0331marine -> RE: Attention Wargamers! This post is for you! (3/28/2017 8:21:16 PM)
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I think most wargames should have ethical dilemmas presented to the gamer. A propper dilemma is two bad options that were you as the player has to do a cost benifit review, and swallow the pill that is the least bitter, from your point of view. War is hell, making it out to be an excerice in accounting, or as a stylelized competition, denigrates its nature. War is politics by other means, and politics ARE messy. Even so you do not need to make it boring, I would even say you could make them optional, and never ever railroad players to have to follow history. Give them options, but options with a cost associated with them. Also, a previous poster mentioned that he would find the allocation of rollingstock to transport jews to death camps, distateful. I say bring it on, it teaches your as a player some hard historical facts. Yes you may be uncomfortble with such things, but that just means you have been too shielded from such ugly facts. The Coventry raid is a perfect example, you as a human being want to save the people in the city, but you know that if you tip your hand about the having cracked German encyption, you run the risk of it costing more lives down the line. Such choices should be in a war game, they should make you feel sick and make you refelect on the nature of and ethics of war. To take the previously mentioned example assigning rolling stock, the default and "right" answer should be to go a head with using the rollingstock to transport the jews, why? Because there will be a huge political backlash within Nazi-Germany if you don't. This was the nature of that nation and its politics. No leader is ever in complete control, he is always "riding the wolf by its ears". A leader must always apeace factions and stave off cabals to stay on top, and as such a leader must make choices that aren't palatble, in our eyes. On the tactical level, you have other more direct choices, a ship is sinking, close of compartments to save the ship, or save the men in that compartment and let the ship sink? I could go on and on, in the end, these choices are what makes a game memerable, if you look at the big games out there, ethical choice in games are a huge and popular thing, so in many ways, wargames are stuck in the past, so better get with the program is my opinion.
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