Reply to thread

Message: <blockquote data-quote="AbdulAlhazred" data-source="post: 4936608" data-attributes="member: 82106">The thing is Mike is missing a few parts of the equation I think. Things are a lot more complex than "computers can replace board games". Yes, they can, but really its equally true to say that the genre itself has faded. War games were time consuming and a pain to set up and play. The problem was they COULDN'T really be translated to the computer. At least not before the Internet. While you can sort of make a wargame that runs on an Amiga or old Macs it was kind of pointless. There was no reasonable way to play against another person and what passed for computer AI at the time (and to this day really) is not at all interesting to play against. Due to the practical limitations of the hardware and realistic budget limitations the early computer wargames were mostly pretty crude.In the mean time what happened? The wargame hobby died. People don't have the time anymore, and there were other distractions like video games. The RPG gaming scene also stole a lot of people's time and energy since it was a largely overlapping crowd. People don't have the attention span anymore either. Eventually sim and war game programs came along that were good enough to really be start to be interesting, the Internet let people play each other, and the whole RTS genre developed, which again really appealed heavily to the same crowd as traditional wargames.There was never a point in time when it was possible for the wargame hobby to save itself. To a limited extent it moved to computers, but the timing was just wrong. By the time we had good enough machines and a good enough Internet to do what a good AH game could do there really weren't that many people left around wanting to play that sort of game. So Mike's "Snowdrift" IMHO couldn't really happen in the real world. Heck, there were companies around with the willingness to do it and good talent and they even made some pretty decent games. Honestly I think its more likely some kind of new genre which is a fusion of elements from wargaming, RP, virtual worlds, etc may come along that fills the same niche as the old games did.</blockquote>

Verification