As those who have ready my blog posts before might know, I'm an indie game developer. We're currently putting the finishing touches on our fourth game, so I've been thinking a lot about game design. One of the things my thoughts keep returning to is how the different media of games are best suited for different kinds of games. When I say different media, I talk about board games, tabletop games, computer games etc. 
 
It might be easy to think that video games are pretty much the number one choice for almost any kind of game. After all, graphics bring the vision to life, the interaction is concrete and if you so desire, you can multiplay with people from all across the world. But is it really always so? 
 
The thing that really prompted this line of thinking was the book "The Defence of Duffer's Drift", by    Major General Sir Ernest Dunlop Swinton.  He wrote it while serving as a young captain serving in the Boer Wars. The gist of the book is that Lieutenant Backsight Forethought has been tasked to lead a company of 50 men to defend Duffer's Drift, a small and remote river crossing in South Africa during the Boer Wars, so it's obviously based on some lessons Swinton himself learned and intended as a learning tool for other young officers.
 
The book opens up with the Lieutenant laying out what he considers to be a good camp near the river and then turning in for the night. When he wakes up, a group of Boer soldiers has ambushed the camp and are slaughtering his men. As he's taken captive, he thinks about what just happens and distills his failure down to a couple of key lessons, like "always assign sentries" and "always complete the defensive earthworks immediately, even if your men are tired". Then he's transported back to the beginning of the story with these lessons in mind, and tries again, getting slightly ahead each time and repeating over and over, always with a bit more knowledge. 
 
I discovered the book through the excellent Three Moves Ahead podcast after one of the hosts had participated in a gaming session inspired by the book. A game master ran a combination of a miniature wargame and RPG for a group of 15 or so players. The first player went into a Duffer's Drift scenario with no information. Of course he died quickly. But then he had a chance to pass some information to the next player, like "beware the friendly farmer, he'll betray you to the enemy". Then the second player would give it a go before passing what he'd learned on to the next player. 
 
This was one of the coolest things I've heard and something I really want to try some day. But it also made me think of how poorly such a clever game idea could be translated to a video game. Of course it could be done. Design and present a scripted scenario on a multiplayer server, where one player at a time gets to play. After he dies, he has a bit of time to pass on his lessons to the second player, who then jumps in to play.  
 
It could be done. But should it? Due to the nature of the game, the non-playing players shouldn't be able to spectate or the game becomes trivial. After all, a key part of the challenge is for the dead player to decide what information he needs to pass on in a limited amount of time. So how do they pass the time? By staring at some information? By chatting to each other?   
 
Beyond this, how would the actual game work? As a light wargame? Or a simple puzzle game, where figuring out what to do step after step is the challenge? If you really wanted to give it as much atmosphere and depth as a well-narrated RPG could have, the layers and layers of different gameplay elements and styles required would make the process hugely complicated and would almost guarantee that some parts of the game would fall flat.
 
No, I think this is a clear case where just because we COULD make the game into a video game, we shouldn't. The game would work a lot better as it was presented to the Three Moves Ahead host, a unique blend of two different ways of playing games. Just like a Madden tabletop RPG wouldn't really work, this is a game concept that doesn't really lend itself to video games. 
 
Or does it? Maybe I just haven't figured out a cool way to do it yet.