Weekend Reading: Make a Banking Simulation Already

I have been playing quite a bit of Pro Cycling Manager 2011 and I love the way he game managed to mix pure simulation of the role of a team manager in cycling, with finances, sponsors, training schedules and race management all on the table, with the actual handling of the actual races, with decisions about attacking, favorites and when to make a decisive move.

I also love to play a few seasons in Championship Manager every fall and I have also tried out other football management simulations since 2000 and I have very good memories of playing the Railroad Tycoon video games from Sid Meier, which focused on the management of companies during the early days of the train transport revolution.

But it seems outside of sports modernity has abandoned management games altogether, except for the Facebook based CitiVille and FarmVille, which develop no management skills outside of rapid clicking.

I would like to see the gaming industry see the management side of other genres that it is currently developing and create games around them.

Take the first person shooter, which is probably the most important genre of the moment, and see that soldiers cannot exist in the field of battle without logistics, tactics and strategy, all aspects that could be incorporated in a management game.

This does not mean creating strategy games about war but abstracting how logistics, planning, resources and decisions about them affect a war and putting the player in charge of making those decisions in a setting that is as close as possible to reality.

There might not be too many players of a military logistics simulation but in the current gaming space, with indie developers and simple ways for them to launch their titles, I am a little bit baffled that no one though about piggybacking on the success of Call of Duty in order to sell something like Management of Duty.