{"id":3815,"date":"2013-07-17T11:00:27","date_gmt":"2013-07-17T15:00:27","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.playthepast.org\/?p=3815"},"modified":"2013-07-23T04:24:39","modified_gmt":"2013-07-23T08:24:39","slug":"historical-wargaming-and-asymmetrical-play","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.playthepast.org\/?p=3815","title":{"rendered":"Historical Wargaming and Asymmetrical Play"},"content":{"rendered":"

The videogame industry, like other computer and tech industries, tends to have a very buzzword-heavy culture.\u00a0 Certain phrases just seem to resonate with game makers, who latch on to them, often overusing or even misusing them.\u00a0 As some<\/a> people<\/a> have already pointed out, the new videogame buzzword seems to be \u201cAsymmetrical Gameplay,\u201d or designing games where players don’t all start out on equal footing.\u00a0 Most of this sudden interest is due to the Wii U and its inherently asymmetrical design, with one player operating the gamepad and the other three using the usual Wii remotes.\u00a0 However, other developers are jumping on the asymmetry wagon as well, with games like The Flock<\/em><\/a>, which seems a bit like an online version of capture the flag (or maybe more like \u201cFlag Tag\u201d from GoldenEye<\/em>).<\/p>\n

\"A<\/a>
A Game of Hnefatafl.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

Players having asymmetrical roles is certainly not a new idea.\u00a0 During the middle ages, Hnefatafl<\/em>, a board game in which the king and his guards are besieged by a much larger force of invaders, was popular in much of Scandinavia.\u00a0 Though it’s not entirely clear how far back the game dates, the Poetic Edda notes that one of the first things the gods did after creating the world was to relax and play some Hnefatafl<\/em> (which would make it a very old game indeed).\u00a0 Other traditional games like Fox and Geese<\/em> share this asymmetrical style, with one player controlling a small, but powerful force, while the other player attempts to win with superior numbers.<\/p>\n

Examples of asymmetrical boardgames are not limited to folk games.\u00a0 Modern authored games take this approach as well.\u00a0 Back in high school, my friends and I played a lot of wargames, from Risk<\/em> to Mordheim<\/em> to Kingmaker<\/em>, though our favorite game by far was Axis & Allies<\/em>.\u00a0 Unlike games like Risk<\/em>, players in Axis & Allies<\/em> don’t start with equal resources.\u00a0 Rather, they each take command of one of the major combatants in World War II at approximately the point in history when the United States entered the war.\u00a0 This means that the Russian player begins in a tight spot, while the German player seems almost poised to win the game single-handedly.<\/p>\n

Although Axis & Allies<\/em> has some similarities to games like Hnefatafl<\/em>, it’s not simply another example of the strong vs the many.\u00a0 In fact, despite the Axis players being outnumbered three to two, the most powerful player in the game isn’t Germany, but the United States.\u00a0 While the numbers seem to favor the Allies, in practice, we saw the Axis win just as many games over the years.\u00a0 So how did the designers achieve this balance?\u00a0 Much of it has to do with geography and distribution of forces.\u00a0 The British start with a huge empire, but have few troops to defend it and no way to quickly reinforce them.\u00a0 Germany has a lot of troops and a lot of room to expand, but is wedged between London and Moscow.\u00a0 The US is both wealthy and easily defended, but is so far removed from the fighting that support to its allies often arrives too late to save them.\u00a0 Each faction requires a dramatically different approach to be played effectively.<\/p>\n

\"Axis<\/a>
Axis & Allies Gameboard<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

What made this asymmetrical style of play really fun, however, was the dynamic that it created between players.\u00a0 While each team shared a common goal, the best way of achieving it was often a contentious issue.\u00a0 The tension between what was best for an individual player and what was best for the team led to lots of discussions and debates.\u00a0 This tension could also be exploited by crafty players, such as Japan intimidating the US into building a huge stack of infantry to defend California while the rest of the Allies were overrun (although California was certainly safe for the rest of the game).\u00a0 It was this social dynamic that made Axis & Allies<\/em> so compelling.\u00a0 It was also something that very few other wargames were able to do well.<\/p>\n

So why don’t we see see this kind of asymmetrical gameplay in digital wargames as well?\u00a0 The short answer is simply that balancing that kind of game is difficult, whether as a tabletop game or a videogame.\u00a0 Most historical strategy games like Civilization<\/em> or Age of Empires<\/em> have nearly (if not completely) identical factions, differing only in a few unique units and some special bonuses.\u00a0 An ambitious game might take a more Starcraft<\/em>-like approach, having fundamental differences between players, but still starting everyone out on equal footing.\u00a0 I’ve yet to find a strategy game that utilizes the extreme player inequalities that you find in Axis & Allies<\/em> (unless you count the digital version of the boardgame, which was a bit glitchy).\u00a0 This is not to say such a game would be impossible to make, but it does pose a number of problems.\u00a0 For example, our biggest obstacle to playing was that you needed to find five players who were willing and able to play a game that could sometimes last seven or eight hours.\u00a0 Although the game has rules for two, three and four players as well, you lose a lot of the excitement when one player controls multiple countries.\u00a0 For this reason, we almost always played with the full five.\u00a0 As our friends started going to college and moving away, we started recruiting their younger siblings to take their spots.\u00a0 Videogames can address this problem somewhat by allowing for computer controlled players, though computer players usually face the same issue of not being able to reproduce the same social dynamic as a human player.<\/p>\n

If trying to design an asymmetrical strategy game is so difficult, why should anyone even bother?\u00a0 I would argue that it’s important today for the same reason it was important when Hnefatafl<\/em> was first emerging \u2013 because war is generally asymmetrical.\u00a0 Although the idea of two identical chess-like armies marching to battle makes for an interesting competition, it results in a more abstract, rather than historical, kind of game.\u00a0 It’s probably safe to say that\u00a0 Hnefatafl<\/em> was at least partially inspired by an actual battle between the Swedes and the Muscovites (since that’s how the different pieces are referred to in some versions of the game).\u00a0 The Swedes have no hope of defeating the invaders.\u00a0 Protecting their king long enough for him to escape is as much as they can hope.\u00a0 Although we don’t really know the outcome of this hypothetical battle, it was significant enough that the Vikings didn’t want to make stories and songs about the event, they wanted to replay it, experiment with it, and speculate as to how it could have gone differently if they had been there.\u00a0 For me, this is the essence of what makes a historical wargame.<\/p>\n

\"Axis<\/a>
A German invasion of China<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

Let’s look back at Axis & Allies<\/em>.\u00a0 At the start of the game, forces and territory are distributed in a way that is, for the most part, historically accurate.\u00a0 Both sides could certainly try to reenact the second half of the war by following the same strategies that were used historically, or the players could engage in a little playful historical thinking<\/a>, trying to figure out in what other ways the war could have gone.\u00a0 Is a D-Day invasion of France the best path to victory, or could the Allies have simply reinforced Russia and plowed through the Germans lines from the East?\u00a0 What would have happened if the Allies had focused on Japan first, and Germany second?\u00a0 Over years of playing, I’ve seen many scenarios like these, as well as some much more unlikely ones, such as the German Navy sneaking through the Suez Canal and conquering the South Pacific, a massive land war in Asia completely overshadowing the European theatre, and a lone German infantry unit launching a surprise attack on an unsuspecting China.\u00a0 Though it probably did nothing to help any of us remember significant dates or events, it certainly prompted a lot of discussion about how tactics, diplomacy and geography related to those events.<\/p>\n

Could the same lessons be learned from a symmetrical Risk<\/em>-like game?\u00a0 Probably not.\u00a0 Although such games surely inspire their own discussions about history and warfare, they are unlikely to reproduce situations like D-Day or the Battle of Stalingrad.\u00a0 In Axis & Allies<\/em>, these are situations that the players have to think about right from the start.\u00a0 The players’ knowledge of these events helps to inform their choices and the outcome of these choices gives new perspective on the historical events themselves.\u00a0 I like these kinds of games, and I’d like to see more of them, especially on digital platforms.<\/p>\n

I’m certainly in no danger of growing bored with balanced Civilization<\/em>-style games.\u00a0 In fact, I think there’s still plenty of untapped potential in them.\u00a0 However, I’m looking forward to someone tackling the challenge of making the next great Hnefatafl\u00a0<\/em> or Axis & Allies<\/em> on a digital platform.<\/p>\n

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[Hnefatafl<\/em> image by BoardGameGeek user\u00a0jerzyab<\/a> \/ Creative Commons Licensed (CC BY-NC 3.0<\/a>)]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The videogame industry, like other computer and tech industries, tends to have a very buzzword-heavy culture.\u00a0 Certain phrases just seem to resonate with game makers, who latch on to them, often overusing or even misusing them.\u00a0 As some people have already pointed out, the new videogame buzzword seems to beContinue Reading<\/a><\/span><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":20,"featured_media":3821,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_feature_clip_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[15],"tags":[309,308,306,310,35,307],"coauthors":[311],"class_list":["entry","author-christiansen","post-3815","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-articles","tag-asymmetrical-play","tag-axis-allies","tag-boardgames","tag-hnefatafl","tag-playful-historical-thinking","tag-vikings"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/www.playthepast.org\/wp-content\/uploads\/2013\/07\/Axis-and-Allies-Russia-Small.jpg","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.playthepast.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3815","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.playthepast.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.playthepast.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.playthepast.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/20"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.playthepast.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=3815"}],"version-history":[{"count":18,"href":"https:\/\/www.playthepast.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3815\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":3864,"href":"https:\/\/www.playthepast.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3815\/revisions\/3864"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.playthepast.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/3821"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.playthepast.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=3815"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.playthepast.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=3815"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.playthepast.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=3815"},{"taxonomy":"author","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.playthepast.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcoauthors&post=3815"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}