[Joe Miranda, currently the editor of Strategy & Tactics, is one of the most prolific game designers of modern times. His knowledge, experience, and position in the industry give him a unique insight into the wargaming community.]

GameFix: I'm sure many of our readers would be interested in knowing a little about you. Where did you go to school? Military experience and such?

Joe Miranda: I have a bachelor's degree in history from UCLA, and a master of science in criminal justice, the latter from California State University, Los Angeles. I'm probably one of the few people in my graduating class who actually gets to apply their history degree. I served a couple of tours in the Army National Guard and Reserve, and was an instructor at the Special Warfare Center at Fort Bragg. My main military education came from reading endless volumes on the subject. And playing wargames.

GF: What got you interested in the hobby and when?

JM: Back when I was in high school I was very interested in the military. This was during the post-Tet era, mind you. When going to the local hobby shops, I saw these military games by something called the Avalon Hill company. The game boxes seemed to contain an entire world. My first two wargames were Afrika Korps and Stalingrad. Upon playing them, I immediately realized this was a quantum leap forward in what was available to the public.

GF: When did you design your first wargame and what was the title?

JM: Nicaragua, in conjunction with John Burtt. This was back in 1987. I had complained to Keith Poulter, who was running Strategy & Tactics at the time, about the abysmal treatment low intensity conflict was receiving. He gave me a chance to put my money where my mouth was.

GF: How many wargames have you designed and which is your favorite?

JM: About 20. Trajan is my favorite. It was an asymmetrical situation, with the ponderous Romans versus the mobile Parthians. It presented the Ancient Wars system in its pure form. The idea was to show warfare from the psychological perspective of the participants. As for other designer's games, I like Jim Dunnigan's Chicago, Chicago, which was a wargame on the riot at the Democratic Convention in 1968. It had a really bizarre graphic approach that caught the screaming headlines of the 1960s. This is the sort of thing that wargaming should be doing. Significantly, its rules were short enough to be printed on the map itself.

GF: What is your favorite period for wargaming and why?

JM: The ancient world is fascinating because there are a lot of analogies between then and now. I was reading Ammianus Marcellinus' Roman History at the time of the 1990-1991 Gulf War and was struck by the parallels between the Roman and American campaigns in Mesopotamia, at least on the strategic level. But actually I like doing modern political games, particularly Crisis 2000 and LA Lawless. The main thing is to get a lot of information in a four-page rules format; you do this by making most of the combat interaction between the players.

GF: What motivates you to design a game?

JM: A lot of it is that I want to put together games I would like to play.

GF: What do you find is the most difficult part of designing a game?

JM: The order of battle. Unless you are dealing with a well-documented period, information frequently has to be pieced together. We must give multiple kudos to 19th century military historians in this regard, as they kept fairly complete records-a lot better than modern historians, I should add! When doing a British Empire game, for example, I had the records for the British Army of the Indus available. But ever try finding out what exactly the Indian Army had in 1965? Brother! Another major problem is the Combat Results Table. It's not that the information is not available; it's that in many eras you have to show the effects of many different things. In Seven Years War (S&T 163), we had to have all sorts of die roll modifiers to account for leadership, troop quality, cavalry, etc. This is valid (quantitative versus qualitative factors), but also a little sloppy.

GF: You've been around the wargaming industry for awhile. How do you view the current state of games?

JM: I think a major problem is what I call the "decadence of wargaming." What I mean by this is that we have all become so used to the standards of wargame design as set by Avalon Hill that only endless baroque elaborations are considered valid design. This plays hob with the newcomers, who can't figure things out. The best approach is to use the Basic-Advanced game rules. But then a lot of players feel cheated if they cannot use every last optional rule we ever thought of.

GF: What do you think most of the current wargames lack in their designs?

JM: There is not a sufficient appreciation of the cultural and psychological factors. We have to look at the irrational side of things. In designing Storm of Steel, a strategic game on the First World War, I had to simulate the psychology of the combatants, all of whom were willing to throw away a century of rationalism and progress for mutual annihilation.

GF: I know you like to add Command and Control to your games. Why do you think it's important and what other "soft skills" do you think are often overlooked in wargames?

JM: What a lot of people miss is that the commander's biggest problem is simply getting his own people to do what he wants. The enemy takes care of himself. I think the intelligence situation is also very important. A lot of it is in perception of intent. Sun Tzu has one of his famous cliche lines about knowing the enemy and yourself, etc. He's right. This is something I tried to address with the Stratagem Markers in the Trajan series. The idea was that by choosing different types of Stratagems (military, political, intelligence), this would influence your strategy for the turn. I like to make a wargame a contest of wills as well as numbers.

GF: Do you think the current run of wargames is too simple, too complicated, or just right?

JM: There is a lot coming from every angle. I like to have games where the intent is obvious. A detailed sequence of play, as SPI used in its later games, is really the heart of a well-organized rules system.

GF: There has been a lot of talk about wargaming rules in the industry being too simple? What do you think?

JM: What I would like to see is some sort of standardization of basic rules, and then have plug-in modules for the more complex things. SPI did something like this with their Strategy I game, two decades ago. It was a system which you could use to simulate any war in history.

GF: As the editor of S&T you've had the opportunity to see many gaming magazines. How do you view the current state of hobby magazines?

JM: The entire wargaming community has one of the highest levels of military education as a result of reading wargaming magazines. Your average wargamer is much more knowledgeable about what is going on in the real world. Wargame magazines probably did more to educate people about the NATO and Warsaw Pact armies than anything else. Another good example is the series on the World War Two North African and Russian Front Campaigns done in the early 1970s in S&T. This broke a lot of ground in the area of the effects of cohesion on modern armies and anticipated the development of the U.S. military's Airland Battle doctrine.

GF: Certainly the hobby is growing and changing. What do you think the standard game magazine will look like in five years?

JM: Probably the inclusion of a computer game disc.

GF: What do you think of the growing trend of the hobby to have a gaming version and non-gaming version of the magazine?

JM: It's a good idea to get more coverage. The amount of information you get out of a wargame magazine, even without the game, beats any of the popular military history magazines. Wargaming magazines need to become more of a voice in the current military debate. One of our advantages is that, by getting the wargame, you have a chance to check out the theory by playing the simulation.

I am constantly meeting people who are surprised when I show them a current copy of Strategy & Tactics. A lot of people thought the hobby died when SPI collapsed. The nongaming magazine versions will hopefully be a form of advertising for the hobby itself.

GF: There has been some controversy of late about the size of the gaming magazines. What do you think the size ofthe ideal magazine should be and what topics would you include?

JM: We need to do a lot more on conflicts in progress. But given the lead time on design and printing, things are often overcome by events.

GF: How do you think computers will effect the wargaming industry? Do you see computer aided games like Aide De Camp becoming a bigger part of the hobby?

JM: The main thing about a board wargame is that you can use it as an information tool. You can actually look at the map and counters and get information. There is also the physical quality of the game. I like to read the rules of old SPI games. They had a lot of information in there. Even if you did not play the game, it was fascinating to look at the processes they used to translate the historical situation into a game. As for computers, I think computer games would work a lot better if they could solve the screen size problem. Scrolling around is distracting. Computer games should emphasize all those things which board gaming finds difficult or redundant, like limited intelligence.

GF: What do you think about the concept of an e-mail magazine?

JM: Great idea, but everyone is becoming so overloaded by their e-mail that I wonder if they need another input!

GF: Thanks for answering all the questions. Before we go, you should have a free forum to express any opinions qr areas we haven't covered. Joe, this is your time.

JM: One of the things that bugs me about 1990s America is that, despite the barrage of media the public is exposed to, there is very little real information out there on contemporary military conflicts, and virtually no analysis. What we get is essentially the same news clips over and over again, sort of like 1984's telescreen war. The U.S. is the only superpower in the world, yet the public has little grasp of strategic realities, other than on a gut level. One of the things wargaming is good at is presenting both data and analysis. We need to look at ways of making wargames a tool for understanding the real world. The several wargame magazines which covered the Gulf War presented more information than all the television newscasts I ever saw. We have to look at ways at marketing ourselves to a wider audience.

At the same time, we have to remember we are also a form of recreation and produce games that ought to be enjoyable.

Wargaming really took off during a period of generally perceived Western politico-military decline, the decade after Tet. Wargaming was a means to re-evaluate a lot of things. I also saw it as a way to bring people together from all over. I attended a few SPI playtest sessions in the 1970s, and you had anti-war types playing alongside military personnel. We have to look at ways of taking advantage of the current angst. A major discussion in America is in about domestic conflict and the role of the military. I did Crisis 2000 to explore some of the options, but mainly to get people to think a bit.

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