Learning the Wrong Lessons

I’m in the last couple chapters of Geoffrey Wawro’s The Franco-Prussian War: The German Conquest of France in 1870-1871, and right now the Prussians are trying to deal with their catastrophic success at Sedan. Having accidentally shattered Napoleon III’s government along with his armies, the Prussians find themselves trying to negotiate a peace with a shaky provisional government that is held hostage by Parisian extremists.

But the story of the Franco-Prussian War is crucial to understanding what would happen to France in the first half of the 20th century. Back when I was reading Tuchman’s The Guns of August, I found it baffling that the French were so ill-prepared for what the new war would look like. Tuchman places heavy emphasis on the French military’s pseudo-religious devotion to the concept of elan and the offensive a outrance that nearly lost them the war in the first month. But what she doesn’t fully explain is the degree to which this was an understandable, even rational response to the debacle in 1870. And of course, the decisions that led to the French collapse in 1940 were themselves understandable and rational responses to the events of WWI.

According to Wawro, the French army in 1870 was in bad shape. The officer corps was moribund, and both the commissioned and enlisted ranks were packed full of dead wood. But in spite of all the deficiencies of French training and discipline, that’s not really what appeared to cost the French the war. Those problems certainly contributed, but the larger problem that Wawro finds in 1870 is a deadly lack of initiative at almost every level of command.

For instance, the manpower disparity between the French and the Prussians meant that time worked against the French. The French had a large standing army but no real reserves which they could mobilize. What they had at the start would have to win the war. By comparison, the peacetime Prussian army was a skeleton and nervous system onto which the mobilization of the reserve forces would pack muscle and flesh. Once that process completed, it was a force to be reckoned with. But it was vulnerable at the start of a conflict.

So France’s hope in 1870 would be to deliver some brutal blows in Germany before numbers could begin to tell. But that’s not what happened. The French army really had no agreed-upon leadership and no war plan. So they basically milled around the border, delaying any kind of offensive action while the Prussians mobilized. Then, they started looking for a good place from which to defend themselves from the Prussians’ superior numbers. But from that point on, the French would always be at a strategic disadvantage, at constant risk of being encircled and destroyed.

Even then, however, there were opportunities for success. The Prussian armies had to disperse as they advanced, which created chances for the French to isolate and destroy Prussian units. Thanks to a few missteps by Prussian officers, and some smart selections of defensive terrain on the part of French generals, the French had some golden opportunities to crush Prussian detachments. But time and again, the French would turn back a few Prussian attacks, then sit in place while Prussian reinforcements arrived to change the balance.

Finally, on the tactical level, the French had the advantage of a much better rifle, the Chassepot. It had a dominating range advantage over the Prussian rifle, and French infantry enjoyed a great reputation for marksmanship. And indeed, the Chassepot exacted a murderous toll. But rather than switching over to the offensive and counterattacking after Prussian troops had been stopped cold and slaughtered, French units would remain behind cover while the Prussian brought up artillery to blast them out. Had the French just been more aggressive, even locally, they could have set Prussian units to rout and thrown their battle plans into disarray.

But strategically, operationally, and tactically, the French army remained passive while the Prussians destroyed it. So with that background, it’s easier to understand why the French were wedded to the offensive when World War I broke out. They’d spent over thirty years correcting the caution and hesitancy that undid them in 1870, but at the cost of taking a hard look at the likely effects of long range, heavy artillery and the machine gun. To take steps in developing tactics appropriate to a battlefield dominated by big guns and machine guns would be to start encouraging exactly the kind of defensive, static thinking that resulted in defeat in 1870.

By the same token, the French army suffered stupefying casualties due to its failure to to prepare for the attrition warfare of WWI. So they spent 20 years refining their capacity to wage defensive warfare efficiently, led by a general (Petain) who had been traumatized by the sucking wound of Verdun, where a failure to maintain and defend the city’s old strongholds drastically increased casualties. The response, in one form, was the Maginot Line. In another, it was the French belief that tanks would be relegated to a supporting role in warfare, helping troops break through local defenses and preventing the same.

History buffs often talk about the lessons of history and its predictive powers. But if you look at it another way, it misleads as often as it informs. History predicts just about everything that could happen, which is why you can’t really use it to predict anything. The French drew a lot of lessons from each war with the Germans, and dutifully went about trying to prevent a repetition of old mistakes. In doing that, they managed to make new ones.

2010
10/18
CATEGORY
History
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Minerva’s Den and DLC

There I was Saturday night, wrapped snugly in my smoking jacket with a snifter of brandy at my side, when I received a note from Shawn Andrich. In a trembling hand, he implored me to come to the Conference Call posthaste, as Allen Cook had vanished under circumstances most strange, and he did not want to go alone to his rendezvous with Sean Sands and his sinister companion, Demiurge. Slipping a gun into my pocket, I went to the location he specified.

Since we’d all been busy bringing weapons and checking for tails on our way to the fog-choked watefront alley where we recorded to Conference Call, nobody actually remembered a topic. So we improvised, and you can listen to the results over at Gamers With Jobs.

Anyway, my chosen subject was 2K’s decision not to release “Minerva’s Den” for Bioshock 2 on PC. As often happens in a discussion, I didn’t quite make the point I wanted to make. My thoughts were still quite preliminary. Now that I’ve had a little time to consider my objections, I can explain a bit better why this bothers me.

On the show, I explained that I thought this decision trivialized this expansion to the Bioshock universe, and revealed 2K’s disregard for the connection that the audience has to the world of Rapture. Since I can almost hear hundreds of people rolling their eyes, I should probably explain a bit better what I mean.

Little things can change and deepen a gameworld, making every experience you had or have there just a little richer. For me that’s the promise of DLC. You don’t have to make a full game to make an interesting statement. There’s this sequence in Bioshock 2 where you go through what is basically a diorama for the children of Rapture, called “Journey to the Surface”. It’s this dull, heavy-handed jeremiad against the postwar world that exists outside Rapture, with Andrew Ryan narrating every morality play you see. Finally, at the end, you come across an audio diary from Ryan himself.

I know this facility is vital to the preservation of secrecy in Rapture. But seeing myself transformed into that… lurching, waxen nightmare… do children truly respond to this? Still, I spoke to a young man exiting the park after the grand opening, asking him what, if anything, he had learned here. He said his chores didn’t seem so bad anymore — as long as mother wouldn’t send him to the surface.

I love this detail, the portrait of Ryan it provides. He is mystified by children, and uncomfortable with the useful lies he’s teaching them. Seeing himself and Rapture reflected back at him through Ryan Amusements, you can sense that the Rapture experiment is starting to curdle for Ryan, just a little bit. Seeing him react to his first steps toward the kind of statism he spent his life trying to escape, the tragedy and melancholy of his character becomes clearer. That moment alone made Bioshock 2 a worthwhile experience for me.

The Parasite won't let The Artist release his masterpiece to all!

So when I read something like Joystick Division’s summary of “Minerva’s Den”, I badly want to be a part of it. I want to see how they’ve closed out this story. James Hawkins writes:

And it’ll be our farewell to the city, too. We’ve seen Rapture’s lengthy demise, as it succumbed to the narcissism of its culture, and Minerva’s Den ushers us out with the last of the survivors. It is a tasteful and solemn Bon Voyage, not only for the characters within, but for those of us that wanted to see it through.

Sounds great, and I definitely count myself among those who “wanted to see it through.” That’s why I own both Bioshock games, and have spent so much time thinking and writing about them. But that’s not an option available to me, because I don’t own the 360 version of the game.

As a matter of course, I’m against a policy that retroactively turns one version of a game into the “wrong” version by not providing similar levels of support. Now anyone who really loves Bioshock and owns it on the PC can either buy the 360 version or forgo “Minerva’s Den”. My suspicion is that most will choose the latter option. So PC gamers see a product withheld from them, 2K saves on the costs of porting and marketing for the PC, and the creative team behind “Minerva’s Den” reach a significantly smaller audience than they would otherwise.

That also means that “Minerva’s Den” is unlikely to ever be an important part of the Bioshock story. Discussion tends to center around shared experiences, and a large portion of Bioshock’s audience will never visit “Minerva’s Den”. It will be like it never happened.

Which is part of the whole problem with DLC, and why decisions like this make DLC into an after-market ghetto of half-formed ideas and novelties. They can’t ever be “essential”. They must always pass by without disrupting or affecting the experience of the main game. When Mass Effect 3 or Dragon Age 2 come out, Bioware will go to great lengths to make sure that nobody feels like he missed anything. But if the experience has value, shouldn’t it be something people miss? Shouldn’t it be available to anyone who bought the game?

DLC itself is a problematic phrase. To be honest, it’s a suit’s phrase. The rest of us enjoy stories, play games, and have experiences. DLC is the kind of term that comes up in the same breath as conversions, consumers, and monetization. I suspect it dilutes the perceived value of the product, especially when it is so often used as a stalking horse against used game sales, or to wring a few extra dollars out of your customers. It’s why “day one” DLC bothers so many people. People act entitled because they’re feeling defensive, and they’re feeling defensive because there are already so many transparent attempts to screw them. You know, like 2K “adding value” to the collector’s edition of Civ V by leaving the Babylonians out of the standard version?

“Minerva’s Den” should have been a positive experience. Great production values and talented developers combining to make a new and thought-provoking addition to a popular franchise. Everything DLC always promises, but so rarely is. It could have been a counterpoint to all fears of nickel-and-diming that gamers have right now. But instead, 2K took the opportunity to make a lot of gamers feel bad about their purchase of the PC version, and probably reduced the impact “Minerva’s Den” could have had. Seems like everyone loses on that one.

2010
10/14
CATEGORY
Gaming
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The F1 2010 Review

After at least 50 hours of play and 1.5 seasons across PC and 360, my review of F1 2010 is complete and ready for your perusal at GameShark.

There is just one thing I’ll add for now, and that is a wish for the future of this series. Right now you are kind of chucked into the deep end of open-wheel racing. By having your career start with a low-ranking team, the game is actually more difficult than it would be if you started with a good team. Bad cars are much harder to handle and taxing to drive than good ones.

I would consider adding F1′s feeder series, GP2 (I know there are others but GP2 is probably the best fit) and having careers start there. The cars are more manageable and the field is more closely grouped, so it would be easier to know if you’re struggling with the track. With my crummy Lotus, I’m not always sure whether I’m struggling because I’m attacking the track wrong, driving the car wrong, or setting up the car wrong.

Plus, racing in GP2 has a reputation for being a little more wheel-to-wheel, which F1 really isn’t. To their credit, Codemasters didn’t sugarcoat F1 too much. Overtaking is easier than in real life, it is true, but the intervals between cars are still pretty daunting. So while you can pass another car, catching it might be out of the question.

Anyway, go my review covers just about everything you might want to know about F1. So go read it.

2010
10/14
CATEGORY
Gaming
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2 comments

4 Characters

In the weeks leading up to the release of The Sacrifice episode for Left 4 Dead, Valve ran an excellent comic that went into the backstories of the original four survivors and explained the events we’d be seeing in the new episode. It went a long way to restoring my excitement for L4D, and reminded me of why I’d liked the original game so much.

Zoey, Bill, Louis, and Francis were endearing heroes, and their chemistry was fantastic. I remember cracking up when Francis turned to Louis and asked him why he was still wearing his tie. “You worried ya won’t be dressed right for your next board meeting?” he cackled. And of course he was right. Part of Louis’s character was denial that the zombie apocalypse was actually happening, and that there was never going to be a return to normality. It’s why he was always making optimistic predictions about what would be awaiting them over the next horizon, and why he was always so surprised when they came across yet another scene of disaster.

The Sacrifice comic offered a nice opportunity to revisit those characters, as well as say goodbye to Bill, the Vietnam vet who frequently seemed relieved to be fighting again, here at the end of his life. By the end of The Sacrifice, it was understood that Bill would go out in a blaze of glory to protect his makeshift family. But in the meantime, we would see what became of the four original survivors after their escape in the first game, and learn more about who they were before everything went wrong.

Zoey’s story, for instance, was a brilliant vignette. Divorced parents who sniped at each other endlessly, a cop father who taught her to love grindhouse movies but not responsibility, and a mother who clearly felt that good parenting meant reminding your child of all the opportunities she was wasting. And of course none of it can be resolved: Zoey’s last moments with her family are spent enduring yet another argument, and then she’s an orphan.

Like all good backstory, the comic didn’t invent a background for the characters, merely made it clearer. Everything we saw, especially from Louis and Zoey, seemed to confirm things we’d always known about them, but had never completely understood.

The Sacrifice had the unintended consequence of highlighting how indifferent I am toward the new cast of survivors introduced in Left 4 Dead 2. With the exception of the lovably garrulous bumpkin, Ellis, none of them seem to exhibit much in the way of character. I couldn’t tell you why. The incidental dialogue seems inconsequential and uninformative. Most of what I know about Coach and Nick, for instance, comes from their costumes. I still can’t tell you anything about Rochelle.

Seeing the original four survivors playing off one another only underscored the degree to which Left 4 Dead 2 was a narrative failure in spite of great level design and smart gameplay adjustments. Left 4 Dead was always surprising and charming; Left 4 Dead 2 was neither.

If I had to guess, it’s that Valve communicated other, subtler ideas with each of the original survivors. Louis was wearing the uniform of a low-level office worker, and I always had the sense that he was a guy who wasn’t getting much farther in life. After all, was there anyone else in the original cast who looked like they had a bright future? Bill was a run-down vet whose well-worn fatigues suggested an inability to readjust to civilian life, and perhaps even bouts of homelessness. Francis was a biker, a group that’s already associated with alienation. Zoey was a nerdy college kid whose clothes didn’t suggest wealth, and who frequently had an awkward demeanor. All we really knew about her is that she liked to watch horror movies, and she looked like the kind of person who was more likely to do that in her dorm room, alone, than with other people.

And in The Sacrifice, we learn that Louis is a sysadmin at a banking house who is trying to find a way to attract attention from his bosses by keeping the servers running. If the zombie flu hadn’t come, I suspect the only time Louis’s employer paid him any notice would be the day he was let go. Zoey was a film-school dropout from a blue-collar family who had just lost her scholarship. Francis was about to be sent to prison. And Bill was waiting to die in a VA hospital.

For a lot of reasons, I'd rather be part of the group on the bridge.

By contrast, the survivors of Left 4 Dead 2 never suggested an earlier life. Perhaps Valve just weren’t on comfortable ground in the Mississippi Delta. It was a good setting, but not one that Valve understood as well as the industrial North. The story of an old vet, a shy nerd, a token middle-class black man, and a surprisingly sweet biker was one they told with confidence. But in the South, the character’s voices are more vague. The new survivors cut across lines of race, class, and geography that are harder to grapple with, but to flesh them out, you’d have to. Instead, they remain silhouettes moving across scenery. Well-crafted scenery, but not a place that seems to have an existence beyond the confines of the level layout.

2010
10/12
CATEGORY
Gaming
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5 comments

Man Down, Man Down!

Back in June I started playing Valkyria Chronicles, a turn-based, squad-level wargame for the PS3. I suspect many of its fans don’t actually know that’s what they’re playing: VC does a very clever job of not looking like a wargame. Characters are controlled from a third-person shooter perspective, and they behave mostly like shooter characters except for the way they have a limited number of movement points and a single action for each round. It also looks more like a good anime than a videogame. This distinguishes it from most other Japanese games, which largely take their aesthetic cues from trashy anime.

On the other hand, let’s not get carried away praising Valkyria Chronicles’ tasteful sensibilities: your second in command goes into combat wearing a miniskirt and blushing like the vaguely eroticized schoolgirl she is.

In fact, Alicia comes very close to ruining the game, especially if you play it in Japanese with English subtitles. The only thing worse about the way the typical Japanese game visually portrays women is the way it characterizes them: overwhelmingly shrill, perky, and prone to mood swings that make Naomi Campbell look like St. Francis. Or they’re painfully demure, barely able to speak or look someone in the eyes. Or they’re perpetually pissed off and speak in a freakishly deep voice. There’s hardly a convention that Valkyria Chronicles doesn’t drive into the ground.

Rosie, left, an unpleasant but useful member of the squad.

Thank God there’s an inoffensive English voice track.

Anyway, I recently went back to my save game, which was on hold at a point where the difficult was rapidly increasing. This is mostly a good thing: the early part of VC is so easy that the only real challenge is how quickly you can walk all over the opposition. However, since the AI is fairly poor in VC, the missions get more difficult through construction and event triggers, which takes it into more trial-and-error territory. In a wargame, that’s really not where you want to be.

One thing works brilliantly in this game, however: rescuing incapacitated teammates.

You can’t tell in the early missions, because it’s a rare event. However, in the mid-game you start having teammates get shot down, and that’s when the rescue mechanic comes into play.

When a teammate goes down, you have 3 turns to get another squad member to his position and summon a medic. The medic instantly transports the wounded squaddie from the battlefield, and he can actually be brought back into play on the following turn. However, if you don’t get there within three turns, your squad member is dead.

There’s a dark brilliance to this system. Chances are, your squadmate is bleeding out on a dangerous patch of turf, which means you really have to think about whether you want to send more teammates out to rescue him. You can easily fritter away the entire team trying to get one wounded trooper off the field. But if you don’t do it, the soldier is dead. Gone forever. And as annoying as some of these characters can be, they’re my annoying characters.

I saw this scenario play out in tragicomic fashion during my last mission. The enemy commander was taking his super-tank (basically a land-dreadnaught) on a rampage through our bases, and we had to cripple and then destroy it while avoiding its powerful main guns. Midway through that little endeavor, he received massive reinforcements along with an honest-to-God valkyrie. I was completely caught out, and thanks to the Valkyrie’s enchanted spear of death, I lost three troopers almost instantly.

Two of them were in positions where they could be rescued. But one of them, my lead assault trooper Rosie, was lying in a trench that the tank had already overrun, and the valkyrie (who is unkillable) was basically corpse-camping her.

Rosie is extra valuable because she provides an extra command point each turn, which basically means I get an extra move when she’s on the field. Still, with two anti-tank trooper and an engineer nearby, I thought we could get her out.

The medic, who scurries into any situation and rescues the wounded

The engineer made a last ammunition run through the squad, replenishing their stocks, then bolted for Rosie’s position. The valkyrie spotted him and hit him with the lance just as he made it to Rosie’s side and called in the medic. Then he  went down. He was slightly closer to the edge of the trench. Trouble was, the engineer is one of the fastest guys on the team. My AT gunners are better armored, but also lumbering and slow. Predictably, the next one I sent on a rescue run got shot down. Worse, he never even made it to the engineer.

So with one anti-tank Lancer remaining, and two soldiers bleeding out in dead ground, I was starting to panic. Rosie was saved, and she was more valuable than the rest of them, but I really didn’t want to lose anyone to this stupid, unfair valkyrie attack.

My solution was inelegant. I took my CO’s tank, drove it between my last lancer and the valkyrie, and used it as a moving shield. Her weapons damaged it steadily, but not enough to destroy it before it reached their position. My other lancer moved up behind the tank, rescuing my soldiers. She barely made it out of the trench before the valkyrie killed her.

I was stunned at the rush of relief I felt as we backed away from the lighting-touched lady with the glowing lance. We’d gotten everyone out alive, and now I was free to concentrate on the super-tank. But in the melee to get Rosie out of harm’s way, I’d completely forgotten about the larger mission, and was now in danger of losing it.

But that’s the point of this mechanic: it dangles the hope of preventing casualties in front of you, luring you into destructive decisions in the name of leaving no man behind.

2010
10/09
CATEGORY
Gaming
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Closing out F1 2010

I spent my entire day doing Grands Prix in the 360 version of F1 2010 so that I can wrap up my review this week. I’ve had a good handle on the strengths and weaknesses of the PC version, but I’m glad I took some time with the 360 version. I definitely needed to explore the easier difficulty levels and there are some definite buyer beware issues when you try to play this with a gamepad.

I’ll explain more in the review, but the bottom line is that I don’t think the higher difficult levels are even usable with a gamepad. When 75 percent throttle takes you through a corner at high speed, and 80 percent sends you into the wall, you really don’t want to be relying on the trigger buttons.

But there’s no getting around how gruesome this game, or any game, can become when you’ve got to start powering through it to hit a deadline, or to test some game elements that have seemed problematic. When I took this review, my goal was to bring it up to the same standard as Bill Abner’s sports game reviews, and now I realize how much effort that requires. Especially because, unlike an EA Sports game, a racing game doesn’t let you simply sim a racing season while you check the stats against reality. You want to see how a season plays out in F1? You drive.

But it’s worth it to me. There aren’t a lot of legit racing sim reviewers who can approach these games from a perspective that’s useful to the people most interested in them, and I feel like this is one game where I can provide a uniquely strong and informed perspective.

Still, I’ll be glad when I’m finished. I hear engines and gearboxes all the time now, and the room seemed to be spinning for like a half hour after Monaco. Man, fuck Monaco.

2010
10/07
CATEGORY
Gaming
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5 comments