In which MetalJim talks about the fine line between playing a game and watching a replay…

Today I’m going to be chatting about a couple of very complex computer games, but this argument is also an extension of the “simulation versus game” debate that’s been taking place with regard to 4^th edition D&D.

Let’s accept that gamers want a certain amount of “realism” and “complexity” in their games.  We can all agree that there’s a point where you would have too much realism.

In D&D, you would be unhappy if the system only had a single attribute (call it Might), and all weapons did the same amount of damage.  On the other hand, you would also find it problematic if you had to track your character’s daily bowel movements, or if the GM was making rolls on the “tropical disease table” every day your party was in the jungle, to see whether you contracted malaria or dysentery.  Those things just aren’t fun to role-play, even if they are more “realistic”.

The trick, of course, is knowing where to place that boundary line between “fun game” and “realistic simulation”.  Let’s look at a couple of very specific examples from the world of PC computer games.

Europa Univeralis 3

The Europa Universalis system has been around for years now.  There may have been a board game at the core of the original game, but the PC game has added and expanded quite a bit of complexity over the years.  The idea is that you can simulate any nation that existed between 1400 and 1800 (more or less), and make diplomatic alliances with other countries while also choosing when to declare war, and then fighting out your military campaigns using a detailed combat system.  Depending on where you start, you might be able to colonize the new world, or assume political control of the Holy Roman Empire.

EU3 came out early in 2007, and now has two expansion packs.  You won’t find this in retail anymore, but you can go to a site called GamersGate and purchase downloads of the base game along with Napoleon’s Ambition and the just-released In Nomine.  It’s a bit pricey ($70) for all three, but I won’t be surprised if they collect it all into one big $40 or $50 package in the next couple of months.

In the base EU3 game, you can start as any country between 1453 and 1789.  With both expansions, the range is actually 1399 to 1821.  Now, you normally start with the exact monarch that ruled on the date that you start the game.  However, once the game is in motion, you leave the “history” behind.  Your historical monarch (say, Henry VIII of England) could die much sooner than he did in real life.  After that, you just get a series of “random” monarchs and regency councils.  The game actually has a fairly complex set of random tables for generating monarch names, with appropriate names for the muslim countries, etc.

Some people, however, prefer to play with the “historical monarchs” checkbox turned on.  This means that if you know your history, you know exactly when your king will die, and who the next king will be, and if you can expect that king to be any good or not.  If you are playing the Ottoman Turks and you are getting ready to start a war against Venice, you might as well wait a couple of years if you know that Suleiman the Magnificent will shortly take the throne.

The EU3 system has an “event generator” designed to help with some of the sudden historical shifts that the game can’t precisely simulate with its regular game engine.  All of the sudden, Spain acquires the low countries of Holland and Belgium, when Charles V inherits the Spanish throne.  Now, the base EU3 system uses a lot of “random events” that could more or less happen to any country, but there are people out there who modify the game to include a lot more “true” history events, so that the timeline of the game in motion stays closer to the timeline of “real” history.

One good area to judge the historical “accuracy” of your EU3 games is the rate at which the New World gets colonized.  If Portugal controls a string of colonies along the US coast in the year 1475, then that is clearly outside the bounds of “expected” historical simulation, even if you make the argument that the Portuguese actually did have the technology to pull it off, even if in real life they were more concerned with sailing down the coast of Africa.

The EU series is sometimes more “fun” if you play for widely ahistorical outcomes.  For example, fellow d21 writer Smite once bragged that he conquered the world as Switzerland in one of the earlier EU games.  Maybe I want England to settle the US fifty years ahead of schedule.  Maybe I want to unify Italy and turn it into a world power.  Maybe I want to see how history would have been different if the Turks had been able to sack Venice.

Still, there are folks out there who aren’t satisfied unless the game comes really close to approximating the “real” history, such as having Spain conquer Granada by 1492, or having the Protestant Reformation break out on time and having countries turn to the correct religion on the correct date.  Still, if you put in a million “historical events” to keep the game on course, you eventually wind up in a situation where you are merely viewing a replay of history, and no longer actually playing the game.  After a certain point, the game plays you.

The base EU3 game is certainly playable, but each expansion pack brings major improvements to the engine.  You could make the case that the just-released In Nomine finally “completes” the game, but in this state you have a very good game with all kinds of possibilities, both for uber-historical play and also for generating random pseudo-history.

Out of the Park Baseball

You can still download a demo of Out of the Park Baseball (OOTP) version 8, and there should be a new version 9 by the end of this month.  The version 8 demo will still give you a pretty accurate idea of what the series is all about, and lets you play with all features turned on for 2 weeks in real life.  This is one of the deepest and most complex PC games that you will ever encounter, and it is all pretty much the labor of love on one dude from Germany.

OOTP is text-based baseball management.  There are several different ways to play in this very large sandbox.  The “preferred” way to play is to set up a league that mimics the structure of modern professional baseball in every way (right down to the minor league system), but is stocked with entirely fictional players.  The game is pretty good at generating players with “plausible” fictional stats, including some superstars and lots of average schlubs.  As the human player, you can become the general manager on draft day and select your team through a mega-draft, or you can just let the computer handle the auto-drafting and then work with the team that you inherit.  After you have a team, you can oversee all of the player roster moves, and you can customize your lineups versus left handed and right handed pitching, even setting a schedule for certain players to rest every fifth game, etc.  Then you can have the computer simulate large chunks of the season, or you can step in and manage individual games, calling for the hit and run, warming up relievers in the bullpen, and so on.

The other way to play OOTP baseball is to take a given year from the historical database of all real baseball stats (this is something called the Lehman database), and then step in and manage a given team from that year, to see if you can a) replicate the historical success of that given team, or b) change history by having the Boston Red Sox win the 1986 world series.

People who prefer the historical style of play will get very cranky if they discover that the AI auto-manager for the 1986 Mets is using the wrong relief pitcher in the closer slot (in other words, someone other than Jesse Orosco).  Thus, the guy who programs the game has to make sure that the way in which the game converts real life stats into in-game simulation ratings has to be spot on.  He also has to make sure that the stats generated by players within the game seem believable, regardless of whether you tell the computer to simulate an entire season at once or whether you play through every game in manager mode.

Again, there’s a line here somewhere where the quest for “historical accuracy” overwhelms the ability of the player to actually enjoy playing the game.  If the real-life 1986 Mets played against the Philadephia Phillies on June 21^st, 1986, should the computer game end up producing the exact same final score?  Are we disappointed if it doesn’t?  Is the game somehow “broken” if Dwight Gooden fails to pitch for 20 wins in that season?

Given how fanatical some baseball fans can be, OOTP is an amazingly succesful game.  It’s daunting for a first time user to set up a league, but the customization options are massive.  Despite the primitive graphics, the simulated games feel very plausible, and are very close to what you might get watching a webcast of a real game.

Closing Thoughts

There’s a time and a place for “complex” games.  There’s also a lot of fun to had in playing games that offer “historical” simulation.  Of course, no simulation of history can be perfect, but it is fun to imagine yourself at a given historical moment, and then to consider the decisions that real-life historical figures had to make, whether it is the decision to invade England as Spain in 1588 (oops), or the decision to pitch around Barry Bonds with a runner at first in a playoff game. 

As gamers, we like having the ability to “tweak” history and see how things might have been a little different.  Yes, it’s true that IF Spain and Portugal had known about the Americas in 1450 they probably would have started colonizing 50 years ahead of schedule.  Yes, if the great powers of Europe hadn’t been so busy fighting each other, they could have settled the New World much faster.  And so on.  There are probably plenty of Mets fans who would love to replay the 2007 season to see if they could avoid the worst September collapse in the history of baseball.  And so on.

However, as history geeks, we also get cranky if our games are generating results on their own that are outside the bounds of “plausibility”, such as a simulation that allows A-Rod to hit 80 homeruns in a single season, or perhaps a “history” game in which the Chinese colonize Mexico or the Russians colonize parts of Quebec.

The big problem is that the exact boundary line between “fun” and “silly” probably varies from gamer to gamer, and depends in part of how much history you know, and how zealous you are about that history.

So, I ask you… would you rather simulate a baseball season with entirely fictional players, or with “real” player ratings generated by real-life baseball stats?  Likewise, would you rather simulate 100 years of history with fictional random monarchs, or with the precise historical figures that we know and love from history?  Which makes for a better game?