Super Nerd Sundays Presents: A Brief Indictment of the Dialogue on Real Time Strategy Games!

Real time strategy games have long been one of my favorite genres, despite their apparent fall from the main stream. The degree to which they require a balance of attention, careful planning, timing and adjustment on the fly, the chess like grace of high level play, anticipating and pre-empting enemies, at times successfully, at times less so, is invigorating and, to me, offers up so much of the generative narrative that makes multiplayer games in general so compelling.

The depth of involvement, the manner in which they demand so much and the personality that they can muster from repetitive and potentially boring subjects is nothing short of remarkable. Which is why I’m always a bit shocked to hear strategy game enthusiasts discuss real-time strategy games as if they were a plague upon the genre instead of one of the many saving graces it provides, and possibly the biggest money maker in the realm of strategy. To hear the voices of Three Moves Ahead discuss it, real-time strategy is an aberration, to be at best accepted grudgingly and, far more often, to be relegated to its proper place at the bottom of the food chain.

And when the most prominent proponents of a genre start to excoriate one of its cores it feels a little wrong to me. The greatest champions of real-time strategy games seem to be the competitive enthusiasts, the announcers, players and journalists who spend their time embedded in their microcosmic communities, extolling their game of choice with ejaculatory force. Reading through tournament news pages for DotA, Starcraft and Warcraft 3 make you believe that the world of strategy consisted of virtual athletes, mostly hailing from Korea or Sweden. You wouldn’t hear anything about the experience of casual play, the joy of moving units, planning out attacks, watching as they succeed or fail. You wouldn’t know about the manner in which these titles relate to one another, the way that the genre as a whole functions or the way its many diverse themes combine to make such compelling experiences. To be an RTS gamer who wants to read intelligent discourse about the state of the genre is to be the sort of person who is locked out in the cold, staring in a window wishing they could get some of the delicious stew brewing inside, stew being shared by 4X gamers, turn based strategy gamers and war gamers who all consider your genre too course and quickly paced to be worth playing.

But this concept of time management, the concept of attention as a resource and the stakes that emerge as much from waiting too long or playing inaction at the wrong moment as anything else, seem at odds with the relatively relaxed pacing that many of these gamers consider the cornerstone of their experiences. It is, in a way, understandable.

Many of the more prominently discussed 4X genres focus their attention on attracting a more mature audience with less time in general to spend playing games. Meanwhile many of people who spend their time playing more conventional RTSes are younger people, people who either have yet to cut their teeth in the journalistic community, who lack the desire or articulation to do so, or who are themselves quite busy with their own lives outside of the strategy genre.

It could also be a product of the relative lack of intelligent discourse in gaming media in general, however. When you look at the main stream coverage most games receive there are, at best, a handful of authors who actually treat them as if they were a medium every bit as intelligent as film, television or literature, and the few who do so are usually compelled by their employers to write about high profile games, games with marketing tie-ins and money to spend on exclusives with prominent publications. It is only occasionally that games like Dawn of War II and Starcraft II break this mold and actually receive serious discussion from larger media outlets, drawing the big talent that can occasionally deliver an intelligent discussion of games. Of course, the effect of this prominence is somewhat diminished by the raw amount of noise that surrounds major releases, and the overwhelming pressure to turn out a positive review which may gloss over or ignore elements of the game which don’t print well.

But I digress. Whatever the reasons it seems like those few articulate souls who discuss the strategy genre don’t care to talk about the real-time aspects of it, and when they do it seems like they do so solely to discuss the manner in which it caters to younger, action oriented audiences, a claim which wears thinner and thinner each time I hear it. I’d feel like the proverbial old man telling kids to stay off my lawn, but these seasoned writers and journalists have not only usually been in the business for decades, but they’re also usually at least fifteen to twenty years my senior. So any complaints I might voice are essentially proving their point: that real-time strategy games cater to a younger audience in their current incarnation, which may very well be true. Games are constantly jockeying for control of the 18 to 24 year old’s precious dollars, of which I’ve noticed we generally have precious few. It’s less a product of RTSes as a subgenre and more a product of games trying to sell bigger and bigger numbers by grabbing bigger and bigger audiences.

But that doesn’t necessarily excuse people dismissing entire genres out of hand, simply comparing them to other genres with elements they dislike without concern for the context in which these games exist. Action games exist within their own cosmology, a landscape of big sellng titles like God of War, Bayonetta and Devil May Cry, games that, regardless of their intelligence, are rooted in moment to moment action, wherein the activity of play is nothing but frenetic movement from target to target to target, occasionally interrupted by puzzles which involve using environmental elements to get to new targets. The action genre is the genre that invented the quick-time event, a feature which literally demands that players do nothing more than press buttons as they appear on screen. Action games want players to be able to jump in at a moment’s notice, to engage in their play without any thought of the past or future. The awesome boss you’re fighting is it’s own reward, not the victory cut scene at the end of the fight. A cursory examination of the atrocious stories that adorn most of these games is enough to prove that the play is the payoff here, not some sort of greater narrative.

But even the most frenetic real time strategy game is about the arc of entire games, not just the moment to moment instances of play you encounter. A game of Dawn of War II isn’t about unleashing your devastators on a group of advancing Nobz and ripping them to shreds – it’s about your devastators holding that position while assailed throughout the battle, distracting the enemy just long enough for your scouts to infiltrate behind their lines and grab their victory points out from under them in a stunning last minute win. It’s about the interplay of various forces over a long period of time, about building up units and unleashing them as a group, saving the ones you can and sacrificing the ones you must. It is, as some would be quick to snicker at, a game fundamentally rooted in managing resources, with all other activities being secondary to that one.

The only thing that a more frenetically paced RTS really brings to light is that attention is a resource which must be carefully rationed in strategy games in general. It’s less a matter of being forced through a series of reflex tests and more a matter of being able to quickly shift from task to task without losing sight of a greater whole. Action games are fundamentally about dealing with immediate threats: you see the orc, you decapitate the orc, you move on to the next orc. But strategy games are about planning ahead – you see the armies of the Uruk-Hai on the horizon, you feign at them while wheeling your cavalry into their flank and dropping your initial feign back into the body of your main force, catching the enemy between the two massed forces. Strategy games merely force you to look at this sort of a task from a greater perspective and, in most cases, to be able to deal with changes in this plan as things go wrong. And things will always go wrong: that’s what makes stories about battles interesting.

So while I’ll certainly admit that real-time strategy games are attempting to attract new audiences by providing more frenetic and action oriented experiences I don’t believe that it is in any way antithetical to the history of and purpose behind strategy games: forcing players to accomplish a task with limited resources. Quite the contrary, I think these new games do a far better job of giving players tools to more effectively manage large groups of units, with improvements in user interfaces and topos in control and management that have become commonplace in recent times which would have been inconceivable in the days of Starcraft. While it is fair to say that a game is too fast for your tastes, to deride a genre for encouraging a specific kind of play without concern or context for the purpose of that play is simply irresponsible. And in the end it does nothing more to forward the discussion about strategy games as a genre than me sitting here telling all you fucking kids to get off my lawn.