Strategy games

Extensive literature underlines the importance to critically examine the phenomenon of game classification. In computer games magazines of the 1980 decade, the combination of "action", "arcade," or "real-time" with "strategy" is quite common. Here and there, the expression "real-time strategy" is used. But real-time strategy games as we will come to know them in the 1990s are not very similar to games labelled "real-time strategy" in the 1980s: we are simply not witnessing the description of the same gameplay or experience. Micro-histories of gameplay can underline different forms of continuities and reveal new perspectives on strategy gaming.

This article explores the significance of computer games in shaping imaginations of the past. Focusing on Hearts of Iron IV,  I consider how the format can encourage revision of the Nazi past, going against the grain of efforts towards critical Vergangenheitsbewältigung, or working through the past. The article explores how gamers can take up positions perpetuating the myth of a clean Wehrmacht while perpetuating narratives of a barbarian Eastern Europe where the USSR poses the greatest threat to humanity. I show how reconstructions of historical narratives in digital spaces deserve more critical interrogation as a medium for the production of counterfactual history, especially given how popular and successful they are as depictions of the past, albeit a counterfactual one that draws on players’ affective urges and distorts historical reality.

Strategy games are a popular genre of games with a long history, originating
from games like Chess or Go. The word “strategy” is derived from the
Greek word strathgìc (strategós), meaning (the) general, resp. strathgeÐa,
meaning “art of commanding”. Both terms directly hint at the subject
of strategy games: warfare. Players must utilise armies and resources to
their advantage on a battlefield to win a “virtual war”. The first strategy
games were published as “Kriegspiele” (engl. wargames) in the late 18th
century, intended for the education of young cadets. Since then strategy
games were refined and transformed over two centuries into a medium of
entertainment. Today’s computer strategy games have their roots in the
board- and roleplaying games of the 20th century and enjoy great popularity.
In this thesis, we use strategy games as an application for the procedural
generation of game content.
Procedural game content generation has regained some interest in recent
years, both among the academic community and game developers alike.
When the first commercial computer games were published in the early
1980s, technical limitations prevented game developers from shipping their
titles with a large amount of pre-designed game content. Instead game
content such as levels, worlds, stories, weapons, or enemies needed to be
generated at program runtime to save storage space and memory resources.
It can be argued that the generation of game content “on the fly” has gained
popularity again for two reasons: first, game production budgets have risen
rapidly in the past ten years due to the necessary labour to create the
amount of game content players expect in games today. Secondly: the
potential audience for games grew in the past years, with a diversification
of player types at the same time. Thus game developers look for a way
to tailor their games to individual players’ preferences by creating game
content adaptively to how the player plays (and likes) a game.
In this thesis we extend the notion of “procedural game content generation”
by “game mechanics”. Game mechanics herein refer to the way that objects
in a game may interact, what the goal of the game is, how players may ma-
nipulate the game world, etc. We present the Strategy Games Description
Language (SGDL) and its adjacent framework, a tree-based approach to
model the game mechanics of strategy games. The SGDL framework allows
game designers to rapid prototype their game ideas with the help of our
customisable game engine. We present several example games to demon-
strate the capabilities of the language and how to model common strategy
game elements. Furthermore, we present methods to procedurally generate
and evaluate game mechanics modelled in SGDL in terms of enjoyability.
We argue that an evolutionary process can be used to evolve the mechanics
of strategy games using techniques from the field of machine learning. Our
results show that automated gameplay combined with expert knowledge
can be used to determine the quality of gameplay emerging from game me-
chanics modelled in SGDL, and that algorithms can augment the creativity
of human game designers.

This article deals with the philosophical idea of worldmaking pursued through techné, meaning the fusion of the technical means of artistic creation, theorizing, and analysis, but specifically occurring in a feedback loop involving introspection and computation (cybernetic phenomenology). The discussion ranges over a wide variety of topics, including (1) the history of music theory from Ancient Greece to the present (including a rebuttal to Daniel Chua’s (2001) account of music history); (2) emergent properties in music arising from self-organization (explored through the Ancient Chinese abstract strategy board game go); (3) the ontology of musical qualities (properties) and categories (including their relation to visual, tactile, and olfactory qualities and categories). 
Various repertoires, artists, and philosophies are referenced. The essay analyzes aspects of Ligeti’s Violin Concerto, Carter’s String Quartet No. 5, and Lachenmann’s Kinderspiel.  Connections to the author’s own previous analytical and theoretical work are also discussed in relation to his interactive algorithmic audio-visual works (such as Fluxations and FluxNOISations). The techné of these is discussed in terms of logistics as well as aesthetic influences, including Wagner, Liszt, Stravinsky, Schoenberg, Crawford, Babbitt, Carter, Xenakis, Parker, Reich, Ligeti, Truax, Oliveros, Kandinsky, Miro, Pollock, Pollock, Hofmann, Rothko, Louis, Frankenthaler, Moholy-Nagy, Newman, Richter, and Brakhage.  The essay touches on philosophical ideas of Bergson, Whitehead, Deleuze, Harman, and Bogost, and more fully engages the philosophies of Nelson Goodman and Hannah Arendt in connection with artistic creation as relating to the theorizing and analysis of artistic works.     

Contact the author at jmailman@alumni.uchicago.edu
Download the article through JSTOR: http://www.jstor.org/stable/10.7757/persnewmusi.54.1.0005
or http://tinyurl.com/zdvkllr

The ‘‘fortress simulator’’ game Dwarf Fortress (Bay 12 Games, 2006-present) allows players the space to conduct experiments in economics. The player is not granted an avatar in the world, but this does not mean the player is granted the role of a transcendent deity either. Instead, the player operates on the relational level—completely managing all economic interactions and assigning social codes to different spaces. Lacking a ‘‘win’’ condition, players are free to engage with the game however they wish, including allowing for the immediate and unsympathetic demise of the community. As play continues, Dwarf Fortress ceases to be a fortress and becomes what the autonomists describe as a ‘‘laboratory.’’ The social relations of the fortress are upturned and become the site for experiments in production. The fortress too becomes the site for thought experiments on alternative economies, containing not one but many social laboratories.

Strategy games have mostly been studied from an ideological point of view, usually focusing on three different aspects. The first aspect is the “content” of these games: the utmost importance and glorification of warfare and power (Caldwell 2000; Trémel 2001; Kline, et al. 2003; Caldwell 2004; Dyer-Witheford et De Peuter 2009), or the representation of history (Uricchio 2005; King et Krzywinska 2006; Voorhees 2009; Kapell et Elliott 2013), ethnicity (Dillon 2008; Paredes-Olea 2009), technology (Ghys 2012), etc. The second aspect is formal: the values connoted by the point of view (Fortin 2004; Mauco 2005) or by a certain cartography (Nohr 2010). The third aspect is “procedural”: it is the idea that strategy games convey values through gameplay (Galloway 2007; Bogost 2008; Voorhees 2008). Most of these analyses conclude that strategy games — Civilization, StarCraft, and Age of Empires series especially — glorify imperialism, warfare, ethnocentrism, and/or capitalism.

But these analyses do not take into account gameplay as “the way the game is actually played” (Juul 2005, p. 83). I will investigate these questions in three parts. First, strategy games worlds are inconsistent. If we are to find fiction or narration in strategy games, the idea of an aesthetic of fragmentation should be more focused on than a consistent gaming world. Second, fiction in strategy games still seems necessary in order that players see their actions as meaningful, in Salen and Zimmerman’s sense (2004, p. 34), but resemblance between two things does not make everything analogical from one to another. Third, if gameplay is to be understood from a semiotic perspective, we must be aware that signs are always inscribed in a context. In strategy games, this context include what players’ communities call the “metagame,” that is, the way games evolve strategically speaking. Under those circumstances, how do strategy games convey ideology? If we are to find capitalism in strategy games, the economic model of “free to play, pay to win” should probably be our first object of investigation rather than focusing on game worlds that cannot possibly claim to be consistent.

Games played directly inside the web browser have many benefits. Browser games do not need software installation. Furthermore since the web has become the ultimate collaboration environment, the games are available for numerous players that can play in collaborative fashion. Through history online communities have birth alongside with browser games. Nowadays online communities have achieved massive user numbers and those can be important part of the browser game itself. This article targets at analyzing and categorizing of browser games. We also discuss financial opportunities relating to browser games and technologies used in those.

Dentro del marco de la escritura de la tesis (como finalización de la maestría en Crítica y Difusión de las Artes) se le dio especial importancia al problema del estudio de las modalidades enunciativas del videojuego, tema en general poco y nada abordado en el campo de los games studies. La tesis, que se estructura en tres bloques, comienza por una discusión teórica, realiza ajustes conceptuales con vistas a diseñar un herramental analítico y, en la tercera parte, aplica esos desarrollos al estudio de casos. Uno de esos casos es el del género de estrategia, en sus dos variantes: por turnos y en tiempo real. A diferencia de otros estudios sobre juegos de ese género, habitualmente interesados en desmontar los procesos mediante los cuales se construye significado y un comentario acerca de la sociedad (Friedman 1999, Bogost 2007, Frasca 2007, Pérez Latorre 2012), el propuesto por la tesis articula el marco de la sociosemiótica con desarrollos del campo de los game studies (Aarseth 1997, Juul 2005, Fernández Vara 2009 y otros) atendiendo a la dimensión enunciativa del fenómeno: ¿qué clase de escena comunicativa ofrece el género de estrategia? ¿Qué elementos de carácter retórico organizan la superficie discursiva y hacen posible esa propuesta? ¿A partir de qué operatorias se construye a un otro en términos enunciativos, y cómo se lo interpela? El análisis pone de manifiesto una idea que atraviesa la tesis en su conjunto: que la enunciación del videojuego tiene como principal atributo el hecho de modelar a su jugador ideal a través del despliegue de competencias. Pero, a diferencia de los saberes presupuestos en lenguajes y soportes no ergódicos (como el cine o la historieta), se trata de competencias vinculadas con la interacción y la modificación efectiva de la superficie textual: el enunciatario es elaborado a partir de habilidades de distinta índole dependiendo del juego y el género. En el caso del género de estrategia, juegos como Age of Empire II o Civilization V, a través de la suma de sus operaciones configurativas, recortan un enunciatario que debe gestionar una serie de variables relacionadas con la ocupación del espacio, la obtención de recursos, el desarrollo científico, entre otras áreas. El jugador interpelado es alguien que, antes que nada, debe gestionar de la manera más económica posible, ya se trate de el trazado de un asentamiento urbano o, incluso, de la planificación de un ataque armado: la manera en que se despliegan las tropas en el campo de batalla, su formación y las tácticas empleadas también se vuelven una cuestión de administración, a diferencia de lo ocurre en géneros como el first person shooter, donde el enfrentamiento obliga a poner en obra aptitudes vinculadas con la velocidad de reflejos, puntería y otras destrezas propias de esos juegos. Este trabajo propone que una semiótica del videojuego debe atender a las maneras en las que el medio es capaz de generar un intercambio discursivo singular.

Since at least the arrival of 3D graphical displays in the mid-1990s, video games have employed visual perspective to make the flat computer screen appear to be a deep and immersive game world. This essay delineates the three major perspectival modes present in video games today—the first-person, the third-person, and the strategy mode—in order to identify the way in which they make certain political structures operable within the game’s architecture. While periodization is typically elaborated by the historian, sociologist or cultural theorist, here we find a form of periodization internal to the perceptual architecture of contemporary digital media. Such a periodization, this essay argues, is central to the classificatory tools by which subjects and non-subjects are marked out within the societies of control.

Los juegos de estrategia abstracta constituyen un recurso educativo muy importante para desarrollar aptitudes de representación espacial y de pensamiento estratégico. En este sentido, y de forma específica, el juego del QUORIDOR permite adquirir aptitudes relacionadas con la accesibilidad diferencial ("barreras") y la representación espacial.

The Purpose of this study is to propose a method to estimate Rock-Scissors-Paper (RSP, Janken) game strategy based on human personality in RSP game. In order to estimate the player's strategy in the RSP game, it is considered effective to compare the player's hand sign series and the hand sign series obtained from various RSP strategies based on similarity. Therefore, in this study, focused on homology search as a method of calculating similarity between sequences. This paper shows the result of verifying the analysis accuracy of homology search against RSP strategy.

A diferencia de otros géneros del videojuego,
el de estrategia no parece haber atravesado
grandes cambios ni mayores reconfiguraciones
a lo largo de los años. Esa estabilidad puede
observarse comparando las primeras entregas
de Civilization con las últimas: todas
comparten una escena discursiva similar en la
que el texto elabora un jugador modelo a
partir de atribuciones vinculadas con la
interpretación y la gestión de variables, a la
manera de un administrador. Esta relativa
estabilidad, a su vez, puede comprenderse
mejor si se entiende el género de estrategia
como mediatización de una forma lúdica
previa de larga vida social: el juego de mesa de
temática bélica. El pasaje de uno a otro
evidencia la emergencia de una gran cantidad
de novedades (aunque también de
permanencias) que surgen como producto de
cambios de carácter material y discursivo: de
soporte, de dispositivo y de la nueva
centralidad de la interfaz. Este trabajo parte de
un análisis sociosemiótico que trata de dar
cuenta de las particularidades del género de
estrategia en tanto forma mediatizada de los
juegos de mesa bélicos, señalando aspectos
del medio del videojuego que ofician el pasaje
y atendiendo al desplazamiento enunciativo
que parece haberse producido en relación con
la escena discursiva.

Editors: Riccardo Masini, Frédéric Serval, Jan Heinemann

The perception of wargaming as a professional part of military training and scenario analysis on one hand, and the board and tabletop wargaming hobby on the other hand, are dominated by US-American approaches and communities of players and designers. Despite being crammed in a relatively small part of the world, European wargaming spheres and communities seem to have stayed somewhat isolated on a national basis due to language barriers and other reasons and little is known about the state of the profession and hobby from country to country.

This volume aims for closing this gap and provide a comprehensive overview of the history of the multiple dimensions of wargaming all over Europe. Thus, we want to encourage contribution of articles focussed on the history of wargaming (military conflict simulations, as well as hobby board, miniature tabletop and role playing games), the perception of wargaming as part of the national, trans-, and international gaming culture(s), the relations of wargaming and eurogaming in regard to perception, gaming communities, inter-European exchange, as well as to the history and future of approaches to wargame design.

The Call for Articles is open for professionals, scholars, designers and players.

Possible topics therefore are:
The history, state and future of professional and amateur/hobby board wargaming, miniature gaming, and role playing games (in Europe)
The relationship between simulation games, eurogames, German-style games and abstract games
The perception of wargaming as profession and/or hobby in public discourse
The value of simulation games as tools in educational environments
Wargames as research tool for military, history, conflict archaeology, sociology etc
Wargames as popular media and their impact on the imagination of history, wars, gender, conflicts and violence, wargames as commemorative culture
Concepts and approaches to wargame design, the relations of wargames, eurogames, and miniature games in regard to gaming communities and game design concepts
Gender and minorities in wargaming
Civilians in wargames
Regional and/or national, trans-, or international perspectives for European countries (including those no longer existing)
We invite articles submissions that respond to the above issues and questions.

Maximum length of abstract: 2.000 characters.
Maximum length of the article: 60.000 characters (blank spaces and footnotes included).
The articles should be in English, and sent to eurowargames [at] gmail [dot] com
Submission guidelines and citation style guide: https://eurowargames.wordpress.com/guidelines


Timetable
Abstract submission 31th October 2020
Decision feedback 15th November 2020
Submission of full article 15th February 2021
Publishing May 2021

"Strategy" in videogames can bear a lot of meanings; so does "strategy games." The intuitive approach is to consider strategy games as descendants of wargames and, consequently, to define "strategy" as it is defined in the context of war. Nevertheless, when used in different contexts, such as games, war, politics, game theory, or business, "strategy" could almost be labelled as indefinable. Therefore, how could we make use of a concept such as "strategy" in videogames and game studies? I suggest that "strategy" can either be defined from a dictionary or an encyclopaedic perspective. I will show that, actually, definitions of "strategy" can basically be divided in three different categories, depending on what they take into account: iconic, formal, and experiential definitions. But the differences between these categories of definitions show that the rationale behind them are also very different. These different definitions all use the word "strategy" in order to underline different aspects of games or gameplay, from a faithful portrayal of war to a competitive experience. I will conclude by explaining how the plurality of strategy’s meanings does not clarify strategic gameplay.

L’identité générique du jeu de stratégie en temps réel pose problème dès lors qu’on cherche à le penser historiquement. Entre le premier jeu nommé explicitement « real-time strategy » (Computer Quarterback, Danielle Bunten Berry, 1981) et les classiques du genre de la fin de la décennie 1990, l’expression se fait discrète. L’objectif de cette présentation sera de démontrer que même pour un genre dont les critères semblent inscrits dans le nom lui-même — stratégie et temps réel —, le genre est un processus de dénomination qui tient lieu d’un phénomène largement culturel. On soulignera trois points essentiels pour comprendre le vaste champ de la stratégie dans la décennie 1980 et sa relation avec l’action et le multijoueur. Premièrement, plusieurs jeux sont qualifiés au début de la décennie 1980 de « real-time », « arcade » ou « action » combiné(s) avec « strategy », « wargame » ou « tactical », alors que l’utilisation de ces termes ne renvoie tout simplement pas au même sens. Deuxièmement, d’autres jeux sont qualifiés de « real-time strategy » rétrospectivement autant par des universitaires que par des historiens amateurs pour souligner leur importance pour le genre ou par définition, sans que ces jeux ne l’aient été de manière synchronique. Troisièmement, plusieurs jeux — en particulier ceux de Danielle Bunten Berry — contribuent à mettre en place une culture du multijoueur dont le jeu de stratégie en temps réel des décennies 1990 et 2000 est largement redevable.

Computer games are a relatively young medium but one which has become increasingly accessible in recent decades. Within this category, the niche filled by Historical Grand Strategy Games, themselves descendants of board games, holds increasing influence over the public perception of history. These games, originating with the likes of Civilization, tend towards relatively deep representations of the periods and cultures they address and, as distinct from most other mediums, allow a great degree of interactivity. The user controls military, economic, social and diplomatic actions of his country, kingdom or empire within a “sandbox” non-linear simulation and this necessitates a different representation of history to that found in literature, films or even other types of computer game.
Grand Strategy Games have typically been somewhat weak in their coverage of the middle ages. As has been the case in other mediums, the period has often been eschewed in favour of the classical, renaissance or modern eras with little more than a cursory knight sandwiched between legionaries and musketeers. However, this balance has been redressed to a large extent in the new millennium. Games spanning the entirety of human history have placed greater emphasis on the Middle Ages and series such as Medieval: Total War and Crusader Kings have focused exclusively on the Middle Ages. The popularity of these games makes them of increasing importance to medievalism and to teachers of medieval history whose students have increasingly come into contact with this media.
This paper will address the changing representation of the medieval period within this genre. It will discuss the difficulties inherent in producing games of this sort with regards to the Middle Ages looking at how modern preconceptions on the part of both author and audience have dictated design decisions. It will consider the restrictions placed on these games by technology and research limitations as well as the unique nature of politics, warfare and society within the medieval period. It will address the demands for historical accuracy, which increasingly come from the audience rather than the author and how this impacts on the way these games play. Finally it will deal with the dichotomy between free will and predetermination within this medium, an issue which has gained prominence in recent years.