With this month's return to normal programming (and just in time for the festive season) I will be looking at the rise of "great" AARs, as well as highlighting a few specific examples, and examining what makes them so noted. Before we begin, it is worth noting that, apropos of the title, "great" is used to mean notably long or otherwise remarkable, rather than simply "of high quality" (though the two do often go hand in hand.) I'd also like to thank Mssrs. CatKnight, Peter Ebbesen and Director for their invaluable help and expertise during the researching of this chapter. Without you, this would've been a heck of a lot harder.
The AARs
[Please click the sub-headings to read the AARs.]
Resurrection: Rebirth of the United States
Though there are of course epic and notable AARs present in all of the fora in AARland, we will, for the purposes of this article, be focusing on the EU2 sub-forum – and, further still, three specific AARs (or, AAR series.) The first of our case studies is CatKnight's wonderful
Resurrection: Rebirth of the United States, synopsised below for those unfamiliar with the tale (with thanks to the author):
"Thomas Heyward watched London burn to a Nazi H-bomb, but now he has one chance to make it right.
Thrust back in time to the dawn of the American Revolution, Heyward must battle British redcoats, Indians, smiling politicians, and even a demon who can possess others and wants nothing less than to drown the world in fire. Ultimately his greatest enemy will be himself and what he's becoming. Tom must overcome his suspicion, master his fear, tie together the frayed strands of his sanity and muster his dying humanity for one last charge against the night if he's ever to find the only two things that matter:
Jessie, his fiancée. And home."
Resurrection's status as one of our case studies is probably the most secure, being a prime example of a truly epic AAR (it has previously held the honour of being the longest-running EU2 AAR – an accolade I believe it still holds, though and quote me on that.) Across 109 pages, more than 2,000 posts and 240 chapters, we are guided through Heywood's story. It is great in all senses of the word, and yet – as with many longer-running pieces of work – was never intended to be so. With
Resurrection, CatKnight "committed the cardinal sin of a storyteller" (and those were his words, before the hate mail comes flooding into my inbox.) What grew mostly organically into a terrific display of endurance on the author's part was originally intended to be a hybrid mix of history book and narrative. Indeed, such mixing is readily available to be seen in the earlier stages of the AAR, and yet, having not planned any real plot or given thought to an overall direction, when told that readers preferred the narrative updates, CatKnight was happy to oblige. The rest, as they say (and as I have said many times during the course of this series) is history.
The History Park Series
Who Wants to Be Napoleon! |
Here There Be Dragons
Director's two
History Park AARs have, when considered together, amassed nearly 80,000 views and over 2,000 comments, and took four years to write. A unique set of AARs, Director kindly summed up the premise, taking from the introductory post, thusly:
"The Park is a vast, sprawling complex on the Pacific coast of Mexico. Visitors most commonly arrive by high-speed train from Mexico City or Houston, Texas. No aircraft are allowed to overfly the Park – it would spoil the re-enactments of the battles of Gettysburg and Waterloo to mention only two – except for special events. Like the annual visit of the Richtofen Flying Circus, or the PanAm Clipper cruise. Please understand that while the Park is NOT politically correct, children are present… so some things will have to be presented carefully. Now in the adult areas… well, that’s different.
It is a strange and wonderful place, this Park, the blending of high technology (like workable holography and animatronic robots) with showmanship, flair and the urgent need to sell fast food and souvenirs. It is not finished, and perhaps it never can be. The very best ideas come from the visitors themselves, and people who contribute always receive free admissions.
Oh, a strange and wonderful place indeed. Spend the night aboard the Titanic at the Seven Seas Hotel, dine on the Moon, then visit the sculpture garden whose statues move when you aren’t looking. Surf the best waves in the world – five classic beaches side by side – and tote a rifle through the three days of Gettysburg. Or wander over to Middle Earth, but you won’t take anything from Gollum if you’re wise. Go by the Waterloo battlefield and museum and say hello to Napoleon; he’s lonely, and appreciates the company. The newest additions to the Park are the giant ‘Mongol Coaster’ over in the amusement park section, and the gaming areas.
There are two kinds of gaming area, all enclosed and climate controlled. First, there are several huge areas that can be used like stages. These can be filled with various kinds of terrain, plant life, animals, people, buildings… all as real – and as fake – as any Hollywood movie set. The second kind of gaming area is full of holographic maps and displays, virtual reality helmets and gloves, and computer data links. In ‘Who Wants To Be Napoleon’, our heroes used an early model of this gaming area to play out ‘Napoleon’s Ambition’ on a thirty-foot wide holographic map.
The Park has taken the lead in Virtual Reality technology and is pressing ahead with an attempt to develop true ‘submersion’ virtual reality, a false reality that is as – or more – real than the real world itself. This will be a world where you and your friends can truly be hobbits and elves, kings and generals, popes and merchant princes. A world limited only by the imagination and bounded only by dreams…
“This is the place where the imagination is set free, where dreams stand up and walk, where your heart’s desire is promised – and delivered before dinner. HistoryPark – Where Dreams Come Alive.”"
History Park is, in its inception, slightly different to
Resurrection, in that Director went in with a desire to write, having been inspired by the works of AARland greats of the day. The two are similar, however, in that the length (especially as far as
Here There Be Dragons – the latter of the duo – is concerned) came about as a result of not having planned all to much – or, perhaps more accurately, having planned for too much. To quote Director himself:
"Most writers who end up with an AAR of epic scope and length – myself included – I think make a mistake of scale in the early going and get trapped into writing about everything."
In their "epicness", however,
Resurrection and the
History Park duo are similar. Their legacy rests largely on their length and quality. Our third case study, on the other hand, is slightly different.
World Conquest for Dummies
Peter Ebbesen's
World Conquest for Dummies is exactly what it says on the tin: a go-to guide for all those wishing to complete a world conquest in EU2 with a nation of their choice. As Mr. Ebbesen explains:
"[...]in a fit of perversity I decided to write an AAR to demonstrate exactly how one could approach world conquest from an unfavourable starting position and still have a great chance of success. Furthermore, I would make it explicit from the start what the goal was and discuss what could be done better/worse depending on how it turned out. I quite like teaching – though not enough to suffer students less adept at thinking on a regular basis, and most students are that – and this allowed me an opportunity to combine business with pleasure, so to speak."
World Conquest for Dummies is a lesson in 177 thousand words and ten installments (as well as manifold ancillary explanatory comments and a final examination.) It was, needless to say for an AAR that divulges trade secrets, a large success in terms of popularity, currently sitting as the fifth most viewed EU2 AAR of all time. Yet this is not where its greatness lies. Instead, I would argue that we still consider the AAR "great" today (and I do not mean for the speech marks to denote sarcasm here
) because of how groundbreaking it was – and still is. Rather than the length or level of expatiation present, it is the content that sets it apart from many of its contemporaries.
Rationale – Or: The Philosophical Bit
In these three case studies, we see three examples of greatness – and yet, while many of the reasons for which we still today regard them as such are similar, their respective legacies are not all based upon the same things. With
Resurrection, we see an AAR of epic proportions, during which we as readers are transported though a well written and well imagined narrative written out in hundreds of thousands of words. With
History Park, we see two AARs – one considerably longer than the other – that remain innovative (and well known) to this day. And with
World Conquest for Dummies, we see a meticulous guide to the ultimate goal for many players – a world conquest, neatly explained in a relatively small number of chapters.
With
Resurrection, CatKnight had never planned to write at such length. Indeed, as he told me, he had planned very little. The story was, at first, to be a hybrid fusion of two genres, which gradually merged into the one narrative format. Having not planned, it was therefore very easy to be swept up in the story, writing in detail about everything and anything. Often, not planning can lead to the creation of some of the longer works on these boards – which, as I can say from experience, can be infuriating. A trap many writers often fall into is starting at too detailed a level, making zooming out later in order to speed things up nigh on impossible. Happily for a many a reader, this has lead to some fine, epic works of fiction in AARland, though for a writer who wants to move along quickly, it can turn a hobby into a labour (whether or not said labour is "of love" varies from case to case. I've had experience of both sides of the coin.) As Director explains:
"Too often we think we have to get it all in, not considering that over decades and centuries that comes out to be a very great deal of writing if you keep on at a ‘fine grain’ level. Sadly, most authors will sooner or later abandon these ambitious projects. I’ve been saying since at least 2004 that my next project would be a short one but I’ve had two projects go over the six-year mark in that time: the Road to Hades, and all that."
And yet not every single long AAR is born of an accident. With Director's own
History Park series, we see the result of an author wanting to emulate the heroes of the age (I need not elaborate on specific names. You all know who I mean.
) and possibly even take a slice of the whole "popularity" cake for himself. Essentially an AAR in two parts, first act, if you will, is short and light, and at Director's own admission "is [...] absolutely not an epic". A work's "epicness" however, is not solely defined via its length. In creating the
History Park, Director found himself a vehicle by which he was able to not only talk about the history of the game, and history in the game (all the while doing so without losing focus of the game) but which also was attention grabbing and highly innovative – and remains so today. From the initial desire to grab some readers, we see the birth of a planned epic AAR – perhaps not planned in terms of its reach, but certainly in terms of ambition. And sometimes ambition is all one needs.
Peter Ebbesen's
World Conquest for Dummies – our final case study – is different yet again. Having already defied naysayers and doubters alike with the first documented world conquest in EU2 (and, indeed, the Europa Universalis series) the idea of Mr. Ebbesen sharing his secrets (and enviable understanding of game mechanics) was perhaps a predictable success in terms of popualrity. Yet here, once again, we see an AAR remembered as great for a different reason; neither length nor ambition, but fundamental content. What one might term a gameplay AAR – a genre not traditionally known for regularly producing "epics" –
World Conquest proved that length and floridity are not requisite for one to produce a "great" AAR (though
World Conquest is indeed cogent and well written.) An AAR can stand on its own merits rather than having its reputation enhanced by achieving subsequent records in longevity, and, it must be said, World Conquest illustrates this wonderfully.
Though could the same happen in today's environment?
There are without a doubt many incredibly successful AARs out there at the moment, and there are a handful of long-running narratives in the ilk of
Resurrection and the
History Park series, though – sadly – it seems largely that the days of the real epic AARs (and, once again, the term is used with regards to scale and scope) may well be behind us.
AARland today is fundamentally different to AARland ten years ago. For a start, there are far more AARs and AAR writers. Straight alway, this abundance of reading material leads to the sad fact that a larger proportion of this material is going to either only receive a handful of comments, or be ignored entirely (which, for any AAR or writer, is a truly tragic, ignoble and often deeply demoralising end. If there's one good deed you do this holiday season, go and comment on an unloved AAR.) It is generally accepted that comments are vital for the sustenance of any AAR, and therefore – generally – fewer comments leads to less of an obligation in the part of the writer, who largely ends up writing for himself. If one isn't sufficiently enamoured with a piece of work, the ultimate result is obvious: the AAR is abandoned.
Many promising works have been nipped in the bud in such a fashion, though an absence of dedicated commenters is not always the cause of death – or, indeed, the only reason we see fewer "epics" today. As Director explains:
"Today there are many forums rather than one and hundreds of AARs in progress instead of a dozen. Also, Paradox is cranking out new games now faster than anyone can finish an ‘epic’ story. If you want readers and comments – and we all write for that payment – then it is very hard to keep people reading for years while your story moves along, and doubly so when the game is replaced by a newer one. Readers now seem to be put off by an ongoing AAR of great length and will only rarely go to the beginning to read it all; it is the internet that gave us tl;dr (too long; didn’t read)."
As the internet has become available to more and more people, so have AARland's demographics widened. Now, the multitude who visit AARland for pleasure during their downtime are not always necessarily looking for a large investment – that it, many often do not want to have to sit through reams of verbose text in order to get to the meat of every AAR – and the reason we are all here in the first place – the game. As CatKnight explains:
"[...]alot [sic] of readers prefer the quicker payoff screenshots and short, quick statements can provide.."
AARland has developed from what at times verged on being a writers' society to being a more general forum to discuss the game and it's accompanying history against a backdrop of quality prose and snappy shows of gameplay. While this healthy development of the community has, in many ways, greatly enriched the AARland experience, it has – arguably – acted as the primary contributor to the downfall of one of the finest aspects of our history: the epic. Almost like a star burning too brightly to be sustainable, the popularity of these epic AARs – and a subsequent surge in the size of AARland, partially as a result of people wanting to emulate these heroic authors – has seen the market flooded to a point where it is hard for an AAR to gather enough momentum to become "great".
To offer another metaphor, the the original "epics" are like the first few trees in a forest. They can event from having sufficient space and nutrients to grow into healthy, tall specimens. But, in time, these trees drop seeds beside them, which grow into new plants. These new plants, however, do not have the space needed to grow to be as big as their parents, and the fact that each plant is so close to another means there is insufficient sunlight or nutrients for each of them to grow.
It must be mentioned that, even were there enough comments for epics to be sustainable today, Paradox themselves do not help the situation. Nowadays, the rate at which new games are released is faster than ever before. Before an epic is completed, a new game would be released and readers (or, indeed, the writer) would lose interest sooner or later. The verdict is by no means an optimistic one – and, or that, I apologise, but I feel it is, sadly, accurate. The conditions in AARland today simply cannot sustain AARs of the magnitude of works like
Resurrection. Or Rensslaer's
Fire Warms, or coz1's
Into the West. Of course, there will always be popular AARs – and there are some today which I could certainly see being written about by any AARland historians of the future, but they will by no means be as frequent as in days past.
That said, I'd love to be proven wrong.
**DISCLAIMER**
I'd like to apologise for the somewhat maudlin atmosphere of this segment. I'd also like to apologise for what I feel has by no means been the most cogent or well-written update of the series. Sadly, time hasn't allowed me to edit and refine as much as I'd have liked, but c'est la vie.
Once again, thanks for reading, and see you next month.
Next Month: 2002-Onwards AARland Branches Out
Oh, and Director, "portrage" would be "porterage", to dispell your confusion.