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I
like simulating war, at least, as a hobby. As a child I marveled at
Axis and Allies, and games like Risk.
Having started my computer strategy gaming on a Sega Genesis with Westwood's Dune 2, working on a realistic computer war-game, or
a Real-Time Strategy Game (RTS), as it is more commonly called, became for me an item of particular interest.
In graduate school @ USC's Interactive Media Division I had the pleasure of working with the Westwood team at EALA on The Battle for Middle Earth II. Not long there after we even had a course under Professor Chris Swain which focused on RTS game design. It was a blast, and really provided a deeper insight into the process and history associated with the design and production of the genre. By the time I got to writing and doing narrative design with the
award winning team working on Company of Heroes it was the fulfillment
of a life long dream for me.
Working on the war-game franchise made me ask questions. Deeper
questions than I asked in grad school, about where my fascination began, and when this form, RTS,
came to be. The roots of RTS, are war-games. Even if the
setting has fantasy influences, the core combat systems of all RTS is
that of a war-game: Multiple Player Units, Resource Management,
Building, and Command level strategy.
In investigating the roots of
war-gaming in my family I found, to my surprise, that my family began
war-gaming as a result of involvement with the military in WWII and the
Korean War. They played 'war' as students, soldiers, and officers, to
study military strategy. Asking my retired Air-Force officer of an
uncle, he mentioned it rising into a hobby status in the 1950s. Just
about the time Charles Roberts was getting started designing what would prove to be a ground breaking game system.
 His 1954 game Tactics, and the follow-up Tactics II are generally credited as the first board war-game. Tactics pioneered many game mechanics which became standard in
the board wargame industry, including cardboard counters representing
individual military units with separate values for movement and combat;
the odds-ratio combat results table; and variable movement costs for entering squares (later hexes) containing different types of terrain.[1] Roberts knew the game had tremendous educational value. [2] It was serious, serious war-gaming. But I knew it had to go deeper, even those table-top games had to owe what
they are to the ideas of their predecessors. Where did it come from? My uncle was wasn't sure.
 War-games are most
certainly serious in the current age, some of the best strategy game
makers alive work for Uncle Sam creating war simulations. While at
first the notion may seem odd, the reality is war-games have become
tools for military training and
strategists. Serious war-games are
teaching tools, practical for professionals in the field and students
of military strategy. With the models created by war-game systems the
military argues it saves lives. Any training we can have in lessening
the taxes of war is most certainly a worthy endeavor. Game
makers have been driving for realism in war-games for a long time, even the original Tactics box claims "The Original Realistic Land Army Wargame". At some point hobby games became tools of learning for
military
strategists. Where did this fascination come from, and where is the
line where hobby crosses into serious war-gaming? When did military individuals start expecting the
playing of strategic game systems, specifically war-games, to create
narratives which can be used in real life? As
a narrative designer and game maker I can't help but wonder.
So I set out to do research, and like most things in western
culture, one need look east to find their roots. I started with Chess and then dug a little deeper. It lead me to Chaturaga, a game whose rules are mostly lost, but the pieces remain. This, the first serious
war-game, came before Europe was even a dream. The
Sanskrit word "Chaturanga", means "four parts", or "Army", which for
the ancient Indians was compromised by 4 parts. It is a game of 6th
century BCE Indian origins consisting of two small armies with unique units, on an 8 x 8
board.
 Chaturanga
predates Chess, but only in the little evidence had in artifact, not by
popular record. Most likely a Persian invention, Chaturanga beats Chess
in record by only a number of years. Chess is an Arab invention first
mentioned by the court poet Bana, in a poem he wrote between "625 and
640 CE" [3]. Thanks to the trade routes of the ancient world Chess along with Chaturanga
were both brought west to the likes of Africa, Spain, Germany, and the
Ottoman Empire. The game evolved into chess and hung around for until 2400 years later when things got interesting.
Christopher Weikhmann of Ulm, Germany, developed a warlike game called based on chess which had been growing in popularity in Germany thanks to the publishing of Das Schach- oder Königsspiel a book on chess in 1616. Weikhamann's The King's Game in 1664 expanded chess to create a game which reflected contemporary war-fare. The King's Game "was not
designed merely as a pastime... it would furnish anyone who studied it properly a
compendium of the most useful military and political principles." [4]
While innovative in it's own right, for it's array of units, it was a century later The Duke of Brunswick, iterated on Weikhmann's Kings Game
design and took war-gaming to a new level. The game now incorporated
artillery and armor class, two simple elements that increase the
complexity of the war-game
immensely and bring it closer to resembling
modern war.
 While
these games were growing in realism, they were still little more than
the toys of the rich, despite Weikmann's assertion that they were much more. The players in those days were role-playing,
imagining themselves to be great commanders making weighty decisions.
The war-game consisted then of two parts, (1) the system of war, and
(2) the role of commanders as taken on by each player. These parlor
pastimes were still just games, a thing of boys and toys. Shortly
though, games would be crossing from being as hobby to becoming a
serious military training tool.
The first real
advancement beyond Chess, documented in western cultures, occurred in
the 1800's by the father and son team Reisswitz. Lt von Reisswitz Jr.
altered his fathers invention to be played on topographic table-top
maps and in 1824 Chief of the Prussian General Staff, General von
Muffling muttered, "This is not a game! This is training for war!".[5] *Boom* that moment was a turning point in thought; the beginning of a new strategics training paradigm; the serious war-game. What was most impressive about this new
development was not the game
itself, but the attitude displayed in the subtext of General von
Muffling's words. "This is not a game! This is training for war!" His belief in the representation of the
warfare through a closed abstracted game system inherently demands that games
are capable of representing, or simulating, systems in real life. In playing them the player builds a narrative to represent potential conflicts, and thier resolition, in real life. Muffling continued, "I must
recommend it to the whole army."
Here too we see the beginning of the attitude that the abstract systems
created by war-game designs could serve as learning tools. The good
General was playing the Reisswitz's invention, Kriegspiel, literally 'war-game'.
Within
a matter of decades war-game studies became part of regular curriculum
at military academies worldwide. Displayed by this serious play is an
unspoken core belief that human beings can create working models of
life in games, and through their playing, learn how to properly
navigate the very real game of life. As U.S. Lieutenant Colonel Anthony Sab said playing a war-game put it just prior to being sent off to Iraq in 2002 "It's never away from
our minds that the things we are doing here [in the war-game] are going to happen to us in real
life."[6]
5. Author Unknown, Playing
War: the Applicability of Commercial Conflict Simulations to
Military Intelligence Training and Education, DIA Joint Military Intelligence College, 1995
6.
Julian Borger, Research for Iraq in Woodland War-game, http://www.commondreams.org, 2002
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Interesting assertion, it is a most apt criticism of 2nd and early 3rd generation RTS. Especially when it comes to multiplayer modes. I think if you play the COH series, and other late 3rd Gen (arugably 4th gen) RTS you will have a very different experience. I can take no credit for that, the designers on the original COH followed through on a vision to make RTS more tactical, strategic, and visceral. That said multiplayer COH can still seem like a click fest, but you can seriously lower your clicks-per-minute! :)
How do you see memory playing into it?
I remember Avalon Hill and SPI in their heyday. I remember when TSR bought SPI and, as Greg Costikyan said in his history and eulogy (http://www.costik.com/spisins.html), “shot wargaming in the head”. I remember the lapel buttons saying “SPI Died for Your Sins”.
I remember the rise of personal computers; I worked as art director at Computer Gaming World back in the early 1990s. I remember the excitement among wargamers in the early days over the potential of computers to remove the drudgery of slogging through rules, to simulate the fog of war, and to handle all the die-rolling and movement of units.
I also remember how nobody could seem to get it right, how that potential was squandered in lukewarm, slapdash designs that were unsatisfying to the old-timers both as simulations and as games. I remember the lasting bitter divide that developed—and lasts to this day—between the old grognards, who wanted meaty, engrossing historical wargames and weren’t getting them, and the new generation of “this is slow and dull” computer gamers, who wanted flash and dash and were getting them. I confess to being in the former camp, and even now do not play any significant computer or console games.
There is a small, dedicated core of diehards who, through open-source techniques, are developing computer versions of both old mainstays like Advanced Squad Leader and newer publications. VASSAL is perhaps the best-known of these, although a handful of other projects are in the works. Traditional physical games also continue to be published by a scattering of tiny companies, mostly run by small dedicated bands of loyalists in their spare time. Multi-Man Publishing tries to keep the flame of classic Avalon Hill titles alive, despite the indifference of owner Hasbro toward the latent gold mine in their possession.
The hobby is crippled, a mere shadow of its glory days in the 1970s—but it is not dead. Some hope to see a genuine renaissance, a flowering into a mainstream hobby. Others claim it is doomed, that the shiny chrome of electronic games forever will shadow it until it withers away entirely.
Glad you could find it and that it perked your interest. I've met a few similar to yourself. It is really compelling that the computer game war-game style never did attract many of the core board war-gamers. I'm of the school that th game type is not doomed, people have been war-gaming for a good 2000+ years; it's not something that just disappears. A resurgence would be fantastic, and finding that sweet spot which might allow the computerized war-game to cross over into the traditional war-gamer market segment is a fantastic challenge!
@ Andreas:
Yep understanding and executing strategy based on the game system can be challenging. I would wonder though, someone that quits after 5 minutes... is that a bad game, or a bad player? There are plenty of bad players [bad games too] out there, when a player enters the magic circle, he needs to stay there until the game ends, it's part of the collective bargain players make when they play... especially with online multiplayer!
This behaviour is similar to the one where people try to collect every item and defeat every challenge in a game, even if it starts to detract from their fun. The best way for designers to fix this is to insure a significant amount of randomness each time the game is played so that the player can develope techniques as they replay again and again but can't simply search for and memorize a particular pattern of actions that insure a guaranteed victory.
http://www.kriegsspiel.org.uk/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=192&Item
id=94
"Serious" Strategy games fall into three broad categories, in terms of scale:
Tactical Games, where "units" range from one soldier to a company/battalion, where there are usually only two sides (and we have a zero-sum game in theoretical terms), and the time scale goes from minutes up to hours. Tactical boardgames do not have "production". You are given some resources (men, weapons) and you have to get the job done, be it conquer that house, or that hilltop, or kill the enemy.
Operational Games, where units range from battalion to division/corps, with usually still only two sides and time scales going from hours/day up to weeks. These simulations also usually do not have "production", or have it only in a limited way. For instance if in a WW2 game the Germans conquer the oilfields, they might get extra supply or reinforcements. The player cannot choose to get instead a new aircraft unit type.
And finally, there are the strategic games. In these games the player usually commands a whole country, and so is able to set unit production strategy. On the other hand, as in reality, he will not micromanage his forces. Time scales are usually months or even years, and unit scales corps and armies, with 100k men or more.
The first computer strategy games adhered to these categories. The games were usually turn-based, as the boardgames usually are. Ever since 1981 Chris Crawford's Eastern Front, up to to the 90s, nobody would consider making an operational ou strategic situation into real-time. Real-time is well adapted only to tactical representation of conflict. So the natural games are not RTS, but RTT games. One of the best games I ever played was Atomic's Close Combat series, specially "A bridge too far", released in 1997. Here, while there is a operational resource allocation between the interconnected scenarios, in the tactical battlefield, the player just commands the given men and material to fulfill his objectives.
A special type of of real-time strategy game are the games of the Europa Universalis series, where the real-time is more like an accelerated time, the map and decision are all strategic in nature. We have also the Total War series, which has the right concept (Turn-based operational decision, and Real-time battle resolution). Unfortunately the strategic component of the game (at least until and including Medieval 2) was very poorly designed.
Classical RTS games, with strategic AND tactical decision at the same time, are in fact an anachronism, mixing in a unnatural way elements from two different world situations. I can enjoy a fantasy/SF RTS (like Starcraft), but I have great difficulty to consider "serious strategy" to produce GI-Joes from resources I get in the battlefield...