Teching up or dumbing down?
There’s an interesting article about Real Time Strategy games over at God Is In The TV (mainly a music zine, but they cover all kinds of culture). This piece is much better than some of the drivel written about gaming by professional journalists. It suggests that the conventions of the RTS genre are changing, with resource management increasingly going out of fashion.
It’s a couple of years since I was heavily involved in RTS gaming, but my experiences tend to agree. I noticed this trend when I made the switch from Star Wars Galactic Battlegrounds (which might better have been called Age of Star Wars - it was basically Age of Kings with a Star Wars skin on it!) to Warhammer 40,000: Dawn of War. In SWGB there were 4 resources, and managing their extraction and use was a major part of the game. The first 10 minutes or so of game time (less in real time as it was commonly played at double speed!) were mostly spent gathering resources, building, and making more workers. Nobody who knew what they were doing would advance to tech level 2 before they had at least 20 workers. If the game wasn’t ended by a rush in level 2 or 3 it turned into an attritional grind. At maximum population in tech level 4 it was best to have about 60% workers and 40% military units. DoW was a very different kind of game. There were only 2 resources and the main one accumulated by taking and holding strategic points rather than extracting it with workers. Even with their special abilities it was rarely worth having more than 10% of your population slots filled by workers. However, tactics needed to be more sophisticated than in SWGB and units had to be micromanaged a lot to get the best out of them.
I don’t know whether these changing fashions are driven by the game developers or by demand from gamers, or whether it’s a bit of both. It’s hard to say whether these changes are making RTS games more or less realistic. As I’ve said before, strategy games always reflect arbitrary decisions made by their designers more than they reflect real life. But it’s maybe more important to note that changes in gameplay might be related to changing perceptions of war. The old style games which encouraged resource management tend towards a John Childs view of war: that war is attritional and usually ends with the exhaustion of one or both sides. The newer style with less resource management tends towards a Malcolm Wanklyn view which makes tactical contingency and innovation more important than a determinist emphasis on resources. (Maybe there are better examples but I’ve picked two early modern historians whose work I’m familiar with.)
I’m not sure how significant this all is. As far as I know RTS isn’t a very large genre. If the tastes of RTS players are changing that doesn’t necessarily say anything about changes in popular attitudes to war. As a final thought it’s interesting to note that the reduction of resource management in RTS gaming is going on at the same time as increasing anxiety in real life about global warming and peak oil. Things would always get tricky in SWGB when the nova crystals ran out late in the game, and I remember one game where carbon became ultra-rare because we’d used up every tree and rock on the map! Is the new style a way of escaping from these issues rather than confronting them?
