red alert fog

When I was a young boy, about 8 or 9 years old, one of my favorite things was when a friend would invite some of us over to his house to play video games. I had a friend Keith who lived near school, and we would go to his place to play Metal Slug (on a Neo Geo emulator), and Red Alert. Both of those games have a place in my heart, and in this blogpost I’m going to talk a bit about Red Alert.

So Red Alert (1996) is a real-time strategy game produced by the now-defunct Westwood Studios as part of their Command & Conquer franchise. It’s been recently remastered in 2020. (There’s some interesting stuff we could get into about the history of RTS games – this blogpost is about fog, and I was curious to know what the earliest example of fog-of-war in a game is, and it appears to be older than I expected – Empire (1977), by Walter Bright & Mark Baldwin.)

So. There’s a lot to love about Red Alert, and strategy games in general, but I think the thing I love most about it is how simple it begins. Here’s what a single-player skirmish looks like.

You can adjust the settings so that you start with some troops, but you can also start with absolutely nothing except the vehicle that turns into your Construction Yard. (I have a Twitter thread where I walk through what the next steps in the game are, but it’s not really relevant to this particular blogpost).

You start out not being able to see anything other than what’s in a very small radius around you. Then, as you use your units to explore, you see more and more of the map. There’s something about this principle that’s very gratifying, almost intrinsically gratifying. More of the world is revealed to you. I find that this remains satisfying even in recent games like Horizon: Forbidden West, and Red Dead Redemption 2… and some games maybe even exploit this completionist streak in players by not bothering to actually make the world interesting. One of the great experiences in any video game is to discover something surprising, interesting, unexpected.

I’m trying to think of why I wrote this post in the first place. I think I was hoping to find some application to the experience of brain fog… or trying to gamify the idea of seeking clarity, insight, novelty, something valuable, useful…

well, is there anything? I’ll leave this here for now

tbc