Volko Ruhnke's Modern Wargames | Hacker News Reader

Volko Ruhnke's Modern Wargames

shutupandsitdown.com

28 pointssmacktoward7 comments

If you are curious about modern boardgaming shutupandsitdown.com has some of the best (by "best" I mean funny and entertaining) videos and blog posts on the subject, IMO. Cool seeing it on HN.

>"That's a big hitch with digital games. They are inferior to physical games in showing how and why the player’s inputs produced the outputs that they did. I cannot really see the model, nor access it to modify to improve to my understanding of history or the world."

Intuitively, I don't agree with this, but I'm not sure what the actual argument is. My sense is that he was making a statement about his own mentation but couching it as a statement about humanity. Rather strong bias if so.

I believe he means that in digital games the model stays hidden most of the time. You only see the inputs and outputs.

In physical games the players have to enact the model themselves by following the rules at every step. Without exact knowledge of the model, the gameplay cannot even start.

Yes. With computer games, the actual rules are almost never completely described somewhere. They must be divined by trial and error.

A good example is Hearthstone vs. Magic: The Gathering. Hearthstone has all sorts of non-intuitive edge cases and unwritten rules. M:TG needs to be fully understood by all players, so complex interactions are still resolved with a fairly simple set of rules.

Thanks. That looks very interesting, as a tool to try to understand a complex issue. But it probably is a bit like reading the Economist. You have to be aware of the inherent biases, and even when you do you get influenced by them.

"You have to be aware of the inherent biases"

That is part of the victory conditions and gameplay of the COIN series. On one hand, you can't leave the fire in the lake game without understanding the ARVN point of view, at least not if you're even trying to win. On the other hand, you only get one fixed point of view WRT ARVN motivations and goals. Each faction has totally different victory conditions and rules. This is somewhat new in board gaming and I think the reason why has to do with computerized simulation in order to create something close to a balance.

Where "games as a simulation" usually fail is when designers try to balance too hard. Nothing could stop the German in early WWII, thats just how the world works. And that is the appeal of "walk in hitlers shoes" appeal of playing the Germans in WWII games, you get to experience the whole spectrum from utter military superiority to utter failure by the end. It can be quite a roller coaster, which in itself is the dramatic experience of the game. The native american experience vs euros post Columbus as a theme doesn't have quite the roller coaster, so thats why it doesn't work as well as a game theme.

This is part of what I found interesting about Ruhnke's approach: he acknowledges his own biases and provides copious designer's notes so the player can judge how they affect the game for themselves.

I've long been of the opinion that every simulation game design is basically an argument -- a statement that "I think this slice of human experience worked this particular way." But usually the argument is only made implicitly; you have to tease it out via gameplay. I like when designers make it explicit instead by telling you up front why they made the decisions they did.

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