Sid Meier’s Gettysburg! instruction manual.
© 1997 DAVE INSCORE/FIRAXIS GAMES.
16
INTERESTING DECISIONS
Sid Meier’s Gettysburg! (1997)
*
Sid Meier’s Antietam! (1999)
IT WAS NO SECRET THAT I DIDN’T want to go to Switzerland that summer. My parents may have had multiple—and somewhat conflicting—rationales for the trip, spanning everything from broadened horizons and familial duty to emotional shielding and medical necessity, but the question of their eight-year-old son’s approval didn’t seem to be a factor. My father wasn’t indifferent to my feelings, however, and just before we left, he handed me a present.
“Don’t open it until you are on the plane,” he said.
It was shaped like a book, but if so, it was the heaviest one I’d ever seen, except maybe for the dictionary. I felt its weight in my bag all the way to the airport, then on the plane to New York with my father, then on the tram to the Swissair gate. I felt it even when it wasn’t on my shoulders. By the time my father hugged me goodbye and sent me down the narrow gangway, anticipation had triumphed over homesickness. There would be time for tears and angsty diary entries later, but in that moment, all I wanted was to get on that plane.
As soon as I was in my seat, I tore open the wrapping to reveal The American Heritage Picture History of the Civil War.
“When the Civil War began,” read the introduction, “photography was only twenty-two years old; only twelve years had elapsed since the first photograph was made of a U.S. President in office; and only ten since the invention of the wet-plate process.” It went on to describe the “combat artists” who had documented the war, not just with photography but “in the fading twilight with freezing or fevered fingers, making their sketches in ambulances and field hospitals, in trenches and on decks over which shells crashed and bullets whined.”
The book contained no fewer than 630 pages of drawings, photos, paintings, political cartoons, diagrams, and maps from this tumultuous time in American history. There was the 1851 Railroad Jubilee on Boston Common, with a jaunty Millard Fillmore greeting the Canadian governor general in a carriage drawn by six white horses. There were advertisements for farmland along the Illinois Central Railroad line, and a depiction of the very first election in my hometown of Detroit. There was the iconic publisher William Lloyd Garrison, who once publicly burned the Constitution and called it “a covenant with death and an agreement with hell” for its allowance of slavery. There was the cousin of Senator Andrew Butler, bursting onto the Congress floor and striking Senator Charles Sumner with a cane on his kinsman’s behalf. Under the photo of Lincoln’s inauguration, there was the caption describing “sharpshooters . . . at the Capitol’s windows, and a flying wedge of artillery” to maintain order. And there were, of course, many immortal quotes from the man himself.
“In your hands, my dissatisfied fellow countrymen, and not in mine, is the momentous issue of civil war. The government will not assail you. You can have no conflict, without being yourselves the aggressors. You have no oath registered in heaven to destroy the government, while I shall have the most solemn one to ‘preserve, protect, and defend’ it.”
There were sheepish boys in oversized uniforms, not yet aware of what was to come. There was the shallow pool alongside the Battle of Shiloh, where wounded men from both armies drank fresh water side by side. There was even some dark humor from the era, including a gag photo of a soldier pretending to light a “Quaker gun”—a tree trunk carved into the shape of a cannon and painted black—which troops would sometimes set up at a distance to appear fearsome when they had no real artillery.
Most of the pictures were originals from the late 1800s, but a handful of recent illustrations had been commissioned to describe infantry movements over the course of the largest battles. One in particular caught my eye, detailing the second day of the Battle of Gettysburg. The sweeping overhead view filled both pages from edge to edge, and was labeled with names that sounded like they’d come out of a fantasy novel: Spangler’s Spring, Plum Run, Devil’s Den, Sickles’ Salient. Hundreds of tiny, exquisitely drawn figures engaged at every major skirmish point across the map, and close inspection revealed a terrain that was just as intricate. Planks were knocked out of fences, wagons overturned, branches torn from trees—the level of detail was mind-blowing. I had always imagined battles to be laid out in clean, wide-open fields, with the two sides charging each other at full force. But this one had farmhouses, creeks, orchards, and even a cemetery scattered through the middle of it. Small clumps of soldiers advanced on each other from every direction, flowing around natural rock formations and coming up behind one another to retake positions they’d already lost once. They practically swarmed across the page, as if the battle were a living organism.
For years I would return to this book, studying its minutiae again and again. We had a telescope in the house that my father had built from a kit, and at some point I discovered that the removable eyepiece worked as a magnifying glass on everyday objects. I would hold it to my eye and lean close to the pages for hours, like a jeweler examining rare diamonds. The Civil War was, in my mind, the turning point when historical characters suddenly became real people. Other wars had dates and facts, but the fighters on these pages were fragile, and brave, and dutiful, and flawed. The art collected by American Heritage, not to mention all the surviving letters and firsthand accounts it inspired me to seek out, gave their story a sense of immediacy and humanity that I had never felt before.
Like many of my childhood interests, this one persisted in various forms over the years, and the map of Gettysburg in particular was at the forefront of my mind as my career matured. So many of the skirmishes had turned on chance, and a redirection of any one of them might have affected the entire course of the war. It was an obvious topic to build a game around, and during my time at MicroProse I probably made twenty different Civil War prototypes. None of them were bad, necessarily, but they all felt insufficient—I could see in my head exactly what I wanted, and it couldn’t yet be re-created on the screen. Streamlining military encounters until they were digitally feasible was my bread and butter in the early days, and it wasn’t like me to rail against what we weren’t capable of. I generally saw technology in terms of progress, rather than limitations, and lived in a nearly perpetual state of excitement over what we could accomplish. But in this case, my emotional connection to the subject made it impossible to settle for less, and I found myself repeatedly shelving the idea until the technology could catch up.
Now, a decade and a half later, I could finally do those beautiful illustrations justice. Sid Meier’s Gettysburg! re-created every major skirmish of the three-day battle, allowing the player to take charge of either side’s regiments and match their skills against some of history’s greatest generals. Since the advantage had shifted many times during the real battle, we decided that the player should be allowed to win or lose each stage independently—and in fact it was nearly impossible to win them all. Instead, we created branching scenarios depending on the total state of your army, and like real military strategists, the best players had to learn the art of judicious sacrifice and retreat in order to win. But to me, the real centerpiece was the technology. In addition to smooth maneuvers and independent AI for each soldier, the overhead view was no longer top-down and flat, as my previous strategy games had been. Instead, it was isometric, or what developers refer to as “two-and-a-half-D”—that is, two-dimensional, but from an angled perspective, with stretched diamonds instead of squares. Tiny soldiers marched, rotated, kneeled, aimed, and reloaded across a detailed terrain at exactly the same angle as I had first seen them on a plane to Switzerland.
Before we could release our first game at Firaxis, though, we had to figure out who was going to publish it. Distribution and marketing was an entire industry now, and Jeff, Brian, and I felt strongly that the lack of quarantine between departments at MicroProse had con
tributed to its downfall. Business and creativity were both necessary components, but they ought to keep their distance.
Of the many offers we received, Electronic Arts was the largest and most stable. We wanted a company that would be safe (or as safe as possible, anyway) from the endless cycle of bankruptcies, buyouts, and property transfers that still plague parts of the industry even today. As the publisher for Maxis and its flagship game SimCity, EA had also proven that they understood our gaming philosophy, and wouldn’t be pressuring us for platformers or first-person shooters. The idea of, say, Railroad Tycoon conductors aiming at each other from passing trains might sound preposterous to our side of the table, but Sega had once rejected Dan Bunten’s M.U.L.E. unless “bombs and guns” were added, so anything was possible.
One of the other things we liked about EA was their executives actually played and enjoyed videogames. Our liaison in their offices was a man named Bing Gordon, who would eventually become one of only two Americans to ever win a non-developer award from the Academy of Interactive Arts & Sciences, and the first endowed chair of game design at a university. He began in marketing when EA was founded, and directly managed a few development teams in the early years, but mostly he traveled around giving short, brilliant bits of advice to nearly every project under the company’s umbrella. In addition to his formal credits, he’s named in the “Special Thanks” section of over sixty games, while at Firaxis we once listed him as our “EA Godfather.”
Gettysburg! was a success, and a sequel called Antietam! soon followed. Since we knew it was on topically safe ground, we took the opportunity to test our audience’s boundaries in a different way. Internet connectivity had finally become the norm by 1999, and EA was willing to let us try the revolutionary concept of direct-to-consumer sales through our website.
Alas, we were ahead of our time. PayPal had only been founded a few months earlier, Walmart wouldn’t launch a website for another year, and Amazon wouldn’t be profitable for another four. The idea of going to Firaxis.com instead of a brick-and-mortar store was still too weird for most people, especially since the game wasn’t available for download—all that convenience of online ordering was spoiled by waiting a week or more for your CD-ROM to arrive in the mail. Antietam! got good reviews, but almost certainly sold less than it would have through traditional routes.
Still, I felt like there was room for one more in the series, this time based on the battle of Waterloo. The French Revolution didn’t quite reach Civil War levels of fascination for me, but I thought it had some unique military tactics worth exploring, namely the interaction between cavalry and infantry formations. Rifle technology had made cavalry obsolete by the time the Union and Confederacy were marching against each other, because bullets could take down a soldier on horseback long before he got close enough for a counterattack. But during Napoleon’s reign, firearms couldn’t reliably hit anything more than a hundred yards away, and with a reload time of at least half a minute, the cavalry could quickly close the gap. So while the tactics of the Civil War had been mostly terrain-based—moving artillery to the high ground, and using cover to one’s advantage—battles like Austerlitz and Waterloo had been waged with the expectation of close combat, and soldiers had been trained to march and fight in strict, defensive formations.
All of this was interesting from a gaming standpoint because the balance of artillery, cavalry, and infantry created a classic rock-paper-scissors scenario. Cavalry beats artillery, because horses can shift position faster than cannons can be re-aimed; artillery beats infantry, because people can’t move as fast as horses; and infantry doesn’t strictly beat cavalry, but depending on the formations used, it could. This kind of three-way standoff is one of the major pillars of game design, and anywhere you can find such a proportionate layout of strengths and weaknesses, you have the potential for strategic choices.
And, yes, the Battle of Waterloo also tied back to an episode in my youth. That’s what happens when you’re a kid at heart; the fun stuff just keeps bubbling to the surface. The must-have technology item for the creative family man in the 1970s was the Kodak Super 8mm home movie camera, so of course my father had one. While it was best known for creating short, flickering snippets of children’s birthday parties, the camera also included a setting for exposing a single frame at a time. So as part of a school project, I used the map and army pieces from my board game Risk to create a dramatic stop-motion animation of Napoleon’s final defeat. It wasn’t exactly up to the standards of Russell Crowe in Master and Commander, but the class was suitably impressed.
The other fun thing I remember doing with that camera was filming segments of a football game on TV, then playing them back in slow motion until I could understand all the different patterns the receivers ran. I loved football, but my parents weren’t fans, and it was a long time before I was allowed to watch three hours of television all at once. So I used the camera to be a little more efficient with my analysis during the short windows I was given.
I suppose if I had become a filmmaker, or a football player, these anecdotes would be given more emphasis, and others less. As it is, I never even got to make my Waterloo game—EA wanted something new, so we moved on. But the one thing all these memories have in common, including those that actually did affect my gaming career, is the complexity of choice. The quarterback has to choose among open receivers; Ulysses S. Grant has to choose which ridge to storm; Napoleon has to choose the right balance of horses, cannons, and soldiers—and each choice sends these guys careening down completely different paths. It’s maybe even fair to say that games weren’t the defining theme of my childhood after all. Rather, it was their precursor: the interesting decision. I’ve always been fascinated by every type of interesting decision, and a game just happens to be a well-curated series of them.
I’ve been saying variations on this theme for my entire career, but I didn’t realize I’d become famous for my definition of games until relatively recently. Sometimes, I’m quoted as saying “choices” instead of “decisions;” other times they’re “meaningful” instead of “interesting.” No one can agree on what I said, let alone when or where I might have first said it, and unfortunately, I can’t be much help in that regard. My earliest public paraphrasing was most likely at CGDC in 1993, as one of twelve important lessons that Civilization had taught me. No one recorded the presentation—which was officially titled “How I Almost Screwed Up Civilization”—but a staff writer for Computer Gaming World summarized my second bullet point that day as, “Meier prefers games where the player has all the fun (where all the vital information is presented and the gamer has the ability to make meaningful decisions).”
Prior to Civilization, I wasn’t getting nearly as much publicity, so while I may have had the idea sooner, it’s doubtful anyone was asking. Then again, my foreword to the F-15 Strike Eagle strategy guide, published in 1990, includes the dramatic line, “Decisions. Decisions. Decisions. Just like in real life.” So there’s no way of knowing when, exactly, this insight became fully developed in my mind.
Part of finding out that I was famous for this “series of interesting decisions” line was the revelation that a number of people disagreed with me, some quite vehemently. I thought it was a little strange to be both exalted and maligned for something I’d never really elaborated on, so in 2012, I formally codified all my thoughts on the matter into a new hour-long presentation at GDC. The whole thing’s online for those who want to get into the nitty-gritty of game theory, but the overall takeaway is that my definitions of both “decision” and “interesting” are probably broader than expected.
Consider the hit game Guitar Hero, in which players use a special guitar-shaped controller to match the rhythms of their favorite rock ’n’ roll tunes. This is probably the most commonly cited counterexample to my assertion that good games are a series of interesting decisions: it seems to demand only dexterity from the player, yet its popularity clearly establishes it, to the reasonable individual at l
east, as “a good game.” Perhaps, they suggest, I only meant to describe good strategy games . . . ? But in fact, Guitar Hero has multiple interesting decisions subtly built in.
To begin with, there is the game’s concept of “Star Power,” in which some sections of the music offer a bonus prize—players must choose whether to attempt a perfect game throughout, or abandon lesser notes in order to secure the reward for harder ones. Having filled their Star Power meter, players then have the opportunity to “spend” their popularity later in the song. Some will take advantage of the doubled scoring by activating Star Power during the easiest sections, while others will rely on the increased notoriety it brings in order to skate through harder sections of the music that might otherwise turn the audience against them. Some will use a combination of strategies. All of these are interesting options that rely on mental discretion rather than physical agility, and they multiply exponentially once the player enters career mode, where each instrument in a four-person band is given unique scoring abilities that can be applied in different ways to achieve group victory.
Interesting decisions are not about the specifics of what you let the player choose between, but whether the investment feels both personal and significant to the outcome. If you present players with options A, B, and C, and 90 percent of them choose A, then it’s not a well-balanced set—an interesting decision has no clear right or wrong answers. If players are evenly distributed among A, B, and C, but they all chose within three seconds, then it’s not a very meaningful decision. Any answer would have worked. Ultimately, the most fundamental characteristic of an interesting decision is that it makes the player think, “I wonder what would happen next time, if I did it differently?” Of course, the best way for them to find out is to play your game again. But with enough reinforcement, players may even find themselves asking the same question in the real world, where the choices are less clearly delineated. In the right context, a game is not just a vehicle for fun, but an exercise in self-determination and confidence. Good games teach us that there are tradeoffs to everything, actions lead to outcomes, and the chance to try again is almost always out there.
Sid Meier's Memoir! Page 18
