The Future of Computer Wargaming (1981)
archive.org
archive.org
Good to see things never change, gamers argued against change back then as well! Today fog of war and not knowing exactly what the enemy is doing is taken for granted, and full intelligence games are the exception, so he really nailed that prediction!
It's much more limited than what computers make possible of course, but it worked well enough.
And if all fails, the only thing you can do is sit idly by and watch how all your moves turns to dust as your former allies turn against you.
> The effect is not black and white. One pirate will not bring the industry crashing down. Even widespread piracy will not kill the industry. Widespread piracy will have four effects: First, software will be more expensive because software sellers will try to recover their costs on fewer sales with higher prices. Second, software will be more expensive because software sellers will burden it with a variety of anti-piracy devices. You the consumer will pay for these protection schemes. Third, software will be less usable and enjoyable because the protection schemes used will probably interfere with the operation and use of the game. Fourth, fewer games will be available because fewer authors will be motivated to write programs when they cannot earn a good return for their efforts.
In general, I am just amazed at how much commonality in discourse and medium we're seeing from a 1981 computer magazine. The Wolfenstein ad made me briefly reconsider when 3D games became a thing, until I realised that Wolfenstein had a 2D era.
Magazines are priceless historical artifacts. Everything from the ads to the language points to something that has passed (and that still is).
Most of the points are spot on in terms of the AAA response to piracy, but this one has been proven to be hilariously off-base. The open availability of professional-grade game development tools has lead to an explosion in games being developed (even if _far_ more are developed than are commercially viable).
I wonder if this observation can be extrapolated to hand-wringing over copyright in other industries...
Like journalism is innately piratable - the sourcing of facts can cost money, but once out, it's copied and replicated for free. But journalism, unlike videogames, is not inherantly monetisable, and only a handful of subscription-based outlets survive - and even those are beaten on this site by archive links.
Hyperlocal journalism and investigative journalism are both seemingly dying in absence of money. The free open-sharing market is not the most altruistic in how it shares resources.
I do think the traditional business model is probably done-for in a digital environment. Never mind that piracy is technically illegal. News rooms, unlike large music/film publishers, don't have the budget to go after pirates (besides which the journalists I studied with at least were largely ideologically pro-spread-of-information so this would put them in a weird spot).
I posit two alternative models that might have legs (though I haven't tried them myself, so buyer beware):
1. Source the funding for the story in advance. Fewer stories get written, but IMO that's fine. We don't need a constant stream of content (a lot of journalism done is just frankly not necessary even though overall journalism is essential), but some stories are worth paying for if they're well-researched and well-reported. This could be funded by grants and/or crowdfunding.
2. As far as I know industry reporting doesn't have this problem, at least to the extent that mainstream journalism does. For example, Janes. Which would make sense since groups pay for this information with the expectation that leveraging the knowledge will pay for its acquisition. This is similar in that there are patrons interested in the information and that interest translates into willingness to pay for it, just with an industrial flavor rather than a cultural flavor.
I am very interested in alternative models. For lack of a better rationale, I feel like journalism is a space with many problems, and as-yet unexecuted solutions, making it ripe for a good ole disruption. Easier said than done, surely.
I feel like its fundamentals just need to be translated. I like the idea of crowdsourcing - I personally think more newsrooms should crowdsource editorial, ask the reader what they want to read about and do a damn good job of writing it. This doesn't have to mean you will pander, or that you will be dumb. It just negates the problem of being a 'gatekeeper' of information, a problem so many people take issue with despite misunderstanding the fundamental nature of information creating
Interesting as a European to see an American perspective on games from an era when there was a surprisingly large difference between continents. In many issues of CGW there is even a column dedicated to reporting on news from Europe.
For those that did not know, after the magazine shut down in the early 00's some people got permission to scan all the issues and put them online (I assume that is where the scans on archive.org are from?): https://www.cgwmuseum.org/
If this doesn't exist: why not? It seems like the Army should spend millions of dollars to give their officers a fun way to get tactical and logistical experience without having to run in-person wargames.
> Most programmers work in BASIC, a language for beginners. Even among programmers producing commercial software for personal computers, fluency in assembly language (the most powerful language) is rare. It is impossible to fully realize the power of a personal computer without using assembly language.
Steve Gibson would agree with that statement.
In around 1985 (which is why I cannot remember it well enough) I borrowed a book from a local UK library specifically on writing (not playing) computer wargames.
A few such books exist/existed but I remember this one specifically. It was paperback, about half an inch think, and it went into great detail on how to pack army and map information into bytes (2 bits for one thing, 1 for another etc). It had the usual algorithms for movement, terrain, distance-based (not line of sight) fog of war etc., but the thing that stuck out as being different enough that it might be memorable was the bit-level compression of data. It may have been using Pascal, though I'm even more hazy on that as it was 40 years ago. It was definitely slightly more academical than introductory.
I've looked through a lot of the usual books from back then (not just the mainstream Donald Featherstone stuff), tried the library (but they are now a motorbike dealership), and even contacted a few publishers directly (they were nice enough to respond but with a 'not us').
Anyway, I appreciate this is vague but if anyone remembers it I'd be grateful.
Then we got Harpoon and it declined after that - the hardcore moved to smaller niche companies.
But Panzer General was fantastic, yes. I still play it every now and then. It runs quite well even on my phone in Dosbox. It was just at the end of the era when wargames was one of the big computer game genres, and probably outsold all the other wargames, but then as you say the genre declined.