Choices for an "alpha test" game

I think I will get far more done in the context of a trial game than I would thinking abstractly.  My first thought on a test game is the "Imperial Phase" of the Franco-Prussian war.  It is

• geographically confined, 
• fast paced, 
• has many potential actors, 
• can be expanded into a wider game
• does not need a naval component
• a topic I already have a grip on
• involves areas that I am likely to use for future campaigns.

Indeed, I could start with the area around Metz and the  few days around the battles of Mars-la-Tour, then expand it.

Other choices would be specific campaigns from one of the Silesian wars; but they have widely dispersed but strongly interconnected factors in play.

Musing about the base entities

In my last post I had some notes on the challenges in the top levels of a campaign system.  The other end of the spectrum are the bottom level atomic entities; those things on which, ultimately, everthing else operates.

There are some interesting puzzles here.  For example does everything have a location?  People would seem obviously to be in a place, but how about military units?  Seem obvious but what about sub-components?  Where is an 1870 French infantry regiment when its soldiers are sent their call-up notices?

How about money?  One may speak of a wagon with the army pay-chest having a location, but if I am floating a bond issue in Paris where is the money then?  Odd problems, without a single answer, and varying by period.  But still important, if only in the decision to impose an unreal uniformity where in real life none existed (a process frequently confused with abstraction).

And how much do such things matter.  The process of silver coin arriving at the army and the national debt increasing is a level of detail that the player should not have to worry about; we have agents for the Minister of War and the Minister of Finance, it's their job to work it out.  But if we have no details of the model at all, how do we understand the effect of enemy action on the mechanisms?  How do we know the rate the bonds will sell at, for example?

Correct design of bottom level detail will be important; it must have an adequate basic model to cover key issues across multiple periods.  Interesting problem, probably best approached iteratively, starting with simple games that do leave big chunks out.

Doing without turns

Back in my post on the Tyranny of the Turn I complained that campaigns with tuns depend on regular player input, and that is something that cannot be relied upon.

I propose to get away from that kind of turn dependency by bringing together three concepts:

• In most games, the player directly adjusts the model; instead, let the player set objectives and policies.  
• Use Artificial Intelligence, which is far less grand than it sounds, to execute the policies.
• Frequent feedback so that the player can adjust his policies when he needs to.

Each of these ideas brings with it problems along with possibilities.  However, I don't see "problems" as bad things -- more as opportunities to do something interesting.

Problem: If the player is to set policy to be implemented by an AI, and the player is encouraged to be open-ended and in-character in his direction, the referee takes on the role of input translator. 

• The shear labor of this is mitigated by good design; I don't see it as any more obnoxious than having to read player orders anyway.
• The possibility of misinterpreting the order is a real risk.  This is a possibility in any written-orders campaign; the risk can be mitigated by having the AI "explain" what it intends to d back to the player in "its own words".  The bits in quotation marks are the interesting part.
• The player needs to feel connected to the environment. I think this is best achieved by implementing the AI interface using Agents.  This, too, is less grand than it sounds. If you have ever set up a table of actions a non-player commander can take and rolled a die to pick one, you have implemented an agent.  We will need one a bit more clever (or at least labor-intensive) but the principle is not fancy.  The agent lets us make the situation appear life-like to the player:  in the real world the King of France did not "move" his armies, whatever that means, he directed the minister of war to make appropriate arrangements.  The minister reported on his success.

Problem: Creating AI to execute policy.  This is an interesting intellectual exercise, but not as big a problem as it might be for a few reasons

• I'm a computer programmer.  I also happen to find AI interesting; this is just a good chance to play with it.
• This is not a video game, so hyper-fast optimized heuristic algorithms are not needed.  I can just be patient instead.
• The end-user interface will be me, reading e-mail.  I can put together something that emphasizes accuracy and simple data entry without having to program something bulletproof.
• I'll be there to hold its hand.  If the AI produces implausible results, or is faced with a new problem that drives it outside its sweet spot, I can directly adjust the model to bridge the problem until I can code a fix. 

Problem: Frequent feedback.  We want to be free of "turn tyranny" but at the same time people will not be on hand 7/24 to reply to game events.  My first thought on interaction frequency are:

• I have to figure out my own cycle.  How much time will I give to this, and how will I reserve and allocate those hours?  The following points must live in that context.
• When a player's orders are read and fed into the system, get an immediate report back from the minister explaining the result (Majesty, our forces will take 6 months to march to Moscow, and logistics are tenuous at best) to the player can rethink if needed. 
• When the player gets feedback or results, there is a deadline and silence is consent.
• There should be some sort of routine and fixed progress of time so players can plan their own lives.  In that respect, it is hard to do away with turns.  What we can achieve is a lowering of player stress by making it possible to skip a turn occasionally without disaster.

Time and space are interesting; maybe we can do something less turn-like.  It is something I will consider in the next post.

Something like a plan

OK,. so one grand, megalomaniac, plan for creating a strategic wargames campaign. 

Fact is, to do something like this right takes time and testing.  I want to put together a campaign that is enjoyable for me to run, delightful for the participants, and something new in the world. 

So the plan is not just a plan to take existing rules and run a campaign with them, but to start small with new ideas and develop experience in designing and running games based on them,

The terminology at left - what a surprise - comes from software development. 

• I have written about architecture in this blog already.
• Core rules are derived from the architecture and are essentially invariant from scenario to scenario.
• The scenario is not just map, situation and objectives but also those detailed rules (properly integrated as defined by core and architecture) that reflect a particular historical or fictional context.
• Alpha-tests are solo tests designed to exercise parts of a model or a full, small, game situation.
• Beta-tests are normal games with a small number of participants exercising a limited situation.  The Franco-Prussian War (or even ts first 6 months) would be a good candidate for such a test.  Because these are tests, rules might change through the game and between games more than in the "production release"
• The final "Prime Game Scenario" would be something can could run for years - Europe and Her Colonies 1740-1760 for example.

When you set out what a polished, large scale campaign would take to develop one thing is clear: this could take years.  That drives two conclusions:

• Since I am a gaming butterfly, the core here has to be flexible enough to adapt to multiple periods and genres.
• I have to enjoy the process - not just the nattering on about it process I am indulging in here ( although I do enjoy that process) but also the design, testing and most important refereeing of the resulting games.

Which is something to think about in a future post: what's in it for me?.

Considering campaign rules

Simple can be harder than complex: you have to work hard to get your thinking clean to make it simple. But  it’s worth it in the end because once you get there, you can move mountains.
Steve Jobs, founder of Apple (1955–2011), quoted in BusinessWeek, May 1998

Something to keep in mind.

A Model for Politics

I've just made a new post on my book review blog.  Why mention that here?  Because the books offers a paradigm for understanding politics -- and especially the assumption and maintenance of power -- that is widely if not universally applicable.  I am not sure that the "laws" it explains need to appear directly in a game engine, but any system that wants to deliver realistic political events has at least to be informed by it.

Gaming history or flavor?

OK, so lets assume I can make a large-scale campaign work - probably kicking off in a year or so.

Question 1 (in my mind anyway) is real history or imagination?

The advantages of using an imagination (and that project is not going away) I can see right now are:

• I can align the situation to my resources, and focus on any detail level I want without abstraction.  To do history I have to look at how deeply I can research and abstract the layers below that.
• I can generate detail without guilt.  With real history you can fake things up a bit (generic German village names for example) but the possibility of outright contradicting facts that other people in the game (or reading about it) do know does spring up.
• I players come to the game with a different vision of the world than mine, that's OK.  Because reality is a construct, they don't have to be period experts to play the game "right."  In a history game a wildly variant view of the world -- Louis XV invests half the national budget into steam engines or some such -- can drive everyone else's suspension of disbelief off the deep end.
• You can elephants charging Europeans -- oh, India, never mind.

The advantage of gaming reality is the challenge:

• Getting a well-researched model of the real world across to players in such a way that the can game it realistically is intrinsically hard.  Really, why are we trying to do something easy?
• Most gamers who would want to play a reality-based game want to get close to the history.  We are not talking classic epic fantasy here but a game about the "historically possible."  You can't get more possible than reality.

Of course, the instant you set the model going you depart from reality; three things make it historical:

• A realistic start point
• A model that rewards historical behaviors with historical results
• And the hard one: players fitting comfortably within the period and not pressing the bounds of reality too far.  Of course, since reality includes the South Sea Bubble, Russian galleys in the Baltic, and the unlikely ending of the Seven Years War (Tzarina Elizabeth dies, replaced by deranged Prussophile successor) I don't know what I am worried about.

Models, Rules and Meta-Rules

Most of us are familiar with the idea of a "game model".

With conventional games the model is entirely exposed and directly manipulated by the players.  This can be tremendously simple, as in checkers where a piece has three states and position.  It can be as complicated as a hex-map board wargame where hundreds of distinct units in a complex class hierarchy can go through dozens of state transitions in a single turn.  Always, however, the state transitions are governed by the rules, and always playing the game is equivalent to directly manipulating the model states according to complex rules.

Miniatures games are not much different; the main difference (and even this is not universal) is that position is continuous rather than discrete.

Refereed games like Kriegspiel are very different.  The internal model is hidden from the players; state is managed and manipulated by the referee and exposed according to rules interpreted by the referee.  This adds considerable labor for the ref, but the reward is that the players are trying to operate in a mode closer to that experienced by officers in the historical period being gamed.

So far, so obvious.  Clearly the sort of game I have been talking about is closer to a Kriegspiel than to a face to face game.  What I want focus on right now is the capability of a hidden model to overcome "Turn Tyranny".  If the model includes "policy" and "mission" components, then the player is freed (to some extent) from time driven intervention.  As long as my policy is working for me, I can let it go on until I consider it invalid.  At some point, a player has to play, but there can be at least some looseness.  An aside: can we do away with turns entirely, and have a purely event-driven game where the "model" "runs"  until something happens that causes a player to get new information?

However, there is a caveat.  If we are going to allow the players free-form interaction with the model, we can't really have a "closed" model with everything defined -- all classes, all entities, all states, all transition rules -- in advance.  The player interface is the referee.  He has to be able to manipulate the model both by its interfaces and by augmenting and manipulating its internals.  He has to be able to override the results of the model as well; like a kind of free Kriegspiel, to achieve a truly free-form game human decisions must take precedence.  To make that work, however, the referee must either have such respect from the group that his decisions are trusted implicitly (and as ref you can't assume that) or the ref has to keep such careful record through the game of each decision and its reasoning that the players will understand after the game why all of the events happened.

The journey or the destination?

A couple of posts ago I wrote about the problem of what sort of game people want to play.  I want to have a game in which people can play in very different styles.  Well and good, but can how then do you compare their successes?

In an ordinary, symmetric,  uniform-interface game each player faces the same challenge.  Everything is probably zero-sum, and you can tally up units lots, provinces taken, and general nastiness suffered by some formula to arrive at victors and vanquished.  Perhaps winning will not really look like victory - in a game representing the campaigns in Europe in 1945, Berlin holding out until July can be considered a considerable success for example.  But it can still be measured, generally in some sort of point or victory conditions.

But if Aaron is playing the King of France and Bill is a minor Prussian General, how do you compare their relative performance?  This is not a question to which I have an answer, but it is one that has to be answered.

Or does it? 

Does a game need to have a defined form of victory in order to be played for fun?  Role Playing Games seem to rely on the personal objectives of the players.  The objectives do not have to be provided by the GM, or even shared with the GM by a player.  While play often proceeds within the context of a "mission" or a "quest" or the GM's latest splatbook, the whole thing (in my experience, at least) is intended to be as freeform and open as possible.

Can a large multi-player wargame be just as free-form?  It's been my experience that if you provide a large enough group of gamers with an environment where war is a possibility, and an eventual war is inevitable.  On the other hand, societies come with a concept of success that I think may have to be expressed to get players to approach the situation with the mindset you want as the referee.  This is especially important in an historical game.  While it may make sense in a fantasy game for the King of Erewhon to spend half the budget on trying to develop flying machines, suspension of disbelief may fray at the edges if the King of France does the same.  Or perhaps that just shows that fantasy games are, at some level, more fun than history.  After all, they can work even if some of the players have not done the research.

So, do we need victory conditions, or is the play the thing?

One Size Fits All

Another issue with most games: most games are set up with a single "player-profile".  All players are expected to want to interact with the others in a single way.  In Diplomacy, everyone plays the head of a European Great Power.  In Kingmaker, each player is an abstract alliance, the members of which change as part of game-play.  In Kriegspiel, each player is an officer in command of a body of troops.

It is only with the sophistication of Kriegspiel (which depends upon the presence of a referee) allows some diversity of play, and at that only a matter of levels of command within the historical military structure.

Fact is, though, not everyone wants to play the same game.  Some people want to conduct military operations, some to wheel and deal; some want to play abstract games where their viewpoint is abstracted from the historical participants, some would like to role-play a single character even if the character is operating in a strategic mode.

I'd like to have a game where there is only one imposition on all the players:  they must be willing to accept that other players will approach the game differently.  That does mean that there has to be some mechanism to bridge differing play modes and provide a seamless interface so that the differing approaches do not jar the expectations of the interacting players.

Tyranny of the Turn

Most games have turns.  Sometimes (like most of the boardgames we played as kids, chess, and many wargames) players "take turns"; one player participates actively, others are passive or may have intervention opportunities.  In some, such as Diplomacy or Young and Lawford's Charge, players record decisions and reveal them together, using the rules to resolve the results.  Most campaign games I have played are order based, but add a referee using the approach pioneered by Kriegspiel.

So what's wrong with turns?  In a turn-based game, progress is suspended until every player has participated appropriately.  If a key participant is unable to participate due to life event, either the game is suspended or the form of the game has to change to recover.  For example, in this Diplomacy game a player had to drop out, causing a disordered turn and a change of player.  Most games do not recover at all.

Is there a way around this?  We shall see, but first I want to examine some other issues in conventional games that form an obstacle to durable, flexible campaigning.

Game Architecture

Huh?

I design and develop software for a living.  In my trade, the Software Architecture is the foundation on which a system is built.  Get it right and you can deliver what the customer needs now, and adjust the system on the run to deliver what you need in the future.  Get it wrong and you might as well go home; bad architecture kills software.

But this is not a post about software - not even game software.  This is a post (or, likely, a series of posts) about my experience with extended wargame campaigns -- good and bad -- and how those experiences over the last forty years can be applied to a 21st century internet gaming environment.  It is also about how the design patterns that served us well in the past are betraying us in the gaming environment we live in today.

What do you mean "we"?

 My best campaign gaming experiences came when I

• Was free of significant responsibilities.  I had no family, the campaign was in summer so school was not a factor, and the summer job was industrial work I could leave behind at the gate.
• Had a couple of dozen friends 
• ...who were likewise unfettered.
• ...who had a similar vision of how a game should work.
• ...and who all lived in one city, so we could get together face to face every week.
• Had more than one charismatic referee for the game who structured his own life priorities so he could put in all the time and effort required to make it work.

If you are in that situation, you must have some great games going on and I would like hear about them.

My situation now?

• The boys are moving into adulthood, so the obligation factor is down, but it is not out.  I'm moving furniture this weekend because of it.  My wife has far more right to my time than my friends and hobbies.  Not that she is high maintenance, but my priorities have to put her first; and that is not a bad thing from my point of view either.  I also have a job that is fun and intensive, so I think more about it more than the eight hours a day I get paid for -- and can send me to another continent on a few days notice.
•  It is not hard to find people who would be interested in a campaign.  We have a good gaming group here, and the internet gives me access to almost every English speaking gamer on the planet (and the language caveat is my problem, there are doubtless yet more folks out there).  But:
• ...while some proportion of potential players might fit the "free as a breeze" profile (retired empty-nesters as well as young guys) most have the same sort of obligations I do.
• ... my old group a developed a shared vision over years.  The extended group cannot be expected to approach the game experience in a common way.
• ... The extended group is spread across the planet.  The social sessions that made the in-town games so much fun just won't be possible.
• Finally, I can't expect to pull a smart, charismatic, duty-free referee to run this (any volunteers?).  I am not charismatic, and I am not rearranging my priorities.

So can a campaign work with all this going against it?

I think so.  I propose to start by asking what a game should deliver to its payers and referees; look at how existing game patterns deliver results, and why they do not work for my life now; and then consider alternative patterns that might work for me and people like me.

The proof of the pudding is in the eating; test games will be essential before committing to a large-scale project.

I guess this will all take a while.