I would have made a simpler game, but I did not have the time
The word “elegant” flies around as game players, reviewers, and designers attempt to describe what makes a game fun. Designers seek elegance in their games because the description means that the game is simple yet deep, accessible yet skill-rewarding, pleasant yet tricky.
On the whole, wargames are not elegant. This is due, in large part, to the genre’s history: originally, board wargames were designed with the intent of training apprentice commanders for what they might see on the battlefield. Wargames for hobbyists didn’t emerge until the turn of the 20th century.1
Hobby games grew mainly as a result of increased literacy and college graduation rates; it became “fashionable” for the newly educated class to play wargames in their free time2. Despite being produced for the general public, these games were not much simpler than the ones being produced in war rooms; they were merely cheaper and easier to purchase than professionally made games. Thus, for better or for worse, there is a baked-in bias in the wargaming industry toward complexity.
This design ethos does not fit into the twenty-first century gaming market. There is certainly a place for simulation-style games, yet their lingering influence in the hobby space has funneled wargaming into a smaller niche than it might otherwise have inhabited.
Today’s most popular games are elegant, or at least they advertise themselves as such. Games sell based on their visual and thematic appeal, mechanical intrigue and perceived longevity. As someone who entered into the gaming hobby relatively recently, I’ve been primed to seek out these qualities in my own purchases and designs. What I’ve learning is that adding (mechanisms, cards, components, etc.) is much easier than subtracting, yet elegance is only achieved by subtraction.
Charles Vasey likens this theory of wargame design to impressionism in art:
The impressionist style of design recognizes…that with less popular topics one cannot overstay one’s welcome or demand too much of the gamer: one must instead give them the core of the topic in a system that shows it off at its best and do so before the light changes. By doing this we also lift the gamer up from the task of forming every company and positioning every battery.3
My first game, Insurgent: Algeria, condenses 130 years of colonialism and nine years of war into fifteen minutes. Some might argue that such aggressive simplification is crude, that a complex conflict cannot be captured with such broad design strokes. I see the thinking behind this argument: isn’t a depiction like this flattening the experiences of millions of people?
Here’s what I think: the moment one decides to depict a real-world event or system in tabletop form, they are both literally and figuratively flattening it. Games are abstractions, just like movies, books and other media. They take real life and make impressions of them — they impress their own ideas into the event or topic of the game.
Insurgent is an impression of the Algerian War in a deck of cards. I would, in my extreme bias, argue it is elegant in that abstraction. Simplicity is a strength in a market where gamers curious about history, yet intimidated by the intense onboarding required for most other games. By ruthlessly stripping the game down to its core ideas, it maintains both a strong argument and a wide appeal.
Thanks to everyone who has taken the time to play Word Swirl this week! It’s been fun playing with and hearing about your experiences with it.
Looking forward to sharing more games and news with you soon. We’ve got some exciting things in store.
- Matt
James Dunnigan, “The Paper Time Machine Goes Electric,” in Zones of Control: Perspectives on Wargaming, ed. Pat Harrigan and Matthew G. Kirschenbaum (Cambridge, Massachusetts: The MIT Press, 2016), 41.
James Dunnigan, “The Paper Time Machine Goes Electric,” 42.
Charles Vasey, “The Amateur Designer: For Fun and Profit,” in Zones of Control: Perspectives on Wargaming, ed. Pat Harrigan and Matthew G. Kirschenbaum (The MIT Press, 2016).
Where you say "elegant" I would sometimes say "simple" instead, not in the sense of crude or basic, but in the sense of plain, easy, ordinary, or uncomplicated. Simple things are complete and contained within themselves.
Dunnigan wrote a whole wonderful book on the art and craft of wargaming, in which he said: “It is very difficult to keep a game design project simple. Once you get going there are tremendous temptations to add this and add that. A game design is a very dynamic activity. It soon acquires a life of its own, asking questions and providing parts of answers. The game designer is sorely tempted to go deeper and deeper. Without some years of experience and a high degree of professional discipline it is extremely difficult to do an unsimple game that is not a truly incomprehensible one.
For a game is, in addition to being a source of information, also a form of communication. If the information cannot be communicated, the game does not work. You've got to keep it simple. ”
To make this sound more profound than it actually is, here is a quote by the pilot and writer Antoine de Saint-Exupery from his book Wind, Sand and Stars (1939):
“...It is as if there were a natural law which ordained that to achieve this end, to refine the curve of a piece of furniture, or a ship's keel, or the fuselage of an airplane, … there must be the experimentation of several generations of craftsmen. In anything at all, perfection is finally attained not when there is no longer anything to add, but when there is no longer anything to take away.”