How We Got Here - Game Design Theory - page 70

Figure 18 . H. G. Wells playing Little Wars . Illustration first published in Illus-
trated London News (25 January 1913).
represented World War II battles, a favorite period for many war gam-
ers. Squad Leader was followed later by a sequel of sorts called Advanced
Squad Leader , which included countless scenarios and is still considered
the most important war game today.
When looked at through our lens, war games are an interesting case.
They are generally simulations , and as I mentioned in Chapter 1 , simula-
tions and games are not the same thing. But in the same way that a realis-
tic soccer game is both a simulation and a game, a war game is also both
a simulation and a game, because they are simulating something that
happened to be a game in the first place. War is a game—it is a contest of
very ambiguous decision making.
Pen and Paper RPGs
I go into more depth on pen and paper RPGs in Chapter 5 , but there are
a couple of historical notes I should make about these games first.
These games developed from the world of war games. In fact, the
earliest version of what became Dungeons & Dragons was a war game
called Chainmail (also created by Gary Gygax, one of D&D 's co-creators).
Many consider Dungeons & Dragons to be the grandfather of video-game
mechanisms, and for good reason: lots of early hobbyist computer games
were inspired directly by the developers' experiences with D&D .