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I have hit saturation point with 2 v 2 Age of Mythology comp-stomps, I realized last night. My girlfriend and I had a date for some LAN gaming, but the thought of more AoM made me a little ill. What we need to do, I realize, is just bite the bullet and get another copy so that we can go play online. But for some reason, paying $20 for a game we already own just rubs us the wrong way.

While we were negotiating what else we could play (a conversation that requires UN mediation), I noticed Skype was blinking at me. Troy was about to record Three Moves Ahead and it was looking like it was going to be just him and Julian Murdoch unless I could join. The topic was narrative and story in strategy games, and we were recording in three minutes. I ran over to the bar, poured a drink, and got back to the computer just as the call began.

Given the lack of prep time, I was surprised at how well the podcast went. It’s one of my favorites. It turns out I had lots of things to say on this subject, as did Troy and Julian. Nevertheless, within ten minutes of wrapping up the podcast I had thought of a couple things I should have said.

First, I made the argument that the nature of a strategy game doesn’t gel with the nature of story, which is all about the author manipulating events. Strategy games are more systemic than shooters, because their mechanics are inseparable from competition between players. Julian, in what I consider an almost criminal abuse of semantic agility, made the case that all games are systems and this is no more a problem for strategy games as it is for shooters. Shooter fans are as focused on multiplayer as strategy players.

Seeing both sides of an argument tripped me up here, but on reflection I still think Julian was underplaying a key difference. The strategy game usually has no existence outside its multiplayer mechanics. Build a base, destroy the enemy base. Capture and hold some key locations. It’s the same in both multiplayer and single-player. That’s just not true in shooters.

The most popular FPS game modes (capture the flag, king of the hill, control point, assault-defend) have no single-player analogue. The single-player shooter is about a one-man army versus an actual army. All the systems that govern multiplayer depend on teams and magic-circle constructs: my team and I are going to defend this flagpole because that is the point of the game, and you are going to try and take it. We will all use different weapons that complement one another, and whoever fights best and coordinates best will win.

However, I do have an example of an FPS game that is a competitive system and tries to adapt that system to a single-player campaign: Section 8. Section 8 brings all the multiplayer mechanics into the campaign, and result is exactly the kind of brainless, repetitive missions you find in RTS campaigns. So there is a case in point for you.

Second, I wanted to mention World in Conflict as a great example for a story with great production values and some good characters that is hamstrung by the player’s lack of identity and its lousy mission structure. In World in Conflict and the Soviet Assault campaign, you play as the American Lt. Parker and the Soviet Lt. Romanov. Parker is ostensibly your narrator, Alec Baldwin, but he is mute in all the cutscenes involving other characters. He just nods while the NPCs argue with one another, at which point you have to ask why they bothered making your guy a character at all. At least he has an avatar, however, whereas Lt. Romanov is invisible. This gets awkward as the other characters make decisions that your guy would want to discuss, presumably. It’s especially bad in the Soviet campaign, where your character plays no role whatsoever in a growing schism among the Soviet leadership.

Worse, however, is the way the missions are crafted. No matter how dramatic the situation, each mission boils down to a list of menial errands. You start off capturing a hill  at the edge of a town, and are then sent to capture the bridge. You capture the bridge, but naturally the enemy destroys it before you can cross. Your commander then tells you that you have to march all the way around to the other side of the map and capture another hill. You go do that. Then he orders you to march around the map again (at this point you have traveled in a full circle) and take a road leading into the town. Then you have to go take the town. Then you have to hold it.

That is every mission in this game. Over and over again.  Just a lot of pointless marching around to different victory locations with the vague assurance that this is all very important.

Third, I wanted to mention the exact mission that made me stop playing the Company of Heroes campaign: the V-2 mission. Every WW2 game has some bullshit mission where you have to go infiltrate a Nazi base, usually to stop them launching V-1 or V-2 rockets. It’s always a Top Secret mission, which means that it’s obnoxiously difficult and you’re hamstrung from using most of your equipment.

I had played this exact mission, and variants of it, in a wide variety of shooters and strategy games. Running across it again in Company of Heroes, which was already straining itself trying to be Saving Private Band of Brothers: The RTS, was a bridge too far.

Oh, and I could have been more articulate about Myth, but it’s difficult to explain why that game works so well without getting into a serious discussion about its elements. Hopefully we’ll have a Myth retrospective on TMA, and really do the game justice.

The second book of Thrawn’s Heir to the Empire trilogy is unique in that it ultimately revolves around a MacGuffin, in this case a lost fleet of warships that could tilt that balance of the war in favor of whoever acquires it, and it focuses almost entirely on the backwaters of the Star Wars universe.

The central character in this chase is the smuggler-king Talon Karrde. Karrde is another character who would prove so popular that he would continue to play major and minor parts throughout the rest of the Expanded Universe’s development. He is established as a criminal counterpart to Grand Admiral Thrawn. Both men are practically omniscient: Thrawn assesses people and predicts events by studying their art, while  information-gathering have been Karrde’s life’s work. Karrde leads a smuggling organization mainly because that’s the best job for someone who wants to know what is really going on in the galaxy; the wealth and power are fringe benefits.

This means that Karrde starts out a dedicated neutral in the war between the New Republic and the Empire. He is content to do arms-length business with both sides, but mostly wishes to keep tabs on them. Yet Thrawn is on a crusade to defeat the New Republic, and begins dividing the galaxy into those who are with the Empire, and those who are against it. As he applies greater pressure to Karrde, Karrde watches his options dwindle until Thrawn finally eliminates the middle-course: neutrality is hostility, and so Karrde finds himself alone against the might of the Empire, his destruction one of the Grand Admiral’s pet projects.

By the end of the book, Karrde has been forced to cast his lot with the New Republic. Thrawn’s attempts to force Karrde into compliance have produced a marriage between the most capable and well-informed criminal organization and the New Republic’s military power. It is another Thrawn miscalculation, and one whose consequences he fails to appreciate. If Karrde could not be made into a friend, he should at all costs not have been made into an enemy. But Thrawn’s mistake is in thinking that understanding and predicting his enemies neutralizes them.

Thrawn’s antithesis in this book is Leia, who goes on a secret mission to Honoghr to convince the Noghri to stop working for the Empire. Thrawn happens to be there at the same time, and the mission nearly goes catastrophically awry, but Thrawn proves once again that his confidence in his own intelligence and capability is his undoing. Where Leia arrives as an uninvited guest, ignorant of local customs and circumstances, Thrawn is a revered lord with long experience dealing with the Noghri. Yet Thrawn casts aside his regard for custom the moment it becomes expedient, using orbital bombardment and the threat of genocide to terrify a people who are already in awe of him. Meanwhile, Leia salvages her mission simply by watching and listening to her hosts, and cooperating with their wishes that she leave their world before she causes trouble.

When I was younger, Leia’s segments of the book bored me. Her wanderings around Noghri villages and growing understanding of their history were poor substitutes for the battles and chases that comprise the rest of the book. This time I found it instructive. The films hinted that Leia was a trained diplomat and politician, but we scarcely ever saw her without a weapon in her hand or a man at her side. What Zahn does with Dark Force Rising is show the heroism of negotiation and discovery. It is Leia’s compassionate and respectful example, as a representative of the New Republic, standing against Thrawn’s blatant manipulations and threats, that make the Noghri willing to listen to what she has to say, and admit some uncomfortable truths to themselves. At the end of this subplot, there is a dramatic speech to a Noghri assembly in which smoking-gun evidence of Imperial perfidy is introduced. But it is the conversations about family and culture that lay the groundwork for victory. Leia’s compassion and understanding are revealed to be strengths just as much as Luke’s Force abilities or Han Solo’s cunning.

I would be lying, however, if I said these were my favorite parts of the book. They are pretty tame compared to the rest of the book, which includes a battle aboard an underwater luxury casino, Luke Skywalker’s and Mara Jade’s heist caper aboard Thrawn’s flagship, a massive battle at the Katana Fleet’s location, and an Alamo-style holding action aboard the Katana itself. The middle installment of any trilogy risks being flat, because it cannot really resolve anything, but Zahn solves this problem the same way The Empire Strikes Back did: by turning the characters loose on a breakneck series of set-pieces that make defeat exhilarating enough to feel like victory.

The first great book I’ve read this year is George C. Herring’s From Colony to Superpower: U.S. Foreign Relations Since 1776. Despite being almost 1000 pages, Colony to Superpower provides a fast-paced yet thorough tour of American foreign policy since Independence that shows the areas where different policies form a coherent whole, and where foreign policy has undergone major discontinuities. By the end of it, I felt like I had been introduced to my own country.

Herring takes a decidedly unsentimental look at many the myths promulgated by the triumphalist tradition in American historiography, but he doesn’t descend into the bitterness and anger that mark A People’s History of the United States. If Herring is bothered by the injustice and ruthless self-interest that have often characterized American policy, he goes to pains to understand and explain how the principals perceived their own actions and how those unfair policies may have benefited the country. What does bother Herring is the self-satisfaction and forgetfulness that run rampant through the American narrative. The United States is a sometime villain and sometime hero, and usually something in between. Yet it insists on depicting itself as more principled and a greater force for good than any other nation.

This is not new information, but seeing the history of American foreign policy puts a sharp point on it. While the plight of the Native American tribes is well-documented and regretted, the United States has done a much poorer job coming to terms with its predations against Spain, its outright assault on Mexico while that country was in its infancy, and its constant meddling in Caribbean and Latin American affairs. The chapter on the annexation of Texas and the Mexican-American War was the saddest of any save the last. When you consider how often Americans take a snide and condescending attitude to our “backwards” and “corrupt” hemispheric neighbors, it’s horrifying that the U.S. has never really accepted responsibility for the corrupting and retarding influence it exerted on them.

However, the most profound shift in the book came with the end of WWII and the death of Franklin Roosevelt. Prior to Roosevelt’s death, U.S. foreign policy seemed mostly effective and level-headed. There were administrations who managed foreign affairs in a ham-handed and vicious manner, but the responsible caretakers of U.S. interests were quick to reassert themselves. They conducted themselves professionally abroad, and tended to have a high regard for the processes of diplomacy. The high-water mark seemed to come with Franklin Roosevelt, who did an admirable job of curbing U.S. adventurism within the hemisphere while coming to an early understanding of the threat posed by Hitler. As Herring himself points out, FDR may have used a lot of underhanded and deceptive tactics to bring the U.S. into the war against Germany prior to 1941, but Hitler’s Germany stands as an exceptional case if ever there was one.

The problem, Herring says, is that FDR’s successors used his methods for their own purposes, which were never as noble. Even worse, the country seemed to lose its sense of balance after his death. Herring demonstrates that there was a profound and abrupt reactionary tilt to American policy almost immediately after Roosevelt’s death. Although Roosevelt was as capable as anyone at acting decisively, he was also the sort of man to make decisions in a calm, pragmatic fashion. Truman and the foreign policy team that coalesced around him were not.

Whatever FDR would have done about the Soviet Union’s burgeoning imperialism in Eastern Europe, it probably would have been handled more gracefully than Truman’s instantaneous bellicosity. From the day he assumed the office, Truman took a hard, threatening line against the Soviets that only served to stoke their suspicions that the U.S. was an enemy. Furthermore, Truman’s doctrine of containment placed the United States squarely on the wrong side of history during the retreat of the colonial powers, serving to alienate beyond hope the Chinese, the Vietnamese, and most of Africa and Latin America. Furthermore, he demolished the role of the State Department by creating the National Security Council. American foreign policy, once the domain of diplomatic professionals, would be dominated from then on by a growing class of “defense intellectuals” and military officers.

It is also true that the Cold War bred a cycle of hysteria that afflicts the country to this day. The Republicans and Democrats routinely labeled one another as “soft” on communism, squelching any dissent regarding core assumptions of American policy and only disagreeing about how extreme the U.S. response should be. And so Kennedy took office already boxed in by the anti-Communist rhetoric he used to attack Richard Nixon, and Johnson would commit himself to Vietnam in order to guard his right flank during the 1964 election. Now, terrorism plays the part of communism in the national discourse, with the same effects on policy discussions.

One of the ultimate lessons of From Colony to Superpower, and one of its most troubling conclusions, is that the United States has not been able to debate security policy rationally since 1945. As its economic and military power have increased, the capability and sophistication of its foreign policy apparatus and its polity have diminished, to the point where the latter have begun to destroy the former.