EP14 The Game of War

What this episode is about

The discussion centers on modern strategy and tactical war games, highlighting an interview with Maximilian Ria, a founder of a company known for historical-themed games. The conversation delves into the development processes and challenges behind creating these games, drawing parallels to past experiences in war game development, while also exploring the evolution of the genre and personal reflections on gaming history.

Key takeaways

• War games are history's secret sauce; strategy today is built on yesterday's battlefield blueprints.
• H.G. Wells: sci-fi author and war gaming pioneer—who knew he was a tactical titan?
• Chess and Go: ancient warriors or strategic board games? The line blurs in the world of wargaming.
• Germany's 19th-century wargaming blamed for the Franco-Prussian War loss—bet they wished for a time machine!
• Playing with toy soldiers: childhood nostalgia or a future general's training ground? You decide!

Who speaks in this episode?

• Dan Carlin (Host) · 53 min speaking
• Maximilian Rhea (Guest) · 23 min speaking

What is discussed, and when

1. 0:00 – 10:00: Dungeons and Dragons, Hell Let Loose, Maximilian Rhea, Gary Gygax
2. 10:00 – 20:00: Hell Let Loose, World War I, Stalingrad, Maximilian Rhea
3. 30:00 – 40:00: World War I
4. 40:00 – 50:00: Age of Empires, World War I, Stalingrad, Battlefield 1942
5. 50:00 – 1:00:00: World War I, Stalingrad
6. 1:00:00 – 1:10:00: World War I, Vietnam War
7. 1:10:00 – 1:16:00: Hell Let Loose, World War I

Notable quotes from "EP14 The Game of War"

• So if you like that kind of stuff a fascinating interview with maximilian ria who's a game is hell let loose and it's it's a fascinating concept so we'll talk to him a little bit later it was if there is a ben's idea.

  about Hell Let Loose · at 1:03

• That people play when i was growing up was written by h.g wells the war of the worlds author another thing a lot of people don't know is wells actually wrote a i think i know the modern version is in.

  about H.G. Wells · at 2:15

• Before maybe it's not true how about that for a disclaimer but that the french there was an element in the in france that blamed that as a factor that led to their loss in the franco-prussian war.

  about Franco-Prussian War · at 4:18

• One of whom was gary guy jacks who's probably the lead figure in dungeons and dragons i think of other guys like dave arneson and whatnot but gary guy jacks is sort of the lead d and d guy and dungeons and dragons i think.

  about Gary Gygax · at 7:26

• With me right now is maximilian rhea he is one of the founders and also the project director and art director over at black matter studios the developers of hell let loose tell…

  about Maximilian Rhea · at 16:26

• Fight over this piece of land much like they did in world war ii using the iconic weaponry of the day and the vehicles of the day and we've kind of tried to match that as much…

  about World War I · at 17:21

• And he introduced me to this game and this game introduced me to the stories of these extremely iconic but very dispersed historical figures and i would have been only kind of.

  about Age of Empires · at 42:50

• Know with charlemagne but i then started playing other historical games that's actually the first person shooter game i started playing was a game called battlefield 1942 obviously a world war ii game not.

  about Battlefield 1942 · at 43:48

Who and what is mentioned in this episode?

People

• Maximilian Rhea — Person · Main guest · 2 mentions · first at 1:04
  Interview subject discussing the design, historical fidelity, and ethical trade-offs of the WWII multiplayer shooter 'Hell Let Loose' and his role at Black Matter Studios.
• H.G. Wells — Person · Referenced historical figure (wargaming rules author) · 1 mention · first at 2:18
  Cited as an early, influential contributor to wargaming via a seminal early ruleset, used to illustrate the deep historical roots of the hobby.
• Gary Gygax — Person · Referenced historical figure (game designer) · 1 mention · first at 7:30
  Referenced as a key figure in early Dungeons & Dragons and co-author of 'Chainmail', used to connect miniature wargaming rules to the origins of tabletop RPGs.
• Robert Louis Stevenson — Person · Referenced historical figure (early rules attribution) · 2 mentions
  Mentioned as possibly having an early set of wargaming rules, reinforcing the long pre-digital lineage of war games and their literary connections.
  You know how many podcasts we would have in that podcast series given my long-windedness but robert lewis stevenson i guess had an early set of rules if you don't know the long history of war games some of it has to be sort of.

Companies & orgs

• Black Matter Studios — Company · Business focus · 1 mention · first at 16:31
  Developer of Hell Let Loose, discussed in depth regarding game development and historical accuracy.
  If that's a subject that interests you gonna have an interview on this program where we talked to one of the founders of a company who makes the most up-to-date modern types of games you know with a historical theme and all.

Products & tech

• Hell Let Loose — Product · Business focus · 4 mentions · first at 1:06
  Main subject of discussion, a World War II-themed multiplayer shooter game developed by Black Matter Studios.
• Age of Empires — Product · Referenced work · 2 mentions · first at 42:13
  Mentioned as an early historical strategy game that influenced the guest's interest in history.
• Battlefield 1942 — Product · Referenced work · 1 mention · first at 43:56
  Mentioned as an early World War II-themed first-person shooter that influenced the guest's interest in the genre.
• Call of Duty — Product · Referenced work · 1 mention · first at 44:02
  Mentioned as part of the discussion on World War II-themed first-person shooters.
  1942 obviously a world war ii game not dissimilar to our own and then call of duty which was a world war ii game as well and in those games i just picked up this extreme interest.

Concepts & topics

• World War I — Concept · Core topic · 9 mentions · first at 17:02
  Central historical period discussed in relation to the game Hell Let Loose and other war games.
• Dungeons and Dragons — Concept · Referenced work · 3 mentions · first at 7:02
  Mentioned as part of the historical context of war gaming and its evolution.
  Lead figure in dungeons and dragons i think of other guys like dave arneson and whatnot but gary guy jacks is sort of the lead d and d guy and dungeons and dragons i think came out in 1974.

Places & events

• Stalingrad — Place · Setting · 4 mentions · first at 18:01
  Key historical battle location featured in Hell Let Loose, discussed for its historical accuracy in the game.
  You had sent me a screenshot of a particular defensive position pavlov's house at the battle of stalingrad and were talking to me about how until you actually saw it portrayed and rendered in a form that made it visual.
• Franco-Prussian War — Event · Referenced event · 1 mention · first at 4:28
  Mentioned in the context of war gaming's historical impact and military strategy.
• Vietnam War — Event · Referenced event · 1 mention · first at 1:02:51
  Mentioned briefly in the context of war gaming and historical conflicts.
  People will know that there's always a line where you can draw that i mean you could say why have them dressed up as german soldiers at all or you know there's always a line and that is 100.

Full transcript with timestamps

0:02 it's hardcore history i imagine given the uh subject matter that i talk about on this program that there are quite a few people in the audience that have played strategy and tactic war gaming type um games on their computer or video console or what have you over the years if that's a subject that interests you gonna have an interview on this program where we talked to one of the founders of a company who makes the most up-to-date modern types of games um you know with a historical theme and all that i found by uh having the conversation with him that a lot of the same sorts of uh decisions and trade-offs and and questions and quandaries came up in their development meetings that that we had in the development meetings for war remains the virtual reality project i worked on um and that's at the world war one museum in kansas city by the way if you want to see that so if you like that kind of stuff a

1:04 fascinating interview with maximilian ria who's a game is hell let loose and um it's it's a fascinating concept so so we'll talk to him a little bit later uh it was if there is a ben ben's idea that we talk about we sort of set up the context of that with a little personal stuff which i don't like to do uh and i told ben i said uh who cares it's not very interesting and you know it's just me talking about my life and ben said well it's not very interesting whose fault is that that's a hard one to have a pithy comeback for isn't it but the reason he brought it up is he said you know you talk about war games on the program all the time you're going to be talking about something like that later in the program why don't you talk about you know war games as you knew them kind of a war games now if this sounds like grandpa carlin on the front porch in the rocking chair whittling telling stories to the

1:55 youngins and falling asleep about every 10 minutes i apologize the good old days right but um it might be worth just just bringing it up because there's little things about wargaming that your general member of the general public doesn't know i mean one of the really seminal early rule sets for um the war gaming genre that that people play when i was growing up was written by h.g wells the war of the worlds author another thing a lot of people don't know is wells actually wrote a i think i know the modern version is in two volumes i don't remember if the original was i don't know if i've ever seen the original he wrote a history of the world too from like caveman times to his era which um no matter how it turns out think about what a task you set yourself there right my two volume history of everything that's ever happened you know how many podcasts we would have in that podcast series given my long-windedness but robert

2:50 lewis stevenson i guess had an early set of rules um if you don't know the long history of war games some of it has to be sort of imagined because you can kind of infer that that general staffs from militaries you know the long lost past i mean the assyrians had a general staff right just like uh the german army had a general staff in the second world war with all the generals who would you know go over they would war game by then certainly and one can imagine the great general staffs of all time trying to figure out you know tactics and strategy maybe a little sand pit maybe on a map or what passed for a map then there are games that people argue about whether or not they should be classified as war games games like chess which is of course very old the chinese game of go which is also very old but without different battlefields and different terrain and random factors and all these kinds of things people

3:43 sometimes argue although they're usually lumped in with the war general wargaming sort of uh genre uh i was reading something just for this discussion just now and it was talking about the german version of this because the modern history is always thought to begin people will talk about kriegspila the the german name for war game because in the late 19th century they were clearly playing a sort of mock battle setting up battles that they were planning to have and then working out all sorts of contingencies and approaches and trying stuff out um and i read and i hadn't heard this before maybe it's not true how about that for a disclaimer but that the french there was an element in the uh in france that that blamed that as a as a factor that led to their loss in the franco-prussian war i would think maybe railroad timetables and mobilization and all that might have had more to do with it but

4:37 but it was an interesting thing to read right the uh secret weapon of the 19th century you know prussians or early german state wargaming i first was um exposed to this i guess you could say my mom was doing some work and we had to live had to live i mean i have great memories of this but i mean i had to live in london for several months and i had my toy soldiers with me because i'm about what 1972 so i'm gonna be six or seven um always had the toy soldiers because for some reason from birth i'm into that stuff and i have no explanation for why that might be my mother's been trying to figure that out forever and her theories border on the fantastic right bermuda triangle type stuff but i always had the toy soldiers with me and in london i remember having them out on the floor one day and a guy arrived he may have been the son of one of my mom's guests or something college student age and he'd brought his soldiers because my

5:35 mom had said oh you know dan's really into soldiers and so he brought his own went up to see me playing with mine and uh and sat down and said you know basically sat down showed me his soldiers and i was blown away because you know the difference between what you could have bought in a store although what they sold in the store in those days was pretty damn fantastic uh you didn't paint them yourself they were called um britons uh britain's limited i think uh and they were so fantastic and i looked them up and they still make them today they're hand-painted in in those days he had basically a whole army of hundreds of these things each single figure today sells for like 40 u.s and you just sit there and go holy cow you got to be elon musk to have an army of these things today 54 millimeters tall um but he pulls out these these troops and then he pulls out rules and that was the part i'd never seen

6:26 that's the part that makes it a war game right otherwise you're playing toy soldiers and he sat down he started talking to six or seven year old version of me and i didn't like this one bit i can tell you right now because for me it was all imagination and anything i wanted and and i didn't have to worry about anything and this guy was basically giving me stuff like math to do and lots of calculations and figuring out and i mean just it it ruined the spontaneity and the creativity of it all for me but as you get older you see the value in something like that right so fast forward to right around the era where dungeons and dragons started so about 1976 i'm going from memory here uh a rule set comes out called chain mail chain mail actually came out in the very early 70s i want to say like 1971 um and i discovered all this stuff later so when i say 1976 that's when i got into it it happened to be written by two people

7:26 uh one of whom was gary guy jacks who's probably the lead figure in dungeons and dragons i think of other guys like dave arneson and whatnot but gary guy jacks is sort of the lead d and d guy and dungeons and dragons i think came out in 1974. again i discovered all this stuff in about 1976. now in the early dungeons and dragons rule sets they didn't even tell you how to do certain things like how you would handle you know groups of people fighting other groups of people if there were large numbers they would simply refer you in the rule set to chain mail so you had to go pick up chain mail if you wanted to do those sorts of calculations so i went out and got chain mail which was my first exposure since london in the early 1970s to war games rules right meant to be played with miniature figures when i was older than and could appreciate and understand and all this sort of stuff and so started

8:26 experimenting with that so then what you do is you realize oh i need to build an army which was not that easy to do in the middle 1970s you got to go find a place that sells this stuff and the funny thing about it is this was a place i believe that britain was way ahead of the united states it was hard in the united states there was a guy named jack scrooby who's famous in american war game circles who became one of these early people that started to just crank out figures for people not because he wanted to make a lot of money but because everybody needed figures there was not going to be a hobby right um but but you would gravitate towards places and and i don't know what you would do if you lived in some small town but this is like new york and seattle san francisco los angeles boston places where these they're almost like clubs the people that ran these stores could not have been in it

9:15 to get rich but not only would they sell the materials oftentimes they would have big tables in the back where people could come and fight battles and have i mean it became these were little communities i mean if you were where i was from in the san fernando valley 1970s 1980s you would have remembered places like competitors castle with skip gardella and i wonder what skip's doing today hope he's okay um the last grenadier les miserables every community of large size had these places and you didn't do a lot of cross-pollinating i mean i felt like it was almost a school or a fraternity or something like that where you know you had your place and then you meet up with all these other people at some convention down by the airport you know a couple of times a year have big battles competitions the thing about war gaming with miniature figures which is how i did it that's different from what we have today

10:07 is there was a lot of elements to the hobby that you don't need with a computer game but that i find that i like more than i thought i did i mean the painting of the figures there's a railroad you know the model railroad side of this too where people are building terrain and laying out battlefields and i mean there's many different creative elements involved in this before you even get to fighting it all out now fighting it all out i have to say i don't miss that stuff at all let the computer handle the calculations let it let it automatically just take away what was a huge aspect of wargaming and miniatures back in the day which is arguing fighting over what a rule interpretation meant or did you really move this way or is this unit going to hit the forest and be disordered i mean nobody really liked that unless you were what was what was known as a rules lawyer where part of the way you won was not your

11:02 great tactical expertise right and you you out think the other guy no you just have these little rule things that you noticed or maybe you know it backwards or forwards or you have ways of basically arguing that you should get some sort of benefit that ends up leading to well if not a victory for the rules lawyer then a less drastic defeat i pulled out a bunch of my old books on the hobby um and some of them date from before my era i went back and picked up some classics by people like donald featherstone joseph morshauser lots of stuff from phil barker even in the modern era phil's still involved i'm not sure but i think he is uh tony bath people like that were the classics uh on the other side of the pond and it was so clubby even then that when you would buy a set of rules in the back it would it would be like hey you know if you want to get a hold of us uh here's our address you can call us

12:01 this at this hour but we might be gone during i mean it was it was so informal and clubbish that you felt like the guys that wrote this were just you know your buddy down the street but that's how insular and small some of these things were if you think about it there's quite an entry uh level amount of stuff that's required to get into it this there's a there's a barrier right i mean this is not easy stuff to do the time commitment alone um is onerous you have to be a bit of a fanatic but i certainly was one of those people and so when computer games first showed up i was so excited because i mean this you didn't need an opponent you didn't need to spend all day if you didn't have a whole day there were a lot of things that were very attractive about it and even in the very early games you could see without being any kind of a technology expert oh my god give this 10 years it's going to be in fabulously interesting places

12:51 now what's funny about me is the game that i play them the most these days is a game that simply tries to replicate the miniatures version of the games that i played in the 1970s on a computer screen i mean graphically speaking it's stone age and everything moves just i mean it's hilarious because instead of having there are more modern games where everyone moves sort of like individually and takes advantage of all the computers power and and yet something in my you know maybe this is an elderly thing you know when you get nostalgic and you'd rather have the computer game play like pong for you because you grew up with pong it brings back memories one thing i should mention and i only thought about this in preparation for this conversation there was no blood there was no violence unless it was between two players arguing with each other i mean these games had miniature figures whether it was in the pre-gunpowder era

13:49 which i often played or the second world war era which i also played and if somebody died when you had casualties you wrote it down on a piece of paper you said you know you do the math you come up with your figures you say okay you suffered 17 casualties in that charge okay that doesn't even tell you how many are wounded versus how many are dead you write it down on a piece of paper every time we got 20 or 25 casualties you took a miniature figure off that is the extent though of the connection between what you're doing and the violence that you're basically abstracting on the ground that would be there in the real time situation the second world war games we used to play it was mostly vehicles a tank would be hit you'd say that tank is destroyed maybe somebody creative puts a little puff of black cotton on it to represent smoke and there you go a little bit different though from some of the things you see nowadays and that

14:42 brings up interesting questions all its own right i mean all of these uh developments just like dungeons and dragons back in the old days by the way people forget how controversial that was for a time always come with societal sort of quandaries that one can talk about the difference between the violence involved in the war gaming i grew up with and some of the games today is significant we'll talk a little about that in the upcoming conversation in any case i have had a long history um with these sorts of games i've never been the sort of guy i think in my head whatever bermuda triangle my mother thinks i sprang from interested in this stuff from birth i always wanted to to be at like the napoleon level of things you know in control of of the battlefield or like hearts of iron the hearts of iron franchise basically makes you the head of the government and you get to decide what sort of scientific

15:37 experiments you want to uh take part in to develop you know things along i mean it's you get to be like a demigod i like those levels you know surprise surprise rather than the sergeant york um you know on the battlefield with the squad sort of level but the guest that i'm going to speak to in just a minute um maximilian ria he's developed the kind of game where when i was playing the pong version of war games on the very early personal computers you could see in your mind's eye coming and it's fascinating the game in question is called hell let loose but it's part of a genre that many of you will have a lot of experience with and there are all sorts of interesting questions that these games sort of prompt and have connected to them and those are the sorts of things we're going to talk about right now with me right now is maximilian rhea he is one of the founders and also the project director and art

16:31 director over at black matter studios the developers of hell let loose tell me a little bit about your game here so that the public understands um just how far things have gone in terms of development in the wargaming space sure thing so um our game hell at loose is pits 50 um players versus 50 other human players so 100 um human players in total against each other in combat on a world war ii battlefield that was sort of recreated from lots of satellite imagery um to to map out the landscape and then copious amounts of reference photography uh and aerial photography and basically these two forces so initially it's us forces versus german forces fight over this piece of land much like they did in world war ii using the iconic weaponry of the day and the vehicles of the day and we've kind of tried to match that as much as possible to the historical record with some flat flex where we need

17:37 it just due to the nature of games as a medium um but that's kind of where we're at now in so much as video games are concerned um as a digital art form so in terms of what people's expectations are right so everything is built on top of what came before um is this a new level because you know you had sent me a screenshot of a particular defensive position pavlov's house at the battle of stalingrad and were talking to me about how until you actually saw it portrayed and rendered in a form that made it visual and three-dimensional you didn't even realize how um how tough a position this was i can remember first person shooter games i didn't play them but i remember the graphics and stuff way back in the mid 1990s how much of a step up is this in terms of a faithful rendering of what people uh at the time would have seen in that in that place and in that sphere so i think something that um

18:35 kind of modern computing power is enabling us to do um is i mean first of all video games are always representative they're always symbolic of obviously something that's happening um we can never quite capture the full historical reality of any conflict i mean mainly because it might not be something that players would be willing to put their time into playing you know a lot of uh combat as we as we both know um was huge amounts of waiting around or doing very very menial difficult tasks um however where we are able to symbolize things what what modern computing power lets us do is um represent them at a larger scale so for instance as you said dan pavlov's house this famous um soviet apartment building in stalingrad um previously when it's been portrayed in games it's been being portrayed at a compressed size um almost everything at half or a third scale and something that we've done um in our

19:33 particular game is just with modern computing power has enabled us to render this at the actual real scale um that it is in real life including sort of measurements for the apartment building and the square so i think what modern computing power is enabling us to do is increase the size of our representation um of these uh historic conflicts and obviously um something else that's quite novel and is becoming you know is growing by by really the year is the player count modern networking power the amount of information you can send over the internet is increasing as players get better access um to better internet um and the systems also become more sophisticated and so something we were quite quick on was doing a hundred players now that doesn't seem like a lot of players a lot of soldiers on a battlefield and it isn't um but it's a step up from 64 and 64 was a step up from 32 and 32 is a step up from 16 and 16 was

20:33 obviously a step up from from only being single player that is um not playing with other players around the world um and so what we're kind of looking into the future at is um the scale just getting bigger and bigger and bigger and bigger and obviously then um the mind starts to wander about uh how big could you go and what would that representation be like of of you know of these different battles and and just broader experiences generally so other than the increasing number of players that can be uh uh incorporated into a game what what sort of feedback are you getting from users in terms of what they like and what they'd like to see more of in other words when they give you a wish list for the next version what are they asking for i think um it's always a mixture it always depends on the player but i think for our title or at least any title trying to capture historical reality or or what people's idea of historical

21:31 reality is um it's always um to expand it to offer more fronts more battlefields but then it's obviously also to deepen the fidelity and what that can mean is it could mean um having realistic flamethrowers that project liquid fuel in the same way they did on the battlefield or it might mean um very very um complex simulations of uh armor penetration um and the way that different rounds and projectiles struck different armor platings and thicknesses um that's sort of where we're being pushed um within our kind of sub-genre of this sort of hardcore military historical shooter but obviously across gaming um we're expanding out in many many different ways um and obviously you know um very exciting and obviously also uh with some trepidation as well well let's talk about that part of it because uh as a guy who's been wargaming since the early 1970s there's a there's an abstraction to the traditional war gaming

22:39 that that sort of does away with the very thing that is the focus of of the fidelity first-person shooter games i mean when i'm playing uh a tank battle in the 1970s i might have uh 30 or 40 figures representing tanks but there's no real human beings there there's no one burning up there's uh when a tank destroys another tank it's almost as though it's an inanimate object you're playing a form of chess kind of uh that divorces you from you know it's it's strategy and tactics more than there's there's any sense of realism it seems to me that it is both the attraction and also like you said sort of the dicey interesting moral quandary area where the fidelity of the game especially at the ground level creates challenges and listen this has nothing to do specifically with your game i mean this goes since first-person shooters started it's been a question of um how much of this is uh is is all of the fun and adrenaline and

23:36 action uh with none of the consequences but uh for example i i here's the problem i have with this is and that's that i i don't do this personally so it's hard for me to put myself in the shoes of what people get out of this but this isn't a hugely uh and fabulously uh lucrative area of video games people love doing this whether they're shooting at zombies or trolls or or vampires or other people uh how do you as a designer walk this fine line between something that is intended to be uh both fun and potentially teach people about history and make them understand better uh what people were dealing with historically versus simply the enjoyment that comes with shooting another uh human being in a virtual world and watching their head explode uh look i think it's a that's a very con sorry they're starting to make the question so damn long no no no i know and i think it's a fantastic question

24:32 and i think it needs you know and and in return it needs a relatively detailed answer and i think look i think for better or worse um what we're doing with video games is is largely what um we've done with wargaming in so much as um as i sort of touched on we know that everything is representative everything is symbolic um now obviously we are getting far closer um within our symbolism in so much as within our game uh for instance and many other games obviously first person shooters the entire um game loop which is sort of what we call the um the experience that you're repeating in the game over and over and over again so sort of dribbling the ball and putting it in the goal and in football and in soccer um would be the gameplay loop of soccer in our gameplay loop you are using a gun depending on what role you play um to shoot another you know another represented human um with the aim of um taking a position

25:31 in order to win the game taking it taking a trench network or taking an artillery position um the thing is though um it is representative in so much as all the players within the game know that um failure means that they are to respawn so come back into the game um further back from the front line um the way that we sort of represent this is that um the player over the course of the game is representing um many many a weight of number um than just themselves and fundamentally the kind of end game conversations that you have in a game like ours and other first-person shooters um doesn't actually touch on the idea of or the joy of um the actual shooting another person and what it largely focuses on and i would almost say in the majority is the tactics and the strategy much like wargaming in achieving um a success over the enemy in the broader context of the battle um so in the same way that with

26:38 wargaming you might move a panzer unit into position in a way that your opponent didn't expect and and you're able to defeat um the opposing uh formation of the opposing unit um we're doing a very very similar thing that's that's sort of the the hook to the player um on the ground level in the game so i think um look i don't want to give a mealy-mouthed answer but i think that what the more that i've thought about it um the more we we're trying to set up these sort of strategic and tactical questions in the game um and obviously in doing so at an infantry level um and within an individualistic way for players who choose to play on kind of as kind of frontline infantry roles um that does involve obviously firing a weapon and firing it in anger at an enemy human target um however i would say that it's it um is and it sounds funny to say this but a very small part of of um and i'd almost argue uh

27:39 um almost an insignificant part of what makes um this genre tick and i think you can kind of see that in in other first-person shooter genres where um you may not even you know shooting a player may not even result in their death um the way it's represented on screen won't be that you know them them um blood pouring out and shot and falling over it'll just be their removal from the battlefield for them to come back later so much more of a sort of um a very obviously gamified version so i think that's kind of i think that's kind of the thing uh insomuch as players don't have much of an attention span if the soul object the sole pleasure the sole purpose is just to just to try and experience that that that um visceral idea of of killing someone um i think it's far more about the strategical and tactical maneuvering um that sees sort of long-term victory i mean that that's i think that's the best um sort of

28:38 explanation i can give of the genre um because i understand from the outset looking at it it is you know it seems like that is the the soul object um whereas i think that the thing that hooks most players is that greater strategic and tactical layer and that's certainly what we see in sort of the communities of people who follow these games a lot of the conversation does drill down um to very very very esoteric topics like um you know the the gear speed of particular vehicles enabling them to get to a certain point of the battlefield faster than the other people that sort of thing unless on um uh the the designed experience of of simulated um killing of the enemy if that makes sense it does because a lot of that uh follows from the earlier war games we used to play where you would talk about uh tank specifications and speeds and turning radiuses and how quickly the turret would would move things like so

29:36 i totally get all that i can't decide and i'd like to get your opinion on it because i've been swaying back and forth and i've certainly not thought about it for one bazillionth of the amount of time i'm sure you've thought about it i can't decide how i feel about the fidelity of um of the human damage right so when a gun or a grenade or anything does damage to a human being in the game a virtual human being i can't decide if you want to make it more graphic because that actually helps bring a reality into this that makes people think in other words the more graphic you make it the more you go oh this is a really nasty thing to get hit with i wouldn't want to be involved with this in real life or i sometimes go to the other extreme where i'm thinking okay then the bigger the splat of red ink that layers on the ground the more i'm getting a kick out of that is that how do we how do we deal with

30:27 the fidelity question and and the way that that impacts the player i mean one could argue i think that the more brutal you make it the more you help compensate for some of these other things we've been talking about the other side of it is the more brutal you brutal you make it maybe more of a kick the people who like that are getting out of it how do you guys measure that when you're trying to design this thing and they're talking about representations for example of what a grenade does if it explodes in your midsection and whatnot i mean i i it's got to be an interesting fly on the wall sort of moment in the room when you guys are designing these things it definitely is i mean i think and interestingly i think it actually comes down to sort of your philosophy about the preservation of history um which i i don't want to give a sort of politician's answer but um but but for us the way that we've

31:16 approached this is that we're trying to as best as possible um display to you the the best to the best of our knowledge what would happen in real life in kind of nearly every instance of what you encounter in the game um when you're making any piece of um media and video games obviously being no exception you're always making decisions about what you include because sort of nothing's there existing before you start so we have to build all the systems we have to build you know create all the character models um all of our soldiers we have to create even the look of the dirt on the ground and the way the trees sway and everything like that and i think you reach this really interesting conundrum as you have touched on where historically um and i think depiction of of um you know um the german forces uh nazism things like that very very contentious and extremely difficult um topics uh can be approached in many

32:19 different ways and and i think something we've tried to do is to present the recorded history without softening um without softening or doing anyone any favors by force but by deciding to curate um in a particular way one way or another and what i mean by that is we don't want to soften the violence of war because we feel that it would do a disrespect to the memories of those people who fought and died and we don't want to obviously don't want to encourage killing either but we felt that it's very important to depict here what happened when these people were given this weaponry and they fought each other um as a way i think of preserving this i mean and you see this um done um in in films which obviously have a much stronger narrative presence and have a much greater ability to kind of inform your your moral take on the events that are unfolding and obviously video games have a harder time with that because if you're making

33:32 a multiplayer game as we are it becomes extremely um difficult to have any narrative voices simply no no part in the game uh just as you would be watching a game of football um really you would need a commentator to give color to and story to the actions unfolding um on the screen in a way that lets you morally um connect with it and not just understand the plays as they were happening um so it's extremely fraught and and the way that we've approached uh this um attempt at preserving history is to do justice to the violence of war the violence of this conflict to not uh reward it but then also we do know that there is some element of people's reaction that is out of our control i mean that's that's a caveat um but but what we've found with our community and the people who play the game is that conversations about the violence within the game are actually um almost the last thing they comment on um

34:38 and and more what takes center stage is um an appreciation of the um the the minutia and the detail on on different weapons and different uniforms on vehicles um the layout of maps and things like that so it is it's an extremely fraught topic it's extremely difficult but i think for us our perspective of the history is to present it as it was and then let the players decide um whether this is horrendous or or or whatever um and not try and soften it for them um because we feel that this the violence of this needs to be needs to be understood i think in the same way that um someone like spielberg made very very concerted decisions within his portrayal in saving private ryan of the violence of war um to show the human impact on sev the the impact of the violence on the civilian population of france and that um really heartbreaking scene uh where vin diesel's character is shot by the german sniper and then also

35:39 we also see the returning fire on the german sniper as well and i think that you know it was interesting that spielberg decided to show that the horrendousness of that to the audience so that's sort of our approach to this um you know it may not be a perfect one um but we are really approaching it in in good faith from a from an historical perspective um and trying not to you know trying not to curate away from from the nastier side of it well it's interesting you went right where i was going to go to the spielberg type stuff because i was see and that's a perfect example of the artistic trade-offs because it was always my contention because that movie garnered such uh attention when it first came out for being so realistic and my critique was that it wasn't realistic enough and the fact that that the media thought that that was what war looked like when it was realistic was an example right there that it didn't

36:31 have a real idea of what real war was like and so i thought it should have been more vicious more graphic and the whole thing and yet uh spielberg in the same way you know we did a virtual reality first world war exhibit i did it with a bunch of other people and we had these meetings where we had the same kinds of questions coming up which is do you really want to make it as graphic and horrible as it was and if you did would anybody go to take part in it uh if if spielberg shows you what war really looks like does anybody go to the movie right or does it get an x rating so nobody can go to the movie i also want to point out that your game is part of a long history of a genre that people are very comfortable with right now so you shouldn't have to answer all these basic questions about first-person shooter things i'm interested in the idea though of taking this to the next level and one of

37:20 the things that your game does is is is push the boundaries of realism uh the feeling of a three-dimensional space where you're cooperating with other people i mean there's elements in this which are new i would think am i right in saying that would you say that this game pushes certain boundaries in terms of uh directions in the genre yeah i think it i think um it does definitely but i'd say you know like like everyone we're always standing on the shoulders of giants and the people who came before us and i think um in the context of video gaming i mean video games um to um blow the trumpet of the video game industry for a moment is you know is an art form um oh absolutely and it's yeah and it's just it's it's a very young art form as well um i mean it's only really existed you could argue sort of for 40 or 50 years at you know at best at a big stretch and only really becoming popular um to sort of

38:15 majoritarian context i think in the last 10 to 15 years it certainly changed hugely from when i was young to now um the number of people who play them and engage with them um and like all art forms i think that it it's always evolving on itself it's always trying to develop on itself and i think we want you know we we're one in a long line of people who have been doing that but but you're definitely right in so much as um i think uh we're evolving towards teamwork i think um our game in particular is appealing more towards an older player base one who's not just interested in being very very good at aiming but is also really interested in communication um in community itself in working with larger and larger groups of players and coordinating and finding success in that coordination and i think we're kind of seeing this across the whole video game genre games that you know 10 15 years ago you

39:14 would think were completely commercially in non-viable i would argue we would be in that category as well um have started to take um a greater um portion of the market um you know an ever-growing market um and it's been very very interesting to kind of see that happen and it's very very interesting also to think about the future and where it might go um and and i think the best guess anyone has is to look at what we have now and just to imagine what what happens if it gets bigger and pushes further in that direction pushes further in the direction of teamwork it pushes further in the direction of scale strategy planning and that's just for our genre you know i think that um the same can be said of every genre within video gaming that that it will find new ways to iterate on itself um i mean virtual reality alone i think is going to have an extremely significant impact i mean dare i say it on humanity um once

40:15 they solve sort of the issues around um getting one into every household i think that's going to be extremely interesting to see where it goes so yeah the video game genre um just seems to continue to iterate um at an absolutely breakneck pace and so something i guess that we were doing that was new um you know now may no longer be new as of as of you know a year ago a week ago a day ago so i brought up some of the traditional and maybe almost stereotypical downsides of the genre but let's talk about some of the upsides uh wargaming was something that helped deepen and amplified and accelerated my enjoyment and interest in history i can only imagine i and you're going to know so much more about this than i uh i can only imagine the same effect that this is having with young people coming up today who might never think of cracking a book or going down and and doing any research themselves on history until something

41:12 like this prompted the spark in them of interest do you do you see this as i mean if if old-fashioned wargaming with miniature figures that you hand-painted yourself could have that effect on me uh do you think that this is something that becomes an introductory path for for people to become more interested in the period being displayed and that they're learning about as they go through these things definitely i mean this is this is actually something extremely close to home for me so um during during the 90s the early 90s when i was growing up my father would spend um nights relaxing after he got work home from work um by painting little uh figurines of the scots gray cavalry um at waterloo and he had basically a tabletop of of waterloo set up and i would watch him paint these small figurines and i don't think he ever got around to actually wargaming them he just really enjoyed the catharsis of

42:07 of painting these these tiny miniatures um and from there he then you know sort of um age of empires i think came out in 1997 and 1998 age of empires was really one of the first sort of very accessible historical games it was an extremely vibrant game it told the story of genghis khan of uh joan of arc um of um his name escapes me the holy roman emperor i'm not doing a very good job of it right now but um charlemagne charlemagne charlemagne excuse me but um this game um my dad showed me this game and he took an interest in it obviously for his love because of his love of history um and he introduced me to this game and and this game introduced me to the stories of these extremely um iconic but very um uh dispersed historical figures um and i would have been only kind of eight nine or ten and and it just gripped me entirely um and so it's an interesting uh microcosm of my dad going from war gaming

43:15 or at least um painting and appreciating all the miniatures uh to video games and then that being directly given to me and i also should say that you know he still paints these figurines to this day and i i i love um working with him on uh with them with him on them um and i myself have done some wargaming i was a big sort of warhammer fan as well um and so it is interesting how that sort of transmitted through um and then from age of empires um i learned the stories of these key figures um some better than others as we both know with charlemagne but um i then started playing other historical games that's actually the first first person shooter game i i started playing was a game called battlefield 1942 obviously a world war ii game um not dissimilar to our own and then call of duty which was a world war ii game as well um and in those games i just picked up this extreme interest in in world war ii um as a as a period

44:16 as an historical period and and all the um interesting things that took place but then obviously all the tragedy um within it as well but it was this direct transmission from war gaming um to video gaming and then um a lot of that has then shaped and and directly inspired what what we've done at my company with our game um and it's also inspired the way that we try and capture these events as well because just as i learned something you know approximating the historical record through the games that came before i'd like to kind of pay that service to the people who end up engaging with our game so i i definitely think there's a direct transmission through there and i think um as well you know we're seeing um war movies and historical movies particularly take a back seat to other genres of films i think the superhero genre has sort of become the new war movie uh genre if you like um and there's there's obviously

45:13 exceptions to that rule but um i think more and more so now young people especially are engaging with history through games and so we see ourselves as in a small way able to contribute to some kind of understanding of these conflicts well first of all i'm i must be closer to your dad's age because i also have thousands of those miniature figures that i've painted myself from the old days that i still have i also remember the very first computer i ever bought i bought for only one reason and that that was there was a game called the ancient art of war that i had to play and we're talking about the mid 1980s here so as a as a guy who had been in the let's call it the analog world of war gaming the the the potential to take that into the realm of computer games uh was absolutely uh i mean probably the first 15 computer games i ever owned were all war games or variations of war games and in fact

46:08 uh one of my favorite ones to play right now the field of glory games are all nothing more than an attempt by somebody who certainly played those same games with miniature figures like i did to take that game and and turn it into an actual computer game where you don't need to worry about finding opponents as you know from your dad's experience the hobby itself isn't it's a hardcore hobby in the sense that there's almost an obsession to it and if you're a young person it's an extremely expensive hobby to break into uh the entry level requirements are huge whereas with a computer game it is uh you know uh maybe under the christmas tree you can have it there and then all of a sudden without any more uh investment than that you can become somebody who's learning about the past through an immersive sort of an experience so i mean i definitely do see the similarities can you talk to me a little

46:59 bit not not shifting gears here but i'm interested in the game and trying to figure out how you deal with um you know the second world war is famously more of a good guy bad guy war if you go to the first world war uh you can do a much better i think example where anybody could potentially be the good guys depending on the point of view you have how does one incorporate especially since as you said you lack the ability to incorporate a heavy duty narrative uh to the whole thing i mean i i guess i'm just thinking i would not be the kind of guy to play the german forces just because of my own inherent biases um how does that i mean if you're doing stalingrad some might make a case and i think we did in a podcast once that from the american or the british point of view both those sides are necessarily uh fraught with uh what's the word i'm looking for here uh moral quandaries might be a good way to put it and i know

47:49 that in germany you can't show things like swastikas and all that how does one navigate the difficult terrain of the morality in a war that is so dominated by the moral questions that is um you know look that's the key question in so much as um us coming to this subject matter uh it is certainly difficult and it's certainly one that we constantly um think deeply about uh and obviously i mean so so at a baseline um we have removed um all of the um nazi iconography within the game that means um uh obscuring uh swastikas um and other uh imagery like that on uniforms and things so we have this incredibly difficult balance of trying to um give these soldiers the actual uniform they fought in um which often is not what you would think it would look like i think everyone has an opinion of german soldiers as wearing a red armband obviously you know almost like a ceremonial outfit but a lot of them were wearing you know

48:57 sort of the equivalent of a wool jacket some some pretty rough boots and obviously wool pants but but nevertheless we're trying to portray them as they as they were ideally within the theater that they were fighting and as accurately as possible while also making sure that we don't you know obviously we abide by german law um and then just out of sensitivity also obscure um the swastika uh more generally um we've also currently made the decision that we won't be including the ability to dress as the ss in the game which is extremely which is you would think would be a very easy decision to make but for a lot of sort of the historical purists um people get into all sorts of different difficult conversations about uh well what do you do about the nkvd you know obviously stalin's secret police yeah yeah yeah as you said the attorney you know they themselves did not have um clean hands and then obviously you

49:57 then have another portion of of people who might say okay i they they agree that both um the the nazis and um some elements of the soviet forces engaged in this stuff but what about the british in this location or the americans in this location or so on and so forth so it does become an extremely um again a very difficult kind of landscape to maneuver through um we try to do it with sensitivity by obviously removing specific um imagery alongside also wanting to do that to comply with with german law we try i think we've avoided thus far including other types of injury the hammer and sickle and things like that when it comes to the actual infield the on the battlefield type experience i mean no no part of the game is set up to enable you to do anything other than just sort of play the game against another force um we don't have any civilians on the battlefield we don't have any anything that could add uh or give

51:03 players you know an opportunity to you know have questionable elements let's just say um we're just very keen to focus you on the frontline combat experience of those soldiers um and the and i think the the kind of conundrum we've had is that if you didn't want to portray any uh you know any morally questionable people i mean morally questionable people within war you you really can't portray it at all um and i don't want to give a sort of cop-out answer there but i mean no no i actually agree i agree with that actually yeah and so obviously well okay so if if we either can't try it at all or we can portray it then how sensitively do we try to portray it and and for us it's as i kind of touched on earlier it's really about the strategic and tactical competitive elements of this um rather than than any of the um ideology associated with it it's it's it's not present anywhere in the game i think the strongest thing that we've

52:01 got in the game is some is some of the gr writing on the wall the graffiti that some of the soviet soldiers wrote in stalingrad um that was sort of denouncing um fascists um i think that's about as political as we've got in the game and that was largely as a set dressing because it was so iconic within stalingrad um you just saw tons of posters everywhere um and tons of graffiti everywhere of these of these soldiers trading insults back and forth and i think that's kind of as close as we've got to depicting anything um especially ideological within the game obviously one could argue that depicting them at all is ideological but as we've said um you know we would really you would then create a situation where you really could never depict historical events um to some degree um i think he becomes very difficult i'm of two minds about the zone it's the same thing with the violence i think i

52:58 and i haven't thought about it anywhere near as long as you have but but the same side of me that suggests that maybe uber violence is and treating this as realistic as possible helps eliminate some of the downside i feel the same way about like when we would have world war ii second world war is always the way afraid when we were having second world war tank battles back in the 1970s i guarantee you people painted swastikas on the top of their tanks for aircraft recognition as as was done and so there's a part of me that thinks that and i understand from a corporate standpoint and german law and all those other things you have really no choice but there's a part of me that thinks that perhaps and i can go both ways because most people you could say uh would not be affected negatively by incorporating hammer and sickles or swastikas or all those things but the same small group of people that might be

53:47 negatively affected by being able to go around shooting other virtual human beings might be affected by having swastikas and playing the ss but i don't know if you can create whole game systems uh based on what two or three or four percent of the users might react you know in in opposition the way everybody else reacts i think most people would be fine with all those other things and i think it might be a more a more faithful example of history i mean to incorporate a nazi german army and not show swastika seems weird right i mean i understand why it doesn't happen but there's a part of you that goes well if we're trying to teach about the war and if we're trying to make this an introduction to a fascinating period in human history which involves some of these extreme ideologies if you take the extreme ideologies out haven't you left you know haven't you left this giant black hole that is a huge part of the reason that

54:39 this fighting is happening to begin with i mean it is a really tough thing and i remember having similar discussions when it came to the uh immersive uh virtual reality experience connected to realism whereas as a certain point it becomes how do you how do you create a faithful reproduction of a negative human experience but not so much that it turns people off from wanting to participate in it um and so i think i think there's this fine line you guys have to walk and then you add the corporate thing and then you add the german law kind of thing but it does seem like there would be something inherently missing in what is an ideological war if you take out the ideology it seems like you guys would have to design around i guess i'm having a real admiration for your ability to design around those um those issues yeah it is you you're 100 correct though in so much as if we are trying to portray

55:30 things as best we can according to the historical record i mean i commented in two minds and i'm sure you do the same and i mean you've already just said that you do the swastika is i i would argue one of the most powerful icons in human history at least modern human history nearly everyone in the world knows what that symbol means um and the suffering it caused uh you know and the suffering that it continues to cause i mean and and um the echo the echoes of it through history um and so to show it is um to show it will evoke a response either way and i'd be concerned if someone didn't have a response to seeing it um and the same can be said for other symbols of course but the swastika is a uniquely um or a near uniquely um powerful one uh within the the time in history that we find ourselves from our perspective the the way that we've sort of felt about it is that um our purpose is as the type of game that

56:34 we are we're not a single player game we're unable to tell story we're able to guide the player through narrative um means that we don't have the ability to kind of give it the proper context that we've you know that we think it it needs um and as a result we are happy to to slightly you know to obscure it uh within our game because we are focused at the end of the day the object of the game is to um maneuver across the battlefield using all the weaponry in the same uniforms both allied and axis forces in order to achieve a tactical strategic victory over the other force and so we felt that you know look this isn't this isn't if we're not going to attempt to tell the story at all then we're best to err on the side of caution um and maybe we might be wrong in that you know and i'm sure as well that many people will know that there's always a line where you can draw that i mean you could say why have them dressed up

57:30 as as german soldiers at all or or you know um you know there's always a line and that is 100 i think subjective there's no objective rule to this and that's that's extremely tough for us um because boy would life be easier if there was an objective rule um but yeah it is it is subjective and it's kind of the approach that we've taken is that if our object is is not to tell the full story of this um you know of this conflict ideologically um then you know i think we're better to er on the side of caution with this how does the user base feel i mean it's one thing for the people in the corporate uh side of things to worry about all these things because that's your job but the people who are only concerned with either the fun element or the competitive element or the historical element or all of those wrapped up together who give you the feedback on things you can change or things they're not happy

58:24 with or what should be in the next version um do they have an opinion one way or the other i'm sure swastikas and hammers and sickles and all those kinds of things have been raised before is there is there an opinion out there one way or the other from them there's no i wouldn't say there's a majority opinion i would actually say that the historical the more historical uh or more historically oriented people i should say or the purest uh within our particular community um tend to focus much more on battlefield history rather than sort of ideological history um there are some people i would say it's probably less than one percent who are who who would really like to see it's very important to them that you capture the full um you know you capture the full picture with the inclusion of swastikas or the ss but i would say actually that more of the historical feedback that we get is more around um

59:19 some of the concessions we've had to make due to it being a video game rather than any kind of ideological censorship so the things that they're concerned with are more like exactly as you said the turret rotation speed on particular tanks um they're concerned about um within our game um uh we've had a preponderance of automatic weapons with that sorry we've had we've had probably a few too many automatic weapons on the side of the germans um at the unit level um which they would love us to kind of dial back and we're going to make a move to dial back and keep it more um focused around the car 98k which is the german bolt action rifle which was the weapon the majority of soldiers used so a lot of this a lot of the sort of historical oriented criticism i think um comes down to um more of the battlefield and the strategic and the tactical elements rather than anything kind of ideological which is you know which is interesting

1:00:19 but i suppose um now that i think about it suiting to what we're actually trying to capture as an end outcome what's interesting is you wouldn't have any of these problems in the majority of conflicts in human history it's it's it's the nature of the second world war and maybe some of the uh the conflicts during the cold war that happened after that those are the only ones i can think of that would give you any trouble at all i mean if you're going back to genghis khan's conquest none of this none of this enters into the equation at all so you're actually getting trapped in the creases of the leftover you know ideological and moral fumes of that conflict itself aren't you yeah exactly right i mean and you you know i never want to be insensitive i mean in so much as you're right like there aren't a lot of um sort of i think it was was it ancient mesopotamia or um the the location of modern day iraq

1:01:11 that that genghis khan sacked uh he sacked a lot of places he a lot of places true he was he was if there was one thing he was very good at it was it was death death and destruction um but no i think i think you're right i think it's the proximity to this and i think also i mean even just in diving so much into the history we've really been so saturated in world war ii history there is something unique about the forces um at play i mean all of them are ideologically very different roughly sort of capitalist communist fascist um and i mean i there's just something um extremely uh not outlandish but eccentric about them and particularly the german forces naming their vehicles after sort of predatory animals it just the fact that the the this terrifying tank was called the tiger tank whereas sort of the americans obviously named them after generals um there were these these decisions that heightened that ideological difference

1:02:16 and then obviously you know the extremity of the nazi ideology and the extremity obviously you look at sort of um a lot of more and the famines within um soviet russia and it's it's just such a huge scale of human suffering and it's such an it's such a recent um event really relative obviously to um khan that i think yeah we are we there's still you know sensitivity is required um to handle these issues but you're right i mean i think obviously people will have political differences about uh the us involvement in vietnam um and depicting a vietnam you know a vietnam war conflict but far far far less fraught and far far far less clear cut um on the surface than obviously world war ii it's it's a tough one it's an extremely tough one um and obviously all war to some degree uh you know and the way that we view them is written by the victors um but i think it's very difficult to say that um

1:03:23 yeah it's it's very difficult to inject more nuance into a conversation about world war ii i think some people might say that those very questions are what makes it so compelling so i think i think that it's all wrapped up into this package that is the second world war and the fact that i had somebody say to me that they thought that the second world war was more interesting than the first world war specifically because of the ideological questions that we were just discussing so before i let you go what i'd like to know uh just as a guy who's an expert in the field um i remember playing the art of ancient art of war in the 1980s and the difference between that and what you're putting out is is it's not one generation it's multi-generations where do you see this going in like 10 years 15 years any any any clues on what what lies around the uh the development bend look this is this is um i wouldn't say

1:04:11 it's a million dollar question it's probably a trillion dollar question for the industry um and i think that you know depending on your outlook um it's either utopian or dystopian to some degree and obviously the truth nearly always lies somewhere in the middle um i think that we'll start to see uh virtual reality um come into play as i said earlier if they solve sort of the the delivery issue the ability for people to play it without having to pay a huge amount of money um we will very quickly start to see uh people playing our type of game in virtually in vr space in 3d moving your body around actually having to hold a weapon up i mean i think more generally and more broadly uh video games um uh is in an explosion of growth at the moment because um we're seeing a generation that grew up with them um age through the population uh so obviously you know um many generations uh currently never

1:05:16 ever had games when they were younger and we're seeing this we're seeing what it looks like for the first time for instance for um you know people of all ages for instance to read books you know and so much as there was a time a long time ago where books were the new thing um or television was a new thing or or film was the new thing and what we're seeing with video games is is um an advancing generation of people who grew up with them um and so i think that it's only going to get bigger but i also think that it it places huge you know burden of responsibility on people making these sort of digital environments um to safeguard or try and build systems that um people enjoy that don't exploit them that don't um you know trying to present the best form of entertainment that we can um in as ethical a way as we can and try and figure out what that looks like when more and more people's time is

1:06:18 spent in these in these digital environments so um i know that sounds sort of very kind of um doom saying um if you think about it from the perspective of everyone spending tons and tons of hours playing video games but i also think that you know video games have um amazing potential to connect people who might be struggling um you know perhaps uh to make friends um in their physical surroundings people connect with each other online they share great memories online they get to know each other more and more and more we're seeing virtual reality experiences enable people to exercise um within vr you know it's not uncommon now for um people to meet their future um husband and wife or partner online uh in games so it is extremely varied um and it's and i think it's all moving faster than anyone can really keep up with uh but i definitely think that vr is probably the place to watch because

1:07:20 um as soon as if anyone's ever tried that it's it's quite an experience and it can often trick you um psychologically your eyes can kind of deceive you obviously um and it'll be very very interesting to see what kind of experiences move into into vr whether you know shooting games or whether it's strategy games i mean it'll be all of them but but which really pick up with with um the players so look it's it's um yeah it's it's a big road ahead uh and i just uh you know i'll be working and i think many people will to try and um make it the best experience possible whatever whatever that looks like i think this this blends nicely into the into the overall question of the development of war games in the modern era and if you could have told me in the mid 1970s that someday this would be i mean like i said i went and bought a computer just so i could play a game that looks like it's tic-tac-toe

1:08:19 compared to the games out there now so um i appreciate you taking the time to answer these really tough questions and to bring us sort of into the development room a little bit and help us understand the kinds of uh things that you guys were talking over and i can speak from experience that that was exact same kinds of conversations we had designing the first world war game is is these trade-offs these morally ambiguous areas how you portray negative things and how how faithful you have to be to stuff so that you're not so that you're not giving a fake or or uh imprecise or or um or or something that that's that's a fantasy of a reality if that makes sense showing something that that's actually a fantasy game portraying itself as history and i think trying to get it right is actually the key to the whole thing uh the one thing we didn't talk about and that's worth just bringing up here at the very end

1:09:10 is the interplay between all of the other people one of the things you'd mentioned to me was the fact that a lot of people in this game are actually not tip of the spear people but you're actually showing uh how many people are involved in keeping the logistics going and all the that you know you'd mention teamwork and i think that conjures up this idea of okay i'll go around this hill you go around this other side but you've actually got people sort of operating in the supply chain too don't you yeah that's right that's that's exactly right i mean i think as i sort of said a little bit earlier about this sort of aging um generation of gamers i mean myself being being right there um you know when you're younger you're you're you're extremely good at you know um twitch mechanics of your your twitch fibers the muscles enable you to track things with your hand to eye coordination at a incredible rate um and so a lot of video

1:10:04 games you know uh were thought to be sort of the fear of just of young people and then you sort of grow out of them and what we've kind of seen um is that as as gamers have aged um the types of things that stimulate us and interest us sort of age with us obviously which seems obvious now but i don't think but i don't think it has been really um and so as a result of this you've started to see an uptick in in games like ours and so much as we move the experience away from just the hand-to-eye coordination the success of that um to sort of strategy planning talking to one another communicating um and and really waiting success more towards that so yeah for instance in our game you can sort of drive supplies around um most of the game drop supplies off people can build infrastructure you know and as we know um all wars are fought by the people in the rear echelon by the the supply chain is the red bull express

1:11:03 i think was the famous uh yes the u.s uh supply chain with the gmc trucks um and so i mean also i mean it ties nicely into sort of where we think this will go i wouldn't be shocked to see these systems expand so you may end up um you know delivering ammunition or driving supplies or giving ranges to the artillery and never even firing your weapon you might use a binoculars to spot uh targets for the artillery um and so this is sort of the way that the genre is expanding as well um in so much as people really using sort of their grey matter instead of just sort of muscle and reflex and reaction um which i think is you know i think is really exciting i mean as you know uh so few people in war actually proportionally fired their weapon in anger at the enemy um and so i think it's kind of interesting from a historical perspective to it's certainly a far more realistic picture to show that people actually had

1:12:01 to deliver the ammo to the front line troops i can't remember what the stat was i think it was something like 15 percent of frontline of troops made up the front line it's different it's different in every army yes 17 to 1 in the us in the second world war i think it was um you got me it's funny though you got me thinking of things i never thought about which is for example uh that my generation probably that's probably a good age i'm 55. we're the first generation who ever grew up with video games and so how do you write video games to intrigue 55 year olds you know it's a whole different thing than anyone had to worry about in the old days when nobody over a certain age played computer games so um well fascinating future uh in in the offing for the uh for the for the design for geriatric video games well well you say that but i mean that that's really what i'm thinking about i mean i think it could be

1:12:53 it i don't want to say it too soon but it could be a very bright future for people you know for for i think you know you look at sort of um uh elderly people and and obviously um isolation is is um tragic and is really difficult for elderly people it's difficult for everyone and obviously even more so um for elderly people and i do wonder what um the experience of being an elderly person would be like if i was in constant communication with a group of friends a buddy of mine once said we're never going to be the isolated older people in the rest home we're going to have much more to do than people who just stared out the window all day i don't know if that's true but certainly with things like this you could see that this doesn't have to be anything that you ever have to give up entirely necessarily if your health if you if your health will let you do it um exactly yeah max thank you so much

1:13:49 for coming on the program i wish you uh continued success with this it's a heck of an achievement just to see visually what you're talking about here and certainly to work through all of the ins and outs of the questions we've been discussing here um thank you so much for coming on the show oh thanks so much dan and i mean just a huge huge fan so this is just a wonderful wonderful chance and and fantastic questions and a great chat thank you so much for having me on anytime take care buddy that was a fun trip sort of down war gaming memory lane for me uh if you were interested by the way in hell let loose want to know more about it you can go to hellletloose.com and uh i said when we started the hardcore history addendum feed that we were going to be able to use it as a way to uh try to explore some more of these his history-related tangents at times or very sort of niche history for example i am

1:14:39 going to do a boxing show someday i'm going to do a punk rock show someday and i realize that's not sort of an appeal to the entire audience but i'm hoping that when we someday have an archive i don't know how old i'll have to be given my release pace but an archive of a bunch of hardcore history addendum shows some will be crowd pleasers across the board and others will be these ones where you know you probably would skip by but a person who's really interested in that subject would be really jacked to have a conversation you know we we always used to joke that there's no place in broadcasting for people who are interested in 1950s spanish language science fiction comic books but if somebody did a podcast or a show about that you know how jacked they'd be to have something so narrowly targeted to their interests so i kind of feel like i want to throw some of those shows into the addendum

1:15:25 feed in any case if you want to stay on top of whenever we manage to get something out make sure you follow us on uh twitter at hardcore history and i hope to be talking to you all again soon stay safe everyone don't forget you can buy and instantly download past episodes of classic hardcore history right from the website go to dan carlin.com to get the shows

Questions about this episode

Who speaks in "EP14 The Game of War"?

Dan Carlin (Host), Maximilian Rhea (Guest).

What is "EP14 The Game of War" about?

The discussion centers on modern strategy and tactical war games, highlighting an interview with Maximilian Ria, a founder of a company known for historical-themed games. The conversation delves into the development processes and challenges behind creating these games, drawing parallels to past experiences in war game development, while also exploring the evolution of the genre and personal…

What is mentioned in this Dan Carlin episode?

14 people, works and ideas are mentioned, including Hell Let Loose, Maximilian Rhea, World War I, Black Matter Studios, Stalingrad, H.G. Wells. Each one on this page links to its own page with every episode that mentions it.

How long is "EP14 The Game of War"?

The episode runs 1 h 16 min; the transcript is about 14,071 words in 80 timestamped sections.

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