Investigations of a Dog

Now that I’ve got a lot of other things out of the way I can get back to posting more regularly, and there’s a lot to catch up on (although I’m still slightly confused - this post was going to be about something completely different but wandered off in a slightly bizarre direction and isn’t very coherent!). Via Break Of Day In The Trenches there’s an update on Niall Ferguson and Muzzy Lane at Wired. Ferguson’s misplaced enthusiasm for the game Making History: The Calm and the Storm got a lot of attention in the history blogosphere last year (for example see Airminded, and my posts here, here, and here). There was some suspicion at the time that Ferguson was probably being paid by Muzzy Lane to big-up what is a pretty mediocre game, and now Wired reveals that he’s teaming up with them to design an ultra-modern counter-factual game.

It’s good that the Wired article focuses on chaos and complexity, but I think it’s a bit too optimistic. As far as I could see from the demo, Making History didn’t capture the chaos and complexity of war - it was simplistic and predictable. It’s true that strategy games can get people used to dealing with chaos, but Making History isn’t a very good example. If this is the main educational value of a strategy game, then that game doesn’t need to be historically accurate, and doesn’t even need a historical setting. There are plenty of commercial Real Time Strategy games available which are not based on historical research and which don’t claim to be counter-factual tools for historians. In my experience, this kind of game can be so complex and chaotic that even its designers don’t fully understand it.

The one I’m most familiar with is Warhammer 40,000: Dawn of War. I spent the first 3 months of 2005 playing Dawn of War competitively. I’d practice all day, working out build orders and strategies, watching recorded games, calculating statistics, timing myself etc, then go online in the evening and play rated matches. I did reasonably well: my highest rating was 1378, putting me in the top 1000 at a time when there were around 10,000 accounts active on the ladder. Doing all that means I got to know the game quite well, but I could never claim to know exactly how everything worked.

Like most RTS games, Dawn of War had some balance problems. The ambitious and innovative design tended to make this worse. In my previous obsession, Star Wars Galactic Battlegrounds, the 8 races were basically the same but with some adjustments to give them slightly different strengths and weaknesses. The only major imbalances were A-wings making the Rebels overpowered and a resource penalty making the Trade Federation underpowered. In the original Dawn of War, the four races (Space Marines, Orks, Eldar, and Chaos) were all completely different. The Orks even had a radically different population cap system from the others and an extra resource to take care of (this was so complicated that I never really understood it!). This made it exceptionally difficult to balance the game. Changing one thing could have unexpected consequences, creating an imbalance somewhere else. There were 4 major patches between the release of the original game in autumn 2004 and the release of the Winter Assault expansion in autumn 2005. Each one seemed to create as many problems as it solved.

There was simply no way of quantifying the overall strength of a race in order to see if it was “balanced”. A lot depended on the layout of the maps, and how the strengths and weaknesses of races interacted when they fought each other. It wasn’t even easy to define exactly what the balance problems were. There might well have been differences between perception and reality. Complaints on forums about perceived imbalances are not necessarily evidence of actual imbalances. Differences in ability can have a large effect on the outcome of a match. Some people might not be as good as they think they are and blame their defeat on the game instead of themselves. While some people whined, others tried to find ways to defeat supposedly unbeatable strategies. It was interesting to see strategies changing over time in response to new discoveries or patches. Ork players mostly spammed wartrakks until someone discovered the power of the kustom blaster, but then the 1.3 patch put an end to that. Space Marine players underused Word of the Emperor for a long time but later came to rely on it. The banshee rush was the Eldar strategy most feared by Marine players for a while, but it wasn’t really as effective as was claimed and was eclipsed by guardian rushing, which in turn gave way to reaper spam. The scout rush was the most controversial strategy. It could be unstoppable on some maps (especially Valley of Khorne) but even at its height in version 1.2 it was never as deadly as some people claimed. When scouts were nerfed in 1.3 it made it more difficult for Space Marines to deal with Orks and Eldar.

While balance in RTS games is difficult to define, let alone achieve, playing Dawn of War would do exactly what the Wired article claims for Making History: get you used to dealing with the unpredictability of chaotic systems. Another question which arises from my random reminiscences is: how do you study the history of RTS games? Maybe that would raise the further question: why bother? This kind of game is not particularly fashionable or important. Competitive RTS players are a sub-culture of a sub-culture, representing a very small minority of gamers. RTS games are not making the news in the mainstream media. However, that’s what makes them interesting to me. If the history of computer games becomes a metanarrative of progress towards World of Warcraft and Second Life it risks excluding an awful lot of experiences. Historians used to be interested in what was “typical” but now tend to be much more interested in the marginal, the obscure, and the excluded. Game studies has the opportunity to get it right from the start.