A schizophrenic man walks into a psychiatrist’s office and announces, “I have an identity crisis...and so do I!” In truth, something like that occurs in wargaming almost every time we set up the figures on the table. If rules designers don’t pay careful attention to defining whom players are supposed to represent, and how they are to do that, the logic of the game can suffer a nervous breakdown. When a 1,800mm player sits at a table that is covered with 25mm, 15mm, or 6mm figures, and casts his gaze over them, it is as an outside observer, from a “third-person” point of view. He is a spectator. Indeed, he is like a sports spectator in the top row of the stadium, able to see all the ground and all of the action from above - even some ground and action that the game participants themselves can’t see. However, since we want to be participants in a game, rather than just spectators, we need to incorporate a 1st person point of view into the game. We recognize that if we insist on using miniature figures on a tabletop there will always be an “identity crisis” - players can never be totally removed from a 3rd person point of view. Still, that is a price we are willing to pay in exchange for keeping our figures and terrain boards. So it is the job of the wargame designer to minimize the 3rd person point of view appropriately and to give some sort of 1st person role to the player. This means defining when, where, and how the 1st person role can be carried out by the player, and the “character” (the role player is acting for) then reverts to the 3rd person to observe the outcome of the 1st person decisions. This can be complicated. Things get even more complicated when players have to assume more than one 1st person role because efforts have to be made to prevent one role from unfairly affecting another. In some ways a good game is similar to a dramatic presentation. It begins with a sense of time and place. Conflict raises the stakes and makes the story interesting. The protagonist is described in such a way as to draw the audience (player) into identifying with that character, in effect, to see things through, or at least to appreciate them, from that character’s point of view. Now the player-audience is still physically a spectator, viewing the entire play from a 3rd person point of view, and, just like the tabletop game, that is a fact that cannot be overcome. However, we try to minimize that and help to suspend disbelief by illustrating the psychological framework that character is acting within. The audience can better identify with that character when they understand the limits of that character’s knowledge, the experience the character has had in his “life”, and what type of personality he has and how that makes him behave. This explains his motivations and gives plausible reasons for his actions. The antagonist must have a goal, and overcome obstacles. For maximum interest, or a satisfying conclusion, those obstacles should be in some sense “reasonable”. The more random, or unknowable they are for an audience, the less likely they are to maintain the audiences’ suspension of disbelief, or identification with the primary character. The further the author has strayed from believable circumstances, the more likely it is that he’ll have to resort to some sort of Deus ex machina to achieve a satisfactory resolution. Design To bring this into game design means that the rules writer has to make some decisions. In a real battle, every human being is making some decision of some type, conscious or unconscious, all of the time - even if it is just to “do nothing” or to just continue to do what he is already doing. The designer has to must first decide who the decision-makers are to be in his game, and then has to figure out which of those, if any, do not need to be portrayed by players. This is because to have a player make decisions for every single decision made by all actors in an historical battle would lead to a totally un-playable set of rules. (Indeed, such a game would take much longer to play than was needed to fight the real battle.) A game can be made un-playable by giving a player too many units, even if there are few decisions to make for each unit, or by forcing him to make too many decisions, even if there are only a few units for him to handle. Thus, many decision points or decision-makers must be represented by combat results tables, dice rolls, judges’ decisions, automatically-occurring rules and sequences of play, or anything else the designer wants. In these “represented” situations players are passive spectators with a 3rd person point of view. Therefore, a successful designer must first ask himself what command level or levels are the most important for his game to represent, and which are less so. Then he needs to look at how much detail and how much abstraction he will need or can afford in his game. This means compromises will have to be made somewhere in the design. Players are then expected to take on roles, or represent characters, at particular command levels that the game designer decides are crucial decision-making positions, or wants, for reasons of his own, to have a particular experience be represented. These are the places where a 1st person point of view becomes important. It needs to be made clear, though, that “important” is a relative term. Napoleon was important, but that does not mean that he is important in every game design. If a designer wants to focus his game on regimental commanders, then it is “important” that someone has the 1st person point of view of a regimental commander, not Napoleon, even if there are many regiments and a painted figure of the Little Corporal on the table. On the other hand, if the game means to show army-level fighting at Austerlitz, it would be strange to not give a player the Emperor’s perspective and ask him to make decisions accordingly. (Ah, players. If we didn’t have to worry about having actual people play our rules, many of our wargame designs would produce some really excellent theoretical games! A shame, really...) Once a designer has decided upon the command levels he wishes to emphasize, he needs to figure out how players can take on portraying one or more of those levels, because one cannot predict how many players will be involved in a game. One Saturday there may be five players, but a week later maybe only two will show up. (Of course, a game designer could say that his rules are written for “x” number of players only, and that the game cannot be played if there are not exactly “x” players available. That would certainly make his job easier, but would lead to fewer games being played.) Possibilities Therefore, the designer has to be prepared, in one set of rules, for several possibilities for each side: 1. One player may have to take on all roles 2. All players have multiple roles 3.One or more players have one role while others have multiple roles 4.There is one player for each and every command level role. Next, in game terms, the rules writer must decide what the similarities and differences will be for the different roles in his game. The set of problems or decisions facing an historical colonel, and the methods he must use, will in some ways match and in some ways differ from those facing his Corps commander. The designer needs to think this out and decide if he wishes to write rules that will distinguish between the two or not - and, if so, in what way? When will players need to adopt a 1st person point of view, and when will they use the rules to progress the game in the normal 3rd person role? Indeed, using the “dramatic model” alluded to earlier , the author might consider how information, knowledge, experience, personality, and motivation would fit into different situations. That requires another design decision, which is how much the rules should try to account for those factors, and how much should be left to the player’s own information, knowledge, experience, personality, and motivation. Fantasy role-playing games deal with these questions all the time, but in those games the information available to players is controlled for the most part by the “game master-umpire”. Role-playing considerations are much more difficult, some might say too difficult, in a miniatures game, even one that has an umpire available. In condition #4 above, where one has a player for each and every role in a game there is excellent scope for portraying the differences for different commanders at different levels, but even then the players themselves have “too much information” by virtue of the fact that they can see the same game table and can read the same rulebook as all the other players. The other three situations all involve “conflict-of-interest” and “cross-contamination”. That is, if one player is representing more than one “role”, and there are no game rules restrictions placed upon him, he is not likely to make decisions by using only the knowledge and motivation available to the “character” he is at that moment representing. His decisions will colored by information that should be known only to some other “character(s)” in the game, or by information that couldn’t be known by any character in the game but is accessible to the player because of his “spectator” view of the game table. Note that this is not the same as “cheating”, which means deliberately choosing to break a rule. This is instead the “identity crisis” which is a physical fact that cannot be overcome. Therefore, we can only try to place restrictions in the rules that will minimize the effects of the physical facts. In other words, we need to place 3rd person point of view mechanical limits in rule form that reduce the player options available when in the 1st person persona. If we assume a set of rules allows a certain range of actions in certain situations by the units in the game, (such as moving, firing, changing formation, etc.), then, broadly speaking, there are two approaches to restricting player options. The first method would be to allow the player total freedom in applying those actions if he passes some sort of threshold or test. For example, a set of rules might require a player to roll dice to see if his troops are “activated”, or “have initiative”, or are “within his command range”, or some such rationale. This results in some units being eligible for player use while others are not. The player is then free to use those units to best advantage, as allowed by the rules, based upon his 3rd person “player knowledge”. Thus, a player might find it to his advantage to move a unit to the right, and then the very next time, have it move to the left. The decision would be based upon the best use the player could see at that moment, without reference to prior actions. The second approach would be to define the possible 1st person roles in the game, the conditions that require them to be activated/deactivated, and a limited set of options for those roles. These options are limited by the designer’s interpretation of how consistent they are with prior actions that had been taken by that “character”. This is done to limit players to acting as their 1st person “character” might have acted, given that that character would have less information than a player would naturally have. Thus, the first approach tries to limit when activity will occur, but allows more player freedom in that activity. The second tends, if conditions are right, to have more opportunity for activity, but with less “3rd person point of view” impact. Of course, it is possible (it used to be common) to have a game where one player moves all of the pieces whenever he wants, and to his best advantage each time. Such a game is the ultimate 3rd person game. Every unit’s “1st person decision” is based upon a player’s 3rd person knowledge. (Even if such a game has several players to a side, still each player moves his own units so that their combinations are the best the rules mechanics can allow, whether or not an actual historical unit could actually have carried out what may have been two contradictory actions in a row!) Designers can try to combine the two approaches by having a series of tests, whether they are probability dice rolls, or measurements of some kind, such as a necessary distance for visibility, threat, firing, etc., and then follow those with a menu of allowed actions. It is quite challenging to try to write rules to allow players to jump from 3rd person spectator to 1st person participant and back again in a playable and internally consistent manner. Key Idea In my opinion, the key here is to take a page from the role-playing games. I believe no game can actually “simulate” anything, but it can emphasize a designer’s interpretation of what influences on decision-making were important in given situations. Ideas like information (what can that character see, what intelligence has he received, how might he interpret it?), experience and knowledge (tactics, firing, moving, maneuvering) motivation (orders received, threats perceived) will give you ideas to help define reasonable options for a player who has to quickly jump into a “role”. Note that these ideas need not be static; perhaps die rolls or some other element of chance can be included to make sure that the player cannot be sure that the “facts” his character is relying on are necessarily accurate. The important element, though, is that the decision options are believable for whatever information the “character” has. So decide what command levels will be available for players in your game. Examine each from a “role-playing” 1st person point of view, and then decide what factors you think would be important for the guy in that situation. Be aware that the more details you include, the less playable your game will be. Your artistic challenge, therefore, will be to represent some local decision influences that restrict a player’s choice of action and illustrate a participant’s point of view while still in a spectator’s game. In this way you may hope to minimize the effect of a split wargaming personality. What’s the best thing about being a schizophrenic wargamer? It is easy to find an opponent because you’re never alone. Back to Table of Contents -- Courier #87 To Courier List of Issues To MagWeb.com Master Magazine List © Copyright 2003 by The Courier Publishing Company. This article appears in MagWeb (Magazine Web) on the Internet World Wide Web. Other articles from military history and related magazines are available at http://www.magweb.com