Fog of Reality

From Zanecorpwiki

An important evolution in the development of the 'real time strategy' game genre was the introduction of the 'fog of war', which hit the mainstream with Warcraft. In this design, your units have a 'vision', and you only get to see what you're units see. Outside the collective boundary is the 'fog of war'. Enemy movement within the fog is unknown to the player.

In actual warfare, it's not so much about being blind (though that's part of it), as it is about uncertainty. You may see that there are enemy units, but how many of them are there? The history books are rife with examples of mistakes and outright deception. This goes to both luck and conscious strategy.

I've often thought that an 'information filter' that introduces noise into reports one gets would be a great feature in simulation games. Better advisers, adding resources to intelligence, and intelligence technologies would all come into play as part of the game. Information itself becomes a rich part of the game in a rather novel (for the gaming world) way.

In addition to the "passive mistakes", there's also the active disinformation. In war/politics/love/etc., actors commonly inject false of cherry picked information into the streams in order to shape perceptions. Everything from highlighting and downplaying to outright deception and manipulation.

It's a general idea that attempts to model the real "fog of reality" in which we all live. This could be applied not only to combat simulation games, but simulations and games of all kind. It would be a building block in the modeling of reality itself for 'professional' purposes, like predictive algorithms. Perhaps the most important application would be games that simply teach the concept so that we can better deal with the real fog of reality in which we live.