page_title: Fog of war
section_title: In video games
hierarchical_section_title: Fog of war / Simulations and games / In video games
caption_attribution_description: English: Screenshot of a multiplayer game playing Freeciv.net, which is an open source turn-based strategy game.
context_page_description: The fog of war is the uncertainty in situational awareness experienced by participants in military operations. The term seeks to capture the uncertainty regarding one's own capability, adversary capability, and adversary intent during an engagement, operation, or campaign. Military forces try to reduce the fog of war through military intelligence and friendly force tracking systems.
  The term is also used to define uncertainty mechanics in wargames.
context_section_description: A computer's ability to effectively hide information from a player is seen as a distinct advantage over board games when simulating war. 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.
  The earliest use of fog of war was in the 1977 game Empire by Walter Bright. 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. Crawford in 1982 suggested "limit[ing] the amount of information available to the human player" to compensate for the computer's lack of intelligence. 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.
  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. This is also common in both turn-based and real-time strategy games, such as the  Close Combat series,  Total War series, Age of Empires series, Red Alert series, Advance Wars series, Fire Emblem series and Sid Meier's Civilization series.
  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. 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" Merchant Prince displays over unexplored territory what Computer Gaming World described as a "renaissance-style map of dubious accuracy". In some strategy games that make use of fog of war, enemy AI can get access to complete visibility of the map, which a player may associate with cheating when discovered. 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.
caption: In the computer game Freeciv, completely unexplored areas are fully black, while currently unobserved areas are covered in a grey shroud.
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