Non-fiction games... Worms ahoy! (wait not the game Worms, I meant this discussion is a can of worms)

Fellow bloggers ought to chime in on this discussion, preferably in posts of your own, or the comment section if you want to be lazy and write something that even less people than already read this site will read. Don't know how readership can number in the negative, but I'm sure that's one thing this blog can accomplish.

Andrew mentioned non-fiction games in his last post because he said reading makes him feel like a genius. My congratulations.

Alright I kinda have to start by saying I don't really care about this topic. I'm more inclined to read about it than write. Then again, I have a blog, and write I must. For ego's sake. Come on though I don't wannnna.

Let's get ourselves into the right mood by listening to a[n] historical song:

Ah, now I'm ready to learn.

Do I even know what non-fiction is? K, Wikipedia clarifies: the assertions made by the author are understood to be factual, according to his knowledge/research. Doesn't that kinda make religious texts non-fiction though? And that's definitely not right. But a book doesn't become non-non-fiction if one of its assertions is disproven at a later date. But let's just skip that weird discrepancy because it doesn't need to apply to this discussion. Non-fiction is a work in which all assertions are understood by the author and audience to be facts, let's leave it at that.

A game contains authorial assertions alongside audience input, the latter not present in other media. Assertions in the form of setting, dialogue, and scripted events can be argued to be factual in a manner identical to books or film. Nothing new there. That alone is enough to establish that a game can contain non-fictional content - content that the player knows is being dictated to them as fact. Assassin's Creed is a widely popular example of this. The game includes dossiers on historical landmarks, personalities, and organizations. Though the plot (and thus the game as a whole) is clearly historical fiction of the Dan Brown variety, the factual matters are well-enough delineated that an audience member can know they are absorbing information about reality.

Semi-fiction, explained

Control is the more difficult matter to assess - without establishing non-fictional player interactivity, the best a game can be is semi-fiction. An argument made elsewhere on this blog that we'll take as an assumption is that any action leading to failure of the game's winning condition is not a part of the narrative*. Meaning that if you're playing as George Washington and accidentally fall off of a cliff, that does not mean the game is asserting that George Washington fell off a cliff and respawned back in town - only that he could have (fallen that is - I don't think historical figures respawned too often). But without establishing a binary pass/fail to every action the player takes, ambiguity is introduced into which is an assertion and which is simply a player freedom. Say, for instance, we were examining a biogame about Miles Davis. Imagine a scene in which the player is presented with the prompt "press X to throw a trumpet at the bigot or press Y to say 'yessuh massah'" If the player knows that making the wrong choice will cause a Game Over, he can assume that the right choice is a factual assertion. If the game continues regardless of selection, it becomes unclear what action Miles Davis actually took, or whether that was a historical situation at all. Even if it is factual, if the player can't tell that it is, it's not nonf, is it? 

So it seems to me that there is potential to create a non-fictional game experience, though not without limitations. It is first understood that all scripted content must be factual to the greatest degree available to the creators - this includes setting, characters, and plot events. A restriction on interactivity is also necessary to inform the player of what exactly is an assertion and what is a freedom. This can take the form of a binary reward/punish mechanic (an artless means of accomplishing this would be the implementation of a score counter: +1 point for factual actions, -1 for deviation) or a delineation between history lessons and playtime (see Age of Empires II - the battles are clearly free-for-all historically set playgrounds, while the cut-scenes and story progression are informative). 

I always loved how the tiny units lined up for you. It was such a delight. Real-time tiny-unit-lining-up-for-you action!

Dunno, just a day's worth of thought on the subject. Maybe I'm not clambering for non-fiction gaming (personally I find there's as much to learn from fictional narratives), but I will admit that I do feel pretty edified after a session of Romance of the Three Kingdoms VII or AoE II. Actually I never really appreciated how much I learned from New Horizons, but it was chocked full of information about the Age of Discovery. Maybe I'd even make a case for that being a nonf game, on that inevitable day when I expound on how it's one of my all-time favorites.. Regardless, as the Americans say, "it is good enough for me".

*if we do not assume this, the entire argument is fruitless, so we can either take it as fact and argue about it later, or not have this conversation at all

Top Ten SRPGs 2: ContinYOUd

This is the part of the strategy RPG cake where I take you down memory lane to look at some genre classics that provide popular tweaks on a generally accepted framework of Chess Plus. What I mean by that is grid-based gameplay with alternating turns and pieces that only have one type of action. These games vary mostly in their implementation of the notion of role-playing, as you'll come to lovingly understand.

What?

Anyway.

4. Fire Emblem: Pick Which One You Like Best

As the years have passed, Fire Emblem seems to have evolved the least of Nintendo's mainline series. Complain all you want about Zelda and Mario being formulaic, but they take us on journeys through worlds. Link sailed across the ocean and soared through the skies while Mario sunbathed in the tropics and reached for the stars. The adventure and discovery make old mechanics new again. Fire Emblem loses this because its trademark is the setting, not the characters. The heroes change every time, and the castles stay castles. So there isn't much to see - oh well, strategy games were never about the scenery anyway.

The Fire Emblem model is very cut and dry. Units have flavors which define their relationships: axe beats lance beats sword, archer beats magic, so on. There's not much rolling of the dice on the battlefield; once the machinery begins to turn, you won't be surprised (or have to react) to the results. That makes Fire Emblem a preparation game, all about choosing the right units and the right equipment. The choice to take a character into battle carries a greater weight because they each have their own back-story and persona. They may chat with the characters next to them, or perhaps have a town or enemy to uniquely interact with. 

5. Shining Force II

Of the Shiny Forces, I've only played II, so this is a freebee. At first glance, Shining Force is just an even boringer Fire Emblem. Seems like the battles go slower, you have less units, etc. Yawn. Actually what you're witnessing is that Shining Force is more a traditional JRPG than its other SRPG compatriots. You're first clued in by structure of the game. You walk around in towns, chat about, and explore a world map. There are shops and churches and castles, as one would see in Dragon Warrior or Ultima. Battles can be escaped and replayed. This sets a leisurely pace for the game. 

Shining Force wants you to get in there, take your time, and beef up your team. You'll hit the wall occasionally, even if you think you're playing with strategic perfection. Part of the experience is investing time in each character, learning their individual strengths and weaknesses. There aren't the rock-paper-scissors hierarchies, so each unit is more well-rounded and self-sufficient. I'm saying you can grind, got it? To some that is a most comforting notion.

6. Romance of the Three Kingdoms VII

Alright, finally, something interesting. Romance VII is a large-scale, territorial strategy game. Based in historical scenarios, some would call the game a simulation, as it demands that the player manage economy, culture, and diplomacy across his very own Ancient Chinese Dominion. It's true that Romance VII presents itself as a numbers game, all about allocating resources and

Wow you know I'm realizing here how boring strategy games are to write about. Admittedly, plenty of people find them boring to play as well, but I find something impossibly soothing, engrossing, and rewarding about these games. When I sit down to play Romance of the Three Kingdoms, I know I'm going to lose a few hours of my life, and yet am satisfied to see the growth of my sandcastle. There is a quantifiable element of success that goes beyond a high score or kill/death ratio, a constructive effort with nigh-tangible results. The more granularity the game provides and the more hardship one must overcome to amass his little kingdom, the more gratifying it is to witness it come to be.

ROTK7 offers exactly as much control and granularity as you need, through its RPG element. You don't rule directly over the land and all of its day-to-day business, rather this is handled by warlords with individual statistics and predispositions. These characters allow for indirect and personalized development of your domain, keeping the details hidden while you watch your borders expand.

Come back next time to learn about some non-traditional, and maybe even Western!, strategy RPGs.