A common refrain in game reviews these days seems to be "games can't simulate reality, so why waste time trying?" This pontification being used as filler when the reviewer doesn't want to waste time studying the game and its play -- but that's another issue. Is this point valid? My views on the issue are below.

Games can never place the player in the shoes of the commanders who were there -- that is simply true and should be obvious to anyone with a passing knowledge of both games and military reality. If you want to experience what "it" is like, I can suggest a better way than Bill Mauldin's in his book Up Front...

"Dig a hole in your backyard while it is raining. Sit in the hole until the water climbs around your ankles. Pour cold mud down your shirt collar. Sit there for forty-eight hours, and...imagine that a guy is sneaking around waiting for a chance to club you on the head or set your house on fire.

Get out of the hole, fill a suitcase full of rocks, pick it up, put a shot gun in your other hand, and walk on the muddiest road you can find. Fall flat on your face every few minutes as you imagine big meteors streaking down to sock you.

After ten or twelve miles...start sneaking through the wet brush...Give some friend a rifle and have him blast in your direction once in a while.

If you repeat this performance every three days for several months you may begin to understand why an infantryman sometimes gets out of breath. But you still won't understand how he feels when things get tough." [emphasis added]

The point is that a game can't let you in on what its really like -- and its a good thing too, because "realistic games wouldn't be too much fun. The problem I have with the reviewer's statement is that it is not attacking games on the grounds of "making it like the real thing" but that games not only don't, but can't, give reasonably accurate results. And, that's not right!

Games give a good approximation of real results -- given decent parameters and a good model (the game.) Much like the calculus which tries to simulate curves with an infinite series of straight lines, wargames attempt to fit a square peg in a round hole by varying the number of sides. A very simple, abstract game might make a fairly good fit while a excessivdy detailed "simulation" misses entirely.

Why? Besause the number of sides on our wargame peg is not as clearly related to increases in detail as a simple analogy to calculus methods might suppose. Take tank kills. For a given weapon at a given range to kill a given target tank might be a 60% chance in real life. The ultra-detailed armor simulation, in an attempt to be very ascurate, breaks down the shot into as many as a dozen different parameters each of whish the designer must guesstimate the amount and significance of effects (there is no good hard data on many things gamers take as gospel.)

When he's done, the complicated game might end up with a grossly inaccurate final probability because the sum of the independently rated parameters is only an accumulation of their errors. Meanwhile, game designer B takes a wholly different approach. He simplifies the tank fire to a couple of easily identifiable values which very quickly generate something close to the 60 percent required. Game players will invariably think designer A's game is more accurate because of his dozens of carefully calculated (it seems) variables, while they will decry designer B's game as too simple to give good results. In actuality, the reverse is true -- but game players have accepted as fact that more detail means more accuracy.

Breaking things down into their relevant points is a product of modern education. Often a list of "important factors" is memorized and that list then passes for understanding. While the list may very well be true, it gives little clue as to the relative importance of the given factors or how the affect/relate to each other.

Can wargames simulate reality well enough to generate decent results? Yes, but only if the man behind the design is well aware of the interrelationship and relative importance of the differing effects he must give values for. There is no magical reference work to consult, it is all based on intuitive feel. Game players should not be buffaloed into thinking otherwise by a smokescree of numbers and separated values.

Many thanks to those who wrote letters and sent in game ratings. You'll see a few small changes to the chart as games "jockey" for position. The big change was in the number of "not enough votes" games. There are now a lot of one vote wonders in that list which will need a bunch of votes in order to make the chart's minimum of 25 percent. As always, we need more ratings for next time, more letters to publish, more Q&A questions, and articles...I have but two outside articles for this mag so far -- and that's not enough. Please write up your thoughts or, at least, send your ideas of things you want us to write about.