The World of Charles S. Roberts

Wargaming is an ancient pursuit, but its modern form began as a professional training exercise in 19th-century Prussian staff colleges; since at least as early as H. G. Wells's "Little Wars" (1913) it has been a hobby of "boys from twelve years of age to one hundred and fifty and for that more intelligent sort of girl who likes boys' games and books." The free-form tabletop game used miniature figures and tape-measured movements, and remains the dominant form today. But in the mid-20th century, map grids on printed sheets gave the hobby a sudden new lease of life. They were easier to set up, more interesting to look at, cheaper to sell by mail-order. 1970s sales figures for "Strategy and Tactics", the leading US subscription-based wargame distributor, were very similar to those of Infocom's IF games in the 1980s. And like classical IF, the grid-based wargame parceled up a continuous world into locations.

Grids were initially square, as on a chessboard, but square cells have several disadvantages. Four directions of movement (N, E, S, W) is too few, yet allowing movement in the diagonal directions means allowing tanks to travel about 1.4 times faster northeast than they do north. Square grids also only conform cleanly to man-made landscape features such as buildings in one orientation, and they never fit hills well. (A compromise measure to fix this, cutting the squares into octagons to leave smaller diamond squares at corner intersections, has never caught on.)

But following Charles S. Roberts's American Civil War designs for Avalon Hill of 1958-61 (notably "Chancellorsville" and the second edition of "Gettysburg"), a hexagonal grid became the new standard. Each hexagon is the same distance from the centre of all six of its neighbours, which are at equal angular spacings; and clumps of hexagons fit the shape of lakes, contoured hills, and so forth, much more naturally than clumps of squares do. Hexes also have a certain mystique - an air of "I don't belong in the children's department".

But hexes are tricky for IF, not least because English lacks words for "the direction 60 degrees around from front". Our cognitive view of the world tends to be square, perhaps because our two eyes both face front, in a direction at right angles to the plane of our arms, legs, pelvis and eyes. We reach out sideways at right angles to our walking. Even early hex-grid wargames called the cells "squares", though "hexes" eventually caught on. Still and all:

Now to forbid the use of the compass directions:

A slight nuisance is that, with things as they are above, typing BACKWARD produces the response "Which do you mean, backward, backward left or backward right?" To avoid that silly question, we write:

And now a clump of 37 hexes, in six columns of six or seven rooms each. There are many ingenious ways we could put this map together automatically, but instead we will take a deep breath and write:

And now we have a hexagonally-gridded world. Route-finding will work; prepositional forms like "to be mapped backward left of" exist, just as they should; and in general these directions are just as good as the square ones. (The only thing which doesn't look good is the Index map, where Inform is just unable to draw a picture because it assumes a square grid. But that has no effect on play.)

The landscape is much easier to navigate with a little diagram:

And finally: