> It's noticeable how few computer wargames simulate any of this, instead allowing for frictionless high speed micromanagement
In military Command and Staff Training (e.g. for training large HQs), the solution to this is that the trainees don't use the simulations themselves. Instead they issue commands using emulated C2 systems to role players ('lower controllers') pretending to be subordinate forces, who then execute the orders using the sim, and then report back what has happened, as far as they can tell. This generates quite a lot of useful friction. Another group of role players ('higher controllers') represent the HQ superior to the trainees HQ and in turn issue them with orders. The role players and opposing force are also following direction from exercise control (EXCON) and can easily be used to dial up the pressure on the trainees. There is a small industry (e.g. [0]) supporting the exercise management systems that keep track of the various 'injects' that are fed to the trainees via the role players, or by simulated ISR assets, etc.
That sounds great. A lightweight video game system like this is potentially in the Battlefield games, where each side is divided up into 5 or 6 person squads; one of them is the squad leader and can give orders (e.g. capture or defend this point). Because it's a video game and most people cannot / don't want to communicate, it's done in that way and squad members are given a reward for following the order.
In some of them you have a single person who is like a commander of the whole fight who can set orders to each squad. But since only one person can be that and many people want to be, I don't think they kept that feature in for long.
But it's the kind of game where I think if you had a big group of friends with a chain of command and good communication you could easily win any match against an otherwise unorganized enemy, even if their individuals are better players.
> It's noticeable how few computer wargames simulate any of this, instead allowing for frictionless high speed micromanagement.
Friction is simulated in many computer games, the problem is that taking it too far would make them unenjoyable or too niche. Remember they are games first and simulations second (with exceptions; precisely the ones that are too niche).
Friction in computer games is simulated in multiple ways:
- The most obvious one: randomized results. Your units do not do a set damage nor do they always succeed, but instead the PRNG plays a role (e.g. most combat rolls in most wargames, but also whether a missile launched within parameters tracks or fails to in DCS).
- Fog of war: many wargames do not show areas you haven't explored or where you do not have scout units.
- Morale: many wargames simulate morale, units may break if sufficiently scared (e.g. the Total War games do this) and some may even rush to charge without your command, jeopardizing your plans (e.g. Total War, Warhammer: Dark Omens). In the Close Combat series, your soldiers may become demoralized or even refuse to follow orders if you order them to walk through enemy fire or take too many casualties.
- Some have external unpredictable hazards jeopardizing your unit (e.g. sandworms in Dune II).
And many others. So wargames do attempt to model friction; the problem is that if you make this too extreme, the game stops being fun for the majority of players. The illusion of control is an important aspect of gameplay.
That first quote is normally attributed to Charles de Gaulle. [0] I wonder if it would have been in character for Napoleon to reflect on the indispensability of anyone but himself.
There are tabletop wargames for the consumer/hobby market that do try to include various kinds of friction in the gameplay. Both the classic Memoir 44 [1] and the Undaunted series [2] have you issue orders from a hand of cards drawn from a deck.
Memoir 44 divides the board into three segments (a center and two flanks) and your cards to issue orders always apply to a specific segment (e.g. right flank). Lacking the cards in your hand to issue the orders you might want simulates those orders not making to the front lines.
Undaunted explicitly has Fog of War cards which you can't do anything with. They gum up your deck and simulate that same friction of imperfect comms.
Atlantic Chase [3], a more complex game, uses a system of trajectories to obscure the exact position of ships and force you to reason about where they might be on any given turn. The Hunt [4] is a more accessible take on the same scenario (the Hunt for the Graf Spee) that uses hidden movement for its friction.
I don't know how many of these ideas leap across to computer games, but designing friction into the experience has been a part of tabletop wargames for a long time.
> It's noticeable how few computer wargames simulate any of this, instead allowing for frictionless high speed micromanagement.
Games are entertainment, and as with a novel or film, the authors pick and choose to get the level of verisimilitude they think the player/reader/viewer might want. Who wants to take an in-game break to go to the bathroom? When you pick something up (extra ammo) it's instantaneous -- and how come there are so many prefilled magazines lying around anyway? And when you get shot your shoulder doesn't hurt and you don't spend any time in the hospital.
Wargames tend to try to be fun, as opposed to being a realistic simulation of war. Imagine you are playing Napoleon at Ligny: How much fun is it that your reserves receive conflicting orders all day from a field marshal fighting in a different nearby battlefield, and that there are similar town names in the map, leading to your troops coming in late and in a useless location?
You shouldn't even be able to watch the action in detail, Total War style, as you might have a hill, some messengers and low power binoculars. Games have attempted to copy this, but it's a curiosity, not something that brings sales
A lot of 4X games - including the Total War series - develop from being close to the fight and micromanaging forces, to zooming out to an empire view and letting the fights take place without your oversight; it's not the same but I'd say pretty similar? That is, even though you start and end as emperor over everything you control, you can choose how much micromanagement you do. Example is Stellaris, where you can either micromanage your forces, planets, ships, etc, or you can let them duke it out on their own, hand over micromanagement of your planets to governors by giving them high over targets, etc.
I think quite a few wargames, both computer-based and pre-computer, simulate friction at some level.
The original Prussian Kriegspiel involved opposing players being in different rooms having information conveyed to them by an umpire (must have been a lot of work for the umpire).
The wargames used in the Western approaches to train WWII convoy commanders made players look through slots to restrict what they could see.
Computer wargames like 'Pike and Shot' often won't show you units unless they are visible to your troops. Also your control over units is limited (cavalry will often charge after defeated enemies of their own accord).
In the novel Ender's Game, the Command School training takes an interesting approach.
Ender is able to see the full battlefield (modulo fog of war) because of ubiquitous faster-than-light sensor technology. But he doesn't control any ships directly. Instead, he issues orders to his subordinates who "directly" control squads of ships.
I've always wondered if anyone's ever made something like this. A co-op war simulation game with instant visibility but divided, frictioned actions. Nothing about it would be technically difficult. It would probably be socially difficult to find enough players.
> Instead, he issues orders to his subordinates who "directly" control squads of ships. .... I've always wondered if anyone's ever made something like this
See my other comment - lots of real military command training involves the trainees issuing orders to subordinates (role players) who interact with the simulation.
> It would probably be socially difficult to find enough players.
Military training finds them by using real soldiers as role-players (understanding how to handle an order is a useful secondary training effect) and there are also loads of ex-soldiers who will happily (for a small consultancy fee) support an exercise for a few days.
This is how a lot of MMOs like Eve Online worked. You'd have a person or group of people leading the fight and they could see what was happening and would issue orders. But then it would trickle down to different groups and that friction made combat really interesting. Plus there was always latency between issuing a command and the ship acting on the command that was proportional to how massive the ship was. So you could find yourself out of position and unsupported if you moved out of step, and you always had to rely on someone else for the overarching strategy and target priorities.
Eve Online goes even further, with empire leadership making political decisions, alliances, etc. That said, it feels like that aspect of the game is focused on avoiding conflicts, because it's oftentimes a net loss if they cannot control the newly captured territory for long.
It's one reason why I stopped playing, it's the kind of metagame I can't get into without dedicating tons of time and communicating with others. I just want to fly ship and go brrt without fearing other players or having to cooperate with them.
Battlefield 2 (from 2005) and some of the later Battlefield games have a dedicated "Commander" role like that. [0] The friction would be in the fidelity of how your squad spots enemies (allowing the Commander to see them on their map) and whether they actually follow orders (which on public servers was always a question). It was actually a ton of fun if you took it somewhat seriously.
There are some hybrid RTS/First Person Shooter games sorta like that.
A commander who can place buildings or resources, and ping locations, and has a birds eye view, and then grunts on the ground trying to do what's actually needed.
There was a sci-fi story decades ago (probably in Analog) on this theme. A very realistic war game was set up, which two real-world opposing nations decided to use in lieu of losing real men. The friction caught them off guard. The one incident I recall was when one side deployed a biowarfare agent, but the wind changed and they ended up infecting their own troops. There were other incidents of friction.
Your best bet is probably actually shooters. There's several games that integrate elements of RTS games on top of FPSes, like Planetside 2, Natural Selection 2, Hell Let Loose, Squad, etc. In all of these the individual soldiers are individual players so you can't hardly micromanage them even if you wanted to
Doubtful tbh, at least in the context of the article. The problem for games that simulate war (or any other environment with "friction") too closely is not that the AI is not good enough, it's that such environments are just inherently not "fun" and thus not good material to make games out of.
Games work on a tight gameplay loop where the player can have feelings of agency (they can influence what happens at all) and mastery (they can get better at influencing what happens with practice). For this you need to have a relatively predictable relation to actions and outcomes. Having the game randomly lose the orders you give to a unit without any feedback is kinda the opposite of that.
Requiring you to manage a messenger corp in order to dispatch armies past your borders might be a good example of a mechanic that generates friction though.
That's a nice mechanic and many games have something equivalent to that, but if you can merely pay a resource tax to have everything working perfectly again then it's not friction in the sense that the article is talking about.
The problem with real friction is that, even if you did everything perfectly, orders may still not make it to the unit that has to execute them or they may do something else because of reasons neither of you foresaw, or the enemy forces you saw on the minimap are only half the forces that are actually there. Imagine if you were playing some shooter and randomly on 25% of the time your controller does not respond to inputs at all and another random 25% of the time the inputs get reversed. That would be a super frustrating game to play.
"I can make a brigadier general in five minutes, but it is not easy to replace a hundred and ten horses" -- attr. Lincoln (exact words vary by source)
It's noticeable how few computer wargames simulate any of this, instead allowing for frictionless high speed micromanagement.