Principles of Game Design
A Fulcrum of Game Design
This debate is one of the oldest in wargaming, but can also be broadly applied to any game with a claim to "realism," particularly detailed strategy and role-playing games, first-person shooters, simulators, and so forth. - Alan Emrich
Realism versus Playability
by Jon Freeman
from his book: The Complete Book of Wargames
[If this fulcrum of game design,] realism versus playability, is not the burning issue that it once was, it's only because everyone has become tired of the argument - not because a conclusion was reached. The question is: How realistic (read: long and complex) can a simulation be before it becomes too long and involved to be played - before it ceases to be a game? Or, how much can be done to make a game easy to play before it ceases to be a simulation?
There was a time when Simulations Publications, Inc. (SPI) seemed to feel that simultaneous movement - and the tedious order-writing their brand of "SiMov" required - and randomly disobedient units were required by realism. There was also a time when Avalon Hill denied that anything with written orders, "command control," or incredibly detailed rules could be playable. After the Napoleon at War and Modern Battles QuadriGames [simple, playable games published by SPI] (on the one hand) and Squad Leader, Wooden Ships & Iron Men, and Tobruk [complex, detailed games published by Avalon Hill] (on the other), those answers seem as humorously dated as flattop haircuts.
Still, a simulation game ought to meet certain requirements. It should be internally consistent. This may be most readily explained through some gross examples: if one unit is allowed to move four hexes every turn, another ought not to move according to the roll of the die. If an artillery piece attacks by comparing its "attack strength" to an opposing piece's "defense strength," it would be objectionable to have an infantry unit capture by replacement (as in chess) and a cavalry unit take another by jumping over it (as in checkers). Less absurdly, perhaps, a rule ought not to have more exceptions than cases in which it applies. A number, counter, color, or term shouldn't mean one thing in one place and something quite different somewhere else. And so on.
These instances are not as exaggerated as they might seem. Paper role-playing games are notorious for faults of this kind. In Dungeons & Dragons [first edition], for example, the term "level" is used in four distinct ways, none of which is explicitly defined! The numbers used to characterize "armor classes" - which run, illogically and perversely, backward - are utterly unrelated (or, at best/worst, inversely related) to any other numbers, die rolls, or systems used in the game. The newer editions of Tunnels & Trolls admit that, if poisoned weapons are used, you pretty much have to throw out the game's entire system of combat!
Simply put, a game is supposed to make sense. Too often it does not. Much of the complication in modern wargames is due not to depth but to too many special cases, exceptions, and one-time-only rules. Perhaps because of the hectic pace of current production, game designers don't always take the time to come up with truly elegant rules: those that can be stated clearly and simply but remain of general applicability. A historical or contemporary simulation, moreover, must reflect a reality outside the game. This means that battleships can't travel faster than aircraft, that Robert E. Lee did not command the Army of the Potomac in the Civil War, that a rifleman can't stop a tank by himself, and that a cavalry charge against English longbowmen or a Macedonian phalanx is not going to be wildly successful.
A game must represent the possibilities of the engagement. Had things gone just a bit differently, could Napoleon have won at Waterloo or Caesar have lost at Alesia? Probably. Those outcomes, therefore, must be possible in games based on those battles. Yet, you can't have a conflict simulation in which Custer defeats the Sioux at the Little Big Horn or the German battleship Bismarck sinks the entire British Navy. These things simply could not have happened. But relative victory - measured in endurance time or enemy casualties - is another story.
A simulation should allow the actual historical outcome, but in fact this is often a big problem. There is no good way to simulate surprise or ignorance. Consider the Trojan horse. If you were the Trojan player, would you allow the thing inside the "topless towers of Ilium," knowing Cassandra was right and Troy was doomed if you did? Of course not - not unless the matter was taken out of your hands and left entirely up to a die roll, as it is in Troy. How satisfactory is that?
Similarly, the success of the German blitzkrieg in France in World War 2 was due to surprise and the lack of French preparedness. France 1940 was designed to recreate not just the German victory but its magnitude as well; it couldn't simulate ignorance, but it did, quite cleverly, prevent the French player's knowledge from helping him. Unfortunately, playing the French against an unstoppable (if contrived) German juggernaut was as much fun as observing the action of a steamroller as it prepares to pass over you.
You can't go back and repeat the surprises of history, because they aren't surprises the second time around. And you can't spring real surprises of your own, because the rules are not broad enough to encompass the universe of improbable actions. A good role-playing game does allow this freedom of action, but such games don't attempt to recreate the battles of history. A computer can be programmed to fall for the same trick every time, but if that's the only way you can win, how much fun is it? And how much of a contest?
This basic constraint, however, doesn't prevent a simulation from being successful. It can still be an interesting, challenging contest of tactics and strategy. If you want to repeat a particular historical play, solitaire play allows you to make either side as inept as you wish. But don't expect a live opponent to play a dumfounded Dr. Watson to your brilliant Holmes, especially if he's read the book.
"Realism" from Midway to Middle Earth
From Stalingrad, Gettysburg, and Waterloo to Wacht am Rhein, Terrible Swift Sword, and Air Assault on Crete, the vast majority of contemporary wargames have been based on actual battles. Since most such conflicts have been two-sided, most wargames are, at least nominally, designed for two players. In effect, one player takes the part of, say, Napoleon and his officers; he maneuvers the pieces representing the French forces; and he tries to destroy or drive off the Allied pieces and advance on Brussels. His opponent acts as the Duke of Wellington and the Allied officers: using pieces that symbolize the English and Prussian soldiers present at Waterloo, he tries to equal Wellington's historical victory over the French of Napoleon.
Depending on the scale used in the game, the playing surface may be small or so large it requires several boards, and there may be a dozen or hundreds of pieces on a side. As long as the pieces portray with reasonable accuracy the relative abilities of the forces, with similar outcomes under similar circumstances, one scale is as realistic as another. In a hopelessly narrow sense, a game stops simulating the battle as it was actually fought as soon as a single piece is moved to a location never occupied by the real army / regiment / platoon to which it corresponds. Such a strict definition, however, makes a simulation game an impossibility, since a game without options - like poker played with a stacked deck - isn't really a game at all.
It is more useful, therefore, to distinguish games that recreate the terrain, forces, aims, and initial positions of a historical conflict from those versions or variations that introduce major alternatives in the form of a revised order of battle (the forces present), the timing of related events (such as the arrival of reinforcements), or major changes in location, preparedness, knowledge, or policies.
An example or two may be helpful. The last day of the Battle of Waterloo might have gone very differently had Grouchy not spent the previous day wandering all over the countryside looking for the defeated but regrouping Prussian Army. An obvious alternative, then, would be to re-fight the day of June 18, under the assumption that Blucher's Prussians were not available to reinforce Wellington's army.
Besides allowing us to satisfy a bump of curiosity, such semi-historical "what-ifs" and "might-have-beens" can also serve to balance some of what were, historically, rather one-sided contests. Even the unbalanced France 1940 included several alternate orders of battle - reflecting, in theory, a difference in policy, prewar buildup, or British assistance - aimed at giving the French player more of a chance.
Such alternatives are a common feature of contemporary wargames, but they rarely are packaged separately as games in themselves. A notable exception is D-Day, in which the Allied player is free to invade any one of seven different coastal areas, only one of which (Normandy, of course) was actually assaulted on June 6, 1944. A basic part of the game's appeal is the chance to explore the consequences of alternate invasion sites.
Still farther away from history-as-it-happened are games that allow, or are based on, changes so great that the opposing countries are different. In Avalon Hill's Third Reich, for instance, the German player is given the option of not fighting Russia at all - a move that obviously would change World War 2 immeasurably. Diplomacy, which simulates the flavor of turn-of-the-century diplomacy rather than its factual details, allows such unlikely occurrences as an Anglo-German attack on France.
More typical are games based entirely on battles that never took place but that slightly different circumstances might have made plausible. There are several games based on the proposed Operation Sea Lion, an invasion of England seriously considered by the German High Command in World War 2. SPI's Operation Olympic, which is no longer available, was a solitaire game dealing with a possible Allied invasion of Japan in the same war. The subject of Avalon Hill's Invasion of Malta 1942, is equally hypothetical.
Despite what may be initial impressions to the contrary, games like these do not lack historical value. By experiencing firsthand, as it were, the difficulties of an overseas assault, a player in SPI's Seelöwe can get a better understanding of why Nazi Germany decided not to put Sea Lion into operation.
In addition to curiosity and novelty value, a game based on a battle that never took place has two major attractions for non-historians. First, you are not playing in the shadow of Napoleon or Rommel; that is, there is no built-in critical standard by which your "generalship" must be judged. Second, you do not have the original (real) tactics and strategies to fall back on: you must be innovative.
These same reasons help to explain the popularity of the hypothetical-contemporary games (as well as the straight science-fiction and fantasy games), many of which are based on battles that have not taken place but that might occur: Mech War '77, the new and old versions of NATO and Red Star/White Star, and the two Modern Battles QuadriGames, all of which, at least in part, are based on a Warsaw Pact invasion of Ger- many; The East Is Red, which simulates a Sino-Soviet war; Oil War, a fight for Middle East oil reserves; World War Three; Air War; and others. Broadly speaking, all these could be considered science fiction, but they can be distinguished from Ogre or After the Holocaust by their strong historical flavor. The element of speculation is quite limited: Although open to interpretation and subject to certain "Classified" gaps, the data for such potential conflicts are available today. Games like these may not interest the pure "historian," but, if the research behind them is accurate, they cannot be faulted on grounds of realism: tomorrow's sunrise can't be said to be any less realistic than yesterday's simply because it - hasn't happened yet.
While many gamers like to dwell on the events of the past, others prefer to speculate about the unforeseeable but imaginable future or the imaginary and improbable past. As models, science-fiction and fantasy games may take the logically extrapolated near future as it might be (Invasion: America), the present as it might have been had events of the past turned out differently (Dixie), the secondary world of Tolkien's Middle Earth (War of the Ring), the created future of Poul Anderson's Polesotechnic League (The Ythri), or the stories of Michael Moorcock's pyrotechnic if undisciplined imagination. Alternatively, an elaborate and original future history may be developed, as SPI has done with its StarForce trilogy and separately with BattleFleet Mars, Automated Simulations with Starfleet Orion and Invasion Orion, and The Chaosium with a variety of games set on the world of Glorantha. Science-fiction and fantasy games may not appear to be "simulations" at all, but even those with the sketchiest of backgrounds all attempt to evoke - for the duration of play, at least - a separate reality.
Directly challenging a player's intuitive insights, games with extraordinary subject, matter and novel lines of play test the flexibility of his intelligence and the limits of his imagination. Unhampered by the fetters of the past, players of these games must bring to the contest only the weapons of a karate master: open hands, a clear mind, and a willing spirit.
