6 Ocak 2019 Pazar

The Allure of Commanding Tiny Humans

[map loads]
"Battle control online..." "Building ready" "Unit ready"
"We have captured this building" "Your forces are under attack"
*Gold coins dropping*, *gears running*, *monster roaring* *clicks* *plane flying*
"Low power" "More gold required" "Not enough minerals"
*Gunshots* *sword clash* *explosions* *building crumbling* *screams*
"Go, go, go!" "Base is under attack" "Attaaaack!" "Kill them all!"
"An enemy has been defeated" "You are victorious!"
[statistic menu loads]
"Real time strategy"... when I hear the phrase, a weird blend of sounds pops out of in my head. Warcraft 3, The Battle of Middle Earth series, Starcraft series, Red Alert series, Rise of Nations... They all form a one brutal and magnificent dance of bright lights, fire, machine, meat and minerals. Sides, causes, motives, consequences aren't important. You mine every last of rare minerals, cut the last tree, burn the last scrap metal, draw every resource to utterly destroy the enemy. Where these happens have no importance besides tactical consideration, it would be left in ruins until yet another battlefield happens. The fictional people who are in these wars are merely pieces to command, with no past and no future. Stories may happen around them, but they don't have their own; they are here to destroy anything in enemy team colors until their gods are satisfied.  And these gods demand lots of destruction for their entertainment...
This sounds horrible isn't it? Life would certainly be hell if you were a unit to be commanded around in a real-time strategy game. (This is also amazing analogy for capitalism itself, so perhaps we kinda are?) Everything being used to feed the war machine is not an alien situation in the slightest but here it's actually the most sanitized version, more sanitized than legends. The war in RTS games (Which I mean real-time tactical combat games usually followed by base-building) have no boring parts. (In principle, at least) No logistics, no miscommunications, no subordinates with flawed actions, no psychological toll, no permanent change, no consequences besides a victory screen and stats. Just pure spectacle... FPS games are sometimes criticised for creating a similar trivialization of war, but this is, at first glance, arguably worse as you watch the whole thing from afar. You get to see dozens perhaps hundreds of people getting destroyed in the most brutal fashion imaginable. But, then, why it never makes me feel bad in the slightest, how I can watch a small-scale apocalypse happening with my own my eyes and not feel twinge in my stomach even a little, how I can don the persona of a brutal general with delight and not feel any coldness in the slightest?  I am not getting a good story or get immersed in a world, and it is not a good harmless "fun for fun sake" game. It should, by all accounts feel bleak and meaningless. I have always felt I should not enjoy these games and I am wasting my time playing them. But then, how can they keep pulling me back?
When I revisited a few games for this article one thing in particular gave me a perspective I have never considered before: Speedruns. An RTS speedrun is like a  drawing a painting with great passion.  The careful planning, the intensity of moves, computer's general inability to handle player fall together like pieces of puzzle to create beautiful, surreal paintings And when I played some of those games myself, I specifically tried to catch such paintings, the games started to became immensely more fun. With defending your base than expanding, carefully controlling your units so they fight with maximum efficiency, rushing for an early victory, methodically pushing the enemy back, or just sending big, beefy army and enjoying the destruction; you are not just playing a round of game, you are playing a composition. Tiny people on the screen form an orchestra and you are the conductor.
Playing an RTS game can quickly feel like you are watching a disaster and monster invasion movie. These movies have a similar level of abstractions to RTS games, where the audience might relate to misery at some level but will mostly perceive it similar to a light show, because the conflict is physically and emotionally is completely removed from them. This is different from the games that contain highly visceral violence, such as most shooters where you get immersed in the setting, excliptly targeting stuff that feels just real enough that it might cause a distortion in how the player view war and brutality. Watching live-footage or seeing highly detailed pictures of atrocities as opposed to merely reading and hearing about them on news can also cause a similar desensitization. More sensation often don't cause better emotional connection, ironically it fictionalizes the reality instead. (thus I recommend against watching/spreading news with graphic content) With RTS games or disaster movies on the other hand, the audience is very well aware what they see is not real as they are just watching a B movie while they eat popcorn, thus no matter how much plot and characterization goes along with them, at the end of the day when little people collide each other violently, it is hardly different from a circus show. It is like a middle stop between connecting people through immersion and using lack-of-immersion itself as the tool to make the setting feel more authentic.
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(my screenshot)

But we are not merely watching a spectacle here, are we? Player is both the spectator and the creator. Like leaving a mark on the paper with your brush, every click creates an immediate and often permanent change. Of all video games, real-time strategy games usually are the ones which feels truly "real-time". They can excel at challenging your reflexes, dexterity, being able to focus, the ability of multi-tasking and providing good immidiate tactical response. One might even claim that these type of games -- especially the ones who focus on unit command over macro production -- have more similarities with bullet-hell games than slow-strategy games, you just control many tiny creatures instead of one.
What's the at the heart of this spectacle? For the answer we need to look at the core feeling of these games, how the most basic interactions feel like. For a lot of games you can quickly see this. Controlling your character for a platform game. Shooting for a shooter game.  The sense of progression in RPGs. For an RTS this gets trickier. Planning, tactics, strategy, competitive balance? No, these are high concepts that is built around the core. But strategy games are so much defined and advertised with these high concepts it is a norm to ignore or even dismiss basic actions, but as every other game, the core feeling is what matters the most.
Strategy as a genre of a video game is quite old. (It is quite old as a genre of game after all.) There were RTS games on Famicom, but it took quite a while to develop ones that can be truly held as classics. The real culprits in the rise of RTS games were the invention of the mouse, developers getting the hang of smooth controls and visuals starting to get advanced enough to create authentic units that feels more than blocks or dots. Felling of commanding units is the most important. It is what creates the amazing spectacle. It is the primary thing that sent so many RTS games into the dustbin of history. You can see this in this video review of Gray Goo, no matter the production values, it is the first negative that gets called out. Just like you can't enjoy a drawing without enjoying swirling around your pencil, you can't enjoy an RTS if commanding units is boring. And things that drags down an RTS title essentially just intervenes the smoothness of the command act.

For this reason, to be able to enjoy RTS games at its best,the right level of difficulty is paramount. Low difficulty modes risk being too slow, it might feel like you are playing a watered down turn based game. (In fact,  many games with real-time combat have a problem of not being "real-time" enough, but that's another day's discussion) Hard difficulty modes risk being too fast and too stressful to really indulge in chaos. I don't want to sound like I am promoting elitism, in fact I have quite an average skill level on these games myself and easy games always have a critical place but RTS games are really the best when they can give you inject doses of little adrenaline rush while gradually building the sense of victory. Ironically, Starcraft, which did not contain a difficulty setting was better at finding the right difficulty then its successor. It was good at making me feel I was better at understanding the game., Brood War, the expansion pack, dialed the difficulty up to a notch, I never was able to complete the whole game. Hard difficulty on Starcraft 2 give a similar feeling of agonizing slog but Normal felt too much of a park ride. there were only certain moments where the game reached its true potential, but otherwise the moment-to-moment gameplay felt only decent thanks to creative levels and cheesy space opera.
A good sense of tension is does not only come from how much the game challenges you. How the game challenges you is perhaps even more important. When all AI does it try to spam units and overwhelm you, it breaks the graceful progression of your success and starts to become a test of patience and endurance instead. Or, how can you challenge the player if the game does not have a counter system? If numbers define everything alone, then it is just a race of who clicks the fastest or whether you can spam harder than AI. When factions are horribly balanced, you will crush or get crushed easily. But if your game don't fall any of these traps, every second, every click becomes joyful, it's when an RTS game truly becomes legendary.
The core feeling of games is important. Behind all polish, technical aspects, narrative concerns the games should nail down a certain feeling in their basic inspiration. And in the heart of RTS games lies the control of captivating destruction. If you have never tried one before because they looked intimidating, I suggest you to try to catch this feeling. When you can catch the scent, even defeats start to taste sweet.
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(source)

This article is written thanks to my dearest Patrons and special thanks to: Acelin, Alexandra Morgan, Laura Watson, MasterofCubes and Spencer Gill.

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