I was recently reading this preview for an upcoming game by Paradox, Crusader Kings II. Here’s the final paragraph of the review:

Of course there are problems in a game of this scope, when the mechanics become obscure and events make no sense. When he was five Harold invaded Scotland, forcing the Duke of Lothian to surrender his claim on Northumberland, but a month into the ceasefire he managed to usurp it back and even Harold’s babysitter doesn’t know how. So once again, the only way to really work out the game’s nuances is by sticking with it and putting in the hard graft. The hard graft though, is that much more enjoyable than in the rest of Paradox’s strategy games. We’ll see if it can still be as engaging in the long run when it’s released in February, but the preview does leave a distinct impression: it’s still a spreadsheet, but it’s a spreadsheet with a soul.

The preview’s implication, if you read the whole thing, is that this game adds a personal touch to what would otherwise be another Paradox game by focusing on people and families more than countries. This, the article states, gives the game a “soul”.

It’s an intriguing idea, and it sort of got me to wondering what gives a game this mythical quality of “soul”. Can this soul be found in other games– even games that are widely considered “spreadsheets”?

I’ve been playing Hearts of Iron 2 pretty solidly over the past few days inbetween working on my NaNoWriMo. I’ve been playing as Canada, which I find really fun to play for some reason. My main goal of the game was to turn Canada into a surprise industrial powerhouse while also providing some backup for my brothers in arms across the Atlantic.

One of the benefits you have as a player in a video game based on a historic event– in this case, World War II– is that you know when things are going to start happening and you can prepare accordingly. In this case, I was able to shuttle some troops across to France and line them all up along the Maginot Line. My hope was that maybe, if I could provide enough help, we could thwart Germany’s advance into France entirely and mess with history a bit– isn’t that the point of Paradox games, after all?

This didn’t happen. We put up quite a nasty fight but in the end the Nazis overran us. My forces retreated into one lone province, and I remember watching quite helplessly as they put up a last stand there against the Germans. And you know, for one fleeting minute there, I felt that I had failed. Not as a player. Not as a strategist. But as a leader. Suddenly, for a few brief seconds, I could see in my minds’ eye the desperate last fight of a group of soldiers facing the numberless hordes of the enemy. I thought about how a few in-game years prior I had made them say goodbye to their families and friends and sent them across the ocean to a foreign country. I wondered what they must be thinking, there in their little province surrounded by Nazis. I wondered if they thought this was the beginning of the end of the world. I wondered if someone made a stirring, spur-of-the-moment speech, inspiring them not to go down without a fight. I wondered what their last thoughts were.

I wondered all of this and then seconds later they were gone.

They weren’t “real”, per se. They were bits of computer data represented by a couple of pixels on my monitor. But they represented real events and real emotions that have happened before and will happen again, and because of that, for those few brief seconds, I found the soul in the spreadsheet.

And that is one of the many reasons why I will always love this medium.