Rush, Boom, Turtle: Real Time After Real-Time

How H.G. Wells accidentally invented real-time strategy gaming 100 years ago
7/15/2009 6:03 PM | 2 Comments | Page 1 of 2

"For all the points on the compass, there is only one direction, and time is its only measure." -- Tom Stoppard, "Rosencrantz & Guildenstern Are Dead"

Forget Herzog Zwei or Modem Wars or The Ancient Art of War, or whatever you think is the first real-time strategy game. The first transition from turn-based strategy to real-time strategy was 1913's "Little Wars." This was the title of a rule set for a wargame played with miniatures. It was written by H.G. Wells and published as a book with the subtitle, "a game for boys from twelve years of age to one hundred and fifty and for that more intelligent sort of girl who likes boys' games and books." I'm not quite sure what to make of Mr. Wells' attempt to get chicks into his gaming group, but based on the past hundred years, I'm making a note here that appealing to their intelligence didn't work so well.

The book is available for your perusal here as part of Project Gutenberg. Even better, there is a scanned version complete with some illustrations and photographs, which suggest why chicks weren't involved. Consider the photographs of blokes crawling around the floor, checking lines of sight and adjusting cannon fire. I've seen Merchant Ivory movies, so I know chicks wore petticoats and hoop skirts and bonnets back then. They weren't about to crawl around on the ground dressed like that.

Now you might have heard about this book if you move in the same circles as wargamers -- which I doubt, because you're reading a column about real-time strategy games. Wargamers and RTS players are like the Xbox and PlayStation fans of videogaming. They simply don't get along. Those shiftless wargamer types with their dice and CRTs hate us RTS types. They're jealous because we're free of dice and CRTs and hexes. But if you happen to be open-minded like me (some of my best friends are wargamers), you might have heard wargamers refer to Wells' book. They might have even claimed that this is one of the earliest instances of their beloved wargames. But what those bearded chit-pushers conveniently ignore is that Mr. Wells was chafing against the conventions of turn-based gaming. He yearned to be free to play RTSes. To wit, I refer you to Page 24 of "Little Wars":

Our next step was to abolish the tedium due to the elaborate aiming of the guns, by fixing a time limit for every move. We made this an outside limit at first, ten minutes, but afterwards we discovered that it made the game much more warlike to cut the time down to a length that would barely permit a slow-moving player to fire all his guns and move all his men. This led to small bodies of men lagging and "getting left," to careless exposures, to rapid, less accurate shooting, and just that eventfulness one would expect in the hurry and passion of real fighting. It also made the game brisker. We have since also made a limit, sometimes of four minutes, sometimes of five minutes, to the interval for adjustment and deliberation after one move is finished and before the next move begins. This further removes the game from the chess category, and approximates it to the likeness of active service. Most of a general's decisions, once a fight has begun, must be made in such brief intervals of time.

This is clearly a man who's sick of "the chess category" and wants to play a real-time strategy game like Command & Conquer 3 or Dragonshard. However, I submit he's one of those poor misguided souls who's going about it for all the wrong reasons. For instance, he opted to make his game more "war-like," to capture the "hurry and passion of real fighting," and to "approximate it to the likeness of active service." Ah, that old specious appeal to realism! I know it well. "Brisker" is a valid rationale, but to Wells it was an afterthought. He has put the realism cart before the gameplay horse, resulting in the jackknife of misguided game design. Oh, Herbert George! I'm so glad you didn't quit your day job as a science-fiction writer.

Real-time strategy games should not need to be played at a certain pace. They should not seek to be realistic, or hurried, or to approximate an actual battle. That way lies madness. Or at least something really twitchy that's going to disproportionately reward the guy with the faster reflexes over the guy who's smart. The pace of a game should not be something that has to be mastered. It should not be part of the learning curve or a barrier to entry. It should be flexible. It should no more be an obstacle than the interface. In any RTS match, the events should be the same at the default speed or at half-speed.

Rise of Nations, for instance, has a lot of finicky detail in the later eras. Take spies, who can bribe enemy units. It's a simple matter of pressing the spy hotkey, then right-clicking a target unit. However, it's more work for less payoff than drag-selecting an army and giving it an attack-move. But Rise of Nations does everything it can with the interface to make it easy to use -- and respond to -- spies. It even concedes that the game might require a different speed at different times. Rise of Nations understands that pace is a subjective and malleable thing, so it has a couple of options for adjusting the speed. It understands that the guy who paid iron and gold to get a spy shouldn't be punished for spending his resources on something you can't simply drag-select with the rest of your army.

The endgame in Rise of Nations is full of this kind of stuff. Generals with their powers. The Patriots added in the expansion pack. The interplay of ballistic missiles revealing their silos when they fire, leaving themselves vulnerable to counter-fire from cruise missiles. Naval crossings. The fight for oil at the dawn of the Industrial Age. Aircraft. The sabotage power of scouts. All of these details are a significant part of Rise of Nations' design and balance. The developers made sure to do the best they could to keep the interface and pace from interfering with these gameplay mechanics. They know that a feature swallowed up and overlooked by most of the players might as well be a feature left out.

Unfortunately, this approach has fallen out of favor by RTS developers content to marginalize their genre by catering to power players who measure performance in clicks-per-second. One of the reasons I'm not really excited about StarCraft II is that Blizzard knows full well how popular it is among competitive professional gamers who emphasize reflexes and speed. Those guys are even worse than wargamers. At least wargamers don't fancy themselves celebrities or cyber-athletes.