STRATEGY
Strategy games have their roots in wargames. One of the first known war simulations was Kriegsspiel, a nineteenth-century board game made by a Prussian lieutenant in order to depict combat situations, as opposed to chess, in which the war theme is merely symbolically represented by the pieces (Egenfeldt-Nielsen, Smith, & Tosca, 2008, p. 46). There are different tendencies in today’s strategy games, some inherited from their wargames history, while others are inherited from sports and competition games.
For contextualization purposes, a general history of video games is crucial, and a genre history is also of primary importance. However, a thorough history of the strategy genre is still to be written—especially when it comes to the emergence of the genre. Analyzing a strategy game does not necessarily consist of understanding its mechanics and assuming that they are an ideal representation of how the game is played since its release date. The history of the game itself as a cultural object, and thus the history of its strategies, can be of major importance in understanding its place in the history of video games. In other words, analyzing a strategy game is examining in detail how it is inscribed in the “history of interactivity,” to use Henry Lowood’s expression (2004, p. 6). Analyzing a game can also imply studying its playing habits and its strategies at different historical moments, using archived gaming sequences, reviews, strategy guides, etc. The history of strategies of a video game, a group of video games, or a genre can be done using two different and complementary paradigms of archiving: exhaustiveness and meaningfulness.
Common Considerations in Strategy Games Studies
Every game that necessitates cognitive skills and long-term decisions could technically be considered a strategy game. Usually, however, strategy games refer to military-themed computer games where the player takes the role of a commander and needs to gather resources to summon new military units. Strategy games are divided in two branches: turn-based strategy (TBS) and real-time strategy (RTS).
One of the first games in the field of strategy is Hamurabi (Circle Enterprises, 1978), a text-based game where the player manages a state’s population by growing and storing food, using “text printed out on rolls of paper” (Donovan, 2010, p. 49) as its only visual aspect. The player had to respond to each game state using a combination of small holes on a paper roll. This turn-based dynamic was used in a lot of 1980s strategy computer games. Real war simulation was common (Computer Bismarck, Strategic Simulations, Inc., 1980); science fiction (Reach for the Stars, SSG, 1983) and general management (M.U.L.E., Ozark Softscape, 1983) being other frequent themes. TBS games reached their pinnacle with Sid Meier’s Civilization (MPS Labs, 1991). Some games began to integrate real-time elements at least since Utopia (Mattel Electronics, 1981), but RTS games as we know them today emerged in the early 1990s, with Dune II: The Building of a Dynasty (Westwood Studios, 1992) considered as one of its most influential pioneers.
Strategy games are typically games of emergence, often offering a single-player campaign that is a series of scenarios to complete in a specific order. Most actions are taken while keeping the possibilities of future events in mind, including an opponent’s future moves and one’s own. Strategy games often imply a “fog of war,” which means that each player’s actions are performed secretly, until they are discovered by the opponent’s scouts. When starting a new game, the player will choose individual properties: a map with specific obstacles and in different modalities (one-on-one, two-versus-two, cooperative against a computer opponent, etc.). Each TBS playing tends to run for hours, and is often divided into different game sessions. In online multiplayer games, each player will wait for the other to finish their turn. TBS games often feature a “hotseat” mode, letting two or more players play on the same computer, taking their turn alternately on the same screen. RTS games tend to be shorter: playing more than one match in a game session is frequent. Each move must be made quickly since the time to implement a decision is part of the game. The precision of mouse and keyboard controls is preferred for most RTS fans.
Some video games, such as Lords of the Realm II (Impressions Games, 1996), use real-time mechanics for combat and turn-based for grand strategy scale and management. Each combat situation is not evenly balanced, since the forces present on both side are not equivalent and depend of decisions taken earlier during the grand strategy phase. These game experiences are, therefore, usually closer to TBS games than to RTS games. In Rome: Total War (Creative Assembly, 2004), as in other hybrid strategy games, real-time combats can even be resolved automatically. What is common to each strategy game is the fact that a single match is often only a small part of a longer-term: you can, of course, finish the single-player campaign, yet you never really “beat the game.”
There is also a clear distinction between strategy in a Player vs. Environment (PvE) dynamic and a Player vs. Player (PvP) dynamic. The PvE dynamic is usually experienced in the single-player campaign or in cooperative modes; in its most simple enactments, the main goal is to optimize forces by combining different units or by choosing the correct moves. In Commandos: Behind Enemy Lines (Pyro Studios S. L., 1998), a video game that uses RTS mechanics in puzzle-solving situations, the player controls a small squad of units and enemies do not have a strategy of their own: they are obstacles rather than a symmetric opponent. If one specific strategy fails, the player can attempt another one in the next try in order to optimize his or her decisions.
In a PvP dynamic, optimization is usually not so simple. Consider the intransitive dynamic of The Ancient Art of War (Evryware, 1984), a strategy game using real-time elements. As described by Ernest Adams and Andrew Rollings (2007, pp. 364–365), in most skirmishes, there are only three unit types: in normal circumstances, knights beat barbarians, barbarians beat archers, and archers beat knights, akin to the game Rock-Paper-Scissors although with a deeper complexity. Against an army of knights, it would be theoretically possible to use only archers to optimize the engagement. But the player has to know beforehand what the opponent’s army composition is, for there could be no knights at all in the next fight. This explains why playing strategy games remains a cognitive challenge of struggling with different potential strategies in mind and a question of scouting—trying to know what’s coming next—before it is a question of optimization. Predictability is, then, an important aspect of PvP mode. It implies that players can infer and anticipate what their opponent(s) is/are doing in order to act accordingly. The “tech tree” structure reflects this predictability: in Warcraft III: The Frozen Throne (Blizzard Entertainment, 2003), a Night Elf player has to build a Hunter’s Hall and a Tree of Ages to build an Ancient of Lore and to recruit Dryads. The Hunter’s Hall is a building that allows weapon upgrades to be researched: seeing enemy Dryads is thus a sign that weapon upgrades may have been started for the opponent. If Dryads are spotted early in the game, the opponent probably didn’t have the time and resources to build an Ancient of Wind and recruit air units. If a move cannot be predicted by the opponent to a certain extent—whether it is because of its random cause or by the unpredictable series of actions to get to it—the players will feel that a proper strategy could not have been devised and that the game is unfair. To match a human mind, strategy games in PvP modes will often make their AI-controlled opponents “cheat,” that is, have bonuses that keep them fairly competitive. But even these advantages stay within the limits of the predictable: they will respect the overall structure of resource acquisition in order for their opponents to gauge to a certain extent their possible actions.
Strategy and Fiction
The link between game rules and fiction in strategy games is often weak. In Civilization (1991–present), probably one of the most analyzed strategy series, the player controls a society from the foundation of its first city to the space era. This series has been criticized for its problematic portrayal of real history, for example, the “tech tree” structure described earlier is criticized for being a teleological and ethnocentric portrayal of the history of knowledge. Internal dissension is not possible with a despotic ruler, nor are there different parties in a democracy. Everything is managed by the player, as if a civilization was a monolithic entity in its history. But from a strategic point of view, the predefined structure of technological discoveries offers predictability and lets the player infer actions.
The fictional worlds of TBS games could be qualified as metonymic. In Heroes of Might and Magic (New World Computing, 1995), no matter if an army is composed of a hundred or a thousand gargoyles, it is represented in combat by only one that still occupies only one hex on the battlefield. In general, strategy games show fictional worlds that are ellipsized. In Command & Conquer (Westwood Studios, 1995), the Tiberium resource accumulated by the player is transformed into money that will be used to buy units and buildings. Units simply come out of buildings, which is an RTS convention. In order to create a plausible fictional setting, the player has to imagine that the hiring, arming, and training of troops are actions not represented but still present within the fictional world where these characters belong. Yet, in Warcraft III: Reign of Chaos (Blizzard Entertainment, 2002), when Prince Arthas and his small escort set foot on Northrend, a new continent, it is difficult to assume that new units can easily be recruited from there at the same cost in gold and wood.
Even in strategy games where the fictional world is borrowed from a multimedia franchise, such as The Lord of the Rings: The Battle for Middle-Earth (Electronic Arts Los Angeles, 2004), ludic conventions foreshadow naturalistic representation. In the book, Sauron launched his minions to Minas Tirith from Mordor, but in this RTS enactment of the narrative, the Mordor player needs to erect new buildings on the Pelennor Fields in front of Minas Tirith, and amasses gold and spawns new units directly from there. Rohan reinforcements on the battlefield, instead of arriving after a long journey, can be summoned by a spell. While it appears as though battlefield themes are more suited for strategy games, their narrative frame needs to be adapted to strategy games’ conventions.
Toward a History of Strategies
Most of the RTS conventions are directly borrowed from Dune II: The Building of a Dynasty, which itself owes a lot to earlier games that combined real-time and strategy, such as Stonkers (Imagine, 1984), and does not include a multiplayer mode, a central element for most RTS players since Warcraft: Orcs and Humans (Blizzard Entertainment, 1994). Some later games from the genre were qualified as “e-sports,” a competitive scene of professional gamers followed by an impressive number of spectators. The history of strategy games does not follow a linear path, the history of their strategies being of a certain importance even on a larger scale. This history deals more with interactivity itself and will need to be more precise in the future in order to understand the role of wargaming in strategy video games, as well as the emergence of competition and e-sports in RTS games.
Such a history is related to what Hans Robert Jauss called an “aesthetic of reception” in the field of literary studies. His idea was that while charting the history of literature, one needs to understand the history of its audience. Thus, for him, a “literary work is not an object that stands by itself and that offers the same view to each reader in each period. It is not a monument that monologically reveals its timeless essence” (Jauss, 1982, p. 21). Reception in a video game context could mean the critical reception of a video game, as well as how gamers use it. However, in adapting this thought to games of emergence, it is worth noting that there are at least two receptions implied. The analysis of a video game’s reception is usually done through an examination of reviews released synchronically with the game. But each new playing of a video game can be analyzed through the reception lens, although it is more difficult to grasp: tournaments reports, collection of replays, and recorded video game sequences are all archives of such a reception. The history of chess exists (Murray, 2002) and demonstrates how player strategies have changed throughout history. It would therefore be meaningful to see the reception of specific matches, to document each player’s moves. Being interested in the reception of a certain video game can mean at the same time looking at the reception of matches that appeared around its release date, years later, or even earlier, in beta or alpha versions.
Consider this StarCraft: Brood War (Blizzard Entertainment, 1998) example. During the 2002–2003 KPGA Winners Championship finals, BoxeR—players indeed give themselves different pseudonyms—was losing a series 0–2 against YellOw. At the beginning of the third game as it is shown in the video available online (MickeyToss, 2006), he surprised both the audience and his opponent with a “SCV Rush,” a fast attack with few military units and almost all of his workers. “Workers” refers to different resource gathering units in RTS games, including ones that can attack in some RTS games, at least since Warcraft II: Tides of Darkness (Blizzard Entertainment, 1995). YellOw failed to defend against this attack and BoxeR showed how this strategy could be viable. Supporting a decisive attack with workers is still frequent in StarCraft II: Wings of Liberty (Blizzard Entertainment, 2010).
Strategy in a given game cannot be mapped on its release date. If we were to trust Bart Farkas’s (1998, p. 37) strategy guide released the same year as StarCraft, we would assume that Infested Terran is a strong unit. As strong units usually have a lot of prerequisites, Infested Terran seems like the ultimate weapon for players to obtain. However, the wiki strategy guide Liquipedia states that Infested Terran is almost never used (Infested Terrans, 2011). The Queen is another StarCraft example. It is a unit that was not really used in tournaments at the end of the 2000s (Queen, 2009). Still, in a StarCraft league match that occurred December 10, 2009, Zero managed to use a Queen’s ability to counter a common strategy (nevake, 2011). His opponent seemed surprised by this maneuver, and tried to use an outside-the-box strategy himself. Without the knowledge of a match’s context, one cannot know the rarity of a strategy someone uses and explain why some actions are more surprising than others. Wikis such as Liquipedia or StrategyWiki are useful tools to understand strategies in time, although we must make sure they are up-to-date and actually used by the players’ community of a given game. Which patches a game’s software was using depends on the date of a particular match, and determines what was possible in that game. A reliable archive or database of every version and patch of every video game does not exist, however. Even if for a certain game there is a clear and precise indication of what a patch changes on the developer’s website or on a fan’s website, it is sometimes unclear as to how they change strategies. It is necessary to have knowledge of the situation of a game in order to know what problem a patch was trying to fix: was there a balance issue with one specific unit? Was there an exploit to limit? In Sid Meier’s Civilization V (Firaxis Games, 2010), a hotseat mode was absent from the original version, but after being “much-requested,” was later introduced in a patch (2K Greg, 2010). The very existence of patches confirms that the way players play is not static, but changes over time, and that game developers try to respond to their community.
These examples show how the context of play is not necessarily the context of the release date of the game. If I say “Infested Terran is useless in StarCraft,” I have to be somewhat more precise, for the word “StarCraft” in this sentence could mean StarCraft in 1998 or StarCraft in 2009, as well as refer to different skill levels usage. An analysis of game rules is not an analysis of game plays. As shown earlier, the workers attack mode in Warcraft II does not indicate that common strategies featuring workers exist. As Lowood puts it, “we must not lose sight of how we will document interactivity itself, which means capturing traces of activity, that is, gameplay” (2004, p. 6). He gives the example of basketball: we could preserve the game rules book, the game’s artifacts, or recordings of gameplay. The activity of actually playing the game goes beyond these objects. We could isolate at least two ideals in the preservation of specific gameplay segments.
Exhaustiveness as an Ideal and the “Replay” Feature
First, there is the recorded game or “replay” file, which in most cases fulfills an exhaustiveness ideal. It is with a patch that some games such as StarCraft introduced a replay feature. In a lot of competitive games, from RTS games to first-person shooters, players can save their game when it is over in order to watch it later: every single move of a player is encoded in the file and can be reenacted. Depending of the game, observers can take the point-of-view of each player or have their own perspective on the action.
Age of Empires II: The Age of Kings (Ensemble Studios/Microsoft Game Studios, 1999) didn’t feature any recording possibility before the “Gold Edition” (which comprised the original game and its expansion) was released in August 2001. Thirteen years earlier, Modem Wars (Ozark Softscape, 1988), which ambitiously tried to move strategy games toward a human vs. human dynamic similar to sports that was uncommon in 1988, did let players record their game (Hockman, 1989, p. 35). The game was not a commercial success for, among other reasons, modems were not common enough at the time of its release date (Donovan, 2010, p. 300). It took more than a decade of gameplaying and technological improvement before replays were really seen as useful for players. Although Warcraft II was republished to be included in Blizzard’s online servers (Warcraft II: Battle.net Edition, Blizzard Entertainment, 1999), it never officially featured recorded games except with third-party applications released years later. The history of replays shows how the reenactment of a match, in order to learn from it, was not a specific need in the early days of strategy games, even if it is an essential feature in today’s RTS game-playing.
For different reasons, exhaustiveness is not the most efficient ideal for charting the history of strategy game-playing. A lot of RTS games and most TBS games simply do not have a replay function. Even when they have, how can we know if a replay collection is really representative of certain strategic habits of the time? In a single replay file, a move is not seen in context. Every action is there and can be cataloged, but it is difficult to understand, from an external point of view, the meaning of using a Queen in 2009 within the history of StarCraft, for example.
Meaningfulness as an Ideal and the Audio Commentary
Preserving a game in a video file with an audio commentary fulfills a meaningful ideal. Game tournaments have their own commentators and the matches are shared in video formats online. The commentators usually have recorded their description at the time when the game was played and, in addition to their great knowledge of the game rules and the game context, they will interpret each decision and explain it in more or less detail to future viewers, archivists, and researchers. The StarCraft e-sport scene is mostly set in South Korea, but there are competent commentators speaking different languages. Using renowned commentators as a source is still relying on human beings and does not prevent potential errors. Because the comment is made in real-time, a commentator can easily miss important events in a game, so researchers have to know the basic mechanics of the video game they are trying to understand and be aware of commentators’ quick interpretations.
Since the StarCraft series has a popular competitive scene, with renowned commentators and analysts and an active online community, reliable sources are available for analyzing strategy. But a history of strategies is more difficult to trace for games without a massive audience and competitive scene. It is thus necessary to carefully analyze the sources that are still available today. Game reviews, editorial articles in gaming magazines, and strategy guides can help us to seize typical expectations toward strategy in a given game and at a given time. In the early StarCraft area, when online videos were rare, battle reports were written online by Blizzard in order to raise an interest in their tournaments. Such sources must be investigated in earlier strategy games. Certainly, each review or each description of a game is not exhaustive about what the video game or genre is at the time it was written. However, it is meaningful to note that a certain author, developer, or company raises some questions or explains some actions and not others.
Conclusion
Each new playing of a strategy game is historical, and its archiving can give us a certain context within the history of strategies. It is therefore crucial to use and preserve different kinds of archives especially in the case of strategy games, whether it is the game itself, videos, replays, strategy guides, reviews, etc. Exhaustiveness and meaningfulness are both complementary goals for a game researcher to understand the history of strategies for a given game, series, or genre. Using each type of source necessitates a familiarity with game mechanics and a diversity of meaningful sources.
Strategy is a genre that game studies has not probed deeply yet, probably because each video game studied necessitates a large amount of time for its mastery. Methodological investigations in strategy analysis should address this in the future by showing how a complex activity such as strategy can be meaningfully archived. I hope this essay raises relevant perspectives on this question.
References
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Adams, E. & Rollings, A. (2007). Fundamentals of game design. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice Hall.
Donovan, T. (2010). Replay: The history of video games. Lewes: Yellow Ant.
Egenfeldt-Nielsen, S., Smith, J. H., & Tosca, S. P. (2008). Understanding video games: The essential introduction. New York: Routledge.
Farkas, B. (1998). Starcraft Expansion Set: Brood War. Prima’s official strategy guide. Rocklin, CA: Prima Publishing.
Hockman, D. (1989, February). Modem Wars. A game by any other name. Computer Gaming World, 56, 32–35.
Infested Terran—Liquipedia Starcraft Wiki. (2011) Retrieved August 15, 2012, from http://wiki.teamliquid.net/starcraft/Infested_Terran.
Jauss, H. R. (1982). Toward an aesthetic of reception. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.
Lowood, H. (2004). Playing history with games: Steps towards historical archives of computer gaming. Retrieved August 15, 2012, from http://aic.stanford.edu/sg/emg/library/pdf/lowood/Lowood-EMG2004.pdf.
MickeyToss. (2006). BoxeR VS YellOw-2003 KPGA Winner’s Championship Finals Game3. YouTube. Retrieved August 15, 2012, from www.youtube.com/watch?v=rgJ0V7kgSdQ.
Murray, H. J. R. (2002). A history of chess. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
nevake. (2011). NATE MSL ZerO vs type-b 2009–12–10 @ Match Point. YouTube. Retrieved August 15, 2012, from www.youtube.com/watch?v=LtampeTdPDY.
Queen—Liquipedia Starcraft Wiki. (2009). Retrieved August 15, 2012, from http://wiki.teamliquid.net/starcraft/index.php?title=Queen&oldid=17420.