Good evening you are listening to Three Moves Ahead, and I'm your host, Rob Zakeney.

Tonight, we welcome back our friend, the Game King himself, Sean Sands.

Hello.

And we also welcome back, freelance writer, T.J. Hafer.

Hey, hey.

And we have Games Beats chief historiographer, Rowan Kaiser.

Good morning.

So I have a question for everyone tonight, and that is, do we like playing history or games sort of kind of about history?

Because increasingly, I feel the tension between those two things,

and while it's certainly a topic that we've discussed before, how games reproduce historical

outcomes, how they try to bring their theme into being through mechanics, I have been feeling

that tension a little more acutely lately. Perhaps it's imporodder that put me in mind of it,

or perhaps it's just something in strategy games right now.

But I'm interested in talking about this trade-off we have

between wanting a game to feel historically authentic and believable

and getting frustrated when it feels like a game has put us between guardrails.

For me, it's Three Kingdoms that has really done it, because for the first time, pretty much, there's a total war game that you can actually start to see beginning to have a historical outcome.

And that makes, you know, the game more attractive to me, but it also makes me more likely

to nitpick it because I'm no longer doing like some sort of fake medieval or pseudo-Roman

thing that is, you know, the Egyptians are still using chariots or whatever, but you're

marching your legions, so it looks nice.

I'm actually doing a thing where I can start to begin to see this is almost a war game

...