Comments on: Games and simulations

By: Investigations of a Dog » A Denial?

Investigations of a Dog » A Denial? — Fri, 22 Dec 2006 14:52:28 +0000

[...] Moving up from a tactical to a strategic level, genocide is a significant logistical problem which requires the input of adequate resources and outstanding organisational skills (which the Nazis and IBM clearly possessed). From that point of view you could make a Holocaust management simulation game which, if you�re into that kind of thing, would be no more boring than any other management sim. I�ve already noted the way that Making History: The Calm and the Storm appears to gloss over the Holocaust (see my post on Games and Simulations). This is a serious omission for a game which makes claims to historical accuracy and is marketed as an educational tool. How can you understand Nazi strategy without taking the Holocaust into account? Even in FPS, there are some missed opportunities to bring the Holocaust in. The final mission in the PC version of Medal of Honor: Allied Assault involves breaking into and blowing up a German poison gas factory (no, really). One of the mission objectives is to rescue prisoners who are being used as slave labour by the Germans. What kind of people would you expect these prisoners to be? If you�re not familiar with the game, or the genre to which it belongs, you might not be expecting captured American soldiers, but that�s what they are. I think genre conventions and marketing departments have an obvious influence here but there are some other obvious reasons for the Holocaust�s absence from games. [...]

By: Gavin Robinson

Gavin Robinson — Wed, 01 Nov 2006 18:48:59 +0000

That is a good point. I’m sure there are lots of other examples of governments getting out of their depth because they think they know all about war and how to win it. My thinking about games as cultural artefacts was that they might reveal something about popular misconceptions in the culture that produced them, but I realise that’s limited by genre conventions: where gameplay and realism conflict, gameplay is usually preferred.

By: Dan

Dan — Wed, 01 Nov 2006 17:30:20 +0000

Damn, and I fell into both your cunning traps of starting on him! Could we make a broader point out of your ideas about ‘learning the rules of the game’? After all, British policy makers (mis)preconceptions about the game they were playing in 1938-1943 at least had a heavy impact on how they played. So maybe that’s the lesson we should learn?

By: Airminded · Thanks for playing

Airminded · Thanks for playing — Tue, 31 Oct 2006 12:10:54 +0000

[...] Investigations of a Dog also critiques Ferguson’s article, from a different angle. air-minded, adj. [...]

By: Gavin Robinson

Gavin Robinson — Fri, 27 Oct 2006 08:03:52 +0000

I had some pretty negative and sarcastic things to say about Ferguson in the first draft but I managed to delete them before I posted. Niall Ferguson bashing is an easy way for an empiricist to establish some credibility with the postmodernists, but maybe it’s a bit lazy. I’ll still be interested in playing the demo when it comes out.

By: Brett

Brett — Fri, 27 Oct 2006 00:37:35 +0000

Gah, I wrote a long post about Ferguson’s article too, also informed by my gaming experience, but pulled it after I posted it, because it was too ranty and negative about Ferguson! I might rework it, but you’ve said a lot that I agree with here. I particularly like your point about the arbitrariness involved in games rules. This is probably most obvious in board wargames, because all of the game mechanics are written down for you rather than being hidden away in a program. You’ll often see a nice, elegant movement, combat, logistics etc system which covers most of the gameplay, and then at the end are tacked on various extra rules (known in the trade as “chrome”) to cover special situations. Usually these are to enhance realism, but it does emphasise the arbitrariness of such games when you see that, for example, one game on the Eastern Front in WWII has special rules to cover Hitler’s crazy no-retreat-ever orders (which behaviour historically-aware players are unlikely to replicate unless forced to) — and then another game doesn’t. This makes you wonder what else the games might miss, and perhaps encourages you to go away, read up, and find out, but it hardly gives you confidence that these are ultra-realistic simulations. Wargames instead are acts of historiographical interpretation, and I thought it weird that Ferguson doesn’t seem to realise that, and instead is so dazzled by the level of detail in The Calm and the Storm that he privileges it over his own research.