The Wargamer

Introduction

The Wargamer is pleased to present the first of a three-part series written by Jon Compton, editor-in-chief of Fire & Movement Magazine. This article was originally published by Against the Odds Magazine in Volume 2, No. 2, and The Wargamer would like to thank them for sharing these with our readers.

Groping for the New Paradigm, Part I: The Indictment

Almost fifty years ago a fellow named Charles Roberts began designing and publishing games. They were revolutionary in concept: board games representing warfare in a fashion much more specific and tangible than anything in the past. Unlike Chess, these games offered very specific historical events to choose from, offering the player the opportunity to rewrite history. In fact, they laid the foundation for an entire industry, from which sprang almost all the other game genres that are popular today.

The first efforts quickly evolved. Square movement grids became hexagonal, Zones of Control were invented, as well as the Combat Results Table, Terrain Effects Chart, et al.

Then, right about there, creative thinking pretty much stopped.

Since then we've seen expansion and refinement of those designs, but no real, or perhaps a better word would be successful, departures. Today, an innovative game is one where someone has come up with a new way to determine in what order the pieces will move. Wargame designers have become complacent in their acceptance of the hex/ZOC/CRT model, and apply the same principles to monkeys with sticks as giant robots with nuclear tipped missiles. There is no real creativity happening.

It is startling to realize that almost every era, every scale, and every conceivable style of combat has been represented using the same mechanisms. Hexes, combat factors and movement factors, zones of control, and odds ratios have been applied to almost every conceivable form of combat.

This method has become dogma; a doctrine of design that assumes a one-size-fits-all form of evaluation and application. The Wargame industry has straightjacketed itself with a purely derivative model from which it refuses to evolve or deviate.

It is little wonder that a once thriving and lively industry has shrunken to print-runs of under 5000, and a static customer base that howls for severed heads whenever a wargame company reaches for a new audience by delving into other genres.

Conventions offer some eye-opening grounds for observation. Who has not attended a recent gaming convention and witnessed the paucity of board-wargames being played? Or witnessed the eye rolling and grimacing of other gamers when witness to the hex and counter ecclesiastics?

What do they know that wargame designers and players do not?

Take role-playing games (RPGs) for example. RPG’s have been around almost as long as wargames. In fact, they sprang from the loins of the wargame industry. Why have they managed to maintain popularity, as well as penetration into mainstream sales outlets? There are many answers, but the one that concerns us is that RPG designers have routinely thrown the baby out with the bathwater when it comes to their game systems. RPGs are about the story, or the world they take place in. The system isn’t really a part of the equation when it comes to the player’s enjoyment of the game, other than to facilitate the realities of the environment or story. Therefore, RPG designers create role-play systems that are appropriate to the environment that they are designed to support. Key word here is support.

Meanwhile, the belief in the traditional wargame design model has attained canonization. And the swine are laughing at the pearls. In a nutshell, most games are designed as concept in search of an appropriate system, while military based board wargames are a system ever in search of events from which to extract new names to paste upon the components.