Post by PaulV on Sept 27, 2015 10:59:31 GMT -5
The idea for the game began with a proposal Navy LTs Jason Chuma and Chris Kona made as member of the Chief of Naval Operations Rapid Innovation Cell. The idea was initially called "Madden Navy" - the reference to the storied franchise of computer football games that evolved from games like the old "statis-pro football" and other "statistical board games" making them more fun using a computer to crunch the numbers and roll the dice.
Madden also featured - VERY rudimentary to start with - animation to show the players what was happening as the plays they chose were "run" by the little virtual players.
The game quickly spread beyond the stat-heads that spent hours with spreadsheet like cards and cups full of multi-colored dice to football fans lucky enough to have a Personal Computer or one of the growing number of video game consoles.As video games and computers became ubiquitous during the late 90s and 00s Madden became "the Franchise" and one of the first games that you didn't buy once, but over and over every year to find out what new features it had. ESPN recounts the history of the phenom:
Madden Franchise
Football fans were not the only ones who played the game. As the sophistication of the game grew, so did the value that it had to teach young players about the game and provide even professional players the ability to practice in-game decision-making. With the level of knowledge players acquired at an earlier age, younger players understood the game at a higher and higher level. The effect of playing hundreds - even thousands of games of Madden came full circle when the Broncos Brandon Stokely found himself with a tipped ball in his hands, with 17 secs to go, and rater than just run into the endzone, he ran along the goal line burning time off the clock.
Madden changes the game
So, the question is, could a game about naval warfare help educate sailors (and others interested in naval affairs) about how navies fight? Also providing opportunities to practice decision-making, and a "Sand-box" within which to experiment with analogous to the early Madden games ability to "Create your own plays" and "edit the player stats"?
Anybody familiar with the "X's and O's" representing football plays and then looks at the maps in history books depicting naval battles...can see an analogy.
Now the details of naval combat are MUCH more complicated than football and those details come at a variety of levels of security classification. So an unclassified game would have to have a certain level of abstraction so the details of the sensitive aspects of tactics was assumed to be happening inside the "black box" of groups of ships operating within designated operating areas.
As board games inspired computer games in the case of Madden, naval board games solved this problem by using a hexagonal grid overlay on a map. A number of ship "counters" could be placed in each hex, and
"what happens in the hex, stays in the hex" - the game represents broad capabilities of the individual ships, and uses dice to generate an outcome from a range of plausible possibilities. While it takes a long time to play, working through how exactly to do this is best experimented with using a manual board game. The result - a game system that has an appropriate level of abstraction to speed play and avoid getting into the sensitivities of specific tactics - can then be translated into computer form. The result captures idea of "drawing" a plan for your forces - your opponent doing the same - and then seeing what happens when you "run the play". If you look at the decision cycle of the player as "a play", then you can "turn the crank" on these cycles of the "Observe, Orient, Decide, Act" loop. With players taking feedback from the outcome of one OODA loop cycle into the next.
So here we are with a computer game about naval warfare where the tactics governing individual ship maneuvers and weapons use is abstracted to general probabilities of success and the players have to deal with more operational concepts like relationships between time and distance, coordinating the dispersing and concentration of force, and the problems getting fuel and ammo to them. we hope you enjoy developing it and exploring what can be done with it.
Madden also featured - VERY rudimentary to start with - animation to show the players what was happening as the plays they chose were "run" by the little virtual players.
The game quickly spread beyond the stat-heads that spent hours with spreadsheet like cards and cups full of multi-colored dice to football fans lucky enough to have a Personal Computer or one of the growing number of video game consoles.As video games and computers became ubiquitous during the late 90s and 00s Madden became "the Franchise" and one of the first games that you didn't buy once, but over and over every year to find out what new features it had. ESPN recounts the history of the phenom:
Madden Franchise
Football fans were not the only ones who played the game. As the sophistication of the game grew, so did the value that it had to teach young players about the game and provide even professional players the ability to practice in-game decision-making. With the level of knowledge players acquired at an earlier age, younger players understood the game at a higher and higher level. The effect of playing hundreds - even thousands of games of Madden came full circle when the Broncos Brandon Stokely found himself with a tipped ball in his hands, with 17 secs to go, and rater than just run into the endzone, he ran along the goal line burning time off the clock.
“I think everybody who’s played those games has done that” — run around the field for a while at the end of the game to shave a few precious seconds off the clock
Madden changes the game
So, the question is, could a game about naval warfare help educate sailors (and others interested in naval affairs) about how navies fight? Also providing opportunities to practice decision-making, and a "Sand-box" within which to experiment with analogous to the early Madden games ability to "Create your own plays" and "edit the player stats"?
Anybody familiar with the "X's and O's" representing football plays and then looks at the maps in history books depicting naval battles...can see an analogy.
Now the details of naval combat are MUCH more complicated than football and those details come at a variety of levels of security classification. So an unclassified game would have to have a certain level of abstraction so the details of the sensitive aspects of tactics was assumed to be happening inside the "black box" of groups of ships operating within designated operating areas.
As board games inspired computer games in the case of Madden, naval board games solved this problem by using a hexagonal grid overlay on a map. A number of ship "counters" could be placed in each hex, and
"what happens in the hex, stays in the hex" - the game represents broad capabilities of the individual ships, and uses dice to generate an outcome from a range of plausible possibilities. While it takes a long time to play, working through how exactly to do this is best experimented with using a manual board game. The result - a game system that has an appropriate level of abstraction to speed play and avoid getting into the sensitivities of specific tactics - can then be translated into computer form. The result captures idea of "drawing" a plan for your forces - your opponent doing the same - and then seeing what happens when you "run the play". If you look at the decision cycle of the player as "a play", then you can "turn the crank" on these cycles of the "Observe, Orient, Decide, Act" loop. With players taking feedback from the outcome of one OODA loop cycle into the next.
So here we are with a computer game about naval warfare where the tactics governing individual ship maneuvers and weapons use is abstracted to general probabilities of success and the players have to deal with more operational concepts like relationships between time and distance, coordinating the dispersing and concentration of force, and the problems getting fuel and ammo to them. we hope you enjoy developing it and exploring what can be done with it.