It is a common enough trope in megagames that if nukes are available then someone will either want to get their hands on one, or fire one off. In games where assassination is possible someone always wants to do an assassination. Even when assassination isn’t possible, practical or realistic, someone always wants to conduct an assassination.
And, of course, this is entirely reasonable in many ways. Megagames are games. In being games they naturally encourage playfulness. A game designer offers players a sandbox in which they can act out all sorts of extreme options that perhaps wouldn’t happen in real life, and with no real life consequences – nobody actually dies. Playing in the purest sense.
Those who view the megagame as essentially a realistic simulation of ‘real life’ (or at least containing some semblance of what we think of as real life) sometimes find extreme player behaviours frustrating, annoying even, as they are not ‘playing the game properly’. That is, not constraining their actions to those seen to be within the ‘arc of believability’ around the game.
This is an entirely reasonable expectation. If one were running a megagame set in a historical period, say Napoleon’s campaigns in Germany in 1813, you would expect players to act within the doctrine, attitudes and belief systems of the time. Anachronistic behaviours on the player’s part would spoil what we call the ‘duty to history’ and result in a game that felt nothing like the period piece it was intended to be. But the line is thin. Back in the ’90s, Brian Cameron and I ran a game on this subject and in that game the Austrian Emperor made a separate peace with Napoleon halfway through the game. This was playfulness, because as Emperor he could choose to do pretty much what he liked. Foolish, but not historically unprecedented. But this was a disaster for the other Allies, and for the game, because without a united alliance facing them Napoleon’s armies were unbeatable. The game stopped at 2pm.
Lesson learnt – that not all playfulness can be allowed in a megagame...
