Interview with Larry Bond and Chris Carlson about Harpoon pt. 2 of 3
Harpoon reached across international and disciplinary boundaries, in ways we are only beginning to comprehend.
In the second part of our interview with Larry Bond and Chris Carlson, we explore the ways Harpoon crossed boundaries. Harpoon started out as a board, and it continues to live that way to this day. However one of its most successful. Furthermore, because Harpoon was technologically sophisticated but unclassified, it was available to people who might not be able to get access to military technology in such an accessible format.
Strategic Play:
So the military has a love-hate relationship…that's not the right phrase. It's got an off and on relationship with the wargames. Sometimes the military loves it and sometimes it doesn't. But it's not just the military that likes war games.
Are you aware of any cases where outside the military, maybe universities or other countries other organizations were influenced by “Harpoon”?
Two guys came in and asking for games in a heavy Russian accent. The guy running the shop pointed them to a couple copies of “Harpoon” and they scuttled out the door with great squeals of delight.
Larry Bond:
Harpoon has been purchased by several foreign militaries. I was informed of that. You know, GDW would call up and say, “Hey, you know, the Russians just bought a bunch.” <laugh>
Back in the day, I can remember one specific time at a game shop that is long since gone the way of all things, the owner told me a story. Two guys came in and asking for games in a heavy Russian accent. The guy running the shop pointed them to a couple copies of “Harpoon” and they scuttled out the door with great squeals of delight.
So yeah, we're sure that it has been used unofficially by those countries. Maybe just as a data source. Maybe just to see what's going on, but especially for smaller navies, which are strapped for training funds, just like we are. It's a great way to go, but it has to be implemented at the institutional level, not the individual level, or it's never going to work. I know different Assistant Secretaries of the Navy and other people have tried to make gaming more integral to the Navy. And so far, they have not had a lot of success.
Chris Carlson:
Your big games tend to be those Title 10 games, you know? Like the Air Force technology game or the US Navy Global Games that they that they run usually on an annual basis. But that's as, the name breaks it out, “Title 10,” they're talking about acquisition. "What do we get in the future? What do we think we need?" They're trying to articulate requirements, if you will, and then try and put a little meat on the bones of the requirement process. And then they throw that in.
As soon as you roll the dice probability skews the results.
The ultimate idea is “What are we going to buy in the future?” I don't see a lot of doctrinal development or tactical development going on in those games. And I participated in a few. A lot of times that's just assumed to happen, which can be disturbing <laugh>. But the bigger problem is that there isn't a lot of time in the institutional Navy, if you will, or institutional Air Force to really dig deep. Oftentimes, and, I'm not ashamed to say this, oftentimes war games are being used to prove a concept or validate something, which is actually 100% wrong. You can't prove anything with a game.
Larry Bond:
As soon as you roll the dice probability skews the results.
Chris Carlson:
So that's the problem. So, they're trying to use it as a validation or a vindication tool, and it's completely not what it's designed to do, because you can't reproduce your results.
I mean, even if you play it again, the players’ thinking has changed because they made decisions, saw how things turned out. And occasionally they go, “Well, that was kind of dumb.” They're not going to do that again. So how do you compare these games now? And that's where the problem comes in.
Strategic Play:
You mentioned earlier that you started working on “Harpoon” with NAVTAG. How did “Harpoon” come about? Where did it come from?
Larry Bond:
Well, NAVTAG was an official Navy game that was featured on the cover of Surface Warfare Magazine in, July, 1976. I still have a copy in my filing cabinet. And when I got that issue, my ship happened to be down in San Diego, and the guy who had written NAVTAG, Lieutenant Commander (at that time) Neil Byrne, was assigned to the staff of COMCRUDESGRU 5, which was our parent command. And he was aboard the tender Dixie, which was three piers over from where we were. So, I just stepped off the ship, walked over there, asked to see Lieutenant Commander Byrne, told him what I was doing, and he gave me a copy.
I signed for it, brought it back to the ship, showed it to the skipper, and he said, "Make it happen." And that was critical, because without command backing, I never would've been able to peel officers away from the 50 other things that they had to get done right away to sit down and play a game. For most officers, training is about maintenance or how to fill out personnel reports. We are supposed to be trained to fight. And I think the skipper appreciated that thought.
The problem with NAVTAG, much as it was useful to the Navy, was it was SECRET//NOFORN. And it was not well written. I think that a lot of great ideas come from when somebody says, “I can do better than this.” And so, I wrote a game, and I did steal a lot from NAVTAG. But I had played a lot of other games by then, and I knew about rules structure, turn sequence, all the things that we needed to make play flow. I kept it as simple as possible because I knew it was going to be played by non-gamers, other naval officers.
I also kept it unclassified so that we could leave it lying around, make copies, and not have to worry about all the security procedures. When NAVTAG was not actually in use, it had to be locked up in my safe. And that's not how you want to spread information about the game. I just used Combat Fleets of the World, which we happened to have a copy of on our ship. Thank God it wasn't Jane's. <laugh> And we played it, and it was successful.
At that time, I knew and was good friends with Dave Arneson, of Dungeons and Dragons fame. He'd started his own company, Adventure Games, back in Minnesota. And I said, "Dave, would you like to publish this?" And he said, yes, we would.
He published the first edition of “Harpoon,” and it appeared in April of 1981 But, you know, it grew out of me seeing value in a tactical naval game that was accessible to both civilian gamers and the military, because I didn't just say “convergence zone.” I explained what a convergence zone was. I explained what missile seekers did and tried to categorize everything.
And frankly, some of that was new to the other officers. For instance, I was the sonar officer on my ship. I was supposed to understand it. But some of the other officers didn't know what a convergence zone was. So there was a lot of description.
That's one of the reasons why [Tom] Clancy picked it up, because it explained a lot of the naval terms like “electronic support measures,” that type of stuff. That made it accessible to players outside the military as well: civilians.
I used real world terms. I used knots. I used miles. I used points only for things that couldn't be described without some sort of method of quantification, like damage. So by keeping it simple and rooted in the real world as possible, it was good for both communities.
Strategic Play:
One of the things that I really liked about the game when I played it, the computer version of the game, was that even though it was military tactical, very technical, I felt like it did a really great job explaining to me as a young person these things that were fairly foreign to me. It also had a story that you could follow through the computer version of the game. Whether the computer or the non-computerized version, gameplay is a big part of it. Making it fun. So how did you balance the tell telling a story. Having the game be fun, but also being accurate.
…a mini campaign needs a storyline. Individual scenarios do not.
Larry Bond:
That's, I think, just linking the stories. The story idea really wasn't my idea. I can't take credit for that. That was, that was more the computer guys who really put that in there.
Chris Carlson:
Well, that's because the computer could do a mini campaign. And a mini campaign needs a storyline. Individual scenarios do not. You have an introduction that says, here's the situation, strategic, operational, tactical. Here are your units. Go forth and beat the crap out of each other. I mean that's a single scenario. So, it's in isolation. To make a computer game more successful, the replay factor that they always look for, you have to have linked scenarios that makes a mini-campaign. Well, now you need to provide a narrative for that, otherwise it doesn't grab the players and they don't see the linkage.
Larry Bond:
My memory is not great of that period. I don't remember how much of the story I actually created or how much they created, and I commented on. It was a very interactive process, I remember.
I think that's a key word: “engagement.” The narrative gets the player involved. It gives them a reason to start dealing with all the nuts and bolts, which can be tedious in, in a lot of ways if they’re viewed in isolation.
Chris Carlson:
But Don Gilman was very big on having the story included.
Larry Bond:
Yeah, that's right. He was AGSI (Applied Gaming Systems, Incorporated). They did a good job.
I mean, it's funny, looking back on it. It was very basic. But we demoed it to a room full of… I mean, this is us pushing computer gaming to the defense community, and we had a room full of colonels and commanders. And they're watching this thing on the screen. And animation was pretty basic back in the eighties. We had one animation of a missile launch that we used for both sides. And if you're firing four missiles, you see the same animation four times. And these guys loved it. Maybe it's just color and motion, I don't know.
There was a definite engagement by these guys in the game. They thought it was great stuff.
Chris Carlson:
I think that's a key word: “engagement.” The narrative gets the player involved. It gives them a reason to start dealing with all the nuts and bolts, which can be tedious in, in a lot of ways if they’re viewed in isolation. But when you see how they all come together, how they work to accomplish a particular mission or a particular attack, and then how that affects the narrative, that’s what strings them along. They become engaged, because they like the story and then they’re part of the story with their decisions