"Real" Real Time Strategy?

Mr. Fluffyhead writes "This hardcore RTS gamer's rather thoughtful wish list asks the question, if somebody made a 'real' war sim, would anyone want to play it?" From the fake Newsweek cover story about the "Ultralisk Rape Scandal" to Mr. Wong's yearning to break the Geneva Convention in pixel form, this one's a humourous yet realistic look at real time war games.

Comments

Hmmm...

[SuperMo0]

Now where have we seen the "Fog of Bullshit" before.... *wink* *wink*

Real Real Time?

[Vargasan]

I don't know about everyone else, but I don't want to play a game that takes 5 - 8 real-time months to build a barracks. Might lose it's feel.

Real != Fun

[I_Love_Pocky!]

I have always thought that a realistic real-time war sim would be nothing like the Warcraft/Comand & Conquer type games, because those give you way too much control. In real warfare you can't control individual soldiers. As a general you can map out a very general battle plan, and then kind of sit back and hope it works out. Even with the best communcation systems in place at best you could give orders to individual soldiers, but you wouldn't have any control over how they carried them out.

Now, how much fun is it to play a game where you basically sit back and watch the action, rather than being able to interact with it?

Re:Real != Fun

[{8_8}]

I suppose you could adapt the current RTS interface. It'd pretty much be like the article says. You'd click to build units. These units may or may not have defects, psychological issues, anti-war beliefs, etc. etc. Corruption might or might not result in your shiny new BigEffingTank8000 being sold to street gangs somewhere in Asia, or that vital shipment of anti-aircraft batteries being delayed until Senator Bob gets his vital SUV legislation passed. You select the units and tell them to go to area X and kill anything along the way. Along the way, the aformentioned problems might kill some, none, or all of your units, or maybe your units desert and go searching for Saddam's hidden gold cache. Once they reach area X, they sit there until you tell them to do something, unless those ugly problems rear their heads and new orders conflict with the heroin smuggling operation on the side. When you give the units an objective, they'll try and follow your orders until things go to hell, at which point they bail and return home. Once again, inherent unit problems might result in friendly-fire casualties or an aspirin factory explosion instead of a chemical weapons factory explosion.

This actually sounds like a fun game, if really frustrating.

Re:Real != Fun

[stienman]

I agree with you, and add that games are mere simulations. Any simulation of a 'real' activity is, by definition, simplified.

You can't account for all the random acts that may occur in any simulation. You can try to program in as many as you can think of, but how many game designers want to add the "Stupid soldier smokes while filling vehicle and blows up fuel depot" option? Now imagine that there are thousands of people, each with their own misadventures. Then you get to account for random environmental factors (more predictable than humans, I bet) and only then can you start looking at random enemy actions.

Even if you could program a large portion of these things in, gamers don't want them. Gamers like predicatability. You've seen, I imagine, all those "Perfect run" videos where a gamer practices a game until they can run through it in a short period of time, gaining maximum points? They don't want to fail a level because of something they can't control such as the aforementioned chainsmoking fuel depot lackey. Further, once they remember that the lackey blows up the depot they want to assume that it'll happen the same way every time they go through that level - that way they know they should frag him first.

Even RTSs with 'random' events (such as sim city) are extremely predictable. You just have to have a set of rules you follow, and 'stay ahead of the game.' Of course the real issue with the article is not how real the scenario is, but how the public, at a distance, interacts with the war. This is something gamers don't want - to be judged and scored according to a set of rules that they not only don't know, but that are dynamic.

-Adam

Interesting way to make a political statement

[the morgawr]

Guys, in case you didn't realize, he's not talking about any game; he's making a political statement. I did find the satire and the backdrop of a video game a very interesting way for the author to express his opinion.

Re:Interesting way to make a political statement

[I_Love_Pocky!]

Yeah, he made some really good points. But because he came at it from the angle he did, it made me sympathize with Bush about how hard it would be to win a war like the one we are engaged in in Iraq. All of the various things that come up that make it so you lose no matter what you do (even if you defeat the "enemy" you still haven't "won".

So what? Real war is not a game. But to quote Wargames, "the only way to win, is not to play." The article was written as though Bush was forced into some horrible situation he has little chance of winning in. Who forced him to go to war with Iraq? Sometimes I think maybe he wanted to have a real war game, so he made one.

Re:Interesting way to make a political statement

[protohiro1]

No kidding. To that I say to Mr. Bush: "oh, you mean you are really damned if you do, damned if you don't and you are trapped in an unwinnable quagmire? Well boo hoo, if you'd listened when we told you this was a bad idea and not lied your way into this situation you wouldn't have to deal with it."

I really disagree with him on a lot of his political points, but you've gotta love the "you can't handle the truth" hot key. I love that movie and I really love that scene. But I always interpreted the point of the scene differently. I thought the general looked pathetic, that he really believed that his mission to protect freedom made the ends worth the means. Of course, his mission was to protect Gitmo from cuba, which is a pretty damn useless missions.

But I really like the idea of Donald Rumsfeld, standing in front of some congressional commission:

Senator McCain: Mr. Rumsfeld, did you order the homorerotic abuse?

Rumsfeld: I did the job you sent me to do.

Senator McCain: Did you order the homorerotic abuse?

Rumsfeld: You're goddamn right I did!

Re:Interesting way to make a political statement

[protohiro1]

You know what, you're right. Saddam was never planning on playing nice. But I still don't see why that means we were doomed to re-invade. I know its a tired arguement, but there are a lot of not nice governments and we aren't invading their countries. Saddam does not seem to have posed any serious threat to the United States, immediate or otherwise. There is no evidence to suggest any relationship between Saddam and Al Quaida, and if Saddam had any deployable WMDs (which is unlikely) they were certainly far from a state of readiness at which they would pose any threat to the even the neighbors of Iraq, let alone the United States.

I assume the worst because their is no evidence to suggest otherwise. The lead up to war and the intelligence supporting it demonstrates either gross incompetence or deliberate misleading on the part of the administration. The handling of Iraq since the invasion has been a complete disaster, mostly due to an (apparhent) complete failure to anticipate anything but the most rosy of post war senarios.

So its not an assumption. I wasn't against this war because I'm naive, stupid or ignorant. (although its possible I'm all three and don't know it...) This war never struck me as necessary. If it was the administration has completely failed to demonstrate that it has been worth the cost in lives, money and international esteem.

If that frightens you, well, sorry. The president frighens me

Re:It has to be said...

[Anonymous Coward]

You fucking troll. Sure, he didn't say "the events in Abu Ghraib require Bush to commit hara-kiri on live TV". Nor did he say "we were right to use torture because it might have prevented one of our soldiers stubbing his toe on a concealed brick". He presented a fair and balanced view: that the actions of the American troops were not as bad as some of the things Saddams have done, but at the same time, they were still inexcusable. In other words, they were neither purely good nor purely evil.

I realise people like you have difficulty understanding that the world contains shades of grey, but keep at it. Try listening to Rush Limbaugh as well as Michael Moore, or even better find someone moderate and balanced to listen to.

Listen to this: Bush isn't stupid and Saddam wasn't evil. Both left and right-wing extremists will say I just said something ridiculous. But I didn't. Come back when you've grown up enough to accept that.

Re:It has to be said...

[Anonymous Coward]

Bush isn't stupid

Surely you would agree that such a strong statement requires some sort of proof? All evidence thus far has been to the contrary. Please feel free to point out any evidence I have overlooked.

Re:It has to be said...

[dangermouse]

Which is, of course, crap. It is not only possible but also moral to make value judgments. It's not only possible but moral to say that killing a hostage brutally and cruelly on videotape is worse than putting a bag over a prisoner's head for three days.

I keep hearing this. I guess you're the thousandth person to have said it or something, because you're the lucky winner of my response.

1. Bags over the prisoners' heads was the least of it. Prisoners at Abu Ghraib were attacked by dogs, isolated for long periods of time, and tortured to death. So let's not pretend the torture at Abu Ghraib was some minor infraction of niggling rules.
2. You cannot justify, excuse, or mitigate the torture of prisoners by pointing out the barbaric acts of an unrelated group of people.
3. You cannot justify, excuse, or mitigate the torture of prisoners with events that happened after the torture occurred.
4. You cannot justify, excuse, or mitigate torture.
5. Judging the unquestionably barbaric actions of one group relative to the unquestionably barbaric acts of another is a really shitty way to go about morality.

6. Call me a "radical leftist", I guess.

A crock I say! A crock!

[WinnipegDragon]

Umm... What a thinly veiled pro-Bush, pro-Iraq-War rant. Sorry, I'm not trying to derail, but basically half of his points are essentially taking shots at those that question things like the abuse of prisoners and civilian casulties.

The fact that he is doing it in the form of a questionably 'funny' video game list, and that it was posted here as a games topic is pretty lame.

Re:It has to be said...

[Colazar]

It is definitely immoral, except in situations where it's morally imperative. And it's actually a very good way to get information, which is why we do it. And by "we" I don't just mean Americans. I mean human beings in general. We learned thousands of years ago that torture is a great way to get to the truth, so when we need to get to the truth, that's the method we use.

Here's the problem. The kind of torture that actually works to get information is slow. The kind of situations that might actually justify torture are situations where you need the information quickly. If you have the time it takes to properly torture someone in such a way that you have enough confidence that you can actually *trust* the information, there was almost certainly a more morally defensible way to get that information.

Another big problem is when you *don't know* whether or not someone has any information at all. Torture is not a good way to do your sorting, either morally, or from a resource allocation standpoint.