One of my English teachers used to badger me with the slogan, “If you cant say it, you dont know it!” His slogan is also applicable to a programmer. Instead, the attempt to express my thoughts on the problems of geopolitics helped refine and correct them. That is, I did not start out with a fixed set of notions and then express those notions directly through the computer. One last prefatory comment: The concepts behind the game evolved with time. This might instill a greater sense of sympathy in the reader for the travails of game design, as well as some insight into the design process itself. In this chapter, I hope to present a chronological explanation of how Balance of Power came to be. Now that it is all over, I would like to be able to say I planned it that way, but that is not true. I had, of course, a guiding sense throughout the process, but a great many of the most important decisions were made for the most unlikely reasons. The process of creating Balance of Power was likewise a series of midair thrashings whose outcome has a deceptive elegance. The true situation is more like that of the diver who, when asked by the sportswriter, “How did you manage to execute a double Fournier backtwister coming out of a swan dive?”, answers, “I don’t remember anything after my foot slipped on the edge of the board”. One might easily get the impression that the creation of the game was a straight-forward exercise, a simple matter of sitting down in front of the computer and transferring the information presented in these pages to the computer.
The explanation of Balance of Power presented in this book has a neat and tidy appearance.
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