Ava Jarvis: BattleLore and the Place of Fantasy

"When I examine myself and my methods of thought, I come to the conclusion that the gift of fantasy has meant more to me than my talent for absorbing positive knowledge." — Albert Einstein

Of late I've been playing with my Wii quite a bit. One of the games I've been obsessively playing is The Legend of Zelda: Twilight Princess, but it's not because I like adventure/fighting games. It's because I like the bobbing fishing so far and want to get to the bit where there is lure fishing, even though it means going down an uncomfortable road for me that will give me serious headaches. It's fishing in a world of spirits and magic, gods and twilight creatures, and yet it is entirely more satisfying to fish there than it is to do so in the only current Wii fishing game.

How does this apply to BattleLore? Read on.

Fishing in Twilight Princess is a strange joy, not one you would expect in a fantasy environment, and certainly not a fantasy video game. You can pull out your simple bobbing lure rod and fish just about anywhere—almost any river, lake, or sacred pools in the realms of nature gods. The feeling is realistic without being tiresome; you really do have to pull back on that Wii remote, and you really do have to wind in your line when lure fishing. There's weird bait later on that you can complete tasks for, smack other critters for, or dig up in your wolf form. Your catch is stuff like Ordonian catfish, and there are all kinds of lures, including the treasured frog lure. You have a little fishing log too. People love the fishing in the Zelda games, apparently, and it's at a head in Twilight Princess.

Then there's Rapala Tournament Fishing, a realistic fishing game. It doesn't use the controls very well, is by turns too sensitive and too slow, has very boring and small and, above all, samey environments to boat around, doesn't look nice, and has so many Rapala lures in the box that chosing one is like trying to get through the damn sewers in the Twilight Realm. The fish bite everywhere; there isn't even a point to boating to different parts of the tiny lakes. There is nothing to unlock, which makes it feel less competetive even though it's supposed to be about tournament fishing. I have no doubts that if Tournament Fishing had a more creative team that wasn't hampered by the need to display what appears to be the entire Rapala catalog, it would have been an excellent title.

Imagination is the key difference here. Or, if you like it in blunter terms, the freedom of fantasy.

"I like nonsense; it wakes up the brain cells. Fantasy is a necessary ingredient of living." — G.K. Chesterton

Fantasy is not just in the realm of imagination, it is the realm of imagination. Whether you're a patent office clerk fantasizing about travel at the speed of light and the resulting weird time effects, or tinkering with stuffing fishing into the world's largest fantasy video game, it's all make-believe. The mere idea that you are operating in a fantasy world lets you free your creativity into outlets that it might not otherwise squirrel into, even if the result does not contain giant spiders or elves. Fantasy does not hamper you with it-can't-be's; instead, it lets you explore, fully, the it-could-be's.

Now take this to the realm of BattleLore and the other more realistic Commands & Colors games—Ancients, Memoir '44, and others.

Without question, BattleLore not only is the most complex C&C game, but is almost certainly going to stay that way. Its competitor in out of the box strategy, Ancients, cannot duplicate the multiple Lore Masters and their special terrain and effects. Its competitor in explorative expansions, Memoir '44, does not have as much potential for variety, what with BattleLore's very diffferent races, larger-than-life heroes, and a dangerous multitude of creatures coming up. In any fantasy wargame, there's more range for the imagination; we're never going to see aircraft carriers with ice breath, or half-animal foot, or air/ground calvalry, but we see it in games like BattleLore and Wizard Kings in the form of ice dragons, were-armies, and pegasi units. Few fantasy games are going to be realistic, but when I'm gaming or reading I want to explore beyond the mundane.

One might think that fantasy would lead to a certain level of garishness—the stuff of the impossible, things that make you scratch your head and go "wha?", and sometimes it does. But we are not wholly rational creatures. At many levels of our thinking, it doesn't matter that we've just thrown in our line with weird wriggling purple bait into some fantastical temple pool and are hoping for something other than greengill pike; what does matter is whether things "feel" right, and that's why the poorly designed Rapala game is much less captivating than the Zelda version, despite the former's greater variety in lures and fish species. And if we're going to go beyond the mundane, fantasy is what often feels right, even if it's downright wrong. It's difficult to believe in technology that will cause trees to spontaneously reach out and whomp nearby units, but it somehow feels more "right" that a BattleLore priest could do it, even though we know that such priests don't exist in real life.

(And looking at it from the other side, we see butter on toast as a solid reality. I can't think of anything that "feels" more real and right, apart from waffles with strawberry sauce, yet we live in a universe where stars explode and galaxies rip each other apart in a dance that lasts hundreds of millions of years. We make our own reality.)

"Fantasy is an exercise bicycle for the mind. It might not take you anywhere, but it tones up the muscles that can. Of course, I could be wrong." — Terry Pratchett

Mind you, it's entirely possible to take fantasy ideas and make them droll, which is where I think fantasy takes a bad rap. After Tolkien, there were any number of imitators who added little that was new, and made the world of high fantasy into a land of clichés rather than a world of wonder. It's the kind of thing that makes people smack their foreheads at yet another fantasy game, because it's assumed that the fantasy will be merely a theme coat on something that might just as well be real, we're so familiar with how the clichés map. True, wild fantasy, on the other hand, goes beyond reality and introduces the wonder of things we see only in our strangest dreams. Zelda's fishing is, in a way, only partly fantasy, and perhaps that's why it's successful—there's enough weird to enjoy, but enough familiar to feel real. Yet even this would pale if done repeatedly, over and over. I tend to think of the rest of Twilight Princess as a break between rounds of fishing, rather than the other way around, that keeps it from getting too boring.

And this is where outright fantasy can bring the magic of replayability, something we are all concerned about when it comes to boardgames. Consider, for a moment, the pure Wii golfing game Super Swing Golf. This is no Tiger Woods PGA Tour, but a game full of strange items to unlock, psychedelic courses with windmills and mushrooms and battle tanks, and multiple fanciful characters to play with, each with their own idiosyncracies. It's addictive in a way that other golf games aren't, and golf is very addictive to the right kind of mind. Now think of the Lore Masters in BattleLore. They all differ from each other in terms of the composition of the Lore cards they can play, giving you such distinctly different advantages that you must carefully consider how to balance your council given your position and general strategy. Whereas there isn't much difference between leaders and Alexander the Great in Ancients (nor should there be in such a game). Additionally, many wargames live and die on the number of scenarios available, with the C&C series no exception, but BattleLore makes even just 10 scenarios more replayable due to the wildly varying composition of your council, including creatures like the Earth Elemental or the Hill Giant.

I really love BattleLore. Up until then, only Ancients promised the most strategy, and only Memoir '44 promised the most variety. And now you get both; although the increased strategy of BattleLore owes much to the insane variety it can produce, in the end the fact of the matter is that there is more strategy—heck, there's more pre-game strategy and possibility for meta-game strategy, even if we allowed for army point construction for both games, due to the different skills of races and Lore Masters. There's a promise of more Lore Masters and creatures and races to come, more terrain, and more lore cards, as well as other mechanics that would be hard-pressed for addition in a realistic game—a variety of heroes, for instance, the kind you only get in high fantasy. There's a ton of potential—the kind that adds fuel for the creation of home-based scenarios, too. And I suspect that there is a deeper reason than "it sounds like fantasy" for why scenarios are called "adventures" in BattleLore.

By the way, if anyone knows whether save files can be sent over the Wii and used in games like Twilight Princess, I'd dearly love one that's reached the point where all the bother about Zora's River has settled down and Hena's fishing hole is open.

Now I'm going to go find some waffles.

"Fantasy is a natural human activity. It certainly does not destroy or even insult Reason; and it does not either blunt the appetite for, nor obscure the perception of, scientific verity. On the contrary. The keener and the clearer is the reason, the better fantasy will it make." — Tolkien © 2006 Ava Jarvis

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Well stated, Ava.  However, as seems so often the case in my life, I find my position lying between two camps.  The utter freedom that fantasy allows makes it seem groundless to me.  With no point of reference, absolutely anything can happen.  It can make the solution to puzzles less clever and interesting.  Strict historical reality, on the other hand, is overly mundane.  History is fascinating, but the level of detail that most of its fans demand can be smothering.  And relying too much on realism can destroy a creative enterprise, be it a game, a book, or an electronic pasttime. I think that’s why I’m such a fan of hard science fiction.  You still have to deal with the laws of physics, or come up with reasonable alternatives.  But the creativity that I crave is still there.  It isn’t a blank canvas, but one that provides a few rules for the painting that you do.  When well done, it’s the best of both worlds to me. I can still enjoy fantasy, but only when the rules of reality are well formulated, consistent, and stated up front.  Bad fantasy doesn’t need dragons and dwarves.  The main reason I find the Star Wars universe so uninteresting is the mystical “Force”, through which all things are possible.  In a story, you can always invoke The Force, just like a fantasy wizard in an unchecked world can always devise the perfect spell to defeat his enemy.  Creativity is essential to me, but only if the creator has the discipline to work within a well formulated set of rules. Posted by Larry Levy on Dec 30, 2006 at 11:11 AM | #

Larry, I agree, good fantasy needs to be internally consistent.  Tolkien’s essay on fairy tales, where the final quote came from, has the same conclusion---fantasy without rules is non-productive dreaming, but a fantasy that is as internally consistent as reality is both useful and enjoyable. “The keener and the clearer is the reason, the better fantasy it will make.” In fiction, when you start rolling up your sleeves and saying “I’m going to write fantasy” it’s hard going because what you need to do is, basically, build a world with consistent rules, yet is an otherwise strange and interesting one.  Only when your reader sees your framework can you expect to throw new twists that, while seemingly weird, also fit strangely into the framework and allow the reader to steadily build their understanding.  A little like a mystery, and much like a game. The best fantasy is comparable to the best science fiction; both are world-building enterprises, and just approach fictional reality from different angles.  I would argue, too, that science fiction is just fantasy with more circuits.  “Hard” science fiction tends to describe a subset of SF that is particularly astringent about world-building in a physical sense, but it is just as hard to world-build in cultural and political senses as well, which is where “soft” SF and fantasy sit. There is bad SF (hard and soft) and bad fantasy, and usually it comes from a breakdown in the world-building process. Posted by Ava Jarvis on Dec 30, 2006 at 02:41 PM | #

Larry. Actually-realistically consistent isn’t entirely necessary. Terry Pratchett’s and Neil Gaiman ‘s remarkable books allow absolutely anything possible. ...as long as they are driven by the same conventions that drive stories. Even those conventions are very vague---but they certainly feel correct. In both cases, you get a sense that the author has very strict rules--even if they are unwritten. Ava...In theory, you can copy saved games from internal Flash memory from and to an SD card--and that could be popped into a PC and emailed.  I think I’m finishing up Zora’s river just now. The fishing does nothing for me, really. It mostly reminds me all of the stuff I like about fishing. Posted by Frank Branham on Dec 31, 2006 at 03:58 PM | #

Frank, Did you get to the Lure fishing yet?  I was under the impression that you needed to finish the river before you got to the fishing hole. Posted by Ava Jarvis on Dec 31, 2006 at 04:48 PM | #

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