Longtime readers will recall that I have run a battle simulation center, I hold the FA57 skill identifier - Simulations Operations - and have been a sims developer as well as participated in the design and execution of many wargame scenarios, from huge enterprises like Millennium Challenge 02 and the Division Advanced Warfighting Experiment (DAWE), to lesser-scoped events like supporting the Division Warfighting Exercise at the Command and General Staff College to simple one man one machine events.

So, while laughing, I was also intrigued by the overlaps.

David Wong (the author) wants a War Sim...

1. ...where I spend two hours pushing across a map to destroy a "nuclear missile silo," only to find out after the fact that it was just a missile-themed orphanage.

I want little celebrities to show up on the scene and do interviews over video of charred teddy bears, decrying my unilateral attack. I want congressional hearings demanding answers to these atrocities.

-In many sims we now have targetable (i.e., able to take damage and be killed) sites that are ambiguous in nature. And there are consequences. We hire role-players to do exactly that in live events, and in sim-driven events where that's a training objective, we build MSEL (Master Scenario Event List) events that do exactly that. Though it might be Barbra Triesand, or McGeorge Looney who shows up in the MSEL... We have real live actual local newspeople come and conduct interviews, and role-play the press.

2. On the very next level I want to lose half of my units because another "orphanage" turned out to be a NOD ambush site. I want another round of hearings asking why I didn't level that orphanage as soon as I saw it, including tearful testimony from a slain soldier's daughter who is now, ironically, an orphan.

-Mebbe not this exactly... but it's there.

3. Every War Sim has a "Fog of War" that obscures the map in darkness until units scout the landscape. Well, I want a hazy, brown "Fog of Bullsh*t" layer below that. I want it to make a village of farmers look like a secret armed militia, I want it to show me a massive enemy fortress where there is actually an Aspirin factory. I want to never know for sure which it was, even after the game is over.

-We now have multi-sided sims where sides can switch from friendly to hostile to neutral depending on how things are going - all in the same run-time event, as well as in live training at the Combat Training Centers.

4. I want those awesome rooted monsters from Starcraft that wait until the enemy gets close and then launch tentacles up their a$$es. Just think of how demoralizing that would have to be.

But I want to lose points off my Public Support meter every time one of those monsters accidentally impales a schoolgirl in a horrific bloody mess that will shock all but the Japanese.

Okay. Not yet. But! In the early days of the Fort Sill Battle Simulation Center, we had a scenario for training the Advanced Course students that took place on Fort Sill terrain. The terrain map we had was *much* larger than the area defined by the graphics for the operation - and students, being competitive, had this tendency to inch out of the boundaries of their graphics... so we built Imperial Walkers. Yep. Those big things from the Battle of Hoth. They were invulnerable, had a PH of 99, a PK of 99, perfect sensors, were only detectable close up, but their weapon had a very limited range and a slight delay. If you didn't run back inside the boundary pretty darn quick, you were toast. They were positioned on the flanks - if you saw one, you were either not paying attention, or you were cheating.

5. I want that "Public Support" meter to rise and fall according to Troops Lost, Length of Conflict, Innocents Killed and Whether or Not There is Anything Else On TV That Week. I want to lose 200 Public Support points because, in a war where 8,000 units have been lost, one of my Mutalisks happened to be caught on video accidentally eating one clergyman. Then, later, my destruction of an entire enemy city goes unnoticed because the Nude Zero-Gravity Futureball championship went into overtime.

I just submitted this one to the master JFCOM MSEL list. That would be kewl.

I put the rest in the Flash Traffic/Extended entry, to save your scrolling fingers.

We don't go to quite this extreme - yet. At least not on record.

7. I want my Mission Objectives to change every 30 seconds, without anyone letting me know. I want little talking heads to pop up on my screen - commanders, politicians, allies, military intelligence - each giving me different sets of victory parameters, all of them conflicting and many of them written in bullsh*t a$$-covering doublespeak.

Heh. We do this, just not always on purpose.

8. I want CIA Field Agents that operate completely on their own agenda, the little units spreading clouds of brown wherever they go. I want to go after enemy weapons scientists only to find out said agents have spirited them away and put them on the payroll.

Who knows what they're doing down at SOCOM? Last time I supported a SOCOM exercise, I had to leave part of my brain in a safe down there. Oh, shut up.

9. I want a super-cool custom weapons lab where I can design mech armor for my infantry with wicked acid-tipped missiles and guns that shoot spiders. Then I want to watch as a hundred men are cooked alive in the desert because of a defect in the internal air conditioning units that shorted due to condensation in the fusion coils and insufficient insulation in the wiring units bypassing the laser reactor core, due to the contractor's decision to use over-the-counter components instead of the military-grade ones mandated in Subsection 12:94A, Paragraph B of the Military Weapons Platform Procurement Act of 3013, a document that is 14,724 pages long and contains some 81,301 loopholes that allow congressmen to bypass component testing and funnel lucrative military contracts to cut-rate suppliers from their home districts at the peak of every election cycle.

Okay, those of us who build weapon databases have *all* built this kind of gear. But of course, it always works in sim. This is a capability we need to implement.

10. Geneva Convention be damned, I want to drop Anthrax.

We never do that. But we let the bad guy do it. And then work the MSEL injects so that we get blamed for it. You think I'm kidding. Hey, we watch CNN too.

11. Gamers complain about bad "pathfinding" (that is, your units wandering around the map and falling into the river against your orders). Well, I want worse pathfinding. I want entire platoons who wander into the mountains because somebody bled on the map. I want tanks to get stuck turret-deep in mud flats and have to be rescued by helicopters while snipers pick off soldiers trying to keep their boots from being sucked off their feet in muck.

ModSAF and early versions of OneSAF anyone? Where the movement AI was just plain *stupid* because we were learning how to build AIs that could make intelligent decisions? You have *no idea* how many little automatic decisions you make without conscious effort when you walk from the store to the parking lot to get into your car - much less drive your car. When you design an AI, you have to figure out as many of those little discreet decisions you make and then write them into the decision trees - or else your driver will hit that tree, then back up a smidge, angle the vehicle a little, and hit the tree again, and then do that 15 times until he clears the tree - oops - he hit the one behind him. Then realize that in an entity-level sim, every entity has to be going through those trees every sim 'heartbeat' and you suddenly realize why entity counts are so low unless you have a Cray or three handy.

12. I want mutinous units that chainsmoke hash and frag their Sergeants and sell Heroin on the side and rogue commanders who go mad and shave their heads and set up fortresses in the jungle decorated with human skulls. I want to have to send a CIA assassin in to take him out. And then they chop up a donkey, for some reason.

See MSEL, in the Apocalypse Now folder.

13. I want factions. Not a simple alien vs. humans vs. bugs three-way war orgy. I want to share the map with powerful forces who are not friend or foe or anything else, a News Media, Private Corporations, a$$hole allies and friendly enemies, everyone jockeying for their own interests and me unable to bend over at any moment without turning my codpiece around first. I want a France.

Been there, done this - all with artful misdirection, however, so that the French Liaison officer doesn't figure it out. Unless you know he's cool, in which case you bring him in on it to make it *more* realistic.

14. I want fat, left-wing documentarians carefully editing the only the most incriminating footage, countered only by low-IQ country music singers crooning my praises while in American Flag-colored cowboy hats.

Nope. We can't get to that level of reality yet. Working on it though.

15. About every five minutes I want one of my helicopters to crash, completely on its own, for some f**king reason.

Heh. Just turn on the maintenance module. That'll slow your exercise down!

16. I want a fourth of my casualties to come from friendly fire and non-combat or training accidents. I want a big-name hero unit who rallies the troops with his Magical Sword of Slaying, only to be killed when an ammo crate falls off a loading dock.

We can do this, except that ammo crate thing. Unit commanders (who are all Big Name Hero Units in their minds, complete with Magical Swords of Slaying) refuse to allow themselves to be killed in picayune ways. That would interfere with training, doncha know. Though, letting the Chief of Staff take over for a while might actually be a good thing, no one is going to tell the General that.

17. In my Public Support display let me find out that the news media has run, in the same magazine, one story blasting us for going to war for minerals and another story blasting us for not acting on the continuing mineral shortage back home.

There should also be simultaneous stories about the outrageous expense of the war effort, and another about how the troops are under-funded and under-equipped. Set it so that I somehow lose Public Support points with each story.

This is reality. Sometimes you can get too too much much reality in a game. Everybody gets depressed, we start eating donuts, get fat, and then you have trouble with AR 600-9.

18. I want to be able to build a POW camp structure where enemy soldiers and suicide bombers are held should they somehow survive battle or should their suicide bombing only be half-successful. I want to right-click on the building and open an option that says "Interrogate Prisoners," which will make parts of the map open up and reveal enemy positions, saving my own units from ambushes.

Then, I want a little cutscene to pop up to announce that photos of my prisoner interrogations have emerged, sparking international outrage because several prisoners were upset and humiliated and some even physically harmed.

The whole world is shocked. Because people were physically harmed.

In a war.

So, I leave the battlefield...

...and brush the flaming chunks of bomb victims off my boots to address the worldwide outrage over the enemy soldiers who had their self-esteem damaged. The game will bring me up on a Court-Martial, everybody pointing out that it was I who clicked the little Interrogation icon. I want to lose tons of Public Support points and have every game objective suddenly put in doubt.

Nah, we just declare ENDEX and head for the AAR room. Well, not really. We *do* inject Law of War violations, and we *do* assess the impacts of negative publicity. Nobody likes it, because it's such a fuzzy thing. Welcome to the real world.

19. Now, beating the game will depend on how I play to Ivy League politicians who think a gun is something you hang over your mantlepiece to be occasionally dusted by the maid in your Connecticut Summer home. And when it comes to that point in the game where this panel demands the truth (and says they're "entitled" to the truth) I want a little drop-down menu that will let me tell them that they, in fact, can't handle the truth.

With a couple of clicks (or maybe a Hotkey) I'll tell them that we live in a world that has walls and that those walls have to be guarded by men with guns. I will tell them that I have a greater responsibility than they can possibly fathom. They weep for mistreated prisoners and curse the military. They have that luxury. They have the luxury of not knowing what I know, that the naked human pyramid and homoerotic torture, while tragic, probably saved lives. And my existence, while grotesque and incomprehensible to them, saves lives.

I'll tell them that they don't want the truth, because deep down, in places they don't talk about at parties, they want me on that wall. They need me on that wall. I'll tell them that I have neither the time nor the inclination to explain myself to men who rise and sleep under the blanket of the very freedom I provide, then question the manner in which I provide it.

I'd rather they just said "thank you" and went on their way. Otherwise, I'd suggest they pick up a weapon and stand a post. Either way, I don't give a damn what they think they're entitled to.

Heh. Everybody knows that just happens in the movies.

20. I want better death animations.

-David Wong.

I don't. I can self-supply the visuals, thanks.