Why Is Strategy Fun?

Why are strategy games fun, and why do we care?  This is the first question that needs to be addressed before any attempt to build a better RTS game is undertaken.  Games like Half-Life were built from the ground up based on questions like this, specifically by trying to create an immersive novel, and with every facet of the game bent towards its ultimate purpose, the result is highly polished.  Whether it’s a success or not is subjective, but I say that Half-Life, and its successors are the Canterbury Tales in the history of single-player video games, and demonstrated what it is that the medium can and should become.  Strategy games are more complex than creating a single linear story because a single game actually embodies a single instance of a solution space that can be immensely large, and using a wide variety of starting parameters such as player skills, preferences, etc.  So if we are to plan what strategy games should become, first we need to figure out their basic elements, and the proper tools and methods used to construct such a game.  Let’s begin by figuring out what has made past strategy games successful.