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4X, Games & Implicit Storytelling
The Zombie Penguin
Eternal Hungry CorpseRegistered User regular
Eternal Hungry CorpseRegistered User regular
So, this discussion came up in the Civ thread over in G&T, and I'm moving it over here in the interests of not hijacking the entire thread.
The discussion was spawned by me noting that the "eXterminte" part of the 4x was increasingly uncomfortable (And to other degrees, the Expand and Exploit) as we grappled with our Colonial legacies here in the west. @Auralynx & @DevoutlyApathetic then replied with the below quotes, and my reply in the thread is there in turn.
Anyway, this seems like a discussion worth having, so here it is! Also obviously this discussion is already expanding past just the scope of 4x games, so please feel to bring up other examples of implicit storytelling (See also the already mentioned Folding Ideas video on Minecraft and Colonialism fer example)
The discussion was spawned by me noting that the "eXterminte" part of the 4x was increasingly uncomfortable (And to other degrees, the Expand and Exploit) as we grappled with our Colonial legacies here in the west. @Auralynx & @DevoutlyApathetic then replied with the below quotes, and my reply in the thread is there in turn.
The Zombie Penguin wrote: »Also, Honestly, the exterimate angle is increasingly more uncomfortable as we think about the colonial legacy of our cultures and the ilk - Not that the first three dont have issues, but the exterminate one really sticks out.
No, it's not.
Not because of the real-world effects, consequences, and ugliness you're alluding to, but because we are not required to be moral actors within video games.
If anything, the success more-modern 4x games are having in creating penalties and gameplay effects around the bad things we do in them is an improvement.
DevoutlyApathetic wrote: »It's cool that you know "The Zombie Penguin" feelings better than they do. I'll say I am a bit uncomfortable with these topics coming up in my game time.
I'll agree we do not have an obligation to be moral actors inside fantasy recreation activities. It still doesn't mean I want to play out those immoral activities. A game that focuses heavily on those activities is one I am less likely to purchase/play.
Come on; I'm not claiming to know anyone else's feelings. If anything, my thoughts re: the "increasingly uncomfortable" observation are:
- As more consequences accumulate around immoral behavior in games, their inclusion as an option becomes less uncomfortable, because the game itself censures you.
- The "exterminate" element should always have been some degree of uncomfortable. It's not any more or less out of place in the genre.
The Zombie Penguin wrote: »
So, i wanna reply to this, but I don't want to derail the thread too hard, so i'll try and keep this brief. Let's be honest, i'm probably not going to succeed =P
Philosophically, I'm not sure you and i agree with regards to the are we required to be moral actors within video games. It's a VERY complicated subject. Super complex to my mind, and endlessly fascinating. What i will say on it is (And I don't think this is something people will debate too much) is that stories influence our behavior. Be these myths, religion, there's a whole argument that's been presented that we should not claim the title "Homo Saipens" (Wise man) but instead Pans Narran (Storytelling Chimpanzee). See: the science of discworld series, among others if you wanna get into this.
Games, as interactive media don't simply tell us stories, they involve us in stories. We end up building our own stories from them. How often do you tell anecdotes about your adventures in games to your friends? I bet it's a lot, if you're anything like me! Like, for example, the time in Stellaris I had to go to war with my Turtle-Men neighbors who hated me (Because i'd objected to their expansionist, slavery-driven ways and smacked them on the nose repeatedly when they tried to invade me) and cut a line straight through their territory to allow my own troops to move, all so i could put a stop to the endgame crisis. And i mean, the crisis wanted to eat the galaxy so stopping them is a good thing, yes? Except whoops, they're a refugee population who are eating galaxies because they're desperate and running form something else, and by stopping them I just drove them extinct. You scamp, Penguin, you!
That's a story, it's a pretty complicated and rather morally grim story, and you could argue i was in the right. But also the nature of stellaris means: I didn't actually have many other options to that story. The way the diplomacy worked in the game meant that i wasn't able to argue my neighbors around to letting me move troops through their territory. The way the crisis works means i didn't have a way to forge a peaceful or more (To me and my perspectives on things), moral solution.
So my question/criticism of the 4x genre is more: What sort of stories is this presenting? and why are these the stories presented? Why does Civ have a only one player can win, one person stands on top approach? I mean, there are some actual simple answers here that relate to the nature of games and competition, but it's worth interrogating.
Why? Because another way that you can frame Only One Can Win is "For One Person To Benefit, Another Has To Suffer"... which is the same shitty story used to justify the lack of free medical care for all, or a strong social welfare net, or access to housing. How do the stories that games tell feed back into "Gamer Culture" and the known issues with that? If we change the stories games tell, does the culture around them change? How does it change?
None of this is to say: you are a bad person for playing Civ and enjoying yourself. That's the stupidest bollocks! Escapism is important, and games are arguably a much healthier release valve for some of the stresses we experience in our lives than other options out there. But it's still worth interrogating these games, and the stories they tell, stories they may not even intend to tell.
Likewise you should always at least take a think about the escapism you engage in, and what results that might have. After all, would you go mountain biking while you have a broken leg? A possibly silly analogy, but you hopefully get the gist - your escapism still has effects on you, and you need to consider that to avoid harm to yourself. Because presumably, you're engaging in escapism as an act to make yourself happier or otherwise provide joy/release, and causing harm to one's self tends to run contrary to that. There's nothing wrong with having alcohol as a form of escapism, there's plenty wrong with drunk driving or drinking to blackout excess. So on, so forth
A related and interesting video on this subject if you want to get into it further is Folding Idea's Minecraft, Sandboxes, and Colonialism, which is super interesting, and touches on games i like to play like Satisfactory as well.
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Also this obviously doesn't touch on your point about consequences to immoral behavior in games, or only does so obliquely. It's a complicated subject and one worthy of it's own discussion in depth. I'll say briefly that personally, i dont think presenting you with a choice in a game, and then shaming you for taking it is the best approach as the game itself is already deciding what choices you can take, which muddles your complicity in them. (See also: Far Cry 3, Spec Ops: The Line and the discussion around how those attempt to shame you for the brutalities of your actions, but never actually give you any choice due to the on-rails nature of the story. It's a whole thing, and a very complex thing at that)
If i can request, if people would like to follow this debate up - could we shift it to a D&D or SE++ thread made for the task? I dont want to monoplize this thread and move it away from talking about Civ: the game, given the whole subject is a lot broader than just civ.
Anyway, this seems like a discussion worth having, so here it is! Also obviously this discussion is already expanding past just the scope of 4x games, so please feel to bring up other examples of implicit storytelling (See also the already mentioned Folding Ideas video on Minecraft and Colonialism fer example)
Ideas hate it when you anthropomorphize them
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On the other hand even in those games I'm probably still going to send out my giant fleet doom ships to purge the galaxy of xeno scum and then to make a sandwich while they do their thing because I'm playing a game and the other victory conditions are much more complicated and involve a lot more work.
Now I'm well aware of that when it comes to reality that an amicable outcome that's inclusive, where everyone works together rather than against each other, is absolutely the outcome that we should strive for. But I'm not playing a 4X game to spend hours on intergalactic negotiations so that I can finally manage to get everyone on board to join the alliance and finish that run.
And if we're talking about people's actions in games having an effect on their actions in the real world then when it comes to 4X specifically I think they're generally iterating towards making it less arduous and complicated to achieve amicable victory outcomes which I would argue is wrong in the sense that it's leads people to believe that progress towards that can be easy when it never has been and I quite frankly doubt ever will be which sets up incredibly unreal expectations.
You raise a bunch of good poitns and i wanna dig into em more later - but i just wanted to reply to this and note i was talking about Civ specifically there, though it's applicable to a degree with Stellaris. My overall experience with 4xs is honestly pretty limited (Civ 6, Civ 5, Stellaris, Sins of a Solar Empire if you count that one), probably more than it should be for talking about this, but hey!
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Do 4X games need to be competitive games?
Definitionally, yes, I believe they do. Take away the competition, and they would become something more akin to a simulation game series, no longer strategy and by extension no longer 4X. And they wouldn't even be good simulation games. Civ's mechanics would seem shallow compared to other historical nation-building simulators. And while the game isn't designed to support it, Civ technically does give you the option of turning all victory conditions off, resulting in a sandbox mode of sorts that just goes on for however long you want.
Do Civ 6's victory conditions encourage immoral behavior in-game?
Some of them do, yeah. Militaristic Victory is the most blatant as it's literally just seizing power through violence, unless you're going for the gimmicky (but actually pretty fun) loyalty pressure strategy. Cultural Victory lets you play Rene Belloq and pilfer archeological artifacts from rivals to display in your own museums. Your A.I. rivals will call you out on it, and the only way you can respond is with a hilariously insincere apology that has ascended to meme status. Indeed, the vanilla version of England's unique ability specifically referenced the infamy that nation gained from this practice during the colonial period. And while there's no converting by the sword in Civ 6 (unless you're Spain or Byzantium!), defending yourself from someone else's Religious Victory will usually require either starting an Inquisition or just declaring war and slaughtering your rivals' peaceful missionaries with your military thugs. Both those options have some nasty implications when you consider the historical events they're based on.
But the victory types outside of Militaristic are mostly about bloodlessly impressing the people of the world with your mastery of a particular discipline, to the point where they can no longer deny that you are the coolest nation of all time, whether that be through reaching another star system, creating a lot of sweet works of artistic beauty, or just getting an endorsement from God. Indeed, the fifth victory type, added in the second expansion, is explicitly about winning at geopolitical politics by just being a very good person. The leaders of other nations want to stop you from accomplishing these feats, not because you are harming their people, but because they want to be the cool guy who does the cool thing, and they can't if you do it first.
Does Civ 6's depiction of these immoral behaviors glorify historical examples of the same behaviors?
It's important to remember that all immoral actions I mentioned above can be conducted by any nation to any nation. Historically oppressed people can commit them against the European powers who colonized them in real life. Does that not recontextualize the behaviors as Punching Up, and therefore acts of justice rather than evil? Or you can just take the high road and win the game without stooping to the level of colonial powers from actual history. So I believe the game's references to some of the more unpleasant realities of the past are probably harmless enough.
I’ll probably have a lot to say later, but I think that it’s worth noting Crusader Kings in this discussion. While technically not a 4X as there is no exploration, it does share a number of similarities with the genre. And it goes well above and beyond just about any other game I’ve ever played in terms of possible immoral behaviour. I’m not even sure where to start. But take the achievements in game. The achievements list includes murdering your spouse, murdering your lover’s spouse, inheriting a title from someone you murdered, having an inbred child, have only two great-parents, and of course a ton of achievements and decisions that effectively involve warfare and genocide.
Battlenet ID: MildC#11186 - If I'm in the game, send me an invite at anytime and I'll play.
If you say yes, then we start swaying dangerously close to how people would say first person shooters are "murder simulators" or Mortal Kombat increases our need for violence in real life. I don't really agree with it (and I think studies have shown having the outlet in games actually helps rather than hurts us), and for the same reason I don't think it's an issue in Civ.
It's a game + sometimes people want to play the bad guys in games....and as mentioned, even there, there's ramifications in these games for being the warmonger.
A person not wanting to play those games or pursue those avenues in those games for personal reasons is perfectly fine, obviously, but their presence is also fine imo.
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Am I saying that someone who goes on a violent conquest rampage across the globe is innately like that? Not at all. People are complicated beings with many facets. I even think there's some value in indulging our darker sides (WITHIN REASON) in a safe/non-harmful environment. Striving not to be an asshole in general, but being a complete bastard in a video game are two different things. Now, if someone is ALWAYS a complete bastard in games, maybe that runs a bit deeper to their core than they'd generally like to think about.
I'm sure how I have played and still play such games wouldn't surprise anyone who knows me, though my deepest forays that come to mind would have been years of Civ II decades ago, and Master of Orion 2 now and then over a wider range of decades.
It's important to remember that the 4x genre takes a large amount of influence from wargames, which tend to have inherently clearer schemes for defining victory. That said, alternative victory schemes go back at least to the original Sid Meier's Civilization, though the way I remember the space route in that working was as a "this has gone on long enough and I'm winning" lever more than the main point. If anyone's got a clearer picture than my childhood recollections of OG Civ on that point, I'd be interested to hear it. The thing I'm getting at, though, is that victory-by-not-extermination is basically a 30-year work in progress in the Civ series (and in other exemplars of the genre, of different ages), because "nothing else is left" was a clearly understood win condition when the genre got its start.
Further, as long as there have been 4x games (as well as looser grand strategy ones like Crusader Kings) there have been people who preferred not to engage on one or more of the axes because they didn't enjoy that aspect of the gameplay, and at least some of that lack of enjoyment has been informed by discomfort over the implications of what the game asked them to do. A lot of them ended up gravitating to stuff like SimCity instead, in the longer run, and I think that's healthy - people should play the games they're comfortable playing. As Far As The Eye is a recent attempt I rather liked to make a game where conflict just wasn't there, since you're playing a bunch of nomads making their way to a location through wilderness.
I think the best example I can think of as far as a morally dark gameplay mechanic in the genre is the raw - massive, even - power of the Slavery civic in Civ 4, which was at higher difficulties essentially the best way to get things done in the early game in pretty much any circumstance where your food-to-production ratios were skewed or you were short of luxury resources. It seems to have been implemented that way to reflect the massive accomplishments of corporate labor in the Stone and Bronze ages (and their attendant costs). That the designers wanted to instill the belief that we ought to work surplus population to death for the ultimate good of the state seems unlikely, but that's a (probably unintended) implication you can pick up if you're looking to.
Stellaris in its current incarnation (and several of the past ones) has a lot of subtle mechanics-level incentives towards playing something other than a good guy. Many of the more-active incentives towards conquest, absorption of empires, and in-game event choices are more consequences of its being a fundamentally incomplete sandbox game without a clear vision what the point of it is apart from putting a lot of cool aliens on the screen, but they're pretty real in their shading of and effect on gameplay. @EvmaAlsar might have more-detailed things to say on the preceding, so I'll risk the ping. Just generally, though, Paradox games seem disinclined to reflection and have more interest in serving the id for the sake of drama than similar games by other studios.
Obviously, we'd be hard-pressed to describe a greater evil than the genocide that these games so often allow us to virtually engage in, but could the argument being made also apply to games where we are allowed to indiscriminately commit murder or torture? What about games where we are asked to role-play as a blatant racist/transphobe/xenophobe? What line, if any, exists between portraying a piece of shit personal/national trait and glorifying a piece of shit personal/national trait and does the game industry have a social responsibility to ensure the latter never happens? Is that even possible? I personally feel that even if a game put up multiple disclaimers saying NOTE: 4K GAMES DOES NOT CONDONE GENOCIDE, there will always be a contingent of creeps who will treat it like Rick Sanchez fans and see that disclaimer as more of a challenge than a condemnation.
Personal thoughts:
If I may indulge in a bit of amateur philosophy for a moment. Every single human being, at their core, harbours dark desires and impulses. I do not believe that there are any exceptions to this. Ultimately, I do believe there is a need to allow humans an opportunity to indulge such darkness in a "safe" (i.e. consequence-free or virtual) environment. I have no science to back this up, but I do believe that, as horrific as such conduct may be in a real setting, allowing it to exist in a virtual environment may indeed serve as an outlet for some and, as much as such a thought may be disgusting to you personally, I do believe it serves a purpose as entertainment, similar, perhaps, to the porn industry or so-called "torture porn" films.
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tl/dr: I believe that escapism, even escapism you may personally find objectionable, is not just entertainment, but actually useful as an outlet for dark desires and impulses. Maybe even therapeutic.
That's actually a great one to bring up, since the Crusader Kings fandom is uh, interesting at points. Which is being kind, and probably a lot kinder than it deserves. Again, it's not all bad, and that's really not what i'm saying, but there's part of the game's surrounding fan culture that's worth raising eyebrows at at the very least -and at that point it's worth asking to what degree is the game and the stories the game is telling creating the culture, vs what's being imposed on it from outside. See the battles that a lot of online games have with toxicity, and then question wether the very structure of the game encorauges that toxicity (High ime investment per match, etc), or is it simply an outlet for it?
Yeah, this is a very good counter point to this argument, and one i dont disagree with, though i think like most of these things it's a matter of degrees. Fucking philosophical discussions! Why cant they ever be simple?!
But more seriously, if i had to try and boil my argument down: Stories and the Culture they come from and the Culture they Influence (Because you cant really separate these out - Stories come from our cultures, but they also effect our cultures, its' a back and forth thing) absolutely effect people's behavior! But they dont happen in abstract, and they dont exist in abstract either - you cannot pull a game like Civ 6 out and pretend it exists in a vacuum, and analyze it from that perspective. It was built and made by people ontop of a legacy of other games built and made by people, who all existed in a culture that grew and changed and has kept growing and changing as it was made! Some of these people will have grown up playing these games and then ended up working on making the next one. And it's interesting to see how the stories of the culture are reflected in the game - and conversely, then the stories it's telling back to our culture.
To follow up on the murder simulators a bit: Sure! I agree. At the same time i think it's worth asking - why, in so many games, is violence the main form of conflict resolution? What does that say about our culture, and our perceptions of these things thereof, the stories we tell ourself? Hell, this is not even unique to video games - violence as a method of conflict resolution is VERY central to so much of human storytelling and mythologies. And this is not a bad thing - as Bizazedo and Forar both raise, there's value (arguably quite a lot of value) of having safe spaces where we can explore, within reason, our dark sides in ways that do no harm (or at least, no non-consensual harm) to other people. See also: The kink community! But then see also the Kink Communities' persistent and deep issues with abusers, with sexism, with racism.
Honestly, I think argument might be the wrong word for this, or at least the perspective and mood i'm coming from - exploration is probably a better one! I like to pull stories apart, and this subject of implicit storytelling caught my interest as I started thinking about the Civ series as some of hte implied series. And a lot of it, is overall, harmless. But it's still interesting to think about.
And also funny. Like that trick in Civ 6 where you give away a bunch of your cities to suddenly catapult yourself to a religious victory. That's HILARIOUS to me - the game cares about % of cities converted, per civ. Not population! So if you find the guy who's below that % and give him enough of your very religious cities... Bing! The implicit storytelling there is deeply funny, slightly concerning and endlessly fascinating.
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"Nothing is gonna save us forever but a lot of things can save us today." - Night in the Woods
...I find this deeply funny, not in a mocking you way, but just because I heavily agree with Romantic Undead, so it's just amusing seeing our disagreements... and our agreements!
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Something that did bother me recently in a game I played that is sort of relevant was in a Baldurs Gate replay. A farmer had a quest where some xvarts (basically goblins) were stealing livestock, and as part of the quest you find a xvart village and kill everyone in it (which is like dozens of xvarts).
This bothered me, especially because it wasn’t presented as anything out of the ordinary and none of my “good” npcs batted an eye. (I probably wouldn’t have thought as much about it if it was part of a quest for like Dorn or someone who is explicitly an evil bastard who only cares about getting the job done.). Framing matters a lot. It bothers me more if something morally questionable has no consequences or is rewarded.
I think in general more recent RPGs have done better at things like this though. I think 5th edition d&d had an aside in one book about how societies might be evil but intelligent races were not by default, and that while an orcish tribe might come into conflict with humans a paladin for instance murdering a bunch of orcish babies isn’t really a great thing to do.
Paradox games sans Stellaris are the closest I can think of, mainly because there isn't a specific win condition, just a start date and end date, and what you do and what your goals are in the meantime is all up to you.
Victoria 2 is probably the best example, at least in abstract (as I'm not sure if it has a multiplayer component), mainly because it is explicitly made to be impossible to do a World Dominantion run like in EUIV or CK2/3, so any goal you come up with will have to fall well short of that, leaving others the chance to succeed in their own goals so long as they don't run counter to yours. It also has the most depth in terms of economy and politics of any of PDX's grand strategies, so taking a path with little or no warfare doesn't mean mind-numbing boredom either.
There's a not-quite-nontroversy in Genshin Impact at the moment over the hilichurls, which are basically an endemic (possibly aboriginal) variety of masked goblin that you end up killing in, uh, droves.
Frequently you'll see them sleeping, or dancing around campfires (with actual indigenous-inspired dance moves), or similar, and they appear to just be chill dudes when not villainized by your character's proximity, so it feels really weird that the game is not just okay with but pretty much encouraging you to do things like shoot giant birds made of fire at them.
Yeah, Victoria a lot of times your reasonable long term goals didn’t even involve conflict necessarily, you could definitely play a game that was more like “Take Egypt in 1830 and modernize it to be a moderately powerful regional power with a decent standard of living and industrial base that is considered one of the top 10 great powers in the world.”
But all paradox games can really be played like that, most just end up with players conquering big swathes of land and murdering tons of people because players are going to be players.
(cue dramatic music)
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This is my actual, unironic philosophical position on the matter. I will not be taking questions on it at this time - let's talk about games!
We've cracked it! Thread over, everyone go home. (It's actually an interesting point to consider, though one that's possibly getting a bit too general/broad philosophy?)
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Yeah, I think CK2 subtly encouraging me to murder three or four cardinals so my brother could be Pope was the lightbulb moment for me.
And these bits are like the flipside argument to why these games are good - Teaching through expreince is a lot more valuble than teaching through telling!
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This is the thing I worry about more with games, that like with police procedurals or shows like 24. People will take subconscious lessons about what works in a game, and use that to inform their decision making / politics in real life. "Torture is fine, because in Black Ops 8, you torture the terrorist and that leads to to the base with the nuclear weapon is hidden". So why wouldn't I support the police being able to spy on everyone, there might be a nuclear weapon!
"Yeah triangle trade was really good for the economy, look at all the growth and progress it makes when you do in in EU4."
Breath of the Wild is effectively the same in this regard. Most of the time the primary monsters, the bokoblins, are just hanging out in tree forts or around campfires. It's super fun to brainstorm creative ways to slaughter them all with your various weapons and abilities before they can even pick up their weapons. Plus you don't have to feel bad about not checking to see if they're good bokoblins or not because none of them are good (and if they were, the game would probably just disallow you the ability to harm them like other NPCs).
How intelligent monsters are depicted and treated has become more of a focus in recent years, especially those monsters that are identified as being stand-ins for real world human cultures. I understand there's a a recent novel series inspired by Lovecraft's Shadow Over Innsmouth that reveals that the fish people from the original story were just normal folks who happen to look different.
It's also been a major point of criticism against Dungeons & Dragons even as the game has become more popular than ever. Before, D&D took the Legend of Zelda approach (or perhaps it would be more accurate to say Legend of Zelda took the D&D approach) of having it okay to kill intelligent monsters because they were all the creations of evil gods or demon lords that essentially programmed them to enact their wicked will on the world. In the past year or so especially critics have likened D&D's treatment of monsters as being too similar to how colonizers would conceive of other peoples in justifying their atrocities.
This has led to few changes, with varying degrees of acceptance from critics:
I have to admit I'm curious if the changes to intelligent monsters in D&D will spread to other, related media (such as the Legend of Zelda series) that have historically relied on "always evil" intelligent creatures as opponents that are okay to kill.
An interesting twist on the "okay to kill" trope appears in the game This Land is My Land, in which the protagonist is a Native American chief charged with stopping westward expansion by attacking the encroaching settlers and destroying their settlements. However, said game also wasn't actually created by Native Americans and has faced criticism for that fact.
Except for the possibility that some people may play these games and think "oh, this is just how the world works" and/or "if European nations hadn't done what they did some other nation would have done it themselves".
Yup! That is sort of the original argument/point i've been making, but it's also one of those really hard things.
Like let's pivot briefly here to another Dan Olson video, The Nostalgia Critic and The Wall. Specifically, during this video he brings up the sequence during The Wall in which Pink imagines himself as a Fascist dictator leading a rally - one populated with the iconography of crossed hammers. Within the context of the Wall, it's uh, pretty obviously anti-fascist - this is not a complementary thing towards fascim or fascists!
Annnnd then he brings up that there's these neonazi chucklefucks who co-opted the Crossed hammer imagery and adopted their name from the wall. Whoops.
Now, this is way more explicit than the subtlety you're talking about, but it loops back around in my mind to the argument i made in my OP about Civ games unintentionally promoting a Zero-Sum idelogy, the same ideology that is often a basis for anti social saftey nets, or the idea that we simply cant feed everyone on the planet, and we've gotta prune the number of people back~, and on that note fuck you avengers movies and your fucking thanos- *explodes*
Okay, so exploding aside, it's a real tricky one. Because the storytelling + learning that @Auralynx & @Monwyn cite is incredibly valuable! You can really understand how people take perfectly rational steps that lead to immense human suffering! But as @Hexmage-PA has just cited as I was in the middle of replying... there's a real dark side to this learning too.
And I don't actually know the answer to this. I suspect it involves the sort of skills we arm people with, like critical thinking, and that's its own whole massive kettle of fish that's getting into the education system.
Except I just implied we should shift the burden of this from the people producing these products to the people consuming these products, and you know, i'd swear I've heard similar arguments before about personal responsibility... Possibly related to the idea of social safety nets, and how really, people should just take more responsbility for themselves and they'd stop being poor.
Good job Penguin.
So that alone cannot be the answer - We need to change how people make things too, or we're just playing hot potato with the responsibility-bomb. But - We also need to figure out how to change how people engage with, or examine media that they want to engage with. And when it comes to escapism, that's fucking tricky - as we've talked about, and are continuing to talk about, the want to just... put your burdens down, or let out the toxins of a bad day in some good ol' fashioned head-exploding violence is not only valid, it's potential quite healthy. Gets a lot harder if you're constantly second-guessing yourself on your escapism of choice.
And all of this ignores or at least glosses over the finical incentives that go into video games or generally any form of culture that's focused on relaxation and enjoyment and the way that can entangle things 'orribly
(Also, hey, thanks for all the discussion! there's other stuff i wanna follow up on and may not get to, but i just wanted to call out all the good posts in genral happening in here)
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Those sound like pretty accurate descriptions of history.
I think it is endless space where when you ally with another race it ties your victorys together. So now your Money victory takes twice as much money but also both players contribute and you both win together.
There are less-violent victory conditions in most 4Xs I've played but your most useful ability to directly influence another player is almost always military.
I don't believe that is the case. The brutality of colonialism is not something that was set in stone at the beginning of history.
I'm hopeful that the upcoming Humankind is a bit more than a Civ-alike, because I have kind of fallen out of love with conquer-the-map-from-the-AI games, but I love the idea of putting together a big complex civilization over a long time.
I'm also interested in trying this big wargame Shadow Empire after reading a review, it seems like it has a lot of interesting elements to it above and beyond the fighting. It's still a wargame, so you're definitely going to be spending a bunch of time fighting folks, but it seems like it has a better idea of why anyone would need to start fighting beyond one of the end-game goals being to own all areas of the map.
I played a bit of spellforce 3: fallen god and it handles the humanoid aspect pretty decently. I haven’t gotten too far, but you are essentially at base-level playing a baldurs-gate like party (there are also rts segments), but you are all Trolls.
Which gets pretty neat. Your tribe of trolls you are protecting definitely aren’t noble savages, they raid elves and humans for weapons and magic items, practice ritualistic human (er.. Troll) sacrifice, and aren’t afraid to get their hands dirty, but at the same time they are very sympathetic. The Trolls are a dying people, the other “bad” races like greenskins raid them for slaves while the “good” humans and elves just kill them and sell their tusks for ivory. Trolls form marriage-like attachments to each other (I’m not sure at this point if theres actual female trolls or if they are ungendered and these are reproductive couplings). A big part of the game is basically helping “raise” an adolescent troll through your advice and actions and influencing him towards good or evil, etc.
Very neat.
My favorite example is Justice Scalia using the character Jack Bauer from show 24 to justify the US governments use of torture. If 24 didn’t exist, he still would have made a bad faith argument to justify torture because that is what he wanted. I’m not gonna defend 24 or other shit media like Blue Bloods, but it’s not like we can just get rid of them either without opening a whole can of worms. If there’s a market for torture or murder or genocide simulators, then people are gonna make those games/books/shows/comics/whatever.
It’s up to the individual to determine what their values are and what media is worth their time. I like to conquest in Civ and Crusader Kings because it’s just a game, not because I secretly value monarchies or colonialism or whatever. There is a very clear line between fiction and reality and anyone that cannot tell the difference is either a bad faith actor or has a mental disorder and shouldn’t be in a position to affect people’s lives regardless.
I just don’t contemplate why I make Mario jump on helpless goombas when I can just go over or around it, nor do I consider if it’s enslaved by Bowser and is forced to fight Mario against its will in some torturous personal hell, nor if it has a family or not. It’s just a bunch of ones and zeros and it makes a funny noise when Mario steps on it, I don’t later go outside and look for ants to crush for the hell of it because that’s what the game trained me to do.
Battlenet ID: MildC#11186 - If I'm in the game, send me an invite at anytime and I'll play.
The primary difference between D&D and a 4x game is that the former is interactive at a level a 4x game can't hope to achieve. Which is not to say that there's no possible takeaway to the current pushback against D&D tropes, just that it'll be a lot harder to make satisfying.
I believe that the biggest inherent flaw of the 4x and Grand Strategy genre at the moment is their absolute indifference to the idea of an overall narrative - the sandbox is itself the problem, however many emergent or procedural toys you cram in there. It's understandable, given the vast scope of "be an interplanetary nation," or "guide the course of human history," as a premise. In contrast, one of the big strengths of the Total War series (which might fit as Grand Strategy? It's a little murky) is the limited scope of any individual installment. It creates a context in which goals can be discrete and explicit, and the challenge becomes "how am I going to accomplish that?"
I suspect that same limited (or in this case idiosyncratic) scope is why many of us have such fond memories of Sid Meier's Alpha Centauri. There was a very clear context and ideological struggle being enacted in that game, and it felt satisfying to push towards various possible resolutions.
Also, so far as Alpha Centauri war-stories go, one time I pretty much did what Zepherin was suggesting to a friend in multiplayer; he'd terraformed his home island into something bordering on a paradise, so as an opener to my own campaign to close out the game I fired Planet Busters into it kicked over his sandcastle with great thoroughness.
The Europeans were unique in the power they had due to technological advantage (which was very much a right place in the right time situation). I don’t really think they were somehow morally flawed in some unique way that other humans weren’t. There are plenty of examples in history of pre-industrial situations all over the world that look a lot like colonialism.
We should really do our best to leave that particular tangential set of ideas simmering if we want to keep this thread on-topic.
E: To be clearer - because "Colonialism" is a thread in and of itself.
Economic Victory is also fun in ES2 because the game tracks how much Dust (the game's currency) is being produced per turn as inflation, increasing the upkeep and buyout costs for everyone. Having 2 or more empires in a game going for the Econ Victory almost always created a hyperinflation scenario that could cripple empires that didn't invest enough into Dust production as they are forced by the game to scuttle ship and buildings to stay in the black.
How often, when discussing philosophy or other theoretical/abstracted subjects (math, genetic science, even physics in some cases), do we pose hypothetical scenarios that can have horrific ethical implications? Is there no value in having a virtual environment exist where I can ask the question "I wonder what would happen if I wiped out all of the Hapsburgs?" without, you know, actually wiping out all the people named Hapsburg? Does asking such questions, even as a thought exercise and/or entertainment, suddenly mean we are at risk of justifying actually taking that action in real life in the eyes of some?
I would accuse anyone who would take such a position of being an absolutist deontological goose.