Recently I have been thinking a good deal about various things learned from recent accounts of games played within the United States government. A couple of them were mentioned in this space in an earlier article, but there have been more since. I had almost determined to proceed with a fresh piece on the latest in real life simulations when I changed direction thanks to a recent exercise in alternative history. I had agreed to supply an alternative history version of the Battle of the Bulge, and encouraged by that experience, I pulled out a classic boardgame on the same subject to try one of the great exercises that games enable us to do - experiment with history. The results led to my present essay. Essentially, I programmed the game with inputs identical to those I had used in my counterfactual history. The identity of the simulation is not important. What is of interest is that the game was set with identical assumptions to those used in the "history": delayed Allied reinforcements based on a certain view of the surprise, corrected order of appearance resulting from more comprehensive historical accounts that have emerged, certain German forces released from reserve at different times either as historical corrections or due to the assumptions I myself was making. In all there were a lengthy series of modifications but the net result was very satisfactory. Then I put rubber on the road and played this game solitaire. The Germans mounted their standard ferocious attack to build and sustain the offensive momentum needed to succeed in the Bulge campaign. Readers familiar with this particular battle will know that the Allied front is stretched very thinly at the outset of any Bulge game, and that the Allied player's possibilities hinge directly on the reinforcements and their ability to block road junctions critical to German forward progress. For the German player, conversely, the key is mass, in order to generate the odds required to ensure clearing each road each turn, while incidentally destroying units to keep Allied counter density on the board at the lowest level possible. In the actual play both sides competently executed their optimal strategies. The German side made no major errors, nor was there any highly adverse runs of luck using the dice to resolve combat. I called off the game after most of a day's play, when it became clear that reinforcements had begun arriving at such a rate that the German offensive was effectively bogged down. The outcome bore little resemblance to the alternative history I had assembled. The odd thing was that the end-state in this game seemed not very different from what I remembered of typical fronts achieved in this game in plays at other times and places long ago. Is this historical? It is in a certain sense, that in which Germany lost the Battle of the Bulge. Some of the government wargames I would have commented upon were, naturally enough, simulations of attacks on Iraq. All ended in U.S. victory, at varying levels of force, casualties, and time consumed. Other games simulated the postwar situation in Iraq. They predicted widespread insecurity, looting, economic dislocation, ethnic differences, and more. Would those results be "historical"? Just what is "historical" anyway? There are gamers who would laugh and, referring back to the Bulge example, counter that there never was a Bulge game the Germans could win. I'm not certain that's true though it is clear the German player usually has his work cut out for her/him in any game on this topic. But such an approach is a design sell out. That is historicity on the cheap. In any simulation a historical result needs to be high on the list of possible outcomes but it ought never to be the only possible outcome. Time for design theory 101 ... In creating a game there are several necessary elements. For today's purposes the discussion will be restricted to actual historical (not current or future) simulations. The first is an accurately weighted representation of forces. Also required is an appropriate treatment of the battle area, in terms of terrain and geometry, whatever may be the basis of the game system. Some designers basically stop there, utilizing game mechanics, rules, and systems that are standard in some fashion. The best designers go further, thinking deeply about the nature of combat and the ways this can be represented on a board (or by a machine program for that matter). This requires postulating theorems about the interactions of technology as embodied by weapons on the battlefield, the impact of assorted weapons acting in unison, the effects of organization on the simple capabilities of weapons, the suitability of those organizations with that technology in the terrain in which combat action occurs, judgments as to combat effectiveness of various forces, and the ways in which external factors (command control, intelligence, air power, etc.) can influence the immediate outcome. Interactions moderated by the game system among the forces portrayed, which are modeled along all the different axes just enumerated, generate the feeling of authenticity in the game as a whole. The entire approach to the "historical" is somewhat different, and a design carried out in proper fashion should automatically contain the actual outcome among its possibilities. There is also the question of loose versus strictly historical outcomes. In our Bulge example, for instance, is it necessary that the Allies end every game still in control of Bastogne, not to mention Spa, or Liege and Namur? If the German player grinds ahead and then runs out of steam, having taken Bastogne but short of the Meuse, is that result historical? In terms of the dynamics of the German offensive it probably is. Aiming at a strict historicity results in a rigid game that is going to be many things, including less fun to play. Loose historicity may be more fun, on the other hand, but has its own problems when the very thing that attracts us to the games is to experiment with history on a board (or computer screen). At a certain point the game loses interest because it is not enough of a simulation. At the same time, loose historicity may be all that is possible within a given game system. In the last issue this column commented on the recent trend toward card-driven games, the latest entry in which genre (at least which I have seen) is GMT's WWII: Barbarossa to Berlin. Having now played that game it is apparent that the problems of historicity in this type of system, detailed there, have not yet been solved. The necessities driving operations within the game mechanics ensure that many of the conditions that should be constraining the players never occur at all. At some stage playtesting needs to moderate the design approach. The historical outcome needs to be generated by the game in play, reliably, among a number of runs. Other outcomes have to be possible as well or the result is not a game. Simultaneously, the functional and historical features that condition action have to be present or the game is not enough of a simulation. Among equal players there should be a result that could be termed historical approximately half (forty to sixty percent) the times the game is played. In solitaire play it should be possible for the gamer to win using either side. The testing ensures that both sides of the equation are examined thoroughly before the game is put out to market. It also gives an opportunity to air the system, to expose it to garners who want all the classic elements of the game situation as well as the particular characteristics of the game system. Design and testing are synergistic in their relationship. More testing by itself will not ensure historicity if the game system is incapable of simulating a piece of history. The plea has to be for more design thought and more playtesting. Rigid historicity is unpalatable because it does not allow enough scope for players, their skills and their proclivities, and for the "what ifs" that affect history. Loose historicity is not acceptable because it ultimately loses the gamer that wants to feel the texture of reality and experiment within a range of plausible outcomes. There exists between these extremes a combination of moderate complexity and simulation fidelity that should permit satisfactory historicity. A dedicated playtest effort will identify the points of friction between the desire to play fast and that to be "pretty", as it were, as well as the features that are the sheerest fun. The challenge is to keep the fun in a stimulating fashion. That is the direction design needs to go in. Back to Table of Contents -- Against the Odds vol. 2 no. 3 Back to Against the Odds List of Issues Back to MagWeb Magazine List © Copyright 2004 by LPS. This article appears in MagWeb.com (Magazine Web) on the Internet World Wide Web. 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