Seriously Retro Gaming

Thursday, October 1st, 2009

Think playing the Virtual NES console online is retro?  How about playing Adventure for the Atari 2600?

I found a stash of really, really old-school gaming books at the Evanston Public Library.  Their collection is odd – they have enough graphic novels to stock a small comic store, but their kids’ DVD collection consists mostly of badly-produced documentaries.  I was perusing the games section of the stacks, looking mainly for a book on Go, when I found the following titles:

1. Naval War Games: Fighting sea battles with model ships, by Donald Featherstone
2. Wargame Design, by Strategy & Tactics – the house magazine of SPI (RIP)
3. A copy of Little Wars, by H.G. Wells (forwarded by Isaac Asimov!)
4. The Complete Wargames Handbook: How to play, design and find them, by James Dunnigan

And there were at least an armload more that I couldn’t get because I had to carry my daughter to the car.

There’s something poignant about reading these books – they talk about tabletop wargaming in the present tense – not with a wary eye to the future, but with a bright sense of optimism that wargames are the way of the future – particularly the Featherstone book (one of a series, according to the inside cover), which was published in 1965 and contains instructions for building scale WWII models out of wood with a Dremel.

I also picked up The Book of Games: Strategy, tactics and history, by Jack Bottermans.  It’s the only one of the bunch that can still be found on Amazon (scratch that – I’ve added links to the others that I’ve found).  It’s a weighty coffee-table tome that could easily put someone into a coma if you hit them over the head with it.  Inside are the rules for every ‘open source’ board game in existence, from Shogi to Chutes & Ladders, which I was stunned to discover wasn’t a crappy game from Parker Brothers, but a game used to teach karma in India.  There’s even a picture of one of the old stone boards in the book.

So why am I reading all of this?

I’m cramming my head with a critical mass of information, to try and spark the creative process and get back to game design.  It’s the last thing that I haven’t picked up from before this summer’s shenanigans.  I’ve been reading a lot of ‘modern’ stuff as well, online and in PDF form, but these books have filled me with ideas – old ideas at that – that are still quite relevant in to making a good game today.  I think the lesson that I’m learning is that what makes a good game isn’t tied to finding the next great thing.  It’s taking what we know now, salvaging what we can from the past, and fusing them together.  Wargames are still incredibly popular, after all – it’s just that with the PC they’re not played with counters and hexagons (at least physical hexagons and counters) anymore.

But more than retreading old game forms with new technology, these older games speak very plainly about what makes a solid game, because there aren’t any bells and whistles attached. It’s like peeking under the hood of a new car – there’s still a combustion engine in there that hasn’t changed since the Model-T.

I think sometimes we as designers forget that