I am not of that wargaming sect whose first commandment is "Magic sucks." I am just not interested. Similarly, this editorial is not about Wizards of the Coast, even though it starts with a move by that company. Wizards has patented Magic's method of play, that is, building a game deck by buying or trading for a selection out of all the cards published for the game, then taking turns drawing from the game deck and bringing cards into play, "tapping" cards, and so on. You can find the details on the Wizards of the Coast web site, http://www.wizards.com, which links to the patent claims.
The notion of patenting game ideas made me wonder: Will method-of-play licensing affect the cost or availability of other card games? What would happen if someone could patent a hypothetical, broadly defined "wargame method of play"? This second question, silly as it is, leads to some interesting considerations:
Redmond Simonsen observed years ago in the original MOVES that hex-and-counter boardgames are just one genre among many. Collectible card games constitute a genre in the same sense. Imagine that someone held the patent on the "typical" wargame method of play. Would part of the cash you fork over for DAK therefore go to compensate the guy who first put a combat factor on a unit counter? Would someone out there be collecting royalty checks from sales of games that use ZOCs? OK, those questions are way too easy. More generally, how different from an earlier game does a design have to be to qualify as "original"? How similar can it be to an earlier game without being an outright ripoff? And how much of a game's value lies in its being typical of its genre?
Examples
Some good examples lie in 20th-century operational games. Consider reserve markers that affect how and when units can move. You can find them in A Bold Stroke, Decision in France, Ring of Fire, Duel for Kharkov, and of course the OCS. A mechanism shared even more broadly is the "Mechanized Movement Phase," or "Exploitation Phase." You'll find this concept -- key to how the games work -- everywhere from Europa to Panzergruppe Guderian to Vance von Borries latest Eastfront games to the OCS and SCS.
The same goes for overruns, called "mobile assaults" in Proud Monster and a scad of related XTR games with so many common mechanics you might consider them members of a de facto series.
It's easy to trace the lineage of some design concepts in Napoleonic games. Napoleon on the Danube and Dresden 1813 clearly derive from Napoleon's Last Battles, as does Kevin Zucker's own Napoleon at Leipzig, which also borrows from Kevin's Campaigns of Napoleon games.
Though not direct descendants of NLB, Ed Wimble's Jena and Zucker's Six Days of Glory show their shared heritage; look, for example, at the command rules. These games, and plenty of others, derive from Napoleon at Waterloo. Among the more complex Napoleonic designs are Wellington's Victory, the NBS (which just barely qualifies as complex, according to the following criteria), and of course, the La Bataille series.
These games all feature facing and formations, cavalry charges, fire combat at range (at least for the artillery), step losses, and morale ratings/checks/states. Here the line between borrowing and plagiarism thins out the most between La Bataille and the Napoleonic battle games coming from Simulaciones Tacticas. Like an ecology-minded consumer, Ed Wimble has his eye on the recycled content in the SimTac games, and he has found what he considers way too much of it. Anyone acquainted with these games immediately recognizes La Bataille all over Sagunto and Los Arapiles.
What I don't know is whether SimTac's lack of originality detracts from players' interest in these games. I suspect not. If people buy games they expect to enjoy playing, won't games obviously derived from proven favorites have a built-in audience?
Apart from this special case of "copycat" systems, I am unconvinced that originality or innovation per se are strong selling points for wargames. Plenty of people were taken aback when the TCS combined unit sizes and a ground scale typical of modern tactical games with a 2-minute game turn and correspondingly high movement rates relative to weapons ranges (e.g. John Kisner's "Thanks, but No Tanks"). Yes, the series caught on eventually, but not before a lot of headscratching over the system's "quirks." It seems that a little innovation goes a long way for us, and a little bit more can be too much. As Kisner puts it in ZOC 10, "Boxed games are in a rut -- and most gamers wouldn't have it any other way."
If the market drives designers backover well-worn turf -- in terms of both topics and technique--is it any surprise that what constitutes originality is often nothing more than coming up with a fresh new mix of familiar ingredients? And is the phrase "nothing more" even fair in the wargame market, where demand is not high for the kind of originality someone could take to the patent office?
Borrow
Designers borrow from themselves (various XTR games, CWB and NBS, Berg games with chit-pull command control) and from each other. Because that's the way we want it. Dean Essig acknowledges using the idea of "regimental equivalents" from Europa in the OCS. For the ZOC-bond rules he uses in Ring of Fire, John Desch duly credits Mark Simonitch's Drive to Stalingrad. Ty Bomba points to Triumphant Fox as his impetus for designing Rommel at Gazala; the maps are similar while the systems contrast. More often, the debts -- to numerous foregoing designs and therefore more nebulous -- are left unacknowledged. Such is the nature of the genre. I think it was Richard Berg who quipped, "I am shocked, shocked do you hear, to find that borrowing is going on in this industry," borrowing from Casablanca in the very act of making his point.
Look at the whole set of design concepts in any given game, and you'll see wargames as the result of a long collaborative process. We tolerate and expect a lot of idea-sharing. We set the threshhold for outright stealing pretty high. This is not the computer industry, where Apple sues Microsoft over who "owns" an interface concept originated, anyway, by Xerox. I can't speak for the people who market card games, but each wargame publisher I know personally is striving not to corner the market, but to make the best games on the market. In board wargaming, asserting intellectual property rights over a widely used set of concepts would be (forgive me) patently absurd.
Response: Letter to Editor (Ops #30)
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