It’s the motto of Dwarf Fortress: Losing is Fun. And it’s one you need to take to heart with that game, because until you get the hang of it (And even after you do) you’re going to lose, a lot. But that’s not quite what I’m aiming at here. In conventional games you may often die a lot as well, but you’ll come back at the last checkpoint or save and carry on.
What I am thinking of, however, is something fairly unique to strategy gaming, which is to say, losses that don’t end the game, but rather that are just a part of the game, a thing you endure, carry on from, and ultimately recover from.
But does that happen? See, in a ‘regular’ game like, say, Halo, when you die you just come back from it. You try again. You succeed, or not, and that’s that. In a game like DF you may lose a lot of work, but in these cases the loss is indeed part of the fun. It comes about because of a silly mistake, or because of hubris, or because you just got bored and wanted to watch the world burn. But in a strategy game losses are different.
Decisions, decisions
In the real world of course no country is in permanent ascendance. Not even Rome enjoyed uninterrupted growth, and Rome eventually fell, as all powers do. So a strategy game must surely account for this as well. Yet in my experience, when you lose a city in Civilization or are forced to cede provinces in Europa Universalis III, it doesn’t feel good. It does’t feel like it’s part of the proper flow of the game. In a strategy game you do expect to be in permanent ascendance, and to not be is irritating and may well turn one off playing. I recall reading an interview with Sid Meier years ago where he said his original intention with Civ had been for your civ to go through periods of contraction and decline, but he found it was far from enjoyable to have it work like that.
Partly I think this is a case of momentum. In a strategy game, when you gain something, that something goes towards helping your empire grow. Overextension and the like are rarely simulated, and almost never simulated well, and in fact when that is attempted (As in the Magna Mundi mod for EU3) it often comes off as very arbitrary and pointlessly constricting.
How about you? Am I alone here, or do others feel the same and dislike accepting losses? Are there examples of games which do this well, and don’t make it feel arbitrary or unfair?
So, I recently won NaNoWriMo by writing a 50,000 word novel in a month. Glorious, no?
You may be wondering what this has to do with video games. Well, for starters, games played a major role in my novel (everything I write is something I’m passionate about. In 2009 it was steampunk, in 2010 it was creativity, and in 2011 it was games.) But, much more importantly, my finishing up NaNo coincided nicely with three days off from work. Do you know what I am going to do for the next three days?
This.
I am going to play nonstop video games. Yes. Yes. It’s going to be glorious. I’ve already warmed up with some Civ this morning and now that I’ve sorted out some chores I’m going to launch into some delicious Space Empires IV and whatnot. I’ve got quite a backlog built up largely for similar reasons that Mister Adequate went into earlier, and of course there are classics to be played!
I’ve written previously about how strategy games give you a pretty weird angle compared to reality due to how they function, specifically that because they put you in charge of a state and they have a win condition, you become pretty psychopathic with regards to your state. It is only a means to your end.
I’m going to come at this from another angle today. I was thinking about it when I was playing GalCiv, because as I am playing as the Humans I’m sort-of-but-not-quite RPing them as they’re written in the backstory; canny traders, excellent diplomats, with an iron fist in the velvet glove. Now GalCiv has election events that are incredibly trivial. You choose a political party and have regular elections. If your party wins you keep their bonuses (Say, +20% to your influence). If they lose, the bonuses go away until you reclaim control. But if they lose you are still in control. Now from a gameplay perspective this makes perfect sense. Nobody wants to sit back and watch your civ get run into the ground by the AI over the next 30 turns or whatever. That doesn’t make it any more sensible or less jarring; ultimately in strategy games you are your state/country, and anything along the lines of elections, changing dynasties, or anything else is entirely secondary at best.
What’s weird isn’t that they do this, it’s that they try and pretend they don’t. I don’t mind being told “You are the overarching driving force behind the French Empire rather than any particular leader or government therein”. But then a game will turn around and I will be presented as being the particular leader or government, such as EU3 where every notification is addressed to “My Emir” or “My King” or what have you. But how can you address this?
Of course the problem is lessened if you're an immortal Goddess-Queen
The Tropico series has possibly the best approach. You are a tinpot dictator and one of the ways in which your score is evaluated is by how much money you have embezzled from your own country over the years. This is a brilliant little mechanic, because you are actively reducing your abilities in one field in order to bump up your endgame results elsewhere. You’re still just going for the nebulous “score” but it’s something. One idea I had was to essentially provide you with ostentatious monuments to build, of truly obscene scale (Think Bender when he becomes Pharaoh), and the larger you build it the better you are. Civ used to do something vaguely similar where a good performance would make your palace or throne room better, a nice sidebar to the main game, and there’s a mod for Civ IV where you really can lose control of your empire to the AI for a number of turns, an interesting if frustrating feature.
Do you have any examples of this issue being done well? How might a game merge leadership of an in-game actor like a country with being an individual leader? Thoughts and ideas!
According to my mom, who went crazy with genealogy research one year a while back, I’m a direct descendant of both William the Conqueror and Charlemagne. I like to jokingly tell people that this makes me naturally good at strategy games because it means conquering people is in my blood.
If that is actually the case, though, ol’ Willy and Charlie both would be disappointed in me. My usual strategy in something like, say, Civ, is to sit around and tech and then win by space victory. I’m usually not the aggressor unless someone gives me a really good reason to be.
So yesterday I was rather surprised by the sudden urge I felt the urge to play a Civ game specifically to go around and destroy everyone. I did so, and it was glorious. Why build more cities when you can just plunder some for yourself? Why worry about diplomacy when you have a military that could take on three or four other civs at once? Why worry about tech when you’re going to be ahead in tech by the end of the game anyway due to, well, conquering everyone?
The rules of the game.
Anyways, going against my usual grain was a lot of fun and by the end I even found myself juggling things I didn’t think I’d have to, like culture– when you take a lot of cities from other people, culture becomes a big deal in order to avoid losing your new prizes.
I did inevitably end up winning with a Space Race Victory, despite taking about half of everyone’s cities for my own. I just can’t resist the lure of flying to Alpha Centauri. Mister Adequate has issued me a challenge, though: Next time, I have to turn off all victories except for Conquest. Bring it on.
The other day Mister Adequate and I were on Sporcle doing quizzes together, which is a fun little pastime that we do on occasion. We had discovered the mother lode of strategy game related quizzes and were having a blast doing things like trying to name all the Civilization IV techs in 14 minutes and whatnot, and then we discovered one particular quiz that was called “Name Every Sim Game” or something.
So we took the quiz. We knew full well that we weren’t going to remember every single Sim game, but we wanted to see how well we would fare anyways, because we both have a huge soft spot for the Sim series. We did pretty well; we probably got about 75% or so, and then at the very end we eagerly went through to see which ones we had missed. It was standard stuff that we should’ve gotten; SimRefinery, Streets of SimCity, Sid Meier’s SimGolf…
…
…
Wait, what?
Sid Meier’s SimGolf.
Sid Meier’s SimGolf.
It’s actually a thing. That neither of us knew existed. Quickly we scoped out the Wikipedia article:
Sid Meier’s Sim Golf is a computer game created by Sid Meier, Firaxis, and Maxis in 2002.
Okay, so, let’s get this straight. Firaxis and Maxis got together. And made a game.
Firaxis and Maxis made a game together.
But instead of taking all the strategic turn-based depth of Civilization and combining it with the sandboxy micromanagement of SimCity to make the ultimate civilization simulator… they made a golf game.
Have a picture of our exact reaction.
And then we were confused for the rest of the day.
As I’m sure you’re all probably aware, I play a lot of Civ IV. A lot of it. Steam tells me I’ve dumped 366 hours into it in the last six months alone, and I have no regrets about this fact.
Civ V is something I have played considerably less of. In fact, I’ve never actually finished a game. Either my (dated) computer decides that it doesn’t want to handle the game and it crashes, or something in the gameplay annoys me and I quit. So, while I’m technically able to tell people that I prefer IV over V, I feel a little bad anytime I do. Like I didn’t give V a fair shake. Like I have no right to really decide for myself which game is better because I haven’t tried it enough.
So leave it to Mister Adequate to issue me a challenge. Mister Adequate has played a lot more Civ V than I have. He has since decided that he likes IV better, but at least he is able to back this up with his own personal experiences. And, as he knows my desire to be able to come to a similar conclusion, he gave me a challenge, which is as follows:
Play three full games of Civ V from start to finish. Not quit if I run into a game mechanic that I don’t like. Keep trying if my computer starts acting up.
Three full games of Civilization V.
My initial reaction.
Now anyone who knows me knows me even moderately well knows that a.) I don’t back down from a challenge, and b.) If you say “I bet that you can’t [insert thing here], I will do everything in my power to prove you wrong. So obviously Mister Adequate said this knowing full well that I was going to have to take him up on this. And so, you had better believe that I am going to play three complete games of Civ V. I’m going to blog my experiences and conclusions as I go, as well. This may not all be in a timely fashion, since for those who aren’t aware, I’m actually going to be moving a solid six hundred miles east this weekend, so I’ll be busy doing that. But inbetween packing and sorting and being-busy-in-general, I hope to bring you all screenshots and impressions of The Civ Game I Never Gave a Fair Shake To.
Anyone who knows me at all will know that I write a lot. Writing at least one novel a year– for NaNoWriMo— is standard for me, and this year I decided to bump it up a notch and write TWO novels, so before November hits this year I am plinking along in Camp NaNoWriMo.
Between odd work schedules, the possibility of moving (again) and the way writers’ block loves to time itself so it hits when I actually have time to write, it’s been slow going. I’m a good five thousand words behind or so– not a thoroughly insurmountable gap, but still a sizable one. Anyways, I was really having a lot of trouble motivating myself to do anything, but then I hit upon a brilliant plan. Basically, I’d force myself to write a good sized paragraph (or the equivalent of it, should I be writing dialogue or something), and then I’d reward myself with ten turns of Civ.
…I was not expecting this plan to work as well as it did.
I think I’ve written more in my current book since implementing this plan than before I did, and I just started doing this a few days ago. I’m knocking out a thousand words an hour– a very high rate for me– and that includes spending a good chunk of time in game.
Playing Civ like it's my job.
The best part is that once I really get going with writing, I don’t have much trouble continuing. This is something I learned back in the day when I used to trick myself into writing by setting a “one sentence a day” goal, knowing full well I’d write more than a sentence. The same thing is happening here; I’m frequently writing two or three paragraphs in between my ten turns of Civ. But the one rule remains steadfast: I must write at least one paragraph before I let myself play more Civ. You wouldn’t believe how fast the writer’s block dissolves when I’ve got Civ an alt+tab away.
I feel really good about this. What’s that you say, world? Video games are a waste of time and are keeping us from being more productive?
Come back and talk to me about it after video games help me motivate myself into writing a novel.
Well, I’m off to do more writing and Civ’ing. I eventually plan to extend this to other turn-based games as well, should I tire of Civ. I’m excited. I can’t wait to SMAC and write.
Sometimes I’ll be driving down the road in town and I’ll see a sign outside an area that’s being developed. It’ll say something on it like “2 acres, zoned commercial.”
And I know exactly what they’re talking about. I mean, why wouldn’t I? I’ve played SimCity.
In fact, 99% of what I know about city development and planning comes directly from SimCity.
Just like everything I know about Europe in the 15th century comes from Europa Universalis 3. They don’t teach you about this sort of thing in school– not here, anyway. You get one year– nine months– of “World History” and they have to cram everything from pre-history to the present era in those nine months. Do you think they have the time to tell you about a bunch of dinky little countries in Europe that have since disappeared or merged into larger ones? They don’t.
Monty Python and the Holy Grail is responsible for the rest of my knowledge of pre-19th century European History.
Now, some games, of course, expressly set out to be educational. Some of them succeed, and some of them don’t. The Oregon Trail is one of the ones that succeeded. Thanks to that game I am expert on dozens of landmarks dotting the midwestern US, as well as several other interesting tidbits, such as: how to use 19th century first aid to treat a variety of illnesses, when it is appropriate to ford the river or caulk the wagon when crossing a river, and how to identify a wide variety of poisonous plants. Whether or not any of these skills will come in handy some day remains to be seen, but one can only hope.
Strategy games have taught me a good deal about war through the ages. I can’t claim to be at the same point that Mister Adequate is (the chap actually has a master’s degree in this sort of thing, thanks to an interest in it that was sparked by video games), but where else would I have learned about various types of war doctrines or crazy sounding terms like “amphibious invasions”? The History Channel, maybe.
Next up, on the History Channel!
Actually, I was recently flipping through a coffee table book my mom had lying around; it was called “The 100 Most Important Ideas in Human History” or something. Reading it was like reading an enhanced version of the Civilization tech tree. I mean, you literally could have released this book as an addon to a Civ Special Edition package or something and no one would have questioned it because the game and the book cover the exact same material.
You know, I could go on and on with sort of thing all day. Just like all other media, video games teach us things and mold us into who we are. Sure, we all love to relay that infamous Pac-Man joke:
Here’s a thing that bugs me about videogames that take place over a long period of time; They run on the assumption that what held true in our world will hold true in that way. Absolute monarchy and aristocracy begin, and these are gradually or violently reduced in favor of either constitutional monarchy or republicanism. Divine Right gives way to consent of the governed. Religion begins as a dominant force for the entire planet, and gradually declines in importance. It’s true that most games allow you through some means or other to maintain your previous status quo, but the assumptions are always the same – later technologies unlock new governments and these are superior to previous ones. You can run a theocratic state in Civ but if your rivals are a police state or democracy, they’re likely to outproduce you by some measure due to the bonuses they get compared to yours.
Now, in the first instance, I understand that even making these value judgments can be a pretty tricky task if you’re making a game which offers a number of governmental forms, and every single thing you add to that can complicate it considerably. Let’s take Communism as a working example. Superficially it’s easy to see why a Communist state would get a bonus to industry – Stalin forced the USSR from peasant serfdom to industrial superpower within a couple of decades, and Mao attempted the same in China (Though it was Deng Xiaoping’s free-market oriented reforms which have unleashed the Middle Kingdom’s current surge in wealth). Hoxha’s Albania and the DPRK regime both put military production before any other consideration. Our real-world historical examples of it are industry-centered, militaristic, and vary from merely autocratic to incomparably vicious.
If it was like this, we'd all be Red.
The question is, does this demonstrate what Communism has to be? Or is this how it is perceived because that’s how it worked out in our world? I would argue no, that much as I am opposed to it as a system, it wasn’t a fait accompli that it would turn out as it did. Had it taken hold in a heavily industrialized country such as the UK, France, Germany, or the USA, had the Mensheviks taken power in 1917, had the CNT-FAI won in Spain and resisted Stalinist control, we might well have a very different image of what Communism is.
My point isn’t to defend Communism. I’m merely using it because it’s an excellent example for what I am talking about, which is that game makers rely overly on preconceptions rooted in our reality’s experience to inform them of how things work in their games. More interesting, I feel, would be a more gradual, evolving system, where you didn’t choose your form of government so much as evolve it over the course of the game by reacting to events and conditions. The closest example to this I am aware of is Victoria II, where different political groups have various objectives, and different ones are allowed to do different things (So the reds can build factories all over the place, whilst radical liberals can’t fund any, for example) but even so, it feels somewhat thin, perhaps because it takes place over a relatively short time period.
I would, in any event, love to see a game on the timescale of Civ or even Spore where the development of not only your country, but its ideologies and most of all, what those ideologies actually entail, changes over the course of the game. For another example, consider that during the Renaissance and Enlightenment it was argued by many (very pious) people that to understand the universe in a scientific manner was not only in accordance with being a good Christian, but indeed a form of worship in itself. The argument (Grossly oversimplified; I’m no theologian) was that as God had created everything, everything was holy, and thus understanding anything had to be an act of worship in itself. What if such a perspective had taken hold even more strongly and become as universal an attitude towards Christianity as the doctrine that Christ died on the Cross? I doubt the current perspective that religion is dogmatic and myopic whilst secularism is the route to a more accurate understanding of the world would be as deeply entrenched by any means. So yes, what I'm saying is that no current game is spergy enough for me.
The problem is, of course, that this is an immensely complicated field. Even working on the experiences of our actual history, we have a huge amount of different experiences to draw on. When you implement “Democracy” in Civilization, is it the democracy of Athens? Is it a democracy where only the landed elite can vote? Is it constrained by constitutional checks and balances? How do you model a unicameral vs. a bicameral system? Is the President the Head of State only (As in the Irish Republic) or the Head of State and Head of Government, as in the USA? And what influence does this have on how the respective countries are run? These are all just individual factors of a single potential form of government. How they all interact, how they might all evolve over the course of centuries, is certainly a daunting thing to tackle in even the densest academic text, nevermind a videogame.
But ultimately, isn’t that what more ponderous strategy games are about? You’re not just drawing your lines on the map, you’re creating a country, wrestling with competing concerns, trying to do five things with the resources to do three of them properly, listening to the concerns of different groups in your society and deciding how to react? I admit it might be something of a niche game, but I think there would be room for something that really went into the evolution of political systems, religions, and social ideas in videogames.
Okay guys, gather round and I’m going to tell you a story about a Civ IV game that Mister Adequate and I played. It went something like this:
Starting as early as I could I built up this massive, massive army over the course of several in-game centuries. I wish I could tell you exactly how big the stack was, but I can’t remember the details, only that it was huge and contained dozens of catapults and at least a score of swordsmen, axemen, and crossbowmen. It was just ridiculously imposing.
I then spent 80 turns sending the freaking thing across the map to Mister Adequate’s base. 80 turns, because for whatever reason the map we were playing on was completely covered in mountains so it took forever to get anywhere.
Eventually, though, my massive military was parked outside of one of his outer cities. At which point I informed my dear partner over voice chat that if he didn’t give me all of his tech, I would destroy his city.
He was quiet for a while, I think out of utter shock, and then asked to see my army so he could make an accurate assessment of the stakes. I agreed and inched my army a bit closer to him.
This is where I noticed two things. Firstly, he was playing a Protective-trait leader, so he had extra defense built into his cities by default. Secondly, the march across the map had taken SO LONG that he’d just finished researching Feudalism by the time I got there and was upgrading everyone to Longbowmen, which– for those of you who are not familiar with Civ IV– are incredibly effective defensive units well into mid-game.
And I made a big mistake here. A BIG mistake.
Namely, I voiced my dismay at these two facts. In other words, I was betraying a bit of insecurity on my end.
So you know what Mister Adequate did?
He said, and I quote, “Come at me, bro.”
Just like this.
I quailed here. I could hear a bit of panic in his voice, and so the thought crossed my mind that maybe he was bluffing, but then I got scared. He did have longbowmen. He did have a Defensive leader. The city I was standing next to was on a hill. And the guy I was playing against does actually have a master’s degree in this sort of thing. (No, really, he does.) And the game’s built-in combat odds estimation wasn’t telling me a whole lot, either.
And what if he had his own massive army, hidden in wait somewhere? Waiting to strike once my own army was demolished?
So I… said never mind and backed off. Actually, I had a new plan, because I was researching gunpowder at that point and figured that soon I could upgrade my units and try again. But we quit the game for the night not long after and I never got to that point.
That’s when he laughed at me and told me that he had been bluffing and I probably could have taken at least a couple of his cities easily.
Drats. Foiled again. :(
I’m not the only one who has made stupid mistakes like this, right? D:
