Simulations and games
Abstract and military board games sometimes try to capture the effect of the fog of war by hiding the identity of playing pieces, by keeping them face down or turned away from the opposing player (as in Stratego) or covered (as in Squad Leader[6]). Other games, such as the Dark chess and Kriegspiel chess-variants, playing pieces could be hidden from the players by using a duplicate, hidden game board.[7]
Another version of fog of war emulation is used by block wargaming where, much like Stratego, the blocks face each player, hiding their value. However, this also allows for incremental damage, where the block is rotated up to four times to indicate battle damage before the unit is eliminated from the playing field.[citation needed]
Solitaire games also by their nature attempt to recreate fog of war using random dice rolls or card draws to determine events.[8] Complex double-blind miniature wargames, including military simulations, may make use of two identical maps or model landscapes, one or more referees providing limited intelligence to the opposing sides, participants in the roles of sub-unit leaders, and the use of radio sets or intercoms.[citation needed]
In video games
A computer's ability to effectively hide information from a player is seen as a distinct advantage over board games when simulating war.[9] Fog of war in strategy video games refers to enemy units, and often terrain, being hidden from the player; this is lifted once the area is explored, but the information is often fully or partially re-hidden whenever the player does not have a unit in that area.[10]
The earliest use of fog of war was in the 1977 game Empire by Walter Bright.[11] Another early use of fog of war was the 1978 game Tanktics designed by Chris Crawford, which was criticized for its unreliable and "confusing" fog of war system.[12] Crawford, in 1982, suggested "limit[ing] the amount of information available to the human player" to compensate for the computer's lack of intelligence.[13] In a 1988 Computer Gaming World article Dave Arneson called fog of war "one of the biggest 'plus' factors in computer simulations", while Crawford concluded, using Tanktics as an example, that video game fog of war systems became less "fun" the more realistic they were, leading the medium to instead use simplified systems.[14]
Two large Blizzard franchises, Warcraft and StarCraft, use a fog of war which only reveals terrain features and enemy units through a player's reconnaissance. Without a unit actively observing, previously revealed areas of the map are subject to a shroud through which only terrain is visible, but changes in enemy units or bases are not.[15] This is also common in both turn-based and real-time strategy games, such as League of Legends, the Close Combat series, Total War series, Age of Empires series, Red Alert series, Advance Wars series, Fire Emblem series, Sid Meier's Civilization series, and the Supreme Commander series.[citation needed]
Fog of war gives players an incentive to uncover a game's world. A compulsion to reveal obscured parts of a map has been described to give a sense of exploring the unknown.[16] Crawford said that "reasonable" uses of fog of war, such as needing to send out scouts, "not only seem natural, but ... add to the realism and excitement of the game"[13] Merchant Prince displays over unexplored territory what Computer Gaming World described as a "renaissance-style map of dubious accuracy".[17] In some strategy games that make use of fog of war, enemy AI may have knowledge of the positions of all other units and buildings on the map regardless, to compensate for lack of true intelligence, which players may consider as cheating if discovered.[18] A designer may use fog of war to keep a game that has become impossible to win enjoyable, by hiding this fact from the player.[15]