This is why I found Avalon Hill’s The General and SPI’s Strategy and Tactics to be such an essential part of board war gaming. In those magazines the designers were often talking directly with the fans about the research and the process that went into designing the game, so they were relatively transparent about what they knew vs. what they didn’t know and how they decided the tradeoffs between accuracy and playability.
I’m curious if there was a similar dialog regarding historical accuracy in, say, Call of Duty (the WWII ones)? From what I can tell (haven’t played it) it strikes me as the heir to a game like Avalon Hill’s Squad Leader, but I’m curious if the makers put any of the same effort into historical accuracy.
Still true with Strategy & Tactics, War Diary, etc.
But with some ancients games, with tougher research problems, we get what seem to me inadaquate solutions. For example, the game Cataphract is supposed to represent the 6th-century Byzantine army and its opponents.
Luckily we have one manual from the period, the Strategikon. (There is also the “Anonymous Sixth-Century Byzantine Treatise on Strategy” but it is now known to be by Syrianos and it is believed to be a 9th-century work.) Unluckily, it comes after defeats and the resulting disorganization, reduction in unit strengths, etc. so the detailed organization wouldn’t be the same. But the manual emphasizes the distinction between cursores and defensores, two groups of their cavalry, while the game doesn’t have any distinction between them, and imho seems to make all their cavalry too powerful. And the manual emphasizes coordination between melee and missile infantry, while the game only gives them missile infantry. And the army organization into mere, divisions, poses its own problems, but could have been included and isn’t.
Unluckily it’s hard to find comparable sources for their opponents.
P.S. It’s possible that most of their research was directly from Procopius [in his Wars, as opposed to his Anekdota] or indirectly from secondary accounts. I am not a specialist in the period, so haven’t tried reading much of Procopius or of the secondary literature on the period. In this case, part of the question is how much to use manuals, documents, etc. for the reconstruction of organized Imperial armies, as oposed to using literary-historical accounts.
I remember when the term “gamer” was pretty much only used to refer to those who played RPGs, of the non-computerized variety. But things change. I don’t even remember the last time I heard it used to refer to anything other than video game players.
Most of my friends play pen and paper RPG’s (or sometimes LARP) and we still call ourselves gamers with each other but have had to train ourselves to always say “pen and paper” when explaining our hobbies so we don’t spend 10 minutes going, “no not video games, no not board games…”
Although most of us also play video games and occasionally board games. No one in my circle is into war games with minis and most have quit collectable card games.
In high school (in the late 90’s) I was very angsty about video gamers “stealing” the title gamer, and then table top gaming started to get applied to other things too. So far “pen and paper” seems to be the new title and I’ve come to care more about clarity and don’t mind anymore.
Except that the interplay between “gamers” and the game industry has defined “games” and “gaming” so narrowly as to ignore all but a tiny part of the potential of the medium (if we can, for convenience’s sake call games a medium, however problematic that is), and ignore most of the potential (and often, actual) audience. That is, “gamers” (in the sense of people who played games) may have once been largely young men who spent a large portion of their disposable income on games. That definition of “gamer” was maintained long after that stopped being true; the industry continued to cater to “gamers” even as they became the minority of players, making games that were more elaborate versions of what had been made before because that’s what “gamers” wanted, while ignoring the majority of the audience. It’s as if the movie industry just made bigger and bigger films about trains arriving at stations (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/L’Arrivée_d’un_train_en_gare_de_La_Ciotat), and all in French.
Yes, This is why I don’t really know what to agree with.
I can see that the “True gamer” perspective is just silly and restrictive, but I’m not so keen on the “True art is difficult- you just don’t get it.” side of things either. Can’t we just get to the point where we accept that there’s actually room for a multiplicity of genres, styles and tastes of games (especially as digital distribution has given us infinite shelf space), and stop it with the accusations of inverse, reverse, pure up or down snobbery. The rise of indie publishing, greenlight, digital distribution, mobile and all that has given such a boost to what gaming can be, catering for one person’s preference doesn’t mean taking fun from anyone else. In fact, the more we recognise that different people enjoy different things, the better. There’s room for casual gamers, “True gamer” games, “Games are art” games, as well as any other sort of genre you can describe. An
I can’t help thinking that the worst outcome would be to end up with games going in the same direction as novels, which have almost totally segregated the mass audience from the genre audiences, and both from the world of literary fiction, ( I hesitate to use the word “audience” here because it doesn’t really have one beyond a tiny pool of academics and critics). And they exist almost as separate worlds, with different imprints, and audiences cut off from outside influences.
Certainly in many ways most of that quote is correct. However it explains nothing and makes no salient point.
It’s like saying novels are merely sequences of words that run a groove and make you read from one chapter to the conclusion. There is no novel which is not formulaic and derivative to a degree almost no one is willing to admit. Even the most widely acclaim prize winning literature exists in a small set of genres alongside the more accepted genres, nobody escapes it. Nor do they escape story structure and beats and the standard processes and structures of writing. The most experimental works of fiction are either less experimental than they first seem and people would have you believe or they really are experimental and try to do away with these are nigh on unreadable (give them a go - something like Amalgamemnon and even that takes structures and literal lines from other texts and mashes them together).
I’d actually say in gaming there is a healthy mix of desire for the novel, the new and innovative as well as repetition. Certainly more willingness of audiences to embrace novelty and originality in game design and mechanics than in any other artistic medium pretty much.
The history of games is littered with the massive leaps forward, that then get copied and turned into genres. The same is true of every other medium as well.
Indeed. There just isn’t the same variety of subgenres in video games as there are in books, film or music. Certainly when it comes to AAA titles.
Even some “indie” games are essentially the same as their mainstream counterparts, just with a veneer of “hipsterism” on top.
Depends. If your cheese-tasting party consists of plates of ricotta and cottage and Velveeta, I don’t think your guests would be out of line for asking where the motherfuckin cheese go at.
Some of the indie experiments about the nature of what even counts as a game deliberately make themselves borderline cases. Of course a game doesn’t definitionally require PVP or high score lists or fanciful kung fu moves, but something like an “interactive” novel with no branching whatsoever and no interaction besides clicking the Next button deserves some scrutiny and skepticism when its creator insists on calling it a game. I clapped for Tinkerbell, does that mean that I was playing a game watching Peter Pan? I’m pretty sure the story would have turned out exactly the same way regardless of my input.
