My love for historical gaming is likely well known to any followers of Concerning History; posts on everything from ranking Ryan and my favorites to exploring representations of atrocity (or their conspicuous lack) to even their use in the classroom have graced our front page in months and years gone by. In the first year of our blog, in fact, I had written up a short little post reflecting on the balance between accuracy and and enjoyment in such games, but a recent chance discovery compelled me to dive deeper into a specific aspect I hadn’t previously discussed: the ease and rapidity of command and control in historical strategy gaming.
For all their thematic and mechanical complexity, modern strategy games are essentially direct descendants of those most basic and original of games, chess and checkers. The board may be accurate to geography, the pieces assigned their own unique statistics and combat styles and logistical baggage, but you still just move them around to your own advantage and, most crucially, know where they are and how they will perform at all times. Sure, many modern video games institute a “fog of war” system that hides enemy forces when not in the player’s own territory or close to their borders, but you still retain the kind of absolute knowledge of and immediate obedience from your own armies—no matter the geographical distance—that governments the world over have only dreamt of. No wonder it’s so easy to reforge Rome into an enduring world state or kick the British out of India by 1800 when we the players don’t have to deal with pesky things like not knowing the dispositions of any troops involved, delayed communications, missing or misinterpreted orders, and commanders with their own agendas? Just point, click, and march to victory.
Recent years have admittedly seen some attempts to complicate command and control in video games in particular, but they haven’t seriously upset the usual paradigm. The Total War franchise has introduced a slightly more robust internal politics system that can lead to generals and governors becoming disloyal, and Paradox’s Imperator: Rome not only includes a similar system but has disloyal officials begin to pursue their own agendas; armies move on their own initiative and refuse player orders, construction and other province commands are locked. Ultimately, though, these just amount to another list of statistics and values that can be manipulated to avoid provoking a civil war event, and the most impact it can have on the strategic situation is denying the player use of one of their armies until loyalty can be regained or the offending general imprisoned. Paradox’s Second World War game Hearts of Iron IV goes one step further—to mixed results. The absence of any real fog of war in most games renders certain modern technological advancements like radar somewhat useless, or at least neutered. In an effort to remedy this problem, Paradox reimagined their mechanics governing naval warfare. Rather than the classic system of two forces automatically engaging each other when they entire the same province or ocean tile, Hearts of Iron IV embraces the vast nature of the sea and the uncertainty of battle. Only when certain ships outfitted for reconnaissance spot an enemy fleet and relay its probable location back to your main base does your main battlefleet sail in pursuit of the enemy’s last known position. Players can also adjust the standing orders of fleets and squadrons to refuse engagement based on certain levels of risk, allowing a lone destroyer, for instance, to flee from a battleship if they do encounter each other in the same tile. It’s a novel idea, and one that really does feel more realistic than many other games. The problem, of course, is that very difference, and naval warfare is consistently one of the most disliked and ignored elements of Hearts of Iron IV. Endless guides have been written to help newcomers puzzle it out, and online communities joke about having played thousands of hours yet still not understanding “naval.” Indeed, even in my own playthroughs, it often feels less like an attempt at veracity and more a way to generate resource scarcity by requiring you to devote production lines to types of vessels you’d normally never research, let alone construct.
And then we come to my discovery that originally inspired this post. While perusing the games featured in the annual Steam winter sale, I happened upon a little independent game called King’s Orders. Apparently set in medieval Western Europe around the time of the Hundred Years’ War, King’s Orders fully embraces the idea of imperfect command and control in the pre-modern age. No direct control of armies or cities here; instead, gameplay consists of composing orders to your various forces and officials based on the information you currently have. These orders take time to reach their recipients, may be intercepted, and, most importantly, may not even reflect reality at the time you write them—you’re operating off of information that has been relayed to you under those same conditions from those same officials. Brilliant! An experience that really captures the uncertainty, guesswork, even impotence of real life command. If half of strategy is based on what you and your opponent don’t know, then this is truly a strategy game that promises to be like no other. And then, I read through the reviews. Aside from an apparent lack of content, by far the biggest critique stemmed from the fact that this game was, well, not really a game. Similar to Francis and my discussion about less-than-engaging attempts to design video games as tools for classroom instruction, this arrangement of endlessly reading and writing and reading and writing again understandably seemed more like a homework assignment to many players than an engaging way to spend their free time. And after that realization, I didn’t have much desire to “play” it, either.
So in the end, I think King’s Orders is the perfect example of why we should never expect games to be entirely accurate, or even mostly so, to history. Just as film adaptations of historical events must of necessity organize their events into the neat storytelling conventions that we expect, so too must video games be entertaining and engaging first; accuracy comes later, and will never get all those close to perfection. Nor should it! We human beings love entertainment precisely because real life as it is and was lived is boring (and sometimes terrifying). We as historians just have to keep remembering (and reminding our students and the general public) that these games should never be mistaken for actual history.