Originally Posted by Zichao

But I also understand why there are a million games where you play an infantryman and none (as far as I'm aware) where you're in charge of the supply chain.

There are quite a few in the RTS and city-builder genres. Like in Pharaoh, if you want soldiers you have to have enough housing of the right class, and you have to have copper, and then a workshop that produces weapons, and a shield maker that needs hides, and chariot makers that need wood and horses and so on. Eventually you get to field an army, and then you use it to defend your own city or attack enemy cities. And all the while juggling this with sufficient export production to maintain your trade balance, paying tribute to the king, handling the storage and distribution of the annual harvest, keeping public order and happyness, and building a pyramid etc.

On a more personal scale, The Guild 2 has as a startup businessman or -woman in middle ages Europe, setting up a workshop, producing goods, buying more and bigger businesses and homes, politicking with the town council, getting married, trying to get your competitors thrown in jail, or simply sending thugs to burn down their shops, etc.

Yeah, I suppose, but it's still not exactly the same thing. I guess the best equivalent would be a super fast tetris level with a soundtrack of everyone yelling at you for being incompetent.

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Well I dunno, you don't get much more supply chain-y than actual supply chains. Frex, in Pharoah, maybe some of your potters fall sick, so your pottery production fouls up, so a bunch of workers have to travel further to get their pottery from stores, so the wood production breaks down, so your exports fail, so you can't import copper, so you can't make soldiers.

Admittedly these are rather more business oriented than say supplying troops in the field, But if there was a game that did that, I'm sure there would be players for it. In fact there is a kinda analogy, in that in some of the RTS's you can hand base building and tech buying to one player while the rest of the team concentrates on fighting. In any online game its very easy to have people yelling at you for one thing or another.

Although the market is dominated by FPS's where you run around with guns, there are players for nearly any niche activity you can imagine.

Well admittedly I've never played any of that, but I don't think that at current levels of technology any game could match the level of frustration, boredom, stress and fatigue that you get in real life. Even in really sophisticated games there are limits on what you can do and what can happen to you.

That's partly why I hate those negotiation sim things that I was forced to do so many of last year. It's nothing like real life so why bother pretending? Still, everyone else liked them so maybe I'm just too picky.

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Well, nothing beats joining the army and fighting real wars but, otoh, you can get nearly as much adrenaline rushes from paintball for a fraction of the risks/fear and nearly none of the boredom...

The point of a game is not to reproduce exactly real life experiences. It's to distill it and usually distill its challenges.

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I guessed that what coming. It's a fair point but when you're an infantryman you know that what's coming next is either an IED, a suicide bomb, or some potshots from the local militia, and you deal with it by either running or shooting. If you're dealing with supplies the problem could be pretty much anything, anywhere, and there's an infinite number of different responses.

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No doubt - although there is a science to supply chain management, with formulas and stuff... - and personally I have little love for most RTS. I did like Civ and SimCity, though but they're not exactly supply chain centric.

My point is that, if a game bores or stress you and even unduly frustrates you, either it's a bad game or you're a problem player...

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A game is an entertainment, so it should never produce frustration or boredom. That's bad design. But stress and fatigue are both valid, and many games produce them. In fact I find command stance games and RTS's far more stressful and fatiguing than FPS's, for the most part. Playing infantry games, you might have patches where nothing much is happening, you're moving to position or lying in wait, but as the commander you're on alert every second. Those games certainly can impose stress and leave you fatigued, but in a good way, like a sport. However quite a few games that have optional commander positions have trouble getting people to take the job, precisely because it is in a sense harder work. Most people will only do a few games in the command seat before needing to take a break, and I've had them leave me wrung out and almost trembling.

Real life combat can be just as boring as logistics, as the famous saying about aerial combat has it, "long periods of extreme boredom punctuated by short periods of extreme fright". No game will reproduce that in any context. But just because they are not perfect reproductions of reality doesn't meant that can't succesfully abstract out the dynamics of a situation and isolate them for closer study, as it were. Games, in a sense, are pocket universes, and just as valid as the real one if not as extensive. Games aren't just trivial; with a typical human-on-human game, they replicate real combat in certain specific ways; even without genuine fear and so on, the players did use their tools and strive their utmost to achieve victory by implementing their own plans and frustrating those of the enemy. The context may be fake, but the conflict is perfectly real.

A game would have to be very badly designed indeed to be nothing like real life. But no game will ever be complete enough to teach you everything about real life