The Game Manual Sucks

[rocketman19]

I know that this game has been around for several years and Grigsby is on a roll with this series of historical simulations, so who am I to “spit in the wind,” so to speak? Well, I have been playing, designing, and developing games for the last 60 years. I have seen a LOT of games. I have seen small games, big games, and monster games. In fact, I even designed the biggest game, The Longest Day, that Avalon Hill ever published, way back in 1980.

That was then, and this is now. Gary Grigsby’s game of the War in the East is a very large, detailed, complicated game. It may not necessarily be all that complex, however, despite a 380-page manual in the 2010 edition. My thesis in this essay is that, for new players, this game takes a lot of blood, sweat, and tears to master, but most of that misery can be laid directly at the feet of the development team who have produced a tutorial that doesn’t and a set of rules that reads like the Congressional Record.

What were they thinking? I have been analyzing rules of play for the greater part of my life and I am now in my seventh decade. I have read the War in the East “game manual” and I assume it has the rules of play hidden somewhere deep inside its many labyrinthine pages, but deciphering paragraphs, and screen grabs is a task for a team of diligent scholars working tirelessly for many seasons. Somewhere in page-after-page of mind-deadening prose, there is a game system, probably a very good one, I imagine. But how they could waste all that energy and not produce a coherent document is a marvel of futility.

It is easy to criticize, so let me explain. Besides being a game designer, I am also a rather accomplished instructional systems designer. As part of my training and practice, I have spent a great deal of time investigating how humans learn and master complex systems. There are at least three major axioms of learning that the writers of this game manual fail to grasp:
(1) Comprehension is markedly enhanced by organizing information to assure that terms and concepts in the current concept have been previously introduced before incorporating them in higher constructs.
(2) Most learners apply concepts through exposure to examples and non-examples. Both are critical to understanding.
(3) When first time learners are exposed to a complex sequence of tasks, they usually derail on the very first step of that sequence. Begin at the very beginning.
In reading the previous reviews for this game, I noticed that many remarked that their learning curve was very lo-o-o-o-ng, some not “getting it” until they invested 30, 40, or 80 (!) hours playing the game. Why? It is a complicated game, but not necessarily a complex one.
I believe the root cause of the failure to “get it” easily is found in the game manual: It sucks.

Now, I have read some terribly composed rules manuals in my life, some really turgid stinkers that were so bad that one wonders, “What was this guy thinking?” Well, I ask, given the ten-year gestation period described in the designer’s notes, what was this development team thinking? I believe they suffered from a terminal case of overfamiliarity with the content.
My theory is that the original designer described how to play the game to the very first playtester and he “got it” and then explained it to every other playtester along the line either face-to-face, on his cell, via Skype, or in lo-o-o-o-ng Facebook posts. Then somebody said, “Hey let’s write this stuff down!” But certainly, no tester learned this game by reading the game manual!

Look, just between you and me, who in their right mind writes a set of rules by starting off with sixty pages of detailed descriptive text explaining every cotton-picking nit and grit about every dialog box and interface in the game? And they are apparently not bothered by the fact that they have never introduced close to 100 terms and labels for things painstakingly described in each and every stupid dialog box. There is absolutely zero context for any of it; it might as well be gibberish! For example:
Toggle Night Air Mission On (hotkey n): This button will display when bomb unit, bomb airfield, bomb city or air transport mode has been selected. The default is day missions (sun symbol). When toggled to night (moon symbol), only air group units with night mission selected in the air group unit detail window can conduct missions, to include any auto-interception by the non-phasing player’s air group units (16.1.6).

Realize in this linear narrative that is the game manual, none of the terms in the above passage have been defined or introduced at this point. What is an air group unit? What does bomb unit, bomb airfield, bomb city or air transport mode mean? What is a mode for Pete’s sake? For the first-time player, this might as well be written in Sanskrit! (But the cross reference at the end is a nice touch except that this passage is Section 4.x.x that references new information that the reader will not encounter until Section 16.x.x. That simply does not work. No one retains details for that long. And who needs hot key info on the first reading? That crap needs to be in an appendix.)

The problem with this game’s set of rules is that they are not directive. The authors set down no general principles, to be followed up with specific cases. None. (I would have to work extra hard to do this intentionally, so it must be accidental.) And understanding is always more efficiently conveyed by the judicious use of examples and non-examples. (A non-example is the opposite of, the reverse of, or the inverse of the thing that is the example.) These guys apparently don’t believe in examples. Or, to be charitable, when they have this existential drive to explain every stinking dialog and interface before they even explain how to move a unit from point A to point B, who needs examples to illuminate their prose?

There is no context for almost everything in the first 60 pages of the game manual except for a terse description of the sequence of play, which boils down to “you move and fight then the AI moves and fights,” followed by a page and a half of “phases” which are little more than logistical and leadership status checks that could just as well be executed by the damn computer. Get over yourselves. After all, STAVKA had a staff of hundreds to screw up this supply stuff, but the player has to do it all by himself? Ah, don’t get me started…

We teach new instructional designers to start every step in a complex task with an action verb like, “Attach the fastener to the thingamajig and torque to 10 ft./lbs.” This directs the reader as to what he or she needs to do to effect the required outcome. I am hard-pressed to find substantial examples of this in the 380-page game manual. Instead, we are treated with page after page of dense blocks of text. For example, a common form in the narrative looks like, “Supplies and fuel can be airdropped to units by transport and level bomber air group units and this mission can be escorted by fighter air group units.” How about, “To airdrop supplies or fuel, assign transports or level bomber units using the umptyfratz interface. Fighter groups can be assigned as escorts, if desired, on the same interface” instead?

And speaking of dense blocks of text, apparently, Gary and Company never heard of an enumerated list or even the sophisticated evolution of using a bulleted list to break up attenuated sentences and paragraphs. It is not rocket science. It is called “chunking text for comprehension.”

And speaking of clarity, the patient reader must wade through 53 pages of grey text and fuzzy screen shots before getting anything approaching an illustration depicting an example of game action. And a screen grab is not an illustration if it is not directive by the use of arrows, callouts, and other graphic devices. In a sea of tiny numbers, first time users must puzzle as to what is an example and what is a nonexample. The dearth of creative graphics to illustrate key concepts is mystifying. If the graphics folks had put as much effort into figures to illustrate processes as they did on the cover art, we would all be better informed.

Much of the gibberish in the 380-page game manual might be solved if the authors of this tome had any concept whatsoever of a learning hierarchy. In a nutshell, this means you can’t introduce a complex concept until you have explained the simpler parts that make up that concept. Comprehension is drastically improved by arranging content in a logical flow that introduces basic concepts that escalate to more complex concepts. Easy right? No, the game manual is an almost perverse reversal of this time-tested construct. Please tell the team that the game is not about a series of dialog boxes and interfaces, but a test of the player versus the AI. (And many of these interfaces are just awful! What is gained by a veritable sea of numbers with no differentiation between primary, secondary, and tertiary levels of importance?)

And folks, there is no excuse for misspellings, grammatical errors, missing words, and the embarrassing misuse of words. Not in the era of spellcheck.

I know this appears to be a rather severe ravaging of a very popular and successful game. But, popularity is not necessarily a mark of quality. It is with humility that I make the bold assertion that The Avalon Hill Game Company and Simulation Publications Inc were producing far superior rules of play in the 1970s. And the games were as big and as complex as WITE is today. Remember, the term “monster game” was coined in the 1970s. Rather than take this as a rant, I would just hope that once and future game designers would take this review as a primer and tutorial on how not to construct a set of rules that mere mortals can easily comprehend.

[Steeltrap]

@HB
I was generally curious,
I'm not at all interested in 'taking sides' and drama. Given I didn't understand the point of the post, and I don't assume I know or attribute the worst possible motives to another poster, I asked. I know, it's terribly "un-internet forum behaviour" from me, lol.

Not sure why the immediate jump to personal slurs and animus toward me as well, but it hardly gets anyone anywhere so forget it.