(A
personal account of the design of this game...)
Today
there is a great deal of talk about the experience of our soldiers –
mainly in World War Two and Vietnam. There are many films and games about
the subject – in fact we seem to be awash in them. Sadly, there is a
kind of bandwagon mentality emerging – a rebirth of nationalism that is
sometimes at odds with the original spirit of the originators of this
revisionist review of the solder’s lot: books, the pre-eminent ones
being War by Gwynne Dyer, and Wartime by Paul Fussell. (Wartime
is the literary crossroads of WWII revisionism – a summary of all
sources of literature, reflection and understanding of that war. Saving
Private Ryan seems to have been made in direct response to Fussell’s
last chapter of Wartime: “The Real War Will Never Get In The
Books”.)
This
game was begun in that spirit revisionism – long before it began to
break into the mainstream. It was part of that simmering zeitgeist.
I
started work, in earnest, on Fire Zone in 1995 – but in reality I
had been working on it much earlier. In 1984, as a teenager, I took up the
hard-edged roleplaying game of Traveller (the Dungeons
& Dragons of the sci-fi genre). Traveller
has a heavy military theme, and the scenarios and campaigns I gamemastered
were often thinly-disguised Vietnam missions set on fictional planets
(your troops were decked out in “powered combat armour” and “gauss
rifles” instead of flak jackets and M16s, flying around in floating
“grav-tanks” which were a combination of helicopters and the armoured
fighting vehicles I had trained in myself in the forces). I heavily
modified Traveller because I was fascinated with the combat aspects
but thought they were off in the game. About the same time (1986) I joined
the army. In those early days, getting my hands right into the mechanics
of this kind of game design, I was studying film and screenwriting in
university, and wearing a uniform – training in mechanized infantry for
the Big One to happen in Europe. Waiting for Ivan to make his move.
He
never did.
It
has been an immense journey since then, this game. My experience in the
army was what switched my game design attentions away from a
science-fiction metaphor of the grunt’s world to a direct interpretation
of it.
At
first I tried making a direct roleplaying game of soldiering, but it
wasn’t working out. A roleplaying game starts with individuals and works
up to small parties of characters – bands of adventurers on the model of
Tolkien’s heroes in The Lord of the Rings (a major inspiration of
D&D), striking out into the wilderness. Problem is modern
combat involves tens, hundreds, thousands of combatants – something that
is impossible to resolve consistently (without resorting to sweeping
generalizations) through a roleplaying game model.
(When
I studied real wargaming – the kind done by the military – I saw how
they too understand this tension between low-level detailed game models
and higher-level abstracted ones; and that you can’t make a high-level
game by just amping up a low-level, detailed model. It's like assuming
that 20 motorcycle engines can do the job of one transport-truck engine.
It might look right on paper - the same horsepower in total - but it
doesn't work out on a practical level.)
Then
one day in 1995 I had a flash of inspiration after playing a miniatures
wargame. That was when Fire Zone was born. I decided to take the
military roleplaying game more in a miniatures wargame direction (and gave
it its current name). The first iteration was written in
one day – it was two pages long.
Yet Fire Zone still remained somewhat in the roleplaying vein. The game
was written with this mission statement, basically unchanged since 1995: A
game about the experience of the footsoldier in the 20th
century. On the one hand it wants to be a roleplaying game – so we
can experience what it’s like to be a grunt – on the other hand it
needs to be a wargame – so we can realistically resolve the grunt’s
lot in combat. This was to dog the project, and stills does: the tension
between the need to abstract (i.e. to make things wargame-like, so that
the vast complexities of combat – moving squads, vehicles, explosions,
fire – can be resolved with simplicity, in a reasonable length of time),
and the need to give a concrete experience (i.e. to enable the player to
“see” the events – to hear and smell and taste things, like the
cordite in the air, the impact of rounds, the screams of fallen comrades,
the image of tracers streaking into the distance). The two things stand in
opposition – the more abstract the game, the less you can see; the more
concrete it is, the more complex and difficult things are to resolve when
a lot of activity is going on (especially major combat – the staple of
the grunt’s experience – with bullets, projectiles, explosions going
off everywhere; lots of calculating if not abstracted).
Yet
I hit on a design I thought might work.
In
early 1998 I was ready to publish, with the first book (all 270+ pages)
fully lain out; even a distribution deal. I was just getting the page
numbers done and the index written. Then I picked up a copy of a little
science-fiction wargame about squad-level combat. (Similar to Traveller.
Have I already mentioned that strong themes of 20th century
soldiering sit barely disguised beneath a great deal of science fiction?)
I saw things in this game that woke me up to weaknesses in my own design.
Suddenly I could see major shortcomings in Fire Zone ’98 –
things I could easily rebuild; ways I could make the game better. But, as
with any exercise in design or engineering, when you move a few major
components – even a little bit – the need to refit and readjust
other parts expands throughout the entire system, until what you are doing
is overhauling it. I could see this would happen. It came to this
question: Do I publish now and to hell with these mistakes, or do I go
back to the drawing board and rebuild?
It
was an agonizing decision.
I
chose to go back to the drawing board.
A
few months later Saving Private Ryan was released.
And
really, as they say, the rest was history. New digital wargames appeared
like crazy. Now there are tons of these games.
Yet,
I continued to work on my game. (I still do, though I’ve slowed down on
it to do other projects in the last few years.) Suffering, slogging
through it. Engineering and re-engineering. Building. Adjusting. Tearing
down. Rebuilding. I did this because it still hasn’t been done – the
defining game about the experience of the footsoldier in the 20th
century (or the modern period as I now say, post-2000). No one has made
this game yet. Even despite all the digital wargames that have come out.
Fire
Zone remains a labour of love.
*
* *
It
is quite a thing to design a tabletop game – in many ways a hundred
times more complex than a digital game. You haven’t the luxury of
relegating complex calculations to a computer. True, you have to budget
cycles in a computer game – but you still have more than enough
calculating power to choose from a vast number of options (in terms of the
whole question of what it is you are going to simulate). With a tabletop
game, your CPU is the ability of a typical person to do the math while
he’s simultaneously trying to have a good time with his friends. And I
respect this! (Where a lot of tabletop game designers – purists from
real military backgrounds – don’t.) Why play a game if not for some
sense of enjoyment? Even if you want to maintain a sense of integrity with
the subject (to represent it correctly)? It would be masochism otherwise
(even though there are a lot of masochistic tabletop gamers out there) –
and plain naïve (this isn’t real soldiering, folks!).
Yet
I wanted to keep the tabletop game alive! Why? Because, frankly, there are
limitations to what you can do in a digital game! Why do we still have
books if there are movies!?! Because a book lets you see your story
with the mind’s eye, not the actual eye. It allows you to understand a
different dimension of the experience – one unavailable to the motion
picture. It is exactly the same thing between a digital game and a
tabletop game.
Marshall McCluhan spoke of "cool" and "hot" media -
where the cool type requires the viewer to be more active, to bring more
to it (like a book); and the hot basically does it all for the viewer, and
they can be more passive (like a movie). It's the same here - digital
games are "hot"; tabletop games are "cool". Tabletop
games require you to be more active - to bring more to the
experience; to make it into something.
Another
thing I did was experiment rigorously with double-blind wargames – often
gamemastering realistic scenarios played out by real soldiers (some of
them former colleagues from my unit). These games were so realistic we
found it was the armchair-types who couldn’t handle them; the digital
wargamers would get too impatient; but the real soldiers found them
bang-on! This forms part of the scope of the Fire Zone
development “franchise”. Again, in a tabletop game, though you do not
see things literally (with computer graphics) you “see” them – that
is, imagine them – with much more depth. You can do more. You can do
things the gamemaster hadn’t anticipated – the same way a soldier can
improvise, adapt, overcome...
*
* *
There
are huge limitations in digital games! Massive, staggering limitations in
comparison to tabletop games! One of the most basic is the depth of things
you can do and experience. In a digital game you must stay within the
rigid confines of what is lain out for you to do in the game – lain out
through hundreds and thousands of hours of development time. You cannot
stray from this. You MUST do what the game developers have already
determined can be done in a digital game – the computer does not know
what to do otherwise.
Ever
play Dust, that really popular map on Counter-Strike (that
tremendously popular digital game)? Ever wonder what’s inside those
boxes? What’s behind those doors and windows that are permanently
locked? Where you are (what country, what city)? Why these terrorists are
trying so hard to blow up those boxes?
Of
course not! You don’t care about those things because Counter-Strike is intensely focused on simulating the particulars of combat –
moving, firing at an enemy there, at this enemy here, coming under fire,
evading. But, because of that, you cannot do anything but move and fire at
the enemy. There is no context beyond this. You cannot choose unusual ways
to win at Counter-Strike – all the ways to win are already known.
You cannot, for instance, remove the target the terrorists are trying to
bomb. You cannot negotiate with them. You cannot trap them and wait them
out. You cannot take them prisoner. You cannot disguise yourself as one of
them. You cannot fire mortars at them, or pick up a planted bomb and throw
it, or use tear gas, or claymore mines, or listening devices, or an
armoured vehicle, or do a thousand other things you might be able to think
of.
Why
are you there? Who are you? What is your squad part of? What is your
overall mission? You can’t answer these questions anywhere in Counter-Strike.
That’s not what it’s about. It is only about the laser-focused
scenario of: us versus them; we must shoot each other; we must plant a
bomb or prevent that bomb from being planted.
(But
that's cool, since that's what Counter-Strike is about. And I like
it for that.)
What
if you want to know the larger context? Hell, that is part of what it
means to be a soldier!?! What the hell am I doing here in the middle of
the shooting!?! Why am I fighting!?! What are we fighting and dying for!?!
These questions are as much the experience of the footsoldier as: Can
I hit that guy a hundred metres away with this rifle? I mean, you
would never know it from Counter-Strike (a game about
counter-terrorism), but real counter-terrorists say that if you have to
draw your weapon you have already lost...
*
* *
One
attempt to represent the larger context of things in a digital game format
is through a single-player game with a kind of storyline – such as Half-Life.
Or in a massively-multiplayer online game (MMOG) where you can play a
persistent character in a persistent world – both the character and the
world continually grow and change in the course of play. (Both of these
forms draw their ancestry from tabletop roleplaying games, and thus wargames.) But
still, you must remain within the confines of what the developers have
given you. (Especially in a game like Half-Life, which is something
of a glorified “haunted house” – the player moving through a maze
with only one eventual direction; shooting whatever monsters appear.)
You
simply cannot roam in a digital game. You cannot roam. In a tabletop game
you can roam where you want. Whether you’re a player or a gamemaster. As
a player, you can do a much wider variety of things, within the
limitations of common sense circumstances. You can negotiate with an enemy
instead of killing him. You can use bluff and deception a lot more. As a
gamemaster, you can sketch out an adventure scenario a couple days before
you gather with the players – but neither of you need to stick strictly
to that adventure. The rules are there to support you no matter where the
players wander; to help the gamemaster resolve the questions that are
posed by the actions of player- and non-player characters no matter what
they are. When the
players want to try some unusual thing, the rules allow you to improvise a
means of resolving things in a way logically consistent with the entirety
of the game. In a tabletop wargame you can pick a subject out of any
chapter of history that those rules can cover. You can even make up a
fictional chapter of history – or choose an obscure war almost no one
has heard of. You can even ad-lib! Try doing that with a
digital game!
Many
in the digital game industry have tried to mimic this ability of tabletop
games. But you know what, I don’t want them to! I would prefer to
play a Half-Life just the way it is – as a digital haunted house
(and I’ve been all the way to the end of Half-Life and many other
single-player digital games) – because that forms a lot of the appeal of
those games for me. If I want to roam in a premise game, beyond the
confines of the set experience, I will play a tabletop game. If I want a
premise game with intense visual and audio ambience, I will play a Half-Life
or a Counter-Strike.
*
* *
Another
limitation to digital games is that they all suffer the “black box
syndrome”. (This isn’t my term; it is a professional – i.e. military
– wargaming term several years old.) You feed numbers and decisions in
one end of the black box and an outcome comes out the other. You don’t
know how the computer has “done its math”. A lot of the effort of game
play is to try to deduce what goes on inside the black box that is a
digital game’s mind. Since all games are interpretations made by an
author (a game designer – who is assisted by programmers), the
black box syndrome puts a great limitation on their value. In a tabletop
game, on the other hand, you always know what is going on in the guts of
the game. You can question it; and freely tinker and modify it, without
needing to learn an entirely new language, such as C or C++ (programming
is really an entirely different skill – which is why there are game
designers and programmers for digital games, but only game
designers for tabletop games).
*
* *
Let
me bring this back to the history of Fire Zone. As the first-person
shooters began to catch on – especially multiplayer (I’m a real Counter-Strike
fanatic) – it became apparent there was no point in rules that
emphasized the detailed aspects of combat, such as shooting at specific
targets. Why play a tabletop game for that when the digital game, such as Counter-Strike
or Rogue Spear, is so much better at it?
So
I again re-engineered Fire Zone.
I
took two years off. Well, it’s more accurate to say I was
“compelled” to take two years off, because I suffered a hard-drive
crash and lost about 20% of my material – but this was something of a
blessing-in-disguise. It was a minor tragedy that forced me to put the
game aside and forget about it for a time. That was exactly what I needed,
though I couldn’t see that at the time.
I
put it aside and played Counter-Strike, and played double-blind
tabletop wargames, and worked on other things – other games, including
games for clients.
But Fire Zone sat there (sits there), in the back of my mind. Now and then I would
revisit it, if only to jot a few notes down – to try to slowly
re-develop the tools.
It
was the tools that were important in Fire Zone. The core system, as
it is called in a tabletop game. The system that enables you to resolve
those basic questions of what you (your character, your unit) can do in
the game. It is the system that allows me to gamemaster the events in a
scenario or a campaign.
When
I came back to Fire Zone, it was apparent it needed to tell the
story of the grunt that the digital games could not tell. It needed to be
refocused to build on its strengths. The game had to be more abstract. The
only way to do this was to build a set of core tools – a system – that
could handle the right spectrum of abstraction and detail; a spectrum not
covered by any other game.
That
was really the story of Fire Zone: the game system.
Putting
it temporarily aside allowed me to get out of the patterns of thought I
was stuck in. It enabled me to approach it from a clean slate.
And
this I did. A few months ago – as of this writing (March 2002) – I
broke through: built a system that, I believe, is much better than the new
D20 system that Wizards of the Coast developed for 3rd
edition Dungeons & Dragons. A system that is simple, consistent
with the laws of probability, and modular. It is an elegant system. A
system built to handle the newer vision of the game. And a system that can
be scaled up to handle the larger-scale, double-blind wargaming I had had
such success with – thus enabling me to expand the Fire Zone
franchise to include what I had prior considered a separate game entirely
(i.e. Fire Zone is now both the original squad/platoon level
miniatures/roleplaying game and the platoon/company/battalion
level of my double-blind wargames). This is what will enable the Fire
Zone vision to be reached. It is now a matter of re-interpreting the
subject of the game in the terms of this new system.
*
* *
Doing
the game has had ancillary benefits as well. It has honed my writing and
game design abilities in general; taught me art direction, desktop
publishing, and digital graphic design. (I put these skills to good use in
my paid game development projects – believe me, there’s nothing like
attempting a “monster” game, such as Fire Zone, to teach you
the realistic limits of game development.)
And
it has made me an authority on modern ground warfare.
*
* *
Over
the course of developing Fire Zone I, in a way, lived the story of
the soldier in the 20th century. Not so much the physical story
– of this war or that – but the internal story: the story of the
mental machinery of war. I watched the weapons evolve, and the subsequent
tactics – and my mind followed their arc. I subjected my thinking to a
course of mechanistic engineering to get this game to work – to be
consistent to the laws of probability AND the laws of squad infantry
combat, AND to be simple and elegant enough to use on a tabletop with a
handful of dice and a pencil and papers (as opposed to a computer that can
do millions of calculations a second). To balance all those things was a
hell of a thing to subject my artist’s mind to. I eventually just hit
the limit of my ability to calculate things out, mathematically. But I
kept at it.
And
I know now, in a way, why the soldier is the way he is. I had my own
experiences of it in the army – but this was a whole new thing. This was
the hardest thing I’ve ever done, this game. I’ve written a number of
feature screenplays, and produced and directed film work – but this
thing was the hardest. To put yourself into debt for an idea that makes it
or breaks it on somebody’s tabletop on a Sunday afternoon for the fun of
it. To invest one, two, three, now five years, into it – and still go
back and break it down and rebuild it.
It
got to the point I had broken it down so often, it was as if my own mind
was breaking down. If there were no rules that could stick on paper, how
could my own thoughts on it stick together?
I
pushed it to the breaking point.
I
know now something of what soldiering is. People don’t realise it, but
soldiering is as much thinking as acting.
I
followed the soldier’s story, and I lived it too, in a way.
It
is the story of a fictitious “man”. I watched the evolution of that
man, the modern “grunt”.
In
1900 he is still hanging onto his noble and chivalrous values – this man
of the First World War.
My
own grandfather served in some terribly heavy fighting in the trenches
there – as a machine-gunner; a romantic teenager really. The grunt of
that time holds those weapons – holds that mechanistic realm – in
bitter contempt. As the machine guns and artillery slays his friends. As
he himself slays the enemy with those machines he must befriend at the
same time he hates.
In
World War Two he is coming to terms with his fear of these awe-full new
weapons.
And
thereafter he is yielding his spirit more and more to them. Until now,
when he desires only to get out of their way, and use them from a hidden
vantage point – from a hill a thousand metres away, using thermal
imaging goggles and a laser target designator to call in a 250 kilogram
smart bomb from a friendly aircraft against an enemy who has no inkling he
is even there.
As
I sewed together the technology into a unified whole – as I quantified
and qualified the vast variety of weapons with numeric values so that they
were consistent in the language of my game, throughout the years of this
century, and throughout their relationship to each other (it was the
aircraft that were the hardest ones), I saw his story. The real enemy of
the soldiers was that thinking. That mechanistic thinking. And the
ignorance of those who do not fight. That is why the soldiers of two
hundred years ago were always suspicious of the artillerists – whom they
regarded more as magicians than soldiers. That is why we hear of former
foes – who have stared and fired at each other – having so little
animosity when they meet decades later, graying, on old grass-covered
battlefields. They understand.
I
suppose, when all is said and done, that has been my enemy too. That
devouring, industrialized thought. And this game has been the weapon
against that enemy. It is an attempt to reconcile – with honesty and
consistency – the irreconcilable: the dehumanizing weapons of war we
have inherited against the humanizing courage of true soldiers. Even if it
does this by means of entertainment – telling the rattling good history
that is war – it does it still. It is a system to do what really no
digital game can: to display and represent soldiers as they really are:
people. Ordinary. Flesh-and-blood.
(I
actually had to make the rules about characterization less complex to make
the game easier and workable – but I always had emphasized the idea of
the soldiers as people in the game. Partly because I know what it’s
like, to a certain extent, to be a soldier.)
This
game then is a kind of weapon. Against that thought – though funny it is
I have had to go through that thought to arrive here. It is a weapon
against the digital games too. I say this knowing full well Fire Zone
may be made (hopefully will be made!) into a digital game one day.
But even if it is I'll never abandon it as a tabletop game. When we may
only play a premise game by using a computer (no matter all the advantages
of some computer games, and there are many); when we MUST use a machine to
play; when we CANNOT ever sit around a table, with the simple tools of
pencils, paper and dice, and enjoy the company of our friends, and
“fight” them in a game, face-to-face, and with a handshake at the
end; or a compliment to a gamemaster who is a friend and spins a good
adventure for us, and only us; and not through wires, screen and keyboard,
against a circuit board which, a dead thing, we owe not to play fair
(“cheats” or certainly loopholes are a huge part of winning against
digital games); when we have lost all that, then the machines and the
circuits will have won forever. And our hearts will be dead with them.
This
then is a weapon, like any other. ...Against that.
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