The big companies at the time were Avalon Hill and SPI. There’s a lot of historical material to choose from, because people being assholes and taking other people’s stuff had gone on for a long time. Although you might be choosing which war and geographic location, they were mostly the same. The armies were based on historical groups of troops. You fought with what you had with no chance to manage your upcoming inventory.
There was lots of room to improvise and change the format. The Japanese were never going to win the WWII war in the Pacific. But, you could gain victory points and make life more miserable for the Americans and still win the game. Getting people used to the idea of moving die cut cardboard counters across hexagons did allow fantasy and science fiction settings to be feasible. These included games based on actual fiction and completely made up ideas just for the game. The idea of having Sauron kick the shit out of some tiny hobbits intrigued me. The same way I would cheat to give the Japanese a bigger edge at Pearl Harbor than was historically accurate. But that’s enough about my psychopathy for now.
What these games did introduce and make common place was legitimately random dice rolls to solve combat. If you understand foreshadowing in movies pay attention to that, it’s important. There would be a table based on the terrain, the type of military units, the size of the army or whatever the overall theme provided. The dice were rolled and there would be a verifiable outcome. It was Risk with more variation.
Once home computers became affordable enough, the strategy game industry really got a shot in the arm. Now people are no longer forced to wait until a worthy about has the time for a game. The historical war themes, science fiction starships, the fantasy dragons, these could now be shown on a computer monitor with ever improving graphics and other standards of computing.
Backing up a bit to classic Dungeons and Dragons where you roll the dice. If your dungeon master allowed you to roll the dice over and over and over until you finally got the stats you liked, it was probably less enjoyable in the long run. There’s no adventure into just instantly winning without effort. But playing solo whether it’s with cardboard counters or with a computer, who are you hurting other than yourself? Everyone I knew would get a new game, play it straight up for awhile, then figure out how to cheat. Get a higher score if the game had points. Get past that super tough monster that you just didn’t have the reflexes for. And just for the fun of finding some trick.
The single greatest, easiest and most common cheat. Save and reload. An entire generation raised on the idea that if you don’t like the outcome you simply hit a reset button and try again. This, by itself is not too bad. But the problem hits home with the development of the internet strategy games based on the stand alone computer games that were based on over the board games. If two or more people want to cheat and reset, somebody is pissed. Mutually agreed resets between two combatants? Hogwash. Suck it up and take the L, you loser.
I played a lot of internet strategy games decades ago, back in the early days. And if there was a legitimate one I never found it. There’s a wide variety of intellectual capacity to cater to. Inevitably “smart” play would be penalized and “stupid” play wouldn’t necessarily be rewarded, but it at least wouldn’t be punished. The era of catering to everyone getting a participation award arrived to games. I’m not going to name any specific games. But just for giggles I played a well known internet game for over two years from 2019-2021 and was not surprised by how the same old problems still exist.
The games are far more concerned with making money than making rule changes to make it fun. There’s usually a mechanism in place to have someone smarter than the rest of the group be a leader or king. Individuals are allowed to act as a lone wolf and go about their own as well as teaming up and going against other teams. Individually the rules are the same. And if you are paying attention the game economics always fails. There are mechanisms in place for collecting resources, converting those into troops and buildings. Then you go out and find someone that isn’t a total pushover because the reward is less than the effort. But somebody juuuusssst slightly weaker than you. Kill, rebuild, repeat.
And watch as the conquered magically has enough resources for an effective retaliation. This could be in the form of the weakling allegedly paying for upgrades and coming back from total incompetence days or weeks later. Or an ally of his bigger and stronger than you. Or just an allegedly random person that caught you in the rebuilding phase after you try and replace your dead troops from your invasion.
As for the first scenario, most of these games have a way to play for free, but have in game boosts where you can pay for an immediate upgrade. It’s highly unlikely that somebody will start a game, play like a doofus, get attacked and then finally pay actual money for revenge. This makes the games not about someone being better, just faster. You’re only leveling up to meet more of the same cycle of attack and revenge. The second and third, psychologically these are trickier. It’s easy to pay attention to your own realm and the economics. But if you’re really paying attention there’s something odd going on the leader boards. No matter what you do, including spending money, there’s always someone far better than you. Always someone faster than you, whether they are paying for it, or….cheating?!?
Here’s where these games show their failure. Talk about cheating is constant. Like the Bill Gates wants to microchip you conspiracy, these games aren’t worthy of cheating on. And trolls will come into the chat and offer you cheat codes, or other hacks and boosts to give you that actual money paid for edge. And magically, the operators of the game have no clue on how to stop the cheating by simply getting rid of or blocking the cheaters who proudly announce their presence. It’s like they actually want cheaters.
Because they do. Most people never get to the point where the realize these super positions are operated by the site. Anything to get engagement, encourage spending money for something of no practical value. Like Alex Jones, but for some stupid game that some jackass programmer suddenly forgot the basics of how to program a simple random number generator. I’ve seen that PATTERN unfold too many times for it to be a coincidence.
The target audience of these games. Kids. The graphics are cutesy. If there is any reaction time necessary for combat success it’s minimal. This is why there’s the South Park episode about chasing the dragon. Kids are getting a taste of winning by spending, while the product they are spending on is an illusion. There’s no long term benefit, you’re not even learning any strategy, unless it’s strategizing how many times you can sneak Mom’s credit card out of her pocketbook to pay for an upgrade until she catches on.
Next up, how this idea of cheating, fake game positions and people refusing to take the L ruined internet poker.
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