Sunday, Sep 7, 2008
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The wargamers who cluster on mailing lists like Consim-L (Conflict Simulation) or debate the finer tactical details of the Thirty Years War on Web sites like the Virtual Wargamer Discussion Board cite two main reasons that the Net has, in their words, facilitated a "renaissance" for board wargaming.
First, there's the age-old wargaming bugaboo: the "lack of an opponent" problem. Not only can games like Gettysburg or Advanced Squad Leader or Panzerblitz require many hours to finish, but it's not always easy to find someone who is versed enough in the intricacies of your particular game in your own neighborhood. The Net solves that problem by making it easy for like-minded individuals to find each other.
"To me, this is better than even in the 'boom years,' as there was no chance then for such easy, open, global communication," says Poulter.
Of course, just knowing that there is a gamer in Brisbane, Australia, who shares your love for North African desert tank warfare isn't quite enough; you still need a way to play the game. Again, the Net comes to the rescue, albeit in a charmingly low-tech fashion. Online board wargamers swear by "PBEM" -- playing by e-mail.
Just in the last couple of years, there has been a surge in the availability of software programs -- some freeware, some commercial -- that allow gamers to translate their board game positions into e-mail friendly formats. Used in conjunction with Net-based "dice servers" that impartially produce random die rolls for gamers and chat rooms for concurrent live communication, PBEM software programs are, according to some gamers, a major reason why board wargaming has been injected with new life.
Not everyone agrees.
"The Net has certainly been a boon in some regards," says game designer Greg Costikyan. "Rec.games.board and sites like www.grognard.com have certainly helped to build and sustain the community of board wargamers. And the existence of the Net has made direct sales more feasible, which is an important lifeline for an industry whose distribution net is in the throes of chaos at the moment."
"However, play-by-e-mail has always been clumsy, and remains so; I doubt many people actually play that way," says Costikyan. "Board wargaming continues to require you to find people in your local area to play, and the Net doesn't always help you do that."
Jim Dunnigan, former president of SPI, which for a brief moment in the mid-'70s reigned supreme as the largest publisher of board wargames, is even more blunt. In his view, the board wargaming business is on its last legs, and the Net can do little to help it.
"I get my market numbers from the publishers, not the players," says Dunnigan, who has written a book about wargaming. "That's because the players you are likely to talk to are the most enthusiastic and atypical. In the last few years, board game sales have really tanked. The average sell-through per title is sinking toward the point where the smallest break-even printing is not practical."
Dunnigan argues that the "lack of an opponent" problem was never a problem at all: He cites statistics compiled while he was at SPI that indicated that "90 percent" of all wargamers "were always content to play the games solitaire. Remember, board wargaming was always the hobby of the overeducated."
One can argue over whether wargamers really were "content," or whether they were just accepting a status quo they had no chance of changing. But there's no doubt that the Internet has always shined as a tool for creating communities of solitaire players. There is strength in numbers -- even if the numbers are small.
But what difference, really, is there between paper games and their digital equivalents? Some gamers question whether the distinction matters at all.
"I think that there is no difference between paper-and-dice games and computer strategy games -- in fact you'll sometimes find direct conversions," says Greg Lindahl, maintainer of the Play by Mail FAQ. "While some of these computer games only play multiplayer face-to-face, others have play-by-e-mail options. All one hobby, and it's growing."
But to many board wargamers, the new computer games are no match for their forebears in terms of complexity, attention to historical detail and possibilities for real strategy. Computer-based artificial intelligence is no replacement, yet, for human wiles, they argue. Thus, fear of the death of board wargaming isn't just a nostalgic longing on the part of middle-aged gamers for the pleasures of youth: To the hard-core hobbyists, overproduced computer games offer a hollow future.
While the Net may do little to save or revive the old-fashioned wargame business, the play-by-e-mail movement offers tantalizing possibilities for transferring its best aspects into digital form.
To successfully play a wargame by e-mail, one must first use one of the available software programs to move the game from paper to screen, creating individual "gamesets" for particular games. Some of the more advanced gameset-creating programs, such as Aide de Camp II, are virtually game-development tools in their own right. Indeed, established wargaming companies like Avalon Hill have eyed these new programs with no small amount of suspicion, worried about the potential copyright violations of such electronic reproductions.
Perhaps these software programs will evolve into tools for transferring the knowledge and experience embedded in board wargaming into online and other computer formats.
"Game designers have found that the Web is a great medium for play-testing," says Todd Zircher, the author of V_MAP, a freeware PBEM tool. "With free tools like V_MAP and Cyberboard, it's possible to build and play a wargame without having to go through the tedious process and expense of making paper and cardboard components that need to be mailed off."
"I've been buzzing the Aide de Camp guys for years to expand their product to make it more of a game design tool (an AI tool kit, for one thing)," says Dunnigan. "It was a technological breakthrough like that, desktop publishing, that kept paper games alive into the 1990s -- i.e., brought down the production cost of games."
So let the established board wargaming companies founder, as it appears all too likely they will. The Net may not save them, but it could save the knowledge and history embedded in wargames already produced, and midwife them into new formats.
"The Net has fostered an amazingly fertile ground for the wargaming hobby -- the amount of information passing around is astonishing when compared to the major hobby outlets of a decade ago -- paper magazines, mostly," says Walter O'Hara, who maintains the Play by E-mail Emporium.
"I think the potential is there for a new future for wargaming in this keen new electronic format," O'Hara says. "However, we have to grow a critical mass by networking our individual efforts into a Web of gameset/gamebox/whatever designers and players." Given the passion of the hard-core wargamers, that's not such a far-fetched scenario.
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