Back in July, Riley went public with some very important news: as a newly middle-aged man, he had developed a passion for historical armed conflicts, and was beginning to express it, as so many middle-aged men do, by playing dusty video games about them.
In an attempt to help coach him through this (sometimes) difficult transition from one stage of life to the next, myself and some other strategy game nerds got Riley into the hotseat for an episode of Three Moves Ahead ("the leading strategy game themed podcast on the internet"), in which we used Riley's growing thirst for the Civil War--and attempt to satisfy that thirst by playing a real-time strategy game about it, a genre he's not exactly comfortable with--as an opportunity to welcome him to the fold, to take him by the shoulder, ease him into his seat at the table.
Which was (hopefully) useful for Riley, but also for us, because it was a chance to re-examine the field of strategy games through fresh eyes, pondering everything from accessibility to core gameplay mechanics. Riley had been frustrated at the repeated death of his infantry in a tutorial mission, for example, and while that could have been an opportunity to make fun of him, it turns out he had uncovered a shortfall in so much strategy gaming, where gameplay mechanics and buttons are explained to the player in great detail, but not other, vital, prior-knowledge-taken-for-granted stuff like infantry tactics.
From there, the discussion moves to the meatier topic of playing strategy games based on conflicts like this and the Second World War, where at least one of the factions is, for want of a better term, the baddies. And what it means to have a little fun moving guys around a map when those conquests and victories on the battlefield had very real consequences.
A subject on which I'd like to make a little apology while I'm here! I say on this podcast that Order Of Battle, my favourite empty-calories WW2 tactics game, took a somewhat distant approach to depicting the German armed forces. After re-playing a German campaign since, that is not true! You unlock the Waffen SS as a whole sub-faction, can occupy cities and fly its little skull flag over them, and yikes, that is an error I would very much like to correct on the record, thank you!
Anyway, I'm saying all this because I really enjoyed being a part of the discussion, and think anyone interested in strategy games--and especially the underlying politics and sensibilities of playing them--should check the episode out!
