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Learning from Wargames
Working within the intrinsic limitations of simulations is one of the key challenges of game design. What are you going to simulate in your game? How are you going to abstract it? Which features of the phenomena will you include and which will you ignore? How deep and how broad can your simulation be? How do you tie each aspect of your simulation to the larger player experience? To understand these kinds of design decisions more fully, we look in detail at a particular genre of game, the historical wargame.
Historical wargames are complex strategy games that use cardboard chits or metal figures on a map to simulate a battle. We have already noted that game simulations are not universally beholden to "realism" or "accuracy." But historical wargaming is a genre of game design where both realism and accuracy are important. Historical wargame designers base their troop composition, map layouts, and game rules on historical research, a numerical approach to military history that wargame designer James Dunnigan calls "analytic history." In the game design subdiscipline of historical wargaming, part of the design ethos is that a game accurately simulates historical circumstances.
History, in a very general sense, represents a fixed series of events. But a historical wargame is a game, which means that uncertainty, risk, and unpredictable outcomes play a role. What a historical wargame really simulates are the starting conditions of a conflict. The way that the conflict plays out is what makes the game interesting as a game experience. Will history repeat itself? Was the historical outcome inevitable? How much can masterful strategy affect the outcome? These are all questions that wargame designers and players seek to answer through the creation and play of their games. The meaningful play of a historical wargame derives not only from the strategic complexities of military decision making, but also from the fidelity of the game to its historical referent.
As we know, a simulation can never contain every possible aspect of the phenomena being simulated. Historical wargaming has been wrestling with this challenge for at least a century, making it a wonderful case study for the design of simulations. We have already touched on one aspect of wargame design, the abstraction of unit characteristics. The pieces in a war-game are far more complex than in a game like Chess. When a wargame unit "attacks" an enemy piece, the outcome of the simulated combat is not simply to remove the attacked unit (as in Chess); instead, a variety of factors determine the outcome. Resolving an attack might involve some or all of the following:
offensive strength of the attacking unit
defensive strength of the defending unit
whether or not either unit has already been wounded in battle
terrain that might give advantages and disadvantages to either unit
nearby units that can lend support
the nearby presence or absence of a General or other leader
the morale of a unit or of its team
a random dice roll (to simulate the uncertainty of actual combat)
Generally, players tally these factors and consult an appropriate table that lists the outcome of the encounter. The complexity of the simulation doesn't end there, however, because the result of an attack can also take a variety of forms, including:
one or both units is eliminated
one or both units is reduced in strength
one or both units is forced to retreat
one unit displaces the other's position
A rich procedural representation emerges out of the factors going into and coming out of an encounter between wargame units. By tweaking the formal characteristics of units and the overall resolution system of a game, game designers can arrive at highly specific procedural representations of a historical battle. Depending on the particular game, the simulation might be a World War II tank division encountering enemy infantry, or a troop of horse-mounted archers fighting a phalanx of spearmen in the ancient Middle East.
Wargames are incredibly detailed. At the same time, everything about the representation of units in a wargame is highly stylized: a simple cardboard chit or metal figure "stands in" for a military unit, with each piece representing a whole group of soldiers or vehicles that move as a single block; the straightline or grid-based movement of the units; the reduction of combat to simple numerical factors; a single human player directing the entire battle from a birds-eye view. These are only a few examples of the many ways historical wargames radically abstract their subject matter. However, if you accept these limitations, if you take on the conventions of the game genre, within them there is room for endless play, both for the player exploring permutations of history and for the game designer constructing the systems that make the historical simulation possible.
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