During the awards ceremony at Origins II I had an interesting interview with one young fan. With terribly ernest intensity, he said to me, "Mr. Prados, give us more monster games. On anything."

It was an interesting discussion, and although all its vagaries are not relevant here, the comment on monster games is an important lead-in to a principled discussion of the subject, something which has been significantly absent, but which is of particular importance given the fascination with which the largest game companies are throwing themselves into the race for the biggest monsters. This article is intended as an initial contribution to a discussion of the monsters, with the hope that both gamers and designers will ponder seriously the implications of what is going on.

Essentially the monster game is produced like any other one, with the great advantage that the usual constraints of countermix and mapboard size are lifted from the shoulders of the designer. The usual supporting argument is some form of "bigger is better" - either that everything can be included for the gamer's enjoyment, or that the sale of such a large game brings the company a much larger return for a given R&D expenditure. The initial success of SPI's War in the East and GDW's elaborate Europa productions seem to bear this out, no doubt with the result that every company in the country is now contemplating a monster game on one or another topic.

I will argue, however, that the preoccupation with monster titles is based on inadequate reflection, both by companies and by garners themselves. Companies have been too quick to see the lure of big bucks, and garners have jumped too quickly for the inherent idea of hugeness. The point becomes more apparent with a detailed consideration of the market forces driving the monster game and the design inputs structuring them.

Most companies base the business rationale for their game projects by attempting to derive a quantitative figure for what an average gamer will be able to spend for new games over a defined period - usually a year. In turn, the company selects a package of games intended to soak up as much of the hobbyists' "pie" as possible. Within these parameters, then, the company tries to produce the resultant games with the best possible quality for the least possible cost.

Within this perspective the monster game offers clear advantages. Although the R&D costs for a single title are substantially higher than for the smaller games, using the monster format means fewer titles to produce. The attendent savings for different sets of artwork and separate print runs are such that overall costs are comparable to those of producing a line of smaller titles. In addition, the new formula offers the opportunity to redraft titles that have been previously produced in smaller versions.

None of this sounds particularly bad on the face of it, but the problem is that these considerations are the product of short-term cost-benefit analysis and they neglect the longer term implications of the concept. There are several effects I wish to mention. First, given the longer lead-times to produce the monsters and their attendent higher budgets, by the time that companies accumulate enough sales data to determine whether the monster works as a practical matter, the amount that has been committed by the company to the overall line (if monsters in the pipeline will be huge. Thus, if any problem with salability should develop, the company will be faced with the choice of absorbing a large loss, pushing through the monsters in the hope that at least some will sell, or passing the loss along to consumers by means of raising the price on all their line of games. Certainly a difficult choice. Business considerations are not the only ones of importance with the monsters, there are design considerations involved as well. What the monsters do is to allow the designer to press to the limits of his fantasies in terms of what can be included in a game. While there is nothing inherently wrong with this, it might tend to allow sloppiness to creep into design even more than usual; the argument being that some specific sore point with a design may stick out less if incorporated into a huge game in which it is surrounded by a host of other elements. None of this comes out in the wash, however, until some gamer sets up his $30 dollar game to find out he can't play it, and then the fact that he has spent plenty on the title will begin to tell very heavily. There is, after all, some value to the reduction process that is usually involved in producing the "small" game.

Then there is the old bugaboo of the realism-playability tradeoff. Here the argument is that the monster production allows incredible realism to be included. That would be fine if it were true, but whether it is or not remains an open question. What, after all, is the fundamental difference in the realism of the Battle of Kursk as simulated by a five-board War in the East or a single-map Kursk? The advantages offered by the monster game, in terms of its ability to allow the portrayal of a strategic situation as an operational-level game, are limited at best, and given the playability tradeoff included with the concept, may be the worst thing that has happened to gaming in the past decade. After all, the realism argument ignores one true fact: the hobby is not totally composed of historian types and realism nuts. And if the monster game is to become the standard of the hobby, aren't we ignoring a substantial portion of the gaming public?

Now consider playability in somewhat more detail. The truth is that, because separate decisions must be made by players for each piece within given tactical sequences, beyond a certain level the monster game becomes completely unplayable. A few examples can illustrate the point. At Origins I, a tournament of War in the East, a weekly-turn game, did not get beyond ten turns of the Barbarossa scenario. Similarly, at Origins II, both Terrible Swift Sword and War in the West failed in their demonstration games due to sheer inability of the players to continue concentrating on the games long enough to get through them. Indeed, one of the games could not even be successfully set up.

No doubt there are garners determined enough to go through with such ambitious games. But here I refer to my own experience with Pacific, a Pacific theater game I did many years ago in Puerto Rico, and which has since been redesigned as the strategic game Pearl Harbor. In one of its versions, Pacific came to twelve mapboards, with a rules typescript of 90 pages and some 3,600 counters. Of course, as a history freak I was willing to go through playing such a game. As it turned out, in a game with bi-weekly turns, three friends and myself, playing for eight hours a day, Monday to Friday, took three weeks to play from December 1941 through to January of 1944. By that point summer interest had flagged, and the experience convinced me to go back to the abstracting board.

Tremendous things are possible in a game of such a scope. I myself used to have considerable fun in actually providing for training for individual pilots for the Imperial Navy, and for messing around with aircraft-types within specific air units. But feedback data still indicates that over 90% of games are played solitaire, and certainly monster games are not the way to introduce neophytes to the cardboard battlefield. Monster games will not expand the gaming public, nor is it particularly pleasant, as one friend of mine did, to have to go searching for six months to find an opponent willing to play Bataille de la Moskova, which is actually one of the more straightforward of the monsters. Further, who has the space to leave such a game set up for long erough to play it seriously, except for game clubs, and then there is the danger of missing out on a lot of fun when one matches against a weaker opponent who crumbles early in the play. Then, was it worth setting it up.?

No doubt the games are beautiful too. But are we hobbyists going to buy so many huge games just to hang the mapboards on our walls? And the retail trade-if we want to expand the hobby, thus getting more opponents to play in the long run, and the monsters sell in the stores, how many impulse buyers are going to come back for a second game after walking away with a first monster? And then there is the point that seems to have escaped almost everyone's notice: the first games done, the ones that are supposed to have "proved" the concept, Drang Nach Osten (with its sisters) and War in the East, were all Russian Front games, with an attentive public who will, within limits, buy anything on the East Front. The latest productions have been novelties. But where is the true test of the monster? What happens when someone does a nine-map Great War?

I realize that there is some segment of the hobby that wants monster games. But I would argue that, by and large, those are the same gamers who would find some way' to create such games for themselves anyway. Further, there is a substantial portion of the hobby's media which is already into producing variants, and the monsters, at least on the topics on which they have been produced thus far, are fundamentally only variants anyway. Bigger is not necessarily better, although it may be so in individual cases. Some monster games should be done, because the situations can be best done that way, but they should be done at a slow enough pace to keep track of the monsters' effects on the hobby as a whole, and they should not become the defining catagory of the range of titles that are avilable.

I have argued elsewhere that there should be a distinction drawn between the generality of games and what I have termed as "analytical" games. Analytical games, a concept I developed in the course of doing a French Indochina game during 1969, are those which press against the outer limits of realism. By their very nature they are intricate and detailed, and while their designs may be structured to be playable, they cannot be of overwhelming interest except to a limited segment of the hobby as a whole. To be thoroughly enjoyable on a mass basis, a game must be played, and if a game cannot be finished in one, or at most two, sittings, the likelihood is that it will not be played. Monster games, I feel strongly, belong firmly within the analytical game catagory. The problem is that a lot of companies are fast reaching the decision to plow a good deal of money into them, without adequate consideration of the consequences.

Here I have made my points, as I've done in various conversations at different times. But so long as designers choose to rely on feedback results, I must throw the question back onto you, the garners. In my opinion, a lot of letters and feedback cards going into the "cathedrals of wargaming" are in order. Silence now will not be golden, it will be deadly.