The Learning Curve of Losing: Complex Strategy Games

I had the distinct pleasure of being a guest on Troy Goodfellow’s Three Moves Ahead podcast. Three Moves Ahead covers strategy gaming, and Troy’s regulars (Rob Zacney, Julian Murdoch and sometimes Tom Chick and Bruce Geryk) are engaging and entertaining. This episode, the ostensible topic was how technology has affected strategy games, but as with most shows, we managed to cover a lot of ground, from PC to console to handheld and even to board games. If you have any interest in games and gaming, TMA is well worth your subscription.

My own personal gaming interests are wide ranging, but I realized as we talked that most of my strategy gaming recently has been board gaming, rather than PC or console games. Why is that, I began to wonder?

Actually, that’s not completely true. I’ve dabbled in a number of strategy games, ranging from Panzer General: Allied Assault on the Xbox 360 to Ancient Trader to Napoleon: Total War. But I haven’t actually finished a strategy game since the last time we played Sins of a Solar Empire in our Friday Night Follies LAN party group – and that was months ago.

Some of this has been due to my recent obsession with Mass Effect and Mass Effect 2. But as the podcast progressed last night, I realized that a lot of it had to do with time and pacing.

These days, even relatively simple strategy games require a fairly substantial time investment – and there’s every chance that you might spend any number of hours diving into a game… and then find out you’re on the losing side. I’m not talking about level-based RTS games. The current crop of RTS games now have levels or maps that can play out very quickly – you can usually figure out how well or poorly you’re doing within 15 minutes or so.

Contrast that with Civilization IV or Sins of a Solar Empire. You could be many hours into a large game, only to find out you have no hope of winning – or even doing reasonably well. And in a Civ game, there’s no upside to managing the tedium of the end game if you’re trailing your opponents (human or artificial) by a significant amount.

There have been attempts to alleviate this, mostly through a tiered system that gradually escalates difficulty. Troy Goodfellow once lamented the idea of unlocks in strategy game, but if unlocks are used to keep newbies from diving into aspects of the game that may be too difficult early on, that’s a reasonable use of unlockable content. However, that also means that the early campaigns or maps need to scale appropriately. I’ve played a number of strategy games with tutorials or learning campaigns that covered the bare basics with no actually guide to strategy or tactics, then throws you into the main game with only a bare understanding of the mechanics.

Years ago, I’d happily spend hours and hours exploring and learning new games, but time constraints and impatience on my part means I no longer want to dive into a game in the hopes that the learning process not be a chore. Even Troy alluded to this in our podcast, when he noted that having to learn the ins-and-outs of new, complex games isn’t as much fun as it used to be, but he does it because he’s reviewing games for a living.

RPGs have learned this lesson more effectively than strategy games, though not all have implemented the lessons well. Dragon Age: Origins is a pretty deep and complex RPG, but draws you in gradually. And RPG designers have learned the lessons of the “impossible to win” character build. If you go back as far as Icewind Dale, it was possible to build a party that couldn’t win the final battle. Even games with rough edges, like the recently released Alpha Protocol, seem to have learned this lesson.

Of course, losing is part of the learning process, too. But if you “lose” in a first person shooter, it means (worst case) starting the level over and (best case) restoring a save.

So what to do? I have no easy answers. My problem is that, at the conceptual level, I genuinely like these complex games. Subject matter can draw me in, and make me want to learn the game. Earlier, I noted that I dabbled in Napoleon: Total War. But I wasn’t all that enamored of the subject matter. But now that the Peninsular War campaign DLC has been released, I’ll probably revisit the game, since that’s one of my favorite periods in military history.

If we go back to tabletop games for a moment, the Eurogame revolution created a new breed of games that are fast to learn, offer deep strategy and are great fun. Spending 60 or 90 minutes to learn and lose a board game isn’t quite as daunting as spending six hours learning – and losing – in a game like the old Avalon Hill Age of Renaissance or, worse, Wellington’s Victory.

In the end, too many good games exist, across all genres and platforms – both electronic and tabletop – to make me want to spend a bazillion hours, only to lose, just to learn a game.  Game developers should take that to heart.