This is part one in a planned series on computer roleplaying games in relation to leadership and management skills.
Computer role playing games (CRPGs) have been an important aspect of many people’s lives, particularly for mine. I played my first CRPG in the late 1980s while attending the University of Mississippi. The Ultima series, particularly the “Second Trilogy” had a profound effect on my life in terms of its virtues’ model and striving to “be good” rather than “just win.” There were other games that impacted me, but for this post I’ll focus on Ultima with a nod to another long-running series,The Bard’s Tale. Both offer simulations in leadership and management of scarce resources.
My first foray into the genre was a multi user dungeon (MUD)played on a terminal before the Internet was common, and before anything but ascii pictures were possible. At about that same time, my college roommate bought a Tandy machine and was playing the famed Gold Box Games. I bummed time on his PC when he wasn’t playing it.When the Nintendo Entertainment System (NES) was released, I bought it. I searched for anything like a MUD or those Dungeons & Dragons games the roommate played, and found two games that really hooked me. One of those games, Ultima III: Exodus introduced me to the world that Richard Garriott (AKA Lord British) had created. I never looked back!
Up until that point, I had never owned a personal computer. I had access to computers in labs on campus for my coursework and the NES provided more than enough adventure when there was time for that. At a garage sale, I stumbled across Ultima V: Warriors of Destiny, but for PC DOS computers. I bought the game, and then tried to load it on an 8086XT with an Amberchrome monitor (but an awesome Hercules Graphics Adapter!) in our residence hall computer lab. It loaded. I played it. I wanted to know more about this series, and how to find the one missing from my new collection, Ultima IV. That game, Ultima IV: Quest of the Avatar, was released for the NES at about that same time.
The Avatar’s quest can only be described as groundbreaking. There had been no game before that in which a player had to “be good.” There was no more looting and haphazard killing. The player (Avatar)had to manage a team of companions as s/he built up skill points that counted toward the attainment of the Eight Virtues, intertwined with the Three Truths. Finding a virtue system not steeped in religious dogma was a breath of fresh air for a relatively young adult in college, finding his way in a new world. Still today, that virtue system guides me. Resource management became more important than any game I’d played because of the reagents needed to create magic spells. The Runic Alphabet had to be learned if one truly wanted to feel good about succeeding too.
Ultima V: Warriors of Destiny continued the series. A Lord named Blackthorn appeared and twisted the Eight Virtues into laws in order to form a police state. The world was dark and bleak. It was also huge, and even now, I’m not sure there is a “bigger” single game in terms of the sheer landscape that had to be explored. Resource management and in particular, human resource management became critical. An important aspect of the game was deciding who one’s other characters should be. One only had five slots open but fifteen characters from whom to choose. Timing was critical, in terms of who was added when. Then there were the spells, the items, and the towns. Oh and the Moongates required scheduling for travel!
Just when we believed we had put everything back into proper order, we realized in Ultima VI: The False Prophet that we had basically upended the equilibrium of the known system, and were dooming an entire race (Gargoyles) of beings. There is not another game that teaches systems thinking as clearly as does this one. Completing this game, more than any before it for me, required methodically talking to EVERYONE and assembling a notebook FULL of clues. I think this game helped my note-taking for coursework, more than the seminar on note-taking I attended as an undergraduate. Perhaps I am a minority, but the interface-change in this game was unwelcome. That has been debated far more eloquently than I can do justice, but my preference is the first-person perspective, rather than the top-down perspective of this interface. So, I started looking for other games to satiate that preference.
Enter the Bard’s Tale. There were originally three installments for this game, Tales of the Unknown, The Destiny Knight, and Thief of Fate. This series had (and has, in its new 2018 fourth installment, Barrows Deep) quite an impressive character management and resource management system. These games offer excellent leadership and management simulations. For example, in Bard’s Tale II: Destiny Knight, there are seven slots for characters. However, one slot had to be kept open frequently, because we had to allow non-player characters (NPCs) to join our team in order to complete some quests. When I played the game, I had 15 characters that I created, across classes and races. I’d exchange members of my team, depending on the conditions of the place I was exploring. I think the minimum number of characters necessary to complete every quest is around 11. There are several places where magic is useless, but one needs at least two high-level magic-users (in this game the highest is an Archmage) in order to complete the final quest and win the game (I had three Archmagi, and recommend that many!).
These games (along with numerous others) simulate management (control) and leadership (effecting change) in ways that classroom discussions often cannot. After studying leadership for nigh on 30 years, there are hardly better simulations of a world that is often messy, fraught with danger, and full of consequences based on my actions than a good CRPG. It is important to recognize that much good can potentially come from this medium. There is definitely room for more research on the management and leadership styles of the creators of these marvelous games too!