This post is mostly thinking out loud. So please fill the comments with your own insights.

Though the idea Chick Parabola predated Tom Chick’s eloquent discussion of early in Three Moves Ahead history, the core idea speaks to a hardcore understanding of what strategy games are all about. Like chess or Go or Little Wars, strategy gaming is about mastery.

To refresh, Tom describes his strategy game parabola like this. A strategy game is about learning and mastering a system. If a game ceases being enjoyable once the system is comprehended – i.e., if the game can no longer surprise or challenge us from within the rules of the system as players understand them, then the game will have limited longevity or appeal.

In his own words:

Commonly, there’s this curve where I enjoy a game, and then I master the system, and then – unless it’s got a good AI – I lose all interest because I realize that mastering the system is where the challenge ends. Once I reach that point, the game is dead for me, and I hate that! That’s when the game should really start to take off.

It’s not the Candyland problem, where the player outgrows the game; it’s more an issue of a game being unable to introduce enough variety in situations and circumstances to force the player to adjust his/her planning. If the same strategy always works in a strategy game, then the game reveals itself as little more than a delayed puzzle – almost certainly unintentional on the part of the developers, but math is a stubborn thing.

Increasingly, many video game genres have taken the narrative approach to design. Simon Parkin’s controversial review of Uncharted 3 at Eurogamer addressed the very relevant problem of trying to fit the illusion of an open world into a game that is intended to be a plot driven cinematic experience where most of the surprises are scripted. This is natural as games become more an intimately shared experience where we want to know that people in our community understand what we have seen and can get the emotional pull.

Whatever.

Personally, there is nothing more boring than someone telling me about a crazy thing they saw or did in a game that will be virtually indentical to the experience of 85% of everyone who plays the game. Unless it is a rare treasure like Bioshock or Portal that have narrative pull even after you know the ‘twist’, then talking about an amazing thing you saw in Dragon Age or seeing giants catapult you into the sky in Skyrim are just things that everyone will see and are usually of little import. (Does anyone besides Lara Crigger still talk about Dragon Age 2?)

This is where systems and stories collide and, to my mind, make strategy gaming a weird place.

By all accounts, Memoir 44 is a shallow strategy game. There is some strategy, to be sure. You have objectives and limited actions. The choices you make in what units to activate and which cards to play are certainly strategic and can, every now and then, mean the difference between victory and defeat. It’s an intro level semi-serious board game that has the randomness a lot of intro boardgamers bring from their experiences in other games during their youth.

This is where the “story generating mechanism” comes in, and where games like Crusader Kings, Civilization, and sports managment strategy games like Out of the Park Baseball come in. Each of these games is a system, and a system that can be mastered and even cheated a bit once you master how inheritance or research or owner expectations work. Understanding the formula is the key to most gaming, and especially strategy gaming, because too much randomness in a system interferes with what we see – as strategy gamers – see as free will in our games. Actions have expected consequences.

But you need some randomness, and this is how strategy games build story. The 30 million dollar contract that fails in OOTP because the guy gets fat and lazy. The ambitious vassal that goes on a killing spree and decimates your court before you have the power to stop him/her. The goodie hut that gives you the extra unit you need to eliminate Montezuma in the opening moves. All random, to an extent, but all the sort of thing that aids in the construction of a strategy/war world that you can invest in.

The randomness has to work, however, within a system of expectations. Randomness that is entirely under the hood is not a game at all. Memoir 44 and Last Night on Earth are very random in their results, but most people understand the probabilities on a six sided die and can work that randomness into their stories. Then, however, the story becomes less about the game and then about how you were screwed on the dice. If you fail a combat check because there are many variables, clearly laid out, and the results don’t go your way from a combination of factors (or rolling a lot of critical misses) then that can be built into an in game narrative about a heroic enemy unit that wouldn’t cede ground.

I think that the lack of randomness is one reason that I have so little time for RTS story based campaigns. The story is there, and it is possible to have your own stories within other people’s stories; that is how D&D works after all – an arch-narrative that the party can engage with. This is also, ideallly, how the Elder Scrolls games work. But in strategy games, especially RTS games, the story is there for you to follow and the game part becomes all-system. There are no unpredictable opponents or random events that let you claim that your success was based on thinking of an original strategy that happened to work. And besides, everyone has the same story – when strategy gamers talk about a campaing scenario (if they do at all), its in terms of how to win it, or maybe about the “one good mission” in a sea of overthought 1-2-3 Objective counts.

But then we come to multiplayer games and board games, and that’s where randomness needs to be reined in more. If your game is best played as a multiplayer game, like most modern RTSes, then you want to keep the game as one of skill. It’s one thing to be playing Civ and be forced to face a horde of barbarian invaders, but another to have that event erupt in the middle of a closely fought multiplayer game. If it is a cooperative game like Pandemic or Arkham Horror where the players work together to defeat a system, then mroe randomness is fine. But if it is a game where the players are demonstrating their skill to each other, a truly great victory will ideally be about where the minds meet, and not about who got screwed on an artillery strike because the dice hate me.

Stories within systems aren’t quite a Goldilocks problem, where you are looking for a design solution that is “just right”, since I think that you can figure a lot of this stuff out in early gameplay reports by listening to how a team is talking about their game sessions and what kinds of stories they are telling, if at all.

Is this important? I think so. Games are a social medium, now, and people like talking about what they saw and experienced. If it is a shared moment, like the end of Bioshock or the never-ending dwarf caverns in Dragon Age: Origins, then that builds one type of community – one more akin to fans of a movie or TV show (“I love the part when…”). Strategy games, and a few other genres, are more about the types of conversations you share with friends you know well (“A crazy thing happened to me the other day…”).

Over the last week or so, I’ve been telling some of my close friends about things I saw in the Crusader Kings 2 preview build. The responses have been welcoming, and all from people who know very little about the game beyond what they’ve read. “Is that really in the game?” “I would be laughing the whole time.” “I can’t buy it because I have work to do, and this would stop it..” And none of the events have been entirely ridiculous – my kingdom was saved from a crappy heir by syphilis, the Portuguese inheritance of France has led to the Holy Roman Emperor-ship and prevented my planned expansion in Spain, divorcing a Byzantine princess just after she had converted to Catholicism was mean but necessary.

Unless I am just an awesome storyteller, all of the randomness that was inherent in the mechancis allowed these stories to transpire, giving me the hook to hold the attention of friends differently unversed in either strategy games, medieval history or both.

I can’t reduce this to a systematic explanation like Tom and his eponymous parabola. Feel free to help.