Players attempting to gain some sort of strategic insight from games should seek out every opportunity to play with and against other humans. The game’s artificial intelligence (AI) controls the other nations or characters. Many strategy games, particularly those that attempt to model the entire world at some point in the past, are meant to be played by yourself. Those looking to use video games as teaching tools would be wise to heed the following maxims before booting up. ![]() While the growing interest in using video games to teach strategy and history is laudable there are limits to their utility. Even within the genre of strategy games, those that seek to model every possible detail are often far less popular than those that take shortcuts for the sake of playability. Some British Army units have used Wargame: Red Dragon, which models combined-arms operations in the 1980s and early 1990s to conduct command post exercises and vehicle recognition training.Īs a media meant primarily to entertain, the creators of video games take shortcuts for the sake of practicality and fun, even if they are seeking to portray a historical era or military operation as accurately as possible. Max Brooks recommended a series of different strategy games in these pages. The BBC intermittently runs a game show called Time Commanders in which contestants attempt to fight historical battles using games from the Total War franchise with the assistance of exasperated military historians. The generations that grew up playing video games are now strategy professionals, so they have increasingly considered video games a viable tool to learn about strategy and history. The level of data a computer can process allows players to engage with and visualize a more complex situation than board games or tabletop wargames. The video games’ decision-making element makes them a tempting teaching tool. Unlike (most) books or movies, the player maintains some level of agency over what’s occurring. Video games are unique from traditional media, particularly when it comes to teaching strategy. ![]() As my adversaries’ Mi-24 helicopters took turns pummeling my unfortunate tank with rockets and guided missiles, their motorized infantry advanced, winning the game handily.įor many, video games, like the one I had just lost, are an entry point into the world of military affairs and history. ![]() Tasking it and its crew to hold the last line of defense against a Russian-Czech force may have been a bridge too far. You can only ask so much of a Sherman tank.
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