traditional paradigms drawn from boardgaming. I do agree with those who criticize the rather facile suggestion that computerized versions of board games are somehow the same or interchangeable with actual physical games; the two have very different meanings and embody very different things in reality. And yes, the somewhat embarrassing glowing references to some of those PC wargames is cringe-worthy, given the dismal AI and indeed questionable fidelity of the game systems.
Still, I do think that a message of “don’t automatically dismiss proven board game paradigms when making a computer game” is a valuable addition to the equally valuable maxim of “don’t try to force one medium into another, different medium just because.” It’s all about figuring out what your design goal and user experience is supposed to be, and using the tools necessary to get there.
One other thing that struck me about that article was the rather simplistic treatment of player interactions. The author seemed to pose two opposed states, solo or face-to-face, with no understanding of the shades of nuance between those extremes. Synchronous and asynchronous gaming over the Internet, the use of voice chat, gamers who play solo but participate vociferously in community discussions and even modification/scenario building…these are all part of computer gaming. The idea that we’re all a bunch of isolated introverts is a bit unconvincing.
I really like the thesis, it’s just that the proofs and data and everything else in it was wrong. :) But the message that design is an approach, not a specific medium is spot on.
But I think we are even saying that 100x better than he did.
Yes, the article was somewhat all over the place. I agree, too, that citing a survey no one has access to is about the same as saying your uncle Joe told you this.
And for a bunch of introverts, I can say the folks at the Origins I used to go to back in the late seventies and early eighties partied pretty damn hard and wild.
Uncle Joe told me a lot of things. Like how to keep my damn mouth shut…
I quite enjoyed the article. I disagree with it, but thats ok, it was thought provoking.
For me I think the big factor nobody has yet addressed satisfactorally is the WAY rules are held in wargames.
So in my half baked crank theory the rules for a boardgame are present in a players head. A player attends to them. That is part of the enjoyment and decision making process.
For a computer boardgame port those rules are still active and yet because the computer is holding them in its head they are not present in the minds of the players in the same way.
I guess another way of saying it is reading through the sequence of play, looking at the combat tables and implimenting them as a player feels very different than having a computer do so, even when the rules are the same.
In the same way for minitaures, attending to the spatial problems is different than miniature wargames games on a computer.
I admit I am on shaky logical ground here but its how wargames FEEL to me. I know it shouldnt make any difference but it does.
Oh and I also agree with @Navaronegun that the author is waving away a very big elephant in the room, namely that those old hex and counter computer wargames felt like they were held together by spit and string.
The Hamster got mighty tired in his wheel, Rod.
:) Sorry for my typos by the way. I went and fixed them. I havent even been drinking! Although I intend to correct that immediately :)
To use Strategic Commander above as an example, what I like about it is that it slows that S*** down. It kind of makes you approach it like a boardgame. And thats a good thing.
Brooski
4513
Yeah, the tactile aspect of enforcing the rules in a boardgame changes the game experience when compared to the computer. As Greg Costikyan pointed out, B-17: Queen of the Skies is a passable narrative generator only because you roll the dice and look up things on charts yourself. Putting it on computer would just kill it. Which, btw, is why I don’t think digital Nightfighter is going to work.
Frankly, I’m surprised you even acknowledge the legitimacy of rules at all, Rod! Shouldn’t players just be making stuff up along the way to suit themselves? ;)
JoshL
4514
Holy smoke, AGEOD was written in Delphi?? I worked on Delphi! It was awesome! But, um, a bit out of date now…
Technical debt caught up with them when Delphi all but kind of died. I must say it wasn’t a completely crazy choice - Delphi was a very good environment for manipulating complex datasets minimizing the amount of red tape - but the lack of support for graphics etc. eventually showed up. I am not sure they could even use hardware acceleration on anything later than Windows 7.
Is there anything like ‘technical debt’ for board war games materials or their rulesets?
Components. Though those take much longer to show their age (technically speaking…printing in say 1978 compared with 2008).
Components have never looked better, nor more reliable in reproduction. There really is no excuse for poor components anymore.
The beauty of rulesets is that you do not have to move at the “speed or the ability of AI” for our kind of games.
In fact, some smart designer is gonna design a bunch of games strictly for multiplayer one day…and clean up.
Mr. Grognard Sunshine’s WAP (Wild Ass Prediction) for the Month.
Good point on B17, I hadnt thought of that before. hmm.
Well quite :) More seriously I am genuinely interested in computer driven dynamic rule systems. (an AI umpire in effect) it gets pretty complex pretty quickly though. Definitely not a trivial problem.
Do you mean something like Chris Crawford’s Storytron?
Like the PC version of WiF? :-)
Ending up there by default because the AI could never work doesn’t count.
When I think of willingly and de facto multiplayer-only games, this very old story comes to my mind
A Fox one day spied a beautiful bunch of ripe grapes hanging from a vine trained along the branches of a tree. The grapes seemed ready to burst with juice, and the Fox’s mouth watered as he gazed longingly at them.
The bunch hung from a high branch, and the Fox had to jump for it. The first time he jumped he missed it by a long way. So he walked off a short distance and took a running leap at it, only to fall short once more. Again and again he tried, but in vain.
Now he sat down and looked at the grapes in disgust.
“What a fool I am,” he said. “Here I am wearing myself out to get a bunch of sour grapes that are not worth gaping for.”
And off he walked very, very scornfully.
borrowed from the Library of Congress.
Usually, the only that transpires is in the postmortem of a project we read something like the What a fool I am bit. I think one learns more from the careful observation of the proceedings than from just counting the number of end results of a similar type. Where someone failed, somebody else may succeed.
For instance, where many had failed - playing Go, winning Poker real world tournaments or playing capture the flag so well that humans want the bots in their teams - others are succeeding to some extent and at a great cost. Right now, replicating these landmark achievements any given Sunday is not feasible. But now comes my own WAP prediction: within our lifetimes there will be way more efficient methods, widely available in open source libraries providing similar abilities, and as pervasive as speech or handwriting recognition is in 2018.
Kinda. My interest is more in AI created rules of new games. Doubly so if they can do it in realtime. Artificial game designers if you will.
That’s pretty interesting, Rod. What would the guiding principle for choosing one particular rule amongst other possible ones? What form would those rules have?
