Cardboard Self-Sacrifice
This is Steven Petrick posting:
Games are always at best abstracts of reality. Sometimes the reality the game abstracts is itself an abstract, like Star Fleet Battles. One of the hardest things to abstract is the actions of people. Many games either ignore this facet, allowing you to march your troops off a cliff or into a lake of lava at your own pleasure with nary a whimper in protest. Others impose various rules on morale, but even in so doing will still allow you to order your troops to commit suicide in the name of the cause, even if doing so serves no function.
People are always a critical factor in real life.If you get them really invested in a belief system, you can see them committing acts of self-sacrifice.
Hollywood even expects it.
If you review films about World War II prior to the mass advent of Kamikaze attacks by the Japanese you can find examples of Americans sacrificing themselves. In one film, a nurse offers herself as a prisoner to the Japanese during the battle of the Philippines, but before doing so drops a grenade with the pin pulled down her blouse. Something we would later decry Japanese soldiers doing, i.e., surrendering in an effort to kill Americans. (The nurse, of course, was trying to buy time for her fellow nurses and the wounded to escape, but the general concept of offering to surrender in order to get the grenade close enough to do the job holds.) Hollywood, even before the Kamikazes gave us images of American airmen flying their planes into German or Japanese attackers to save their friends, James Cagney's character did so when a German fighter somehow intercepted the squadron of unarmed bombers he and others were ferrying to England. (How a single-engined German fighter got to an intercept point west of Ireland is not explained.)
In reality, barring massive brainwashing as was found in the imperial Japanese military in World War II, asking, or ordering, your men to commit mass suicide is going to meet considerable resistance. Even the Soviet Union had to employ additional inducements, i.e., machineguns teams with orders to fire on anyone retreating, to get their men to keep advancing into a determined defense.
The gist of this is that the human factor is always a part of real world situations. In Star Fleet Battles when you order that fighter squadron to attack the enemy fleet with their phasers, you have a pretty good idea that the fighters are not going to come back. And you are not going to think about the problem of trying to recover the pilots, you just let the game mechanics work that out down the road. You know that your pilots will all heroically charge the enemy defenses until they are destroyed. You have ordered it, what other choice have they?
In reality, if you have a habit of sacrificing your subordinates, you would probably find yourself with mutiny on your hands.
But gamers, by and large, are far more bloody minded than real commanders controlling real people can afford to be.
Our little cardboard, or plastic, or electronic, or metal, markers will obey our commands like the unfeeling automatons they are, granting us our "bloodless" victories even though their fates on the game board often represent the fates of thousands of individuals, if not millions, who have fallen at our behest.,
Games are always at best abstracts of reality. Sometimes the reality the game abstracts is itself an abstract, like Star Fleet Battles. One of the hardest things to abstract is the actions of people. Many games either ignore this facet, allowing you to march your troops off a cliff or into a lake of lava at your own pleasure with nary a whimper in protest. Others impose various rules on morale, but even in so doing will still allow you to order your troops to commit suicide in the name of the cause, even if doing so serves no function.
People are always a critical factor in real life.If you get them really invested in a belief system, you can see them committing acts of self-sacrifice.
Hollywood even expects it.
If you review films about World War II prior to the mass advent of Kamikaze attacks by the Japanese you can find examples of Americans sacrificing themselves. In one film, a nurse offers herself as a prisoner to the Japanese during the battle of the Philippines, but before doing so drops a grenade with the pin pulled down her blouse. Something we would later decry Japanese soldiers doing, i.e., surrendering in an effort to kill Americans. (The nurse, of course, was trying to buy time for her fellow nurses and the wounded to escape, but the general concept of offering to surrender in order to get the grenade close enough to do the job holds.) Hollywood, even before the Kamikazes gave us images of American airmen flying their planes into German or Japanese attackers to save their friends, James Cagney's character did so when a German fighter somehow intercepted the squadron of unarmed bombers he and others were ferrying to England. (How a single-engined German fighter got to an intercept point west of Ireland is not explained.)
In reality, barring massive brainwashing as was found in the imperial Japanese military in World War II, asking, or ordering, your men to commit mass suicide is going to meet considerable resistance. Even the Soviet Union had to employ additional inducements, i.e., machineguns teams with orders to fire on anyone retreating, to get their men to keep advancing into a determined defense.
The gist of this is that the human factor is always a part of real world situations. In Star Fleet Battles when you order that fighter squadron to attack the enemy fleet with their phasers, you have a pretty good idea that the fighters are not going to come back. And you are not going to think about the problem of trying to recover the pilots, you just let the game mechanics work that out down the road. You know that your pilots will all heroically charge the enemy defenses until they are destroyed. You have ordered it, what other choice have they?
In reality, if you have a habit of sacrificing your subordinates, you would probably find yourself with mutiny on your hands.
But gamers, by and large, are far more bloody minded than real commanders controlling real people can afford to be.
Our little cardboard, or plastic, or electronic, or metal, markers will obey our commands like the unfeeling automatons they are, granting us our "bloodless" victories even though their fates on the game board often represent the fates of thousands of individuals, if not millions, who have fallen at our behest.,
posted by Federation Commander at 3:39 PM
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