I pulled a bunch of old wargames out of the closet recently. I was cleaning the house and finally decided to see if I could sell some old games that I was never going to play again on eBay. I have boxes and boxes of them, so I was only making a dent, but I had to start somewhere. There were old computer games in there, as well as boardgames. I found the jacket to the old Chris Crawford classic Patton vs Rommel that I think was the first game to do simultaneous, continuous-time movement and combat resolution. Or something. You gave orders to little boxes and watched them go attack other little boxes. Cute. I remember having a lot of fun with that game.

I remember having a lot of fun with old computer games. North Atlantic ’86 was one that I played over and over. I can remember watching the little text adventure that made up the combat resolution: you watched the Tomcats fire their missiles, and the Badgers and Backfires launch their ASM’s, and wondered how many would get through to your fleet. Pretty tense stuff considering it was all in your head.

Funny thing, though: while I remember the fun I had with all these games (Kampfgruppe, Eighth Air Force, War in Russia, Carrier Strike) I have absolutely no desire to replay them. You can actually download a legitimate, free, updated version of War in Russia from Matrix Games that will run under Windows XP. But fifteen minutes after I started playing it, I realized I had no desire to play it anymore. It was fun then, but it isn’t fun now. That’s not a knock against the game, because there really aren’t any old computer wargames I want to play. That kind of sucks.

A couple of months ago, I found myself trying to rationalize my understanding of the word, “game.” That’s because I read a review by one of my fellow CGW writers of Gary Grigsby’s A World At War. He repeatedly beats me senseless at most wargames we play by mail, so he knows what he’s doing. But in his review, he made the following comment:

… many of the initial moves are almost pre-ordained. If one doesn’t follow the optimal path of prescribed moves, defeat is almost assured.

He then gave the “game” three and a half stars.

I’ve always been of the opinion that games have to give players choices. If there is only one best move, then it isn’t a game – it’s a puzzle. Figure out the puzzle and you’re done. That’s fine, I guess, for puzzles. But not for games. If there is part of your “game” that is obvious and has only one possible solution, it shouldn’t be in the game. Unless you made a puzzle by accident.

By contrast, if you play Breakout: Normandy, the last of the amazing Courtney Allen/Don Greenwood impulse games from Avalon Hill, you have interesting decisions up the wazoo every single turn. Moving a single German flak battalion may be the most important thing you want to do that turn, but each impulse you have to keep doing something else because your opponent keeps threatening other parts of the board. In another game, that flak battalion can sit on its ass all day. Because of genius game design.

There are only really two game design axioms I’m sure about. One is that anything below the player’s level of control should be abstracted. The other is that anything that has one and only one solution should be omitted. If you are making a game of World War II and there is one single best way to invade France, you should just start the game after the invasion of France. Or quit game design entirely.

Instead, computer wargame designers seem to have embraced the idea that because the computer can make things infinitely complex, all you really have to do is bury your game in so much detail that the answer to whatever puzzle you’ve created takes so long to figure out that you get the necessary replayability simply out of trying to deduce the solution. It’s the easy way out, because balancing wargames is a difficult prospect if not impossible.

One reason is that by definition, a historical wargame is supposed to recreate historical conditions, and there just aren’t a lot of famous battles (or wars) that could just as easily have been won by either side. The over-modeled German offensive that comprised the Battle of the Bulge was doomed before it started, and many games that try and recreate it overstate German capabilities, presumably to make a decent “game” out of it. Strategic World War II games have the same problem.

By contrast, there are tons of old boardgames I’d like to play again. True, a lot of them are just as uninteresting to me now as old computer games are. But there are many notable exceptions. I’d play Conquistador, a game from the mid-Seventies, any time. In fact, I recently started a PBEM game using the free Cyberboard utility, and am having a blast. There is a web utility for playing Avalon Hill’s Dune boardgame online, and I can vouch for the fact that it’s excellent. I could name a dozen boardgames off the top of my head that I would play right now if someone came over to play them. That’s totally without thinking. Give me a second in between thinks and I could name you two dozen more.

So what’s the deal? Why aren’t there any computer wargames I would come back to thirty, twenty, or even ten years later? There are a bunch of reasons. Computer wargaming is a less mature segment of the market than board (war)gaming, certainly. But I also think computer wargaming is suffering from a design crisis. The programmers who used to be able to write games by themselves (and still do) aren’t designers. And wargaming needs some seriously new design ideas for its games.

Another is the speed with which gamers can find balance issues in simple games. That’s because you can play them so many times solo that almost any possible strategy can be tested dozens of times in a short period of time. With board wargames, it might be years before you get a chance to play something ten times. With computer wargames, it might be a week. I probably played a dozen games of Crown of Glory within two weeks of release (granted, I was reviewing it) but there is no way I could play more than one game of The Napoleonic Wars this calendar year. So if the game has some obvious strategy that makes it a cakewalk for one side or the other, that’s going to become obvious pretty fast.

But the biggest obstacle to making simpler computer wargames is that a lot of people don’t like simple games, period. Almost the first thing you’ll read on any official forum where a new historical strategy game has been released is someone asking for a patch to simulate some minor detail, without which the poster asserts the game is worthless. When Crown of Glory was released, someone immediately complained that leaders, while they could be killed in combat, could not be wounded. Then someone suggested that leaders not only be wounded, but have variable convalescence periods in the hospital. Then the world exploded.

This is what computer games do so well – build a world through the inclusion of detail. Unfortunately, if you’re playing a competitive game, you have to account for all this detail in order to have a chance to win. The problem is that a lot of people don’t see computer games as competitive games in the same way they would if they were boardgames. Instead, they’re projects, almost like extended role-playing games that you lose yourself in for hours at a sitting.

I think there’s a good reason for this, which I’m just going to pull out of an old column I wrote in 1998:

When a player loads a computer wargame, his expectation level is extremely high because he doesn’t perceive many barriers to achieving what he sees as a “realistic” depiction of a particular subject. Rather than really seeing a “game,” the player sees instead a microcosmic re-creation of the battle being presented. All the things that would be present in a “real” battle are expected to appear in the computer game. After all, why shouldn’t they? The mechanics necessary to achieve this should be attainable by simply leaving them for the computer to deal with.

I’m pretty sure this is why people immediately post feature requests on a game’s message boards whenever some pet detail of theirs isn’t included: they just see it as something that can be added in a patch with minimal impact on the game, except that the verisimilitude of the game world goes up incrementally in their minds. In a tightly designed game, this kind of fiddling could upset the balance. In most computer games, though, it hardly makes a difference.

I think that says a lot about the current state of game design.

I prefer simpler games. I have no problem with a game feeling “gamey” if it produces a lot of interesting choices that can take the game in multiple directions. For me, the best games are the ones that force you to make important decisions all the time. This is why Breakout: Normandy or Paths of Glory are so great: each turn you’re forced to decide what you want to do, what you can reasonably do, and what you need to do. There aren’t any moments of idle fiddling with some extra anti-tank battalions that don’t really need to go anywhere, because every unit needs to go somewhere.

I think traditional hex-based wargames – the kind where you just stack up units and count combat odds, or whatever – have gone about as far as they’re ever going to go. You can make the interface more useful and informative like SSG did with their excellent Decisive Battles of WWII series, but in the end, if you have counters with movement and combat factors on them, and they move around over hexes, there isn’t much else you can do to distinguish your game other than make it really, really big. And that pretty much ensures that you’re going to rob the game of what makes it a game, and turn it into a project.

War in the Pacific is my favorite example of a game that is really a project. I saw a post on a messageboard recently where an experienced player asserted that the first turn for the Japanese takes you eight hours to plan once you are familiar with the game. I haven’t found that it takes that long, myself, but if people are playing it this way, that pretty much removes it from any category of “game” that I can think of.

I’ll be really interested to see how people react to Down in Flames, because that’s like a poster child or Rosetta Stone or whatever something really good is called, for simplification in gaming. The problem is that it goes against everything people assume a computer game should be. It is highly abstract, and doesn’t make you feel like “you are there” or something. Which is fine with me. If you don’t mind me quoting myself again, I’ll just repeat something I said in my last Computer Gaming World “Inside Wargaming” column way back in December 2001: