How We Got Here - Game Design Theory - page 69

high (i.e., played as a high card rather than a 1) is because of social fac-
tors during the French Revolution. Playing with aces high was consid-
ered a small act of rebellion by the poor, and had very little to do with
whether or not it made for better or more balanced gameplay.
The 20th Century
Some may be wondering why this topic zips from ancient times all the
way up to the 20th century—didn't anything significant happen between
these two time periods? The answer is: not really.
As I mentioned in the introduction, human beings never had a co-
lossal amount of free time until the 20th century. Without the kind of
free time that those of us born in the last 100 years are used to, there
simply isn't a huge demand for games. Modern games arrived with major
technological advancements such as the automobile, telephone, electric-
ity, and other products of the modern age.
Little Wars
Military exercises became common starting in the 1700s, with some mil-
itary commanders creating great life-sized recreations of battles in order
to study them. Sometime in the early 19th century, a Prussian general
started to develop war games that involved small metal pieces on a large
map and used rolls of the dice to help represent the possible outcomes
of potential battles (see Max Boot's book, War Made New ). All of it was
purely for the sake of research, though—not for the sake of fun.
In 1913 H. G. Wells created a game called Little Wars , which is gen-
erally considered to be the first ever war game, a genre that lives on today
( Figure 18 ). Of course, war games that simulate military strategy have
always been around in the sense that generals and war strategists have
set up simulations and maps to outline and test their battle strategies
throughout history. But this was the first time someone created a simu-
lation with fun as the primary intention (at least, the first time someone
famous did it). And, as has been true throughout most of history, Little
War s was designed by a person whose primary job was not game design-
ing. Until very recently, no one ever had that job because there was no
commercial demand for it.
The war-game genre stayed somewhat dormant until the 1950s,
when the first commercial board games began to be produced on a large
scale. By the 1970s the genre was at its peak and had become extreme-
ly intricate and historically accurate, representing actual battles in the
most realistic ways possible. Games like Squad Leader (released in 1977)