Angry Planet - SPONSORED: The Mega-Tank of the Future

Episode Date: May 18, 2022

Today’s episode is brought to you by Auroch Digital, makers of many fine video games including the one we’re here to talk about today: Ogre.For almost fifty years, it has terrorized our future. The Ogre. A massive AI-controlled tank hell bent on the destruction of the human race. Ogre. That’s both the name of the game and the name of the game’s strongest unit. First published in 1977, Ogre became a phenomenon in the wargame scene. It was asymmetric, deceptively simple, and has endured for 45 years.Ogre is out now on the PlayStation and Xbox. It will hit the Nintendo Switch on May 25.Auroch BlogAuroch Game pageSupport this show http://supporter.acast.com/warcollege. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Love this podcast. Support this show through the ACAST supporter feature. It's up to you how much you give, and there's no regular commitment. Just click the link in the show description to support now. People live in a world with their own making. Frankly, that seems to be the problem. Welcome to Angry Planet. Hello and welcome to Angry Planet.

I am Matthew Galt. Today's episode is brought to you by Oric Digital, makers of many fine video games, including the one we're here to talk about today, Oger. For almost 50 years, it has terrorized our future, the Oger. A massive AI-controlled tank held in on the destruction of the human race, the Oger. It's both the name of the game and the name of the game's strongest unit. First published in 1977, Oger became a phenomenon in the war gaming scene. It was asymmetric, deceptively simple, and has endured for 45 years.

You would even play it as a video game. It launched on PC and Mac in 2017, but it's getting a new update. There's also a console edition on the PlayStation and Xbox Now, and it's coming to Nintendo Switch shortly. You can find out more information at aurekdigital.com. And with us today to talk about all things, Oger, is its creator. Legendary game designer, Steve Jackson, Sir, thank you so much for joining us. Oh, I'm thinking this will be fun. Good. All right. So we like to get basics out of the way at the top of the show. I teased it a little bit, but in the context of the game, what is an ogre?

As a game unit, it is a single piece that is worn down very slowly, losing one at a time. It's very many attacks having its movement reduced. until eventually you have notionally shot all the bits off and it just sits there smoking. What this represents is a super tank many times the size of any present armored vehicle that is just bristling with guns and coated with a science fictional armor that will let it hold off contact tactical nukes. Can you tell me a little bit about the background of this world that Ogre takes place in? Because it is this, like you look at the board and you see the pieces. It is very, it was created in 1977. So there's like a certain style and aesthetic to the games that were made back then.

I called it deceptively simple. It was also a micro game. Right. What is, can you tell the audience what that means? It means that the map is on a single legal size sheet of paper, and the rules are ideally limited to what you can get into a 24-page rulebook. See, that's so funny because we think of, I would argue that a lot of modern board game, the stuff that's published, and is popular today kind of comes in that microgame

right? You know, 1977, this was the era when like, you know, my dad had all of the I don't even know what to call them

Bible-sized Avalon Hill games. And people were, you know, people were playing these war games that were, you know, the rule books were long and complicated.

They were interested in as technical and precise a recreation of the Battle of the Bulge or a specific battle in Vietnam as was possible, then something like Oger comes along, which is, like you said, a microgame. Was this a new kind of niche at the time? Yes, it was the first micro game and the microgame series for metagaming was the first small game series.

So it really shook some people up. Yeah, how was it received at the time? with glee. People enjoyed the game. They only had the risk $298 on it at the time. And they had fun with it. The rules are basically SPI mechanics translated into English. And the play is quick.

People liked it. I was happy. What are SBI mechanics? S simulations publications incorporated was SPI. And with Avalon Hill, they were the big dog in the war game field at that time. James Dunnigan and Redmond Simonson, a pair of geniuses who worked well together. Very, very prolific creators of hex-based war games. Okay, so you kind of took this broader system.

And then condensed what normally would be these long campaigns down to like a single battle or set of battles that could be played in. Like how long does a game of ogre last? 30 to 45 minutes. And what exactly does that game look like? Like how many players are there and what are they doing exactly? There are two players. In the basic scenario, the ogre player has one unit. but gets to make enough tactical decisions that it doesn't get boring.

The other player controls a collection of units that are mostly analogs of present-day tanks and vehicles, except you have ground-effect vehicles taking the place of armored scout cars or missile firing technicals, And the infantry are all in powered suits, which is the only way they would survive that environment. And the tank itself is, is it AI controlled or is it an AI creation? It's AI controlled. The term drone didn't mean then what it means now, but it's a great big, arguably self-aware drone. I say arguably because there were a lot of arguments about it. My canon is that in the beginning they were just machines doing what they were programmed to do,

but later some of them woke up. And so one of the things I really find fascinating about this game, and it's kind of marked something I like about a lot of other games that I don't see a lot of, especially like in the video game space, is that it's asymmetric, meaning the two sides play very differently. Was there anything else like that at the time? The only thing I can kind of think of is something like Cosmic Encounter. Cosmic Encounter had up to six different sides,

and they all had different special powers, but they all had the same basic victory condition. So no, this was the first. game that I know of to just make the sides completely different. And how, when you're when you're playtesting something like that, how do you work out, is it more about trying to make something fair or make something fun? Does that make sense? Yes, but the answer is yes. It needs to, it needs to be fair, but people need to have a reason to play it and most of them aren't doing it for love or money or education. It needs to be fun.

And the way you playtest something like that is over and over and over again. Can you tell me about what some of the, like the early version draft versions of this are, if you remember, like what were some of the early problems that you encountered was the tank too overpowered or too underpowered, the ogre, I mean, of course. both at different times, depending on the scenario, we finally settled on a couple of good designs for the large and smaller ogres, and then balanced against that by adjusting the size of the defending force. The defender's objective is to protect a command post. The CP is just a big fat target. and it can't shoot back, any attack will destroy it.

And the ogre wins if it destroys the command post. It wins a better victory if it then gets out, quote, alive, unquote. But it doesn't have to. The instance it gets within firing range of the CP with a weapon that is still viable, it's the winner. And is this a thing where during play testing, when you're trying to make this work, are you trying to get like parity between the wins? Like, when you get to a point where like, okay, one side wins about 50% of the time,

the other side wins about 50% of the time while being fun, or is that even a consideration? No, that sounds about right. Okay. Now, in fact, with skilled players, the defense, walks all over the ogre in the learning scenario. And we know that's on purpose, because the defense is harder to pick up than the ogre. So the ogre, the more powerful unit is easier to play.

Yes. Well, I guess you're only worried about one unit too. We're only worried about movement for one. And to an extent, mistakes are easier to recover from. Right, because, well, they, I assume, that you're losing bits and pieces, but you're never losing a unit itself. Yes. You have only one to lose, and it doesn't go until the end of the game.

But the way it plays out is that even a Tyro, even a bad player of the Ogre, will get close enough to the command post to have the defender drumming his fingers and hoping for lots of sixes. Why do you think this game, I mean, this game has been reprinted, I don't know how many times. I don't either. There's lots of variations and spinoffs. And they started making the video game adaptation, the original ones, came pretty quick, didn't they? They started in the early mid-80s, right? Origin Systems did a video version as one of their very early releases.

It was a very clean adaptation. So why do you think this game has endured for this long? Why is it still popular? Two reasons. As a game, it is easy to pick up. You can learn it pretty quickly, or if you already know it, you can sit down and play it quite quickly. And it speaks to a couple of archetypes. If you are the defender, you are going to sacrifice almost all of your units.

You are absolutely the textbook back against the wall, 300, you know, not backing down from this line, defenders. And if you do that well, you will win. So that's the defender archetype. The attacker archetype is the ogre. The ogre is a ravening creature of destruction. It eats the little human units like popcorn and laughs and goes on for more. But it's all right because it's just a machine doing what it was told to do. So if you're playing the ogre, you can be totally destructive and not have to worry about whether you are becoming chaotic evil or anything like that.

Nope. You're just playing the machine doing what it was told to do. I would say that that's kind of a running theme in your work. The ability to make the left-hand path fun and a little bit silly and like absolve the guilt of the person that's playing that character. Do you see that? Eliminati does that. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, that's exactly what I was thinking.

What's Illuminati, right? Was that a conscious thing, or is that just something that's kind of happened? It seems to be something that happens. All right. People like to play the bad guy, but nobody wants to be bad. No one wants to feel bad when they're the bad guy, right? Yeah. I think there's a lot of video games that make this mistake.

They offer the bad guy path, and it's depicted as just like the brutal, gross, the way the heroes would view the bad guy. The ones that have been successful, I think, and I think Illuminati does this, I think Ogre does this, are the ones that the bad, the way, they have a way of the bad guy viewing themselves as the hero of the story, right?

I mean, depending on what faction of the Illuminati you're playing, you could be argued about whether or not they see themselves as the good guys. The ogre can be seen as a lone hero. venturing into a nest of snakes. Yep. So another thing is going, you're going to get hurt over and over and over again. But if you can hang on long enough, you'll get to that command post. Yeah, I mean, the ogre is sacrificing as well as the humans, right?

Yes, they're both ground down to almost nothing in the course of the game. Another thing I think is really fascinating about this game is that it's this story about AI versus humanity. And this is stuff, this is something that had been, of course, floating around in science fiction for decades at that point. But it hadn't really gone mainstream. And Ogre happens, I think, like, right before we start getting these big Hollywood movies that really elaborate on that fear.

And I'm wondering, do you see yourself as part of that legacy? And, like, I keep imagining you sitting in the theater. I'm assuming you went to the theater to see it. watching Terminator, and like that opening scene with the big, huge, ogre-like tank thing rolling through and crushing skulls, did you, what did you, you know, sorry, I've asked you like three questions there, but. Well, yes, I saw Terminator and I was delighted because I had been told to expect a B movie. I didn't know that I was walking into an early screening of a classic.

And yes, when you see that monster tank crushing the skulls, it's hard not to think, Oger. Do you feel like you're a part of that legacy? I hope so. I mean, it's the game is certainly out there. And from time to time, I see things in the more mainstream media that indicate. I mean, you can look at that and know at some point they played Oger or talked with somebody who played Oger. ogre, because that's where that idea came straight from. I have even seen my imaginary super tough armor picked up and used by name in a recent novel. And that's fine. Somebody had to write

blaster first, but that's what the canonical SF weapon is now. Tell me, can you give me some of the the pop culture links that you've seen? Like, what novel did you see the armor in and like where else have you seen Oger references recently? The novel is by Rick Partlow, P-A-R-T-L-O-W. It's a good book. It's Contact Front. Okay. It's very much indebted to Heinlein's Starship Troopers,

but it was written a few years ago rather than 40 or 50 years ago. Okay. What about where else have you seen Ogre references recently? Well, let's back up a little bit and do the shout out to ogre's own literary sources. There are a couple of important ones. Keith Laumer's Bolo stories are about giant thinking tanks. But the big difference, the thing I didn't agree with and reacting was reacting against, was that his bolos are all soft, squishy people inside.

They're not, they're self-aware AIs. They have human personalities, including vulnerabilities. And I wanted to tell the story and say, this is just a machine. And it's a very smart machine and part of its job is to make you think that Attila the Hun is in there, but no. And the other one is a novella by Colin Cap. K-A-P-P. And it is called G-O-L-L-O-S, which I believe is God-L-L-L-S, which I believe is God-L-L-L-S, in a Middle European language.

And that is, not only is that not in print, but I cannot find the CAP estate. I would so love to pay standard rates and reprint that story. but in Gotlos the ogre type units are smaller and less capable, but they are fear weapons. And the spoiler, put your fingers in your ears if you don't want the spoiler, but I'm going to give it because you'll probably never get to find this, is that Gotlos is a cyborg, and the human brain isn't having any fun at all.

new job. Reminds me of the the Scalzy books Old Man's War. I don't know if you've read those, but they have one of the later one of the later novels, there's the ship that's been repurposed with a human

brain, almost as a punishment. I hope I just didn't spoil something for you. Oh God, I'm so sorry. You're looking at me like, I spoiled something. No, no. Okay. Just, just you spoiled it for somebody. Fair enough.

It's interesting because my day job is a reporter, was mostly war, now transitioning mostly into technology. And the more I learn about artificial intelligence and how it actually works and how it's being applied on the battlefield. Intelligence is almost a misnomer. They are very much machines. and the personalities and things that they have is very much projection that's being done by humans. Well, there's definitely an art to writing

personality simulation software. And you can do a lot with AI's predicting the next word and so on. And they're not writing really good stuff yet, but give them time. Yeah, I mean, I feel like I've been hearing Give them time for a while now, though. You'll hear it for a while longer.

You're probably right. When I visited Brazil, they said one of their national slogans is Brazil is the country of the future and always will be. That's good. So looking at war, modern war, you know, now we do have these words like drone. We have machines that are, we don't have megatanks. and I think there's pretty good arguments, especially as we're watching what's playing out in Russia for why we maybe won't have megatanks.

We'll not have megatanks unless we get my magic armor. Right. Yeah, fair enough. You've got to figure out a way to deal with the loitering munitions before you put an advanced machine inside of the tank, right? Well, if you can give it a hard ceiling, and if the front slope just shrugs off St. Javelin anyway, then it gets kind of scary. Yeah. So when you look at the way modern war is conducted now, the drones, the automation, do you ever think about Oger, like when you're seeing, as you're seeing all this stuff play out?

Oh, all the time. Are you, how do you feel about that? Are you worried? Are you excited? Well, I don't think it's my fault. Sometimes I think that some of the conspiracy, utter bull that has overtaken so much of the country may be partially my fault because I had such fun with it in Illuminati and I made it fun for a lot of opinion leaders. and is it possible that it crept from there into the mainstream and people took it seriously? I hope not. I don't know.

See, I think I, here's the thing, though. Okay, I'll just say this. All right, so I'm from the suburbs of Dallas. I grew up immersed in your creations. The Illuminati stuff was, I played Magic the Gathering, of course, and that was my introduction. And then immediately after that, I was like, what's this Illuminati thing with the creepy pyramid and all these strange cards? And then from there, that was a gateway into like Robert Anton Wilson and this kind of world that you're describing. this conspiracy for fun stuff.

I don't, I think that that is pretty different. I think a lot of people are able to separate fact from fiction. I think that stuff is pretty different from what's going on now. I can see the through line, but I don't think you can lay that all at your feet. I think there's a lot of other things going on. I hope so, because some of the things that the QAnon people are burbling sounds just exactly. like Illuminati, except in Illuminati, the tongue is in cheek. And it's evident to the casual observer with a higher than room temperature IQ that the tongue is in the cheek.

But now I've heard some of these Q people talk. I don't know. I don't think the artist can blame themselves for the credulous not understanding that it's fiction? Well, you hope. You definitely hope. I read a very interesting article, and I wish I could remember the author, but the point of it was that science fiction writers as a group had something to answer for with regards to the popular idea that a nuclear armageddon or other disaster would lead to the breakdown of society because science fiction writers had all been telling that story, it makes a good story, but it doesn't really work that way. People work

together. People sacrifice themselves for each other. Yeah, I think that that's a great, I think that's a great distinction to make in the face of the, like all these post-apocalypse stories, the truth of the matter is that people tend to, when, when, when the, when the going gets tough people tend to get together in tribes and survive and help each other out. And we're actually much more willing to do that than I think people would realize until the moment. But I would also argue that, sorry, this is a bit of a wheelhouse for me. Like I do nuke stuff a lot, that a lot of the great works of nuclear fiction are all horror stories that do not, you know, they're not all fallout. a lot of them make the post-apocalypse seem,

the ones that I think people really remember and are deeply embedded, like threads, or the day after, are the things that embed in their psyche and make them realize that those initial blasts would be a nightmare. You know, maybe I'm, but maybe, maybe I'm wrong. And we are in a place where, like,

the Fallout video game series has turned nuclear war into a theme park. And what's going with what's going on in Ukraine and the tensions between, us and Russia now, it feels like it's 1983 all over again, I don't know. It could be completely wrong. You have Pat Frank's

Alas, Babylon, which was very well written, and it turns nuclear war into something that happened off screen and let the hero become awesome. He didn't get radiated at all. Yeah, and we would all be

radiated. Let's get this back to Ogre, though. I know, I know irradiated, but... Well, yeah, but no, I followed you. It's fine. So you said earlier that you don't have any idea how many different versions of this thing there are? No, there were several printings at Metagaming with substantially the same rules with different covers. There was a Japanese translation published in a pocket box size.

And when I got the rights back, there was a Steve Jackson Games edition. And, well, there were a couple of Steve Jackson games editions. And one of them was the little bitty pocket box size reprint. And the other was the monstrous box that we did Kickstarter for. What's in that monstrous box? Say again. What's in that monstrous box? Big boards, big black.

glossy colored boards, big glossy colored counters, lots of extra scenarios. What's your favorite variation or version of this game? Well, I've never not had fun with it, but the answer would be either the Mark V version of the introductory scenario or about a 12-player ceasefire collapse scenario using the GEV rules. GEV is the sequel and add-on to Oger. You're one of a team of six fighting along a long, skinny matboard

that represents a disputes in front where the ceasefire has broken down. And everybody is trying to cross the line at once. and you have to cooperate with the other players on your side. What do you think of the video game adaptations? You called the first one clean, the old one. What does that mean? It was very easy to pick up and very easy to play. It wasn't ambitious.

It was just the ogre map on a green screen, and you grabbed and moved counters. and the experience was very much like using a couple of thousand dollars worth of computer to play your $2.98 game. I'm bad. I have to confess that there are, I still gather around the table twice a week with friends to play board games or to play a tabletop role-playing game. But a lot of this stuff, the digital versions make a, lot of it so much easier.

The dice rolling and the calculations, when the table gets together and we play Magic the Gathering, everyone's always complaining about how much they have to keep track of because they're so used to playing the digital version now that automates so much of it for you. Yes. Where do you come down? Do you still prefer to have that visceral table version,

or do you like having the ease of use of the digital versions? I had a long fling with digital games that really wound down about seven years ago. There are some remarkable digital games out there. And I had a great time going through, oh, Age of Empires 3, for instance, from the beginning to the end. I don't know if you've seen that one. It's, okay, so you know it's very heavily influenced. by board war gaming and even by the kind of board style card gaming where you build a deck. So those designers were really paying attention to what was going on around them

and weaving some of the threads back in. But I really like to sit down on the table and play. I'll always experiment with a new video game when I can. but I like board games. That's what I do. What do you think of? So when I was a kid, I would say like the era of it being uncool to be a geek and like kind of being bullied was like the geeks being the underdogs was we were at the tail end of it. I was there for like to see that kind of stop.

And we're in this era now where, you know, the biggest movie in theaters. right now is a sequel to a Doctor Strange movie, you know, this Marvel property that is about a multiverse, and it's going to make a billion dollars. We live in a world where, sir, you and I won, board games are more popular than ever. Yeah, the catchphrase five years ago is the culture wars are over, we won. But the wheel keeps turning.

And most of us in our day jobs are doing some kind of something. science. And the United States at least has 40% of the population concentrated in one political party that fears and distrusts science. And we're not winning that war. No, and I would argue that they have, that side has renewed its fervor to fight the culture war in a pretty extreme way, as we have seen, right? kind of going back to some of the stuff that you were talking about with the Illuminati. But we're here to talk about Oger. What do you think is the future of the game?

Well, most of the future of the game is in the new media because I have done the board game media. Something that I absolutely don't want to do is to continue to add complexity to the game. supposed to be simple, nor would I be caught dead changing some of the rules and issuing a new version of the game to obsolete all the other stuff every half a generation. We don't have to name names of the people who do that because we know. So I think that video games on the new platforms as they come out are going to be the way that ogre develops. And I want that to develop in the way of making a simple game constantly easier to play and more of a visceral experience

rather than necessarily making everything more complicated because the computer is doing the fetching and carrying of the numbers. Right. It's funny, I was thinking about your exact thing about not adding extra complexity for the sake of it to move more product, not to do constant rules revisions to move more product. So I was thinking about all the different versions of Illuminati that I have, the collectible card game. And, you know, I have the boxed version that is just the board game that you can bust out with your friends. and I remembered being a kid, you could just buy the box, when you had the collectible card game out,

you could just buy the box, the one with everything. It had it all in there and just be done with it. And I didn't realize how special that was when I was a kid, but I definitely do now. Well,

I make enough money from games that I don't have to be evil about it. That's kind of what it boils down to. This is a good time to get less serious and put in an Illuminati plug, though. A digital version of Illuminati has already been soft launched, and the creators, Radiofree.net, are continuing to add features and clean up bugs and are barreling toward a hard launch sometime in the not too distant future.

I'm very excited for that. That's on Steam. Look for Illuminati on Steam. You should also look for. Have you played this most recent ogre? Which most recent Oger? Sorry, fair enough. The one we are here to talk about, the Aric Digital.

Oh, absolutely. Absolutely. How do you think they did? there are a couple coming that I haven't got to play yet because they're not out yet. I think that it's a good rendition of the game. I want to see more features added because there are corner cases in the rules that aren't yet covered and aren't yet called out as whoops, you might want to do this. There are new versions coming, right?

Yes. We have the console versions coming. And I can't go into a lot of detail about that because I don't remember the detail. I'm not a console player at all. I mean, you're playing Age of Empires. And you were in the Silicon Prairie. Well, you were in Austin, weren't you? You weren't in North Texas, right?

That's right. Okay. But you were still, but it's still Silicon Prairie-ish. You're going to be, you're a PC guy. Mac. My apologies. You're a computer guy. Not a console guy.

No, I don't even have a television in the house anymore. But I won't have any trouble finding somebody to invite me over to play a new version of over. Well, you can get yourself a Nintendo switch and you'll just have it as a handheld. Well, my eyes are poor. So I'm probably better off with the biggest screen. I can get. All right. Steve Jackson, thank you so much for coming on to Angry Planet and walking us through this. The digital version of Ogre produced by Arag Digital is available on Steam. The console

edition is out on Xbox and PlayStation Now. Switch is coming soon. The tabletop version is, of course, available online or at your local game store. And you should always, whenever you get a chance, support your local game store. Thank you very much, Steve. Oh, my pleasure. And I I shouldn't say that I'm delighted that the console things are happening because they reach people who are like me but the other way around. They reach the people who just won't play on a physical game board.