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{"id":22947,"date":"2021-07-07T17:53:50","date_gmt":"2021-07-07T20:53:50","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.finisgeekis.com\/?p=22947"},"modified":"2021-07-07T17:53:52","modified_gmt":"2021-07-07T20:53:52","slug":"os-triunfos-de-tarlac-dev-diary-8-os-desastres","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.finisgeekis.com\/2021\/07\/07\/os-triunfos-de-tarlac-dev-diary-8-os-desastres\/","title":{"rendered":"“Os Triunfos de Tarlac” dev diary #8 : os desastres"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

Tipo de desastre<\/strong><\/td>	Cartas a serem acrescentadas ao baralho<\/strong><\/td><\/tr>
Chuvas fortes<\/td>	8x Fasc\u00edola Hep\u00e1tica e 4x Fracasso da Colheita<\/td><\/tr>
Fracasso da Colheita<\/td>	4x Fome<\/td><\/tr>
Guerra (qualquer uma)<\/td>	8x Recunhagem<\/td><\/tr><\/tbody><\/table><\/figure>\n\n\n\n <\/p>\n\n\n\n Gra\u00e7as a essa mec\u00e2nica, mesmo um cen\u00e1rio pr\u00e9-1315 pode encrespar rapidamente, se os jogadores derem o azar de comprar alguns dos desastres da tabela acima.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Assim, nossa solu\u00e7\u00e3o se provou mais elegante do que a que implementamos para a diplomacia. Embora cada cen\u00e1rio tenha seu pr\u00f3prio baralho, \u00e9 teoricamente poss\u00edvel que um baralho brando \u201cevolua\u201d a um baralho severo ao longo da partida.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Poss\u00edvel, mas n\u00e3o certo \u2013 tal como as crises reais da hist\u00f3ria, imprevis\u00edveis por natureza.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Acur\u00e1cia hist\u00f3rica e tempo hist\u00f3rico<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n J\u00e1 \u00e9 um clich\u00ea dizer que n\u00e3o \u00e9 poss\u00edvel fazer um game 100% preciso do ponto de vista hist\u00f3rico. Para come\u00e7ar, porque \u201cprecis\u00e3o\u201d pode ser entendida de jeitos diferentes: detalhes visuais aut\u00eanticos, mec\u00e2nicas que correspondem a costumes do passado, objetivos que fariam sentido a atores da \u00e9poca.<\/p>\n\n\n\n \u00c0s vezes, para acertar em um, \u00e9 necess\u00e1rio sacrificar outro. E cabe a n\u00f3s, game designers e historiadores, decidir onde tra\u00e7ar a linha.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Desenvolver o sistema de desastres de Os Triunfos de Tarlac<\/em> nos fez entender que h\u00e1 uma outra defini\u00e7\u00e3o de \u201cprecis\u00e3o hist\u00f3rica\u201d que nem sempre levamos em considera\u00e7\u00e3o: a escala temporal.<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n Como dizia Fernand Braudel<\/a> ( e tantos outros historiadores), nem todos os eventos hist\u00f3ricos ocorrem na mesma dura\u00e7\u00e3o. E algumas dessas \u201cdura\u00e7\u00f5es\u201d s\u00e3o longas demais para serem percebidas por uma pessoa – ou mesmo uma gera\u00e7\u00e3o<\/strong> de pessoas. Quem dir\u00e1, ent\u00e3o, de um grupo de gamers com poucas horas a disposi\u00e7\u00e3o para jogar uma partida.<\/p>\n\n\n\n \u00c9 algo importante de se ter em mente da pr\u00f3xima vez que sentirmos vontade de criticar um jogo por tomar liberdades com o tempo. Por exemplo, um wargame que simplifica uma batalha de dias em um \u00fanico rolar de dados; um videogame mundo-aberto cujo cen\u00e1rio \u00e9 uma fra\u00e7\u00e3o do pa\u00eds que desejava retratar, ou um game de simula\u00e7\u00e3o em que jogadores podem mudar a cultura de toda uma civiliza\u00e7\u00e3o comprando a carta certa.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Sim, todas essas coisas s\u00e3o distor\u00e7\u00f5es. Mas a fun\u00e7\u00e3o da distor\u00e7\u00e3o, no design tal como na hist\u00f3ria, \u00e9 tornar algo mais f\u00e1cil de enxergar. Nesse caso, \u00e9 dif\u00edcil argumentar que n\u00e3o cumprem seu objetivo.<\/p>\n\n\n <\/a><\/p>\n\n\n $\"\"$ <\/figure><\/div>\n\n\n\n In games, if not in life, disasters are awesome. Nothing forces us to think outside the box during a board game match than witnessing everything we built crumbling from one moment to the next.<\/p>\n\n\n\n This is an experience that The Triumphs of Turlough <\/em>was supposed to offer from the very start. After all, our game touches upon not one, but three more or less simultaneous crises <\/strong>that shook the British Isles up in the Middle Ages: the Little Ice Age<\/a>, the Great Famine of 1315-1322<\/a>, and the First War of Scottish Independence.<\/a><\/p>\n\n\n\n But there is an intrinsic contradiction in the occurrence of disasters that becomes glaring when we attempt to transpose them to a game: by their very nature, they don\u2019t happen all the time.<\/p>\n\n\n\n This isn\u2019t a problem for games that drop a tragedy on our lap from the get go. But it is, indeed, a complicated issue when the goal is to portray the normalcy of a given people, society or nation \u2013 and how an unexpected event may come to threaten it.<\/p>\n\n\n\n The disasters of Turlough<\/em><\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n *$\"\"$* Examples of disasters in “The Triumphs of Turlough”<\/figcaption><\/figure><\/div>\n\n\n\n It may not look like it, but the challenge, in the end, is one of scale.<\/p>\n\n\n\n The Triumphs of Turlough <\/em>spans roughly forty years of history, from 1277 to 1318. Two of the three catastrophes we wanted our players to face only started to play their hands around 1315. This was the date of a Scottish invasion of Ireland, part of the War of Independence that pitted England against its northern neighbor. The campaign took a toll on the finances of the English colonial government in Ireland. What is more, it helped worsen a period of lean cows<\/a> that beset all of Europe at the time.<\/p>\n\n\n\n If we stopped right there, Turlough <\/em>could easily do well by relying on the existing conventions of the strategy genre. We\u2019d have an initial phase with normal mechanics (1277 to 1314) and a cataclysmic end game in with players\u2019 resourcefulness would be put to the test.<\/p>\n\n\n\n The problem was we had a third <\/strong>crisis to implement. And what is worse, it was the most insidious type of crisis of all: a climate change.<\/p>\n\n\n\n The Little Ice Age was a period of global cooling that started around 1300 and broke the legs of the economy in many Northern European countries. \u201cAround\u201d is the key word here. The climate doesn\u2019t operate in the same temporal scale human beings live in, and its processes can take decades \u2013 if not centuries \u2013 to be felt.<\/p>\n\n\n\n This makes this type of crises difficult to perceive before the worst comes to pass. Something we can unfortunately observe in our own present age, in the actions and words of climate change deniers.<\/p>\n\n\n\n In the case of medieval Ireland, specifically, this change started to show its colors in the first decade of our game, causing a series of unusually cold winters and disastrous rainfall. This inclement weather caused a string of harvest failures \u2013 which, in turn, brought upon supply shortages and famine.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Unfortunately, this process was way too long <\/strong>for our game to handle. Each round in Turlough <\/em>was designed to represent a year. <\/strong>It is impossible to expect that a single match would extent for forty rounds, when each turn, on average, lasts longer than thirty minutes.<\/p>\n\n\n\n For the game to be fun, players should be able to finish a match in no more than 6-8 rounds \u2013 and even that would be pushing their patience. Otherwise, we\u2019d be looking at an entire day spent around the game board!<\/p>\n\n\n\n In historical time, that gave us less than a decade <\/strong>to portray roughly half a century of environmental changes.<\/p>\n\n\n\n To nobody\u2019s surprise, our initial results were far from ideal. In our very first prototype, disasters were determined by a d20 roll: the first five or so numbers represented the main types of disaster; the rest represented years in which nothing significant happened.<\/p>\n\n\n\n We soon noticed that the rolls were moot: the probability of someone rolling a non-disaster was 80%. <\/strong>Even when we got lucky and some interesting event took place, its effects didn\u2019t have time to snowball into the crisis that led to the Great Famine.<\/p>\n\n\n\n We realized we had two options up our sleeve: we could either adapt human agents to the pacing of the economy, or simply the economy to fit into human perception.<\/p>\n\n\n\n The first solution required discarding all the combat mechanics we had already developed \u2013 something which, after the pains we took to make it work, was not something we\u2019d consider doing.<\/p>\n\n\n\n We were left, then, with the second alternative.<\/p>\n\n\n\n A crisis on fast forward mode<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n For our next prototypes, I replaced the die with a disaster deck in which every card represented some significant event. <\/strong>If you played Fief: France 1429, <\/em>you should recognize the principle right away.<\/p>\n\n\n\n $\"\"$ Example of fortune card in “Fief”<\/figcaption><\/figure><\/div>\n\n\n\n There were no more \u201cblank\u201d cards. Every year, therefore, would force players to deal with a different calamity. Still, we needed to decide how frequently each disaster would occur.<\/p>\n\n\n\n It wasn\u2019t just an issue of determining their probability of being drawn. After all, some types of disasters are direct results of others. <\/strong>Abnormal rainfall, for example, increases the likelihood of harvest failures, which makes a kingdom more vulnerable to a shortage crisis.<\/p>\n\n\n\n I was already thinking in incorporating some sort of digital card game when Gabriel Cordeiro, one of the team\u2019s historians, offered us a much more organic solution: a deck whose composition changed throughout the match, as in the game 7 Wonders.<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n $\"\"$ The board game “7 Wonders”<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n We took the initial scenarios we had developed to reflect diplomatic changes and gave each one its own disaster deck.<\/p>\n\n\n\n In most of them, the events are relatively mild, reflecting the calm before the storm that allowed the English to expand their influence in Thomond between 1377 and 1300.<\/p>\n\n\n\n From that point on, things got messier. The decks for the scenarios \u201cThe Scottish Invasion\u201d (1315), \u201cThe Battle of Loughrask\u201d (1317) and \u201cThe Battle of Dysert O\u2019Dea\u201d(1318) are filled with calamities that make it very <\/strong>hard to play as the English.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Some of these events have the additional effect of adding new cards to the deck<\/strong> \u2013 as such, increasing the probability of other disasters happening.<\/p>\n\n\n\n These extra cards are removed after the next disaster card is drawn<\/strong>, lasting, therefore, a single round.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Disaster Type<\/strong><\/strong><\/td> Cards to be added to the deck<\/strong><\/strong><\/td><\/tr> Heavy Rainfall<\/td> 8x Liver Fluke Disease and 4x Harvest Failure<\/td><\/tr> Harvest Failure<\/td> 4x Famine<\/td><\/tr> War (any)<\/td> 8x Recoinage<\/td><\/tr><\/tbody><\/table><\/figure>\n\n\n\n <\/p>\n\n\n\n Thanks to this mechanic, even a pre-1315 scenario could rapidly get worse if players were unlucky enough to drawn some of the disasters in the table above.<\/p>\n\n\n\n As a consequence, our solution proved to be a much more elegant way to portray historical change than the system we had invented for the diplomacy. Although each scenario has its own deck, it is theoretically possible for a mild deck to \u201cevolve\u201d into a more severe one throughout the match.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Possible, but not certain \u2013 just like the real crises in history, unpredictable by their very nature.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Historical accuracy and temporal scale<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n It is already a clich\u00e9 to say that it isn\u2019t possible to make a 100% accurate historical game. To begin with, because \u201caccuracy\u201d can be understood in many different ways: accurate visual elements, mechanics that correspond to customs and practices of the past, objectives that\u2019d make sense to people of that period.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Sometimes, to get one right, we are forced to sacrifice others. And it is up to us, game designers and historians, to decide where to drawn the line.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Designing the disaster system for The Triumphs of Turlough <\/em>made us understand that there is another definition of \u201chistorical accuracy\u201d that is not always taken in account: temporal scale.<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n As Fernand Braudel ( and so many others) used to say, not all historical events happen in the same time frame. And some of these \u201cdurr\u00e9es\u201d <\/em>are too long for any person \u2013 or even a generation of them<\/strong> \u2013 to notice. How can a group of gamers with no more than a few hours at their disposal fare any better?<\/p>\n\n\n\n This is something important to keep in mind next time we feel like criticizing a game for taking liberties with their time scale. For example, a wargame that simplify a battle that took days into a single dice roll; an open-world videogame whose scenario is a fraction of the country it wanted to portray; a kingdom simulator in which players may switch the culture of all of their subjects by drawing the right card.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Yes, these are all distortions. But the purpose of the distortion, in history just like in visual design, is to make something easier to perceive. In this case, it\u2019s hard to argue it doesn\u2019t do justice to this goal.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Nos games, sen\u00e3o na vida, desastres s\u00e3o incr\u00edveis. Nada nos for\u00e7a a pensar fora da caixa durante uma partida do que ver tudo o que constru\u00edmos desabar de um instante para outro. Essa \u00e9 uma experi\u00eancia que Os Triunfos de Tarlac tinha o objetivo de providenciar desde o princ\u00edpio. Afinal, nosso jogo toca n\u00e3o s\u00f3 […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":22950,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"spay_email":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_is_tweetstorm":false},"categories":[580,21],"tags":[702,175,483,589,671],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/i1.wp.com\/www.finisgeekis.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2021\/07\/20210707-tarlac-disaster-cover.jpg?fit=1121%2C644&ssl=1","jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p9rUzW-5Y7","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.finisgeekis.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/22947"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.finisgeekis.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.finisgeekis.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.finisgeekis.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.finisgeekis.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=22947"}],"version-history":[{"count":8,"href":"https:\/\/www.finisgeekis.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/22947\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":22960,"href":"https:\/\/www.finisgeekis.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/22947\/revisions\/22960"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.finisgeekis.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/22950"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.finisgeekis.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=22947"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.finisgeekis.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=22947"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.finisgeekis.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=22947"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}