Can you make an anti-imperial empire game? The 4Xperts behind Civilization, Syphilisation and Victoria 3 discuss eXperimental 4X design

[The_J]

Yes, that is a long title.
Eurogamer has published a new article with exactly this title, "Can you make an anti-imperial empire game? The 4Xperts behind Civilization, Syphilisation and Victoria 3 discuss eXperimental 4X design".
The mentioned "4Xperts" are Civ5's Jon Shafer, along with Nikhil Murthy, the designer of Syphilisation, and Ryan Sumo, who is working at Paradox for Victoria 3 and Europa Universalis IV. And as it turns out, these three know each other and are friends, as it is not uncommon in the game dev scene.
In this interview, they talk about the challenges in 4X games, how some of the concepts are intertwined with ideology (especially of imperial/colonialist idelogy), and how 4X games don't only have to be about strategy, but can also tell a story (not necessarily the Civ games, but e.g. the Paradox games, or as we know, Alpha Centauri).

An excerpt from the interview:

Jon: Edwin, you mentioned Endless Legend, and I think to compare that to Civ - in Civ, there are expectations for what a game about history should be. And if you start changing the script a lot, then you're not really delivering on that, in the same way. Whereas in a fantasy game, or a science fiction game, as a designer, you can go wild with the rules, especially from the base Civilization formula. You can push that in certain directions, but making it so that, say, only certain civilizations can declare war, for what Civilization is trying to do, it doesn't really make sense.

It definitely feels like on the historical side, there's a lot of potential to explore human relationships and politics and the tensions between people trying to compete and cooperate, how that plays out. If you're trying to stick to a more traditional formula, being a little bit more interesting in your setting or your themes, can kind of open up the space there. It's interesting with a historical game, you get a lot 'for free' in a way, but also the expectations for what you're going to do are more specific.

Nikhil: I'm actually gonna push back a little bit there. When I started making Syphilisation, I made it a group report instead of having you actually decolonize India, putting you into the game as the Indian National Congress or something. Because all of our history games are like alternate history games, right? It's not like there's a 6000 year old Gandhi, watching over you from 4000 BC, choosing everything the country does [as in Civilization]. The reason I didn't implement it as decolonizing India directly is that then there's a possibility space I didn't feel qualified to implement. I don't have an answer to the question of what if the Indian independence movement was more violent? What if Jinnah had taken over the ANC leadership in the 1920s? I just don't have answers for this.

You can read the whole article here.

 

[Boris Gudenuf]

What I found most interesting was the way the concept of 'progress' has become equivalent to 'expand' both in the popular view of history and in game design. That's a special problem in the 4x genre because Expand also includes Exterminate and Exploit, so the entire game system comes to revolve around Constant Expansion.

Sound familiar? It's the hoary old Civilization question of Tall Versus Wide: how do you allow for Victory without Expansion/Extermination/Exploitation of everything in sight?

And, what they touched on but is pervasive in the current news, is that the Expansion hypothesis: Growth Equals Progress, has become very questionable these days. The results appear to be not Progress, but economies, polities, peoples that struggle with entirely new problems (one of which is identified as Climate Change, but in reality that has been with us as long as we've been on the planet: the problem is Massive Climate Change) that existing systems do not seem to be able to meet.

Some of these are what I call Traditional Problems: racial differences and tensions, economic disparities, religious conflict, but some are relatively New:

1. The Triumph of Capitalism over Socialism in economics also means that a larger percentage of the world population also has to live with the Problems of Capitalism: fundamental inequities in access to wealth and concentration of the wealth into fewer and fewer hands, resulting historically in either massive Reform or Revolution.

2. On the other hand, 'group' ideologies like Socialism/Communism or Fascism that require everyone to subordinate themselves to the needs of the State also require a massive Coercive apparatus to keep everyone compliant - a burden on the economy and the politics that stifles everything in the State.

3. And many of the 'modern' problems are inherently Supra-National: no one country can make any headway against climate change and climate effects - it requires either a World-Wide action or it will devolve into individual states trying desperately to survive the results - and many if not most utterly failing to do so as either a political or a population group.

4. Likewise, preventing War has proven to be flatly impossible as long as individual leaders, peoples and states can decide on their own that War Is Worth It, at least in their 'special' case, and no reality check will deter all of them. When almost any war quickly affects neighboring states' economies and peoples, Every War has consequences far beyond its battlefields, and a humanity composed almost entirely of individual nation states each jealous of its sovereignty and 'uniqueness' has not been able to handle that well. Throw in an increasing number of states that have, or could have in an extremely short time, Weapons of Mass Destruction, and the world is playing Russian Roulette with hand grenades in a closet.

 

[vorlon_mi]

Two items from the article that I found interesting:

1) The tension between a game (where a player is trying to "win") and a simulation (where the player acts on events, reacts to events). Jon and Edwin both talk about the history of games that began as board games, where one winner is part of the game design. It's challenging to re-think that model, where one can have multiple winners.
2) The history and expectations of game franchises. Each of the experts in the article know what Civ games represent, what Paradox games represent, and what the fans of those games expect. All of them noted that designers/developers have trouble stretching far beyond those expectations; how it would be hard for Civ games to give up certain aspects that make them "Civ."

 

[Boris Gudenuf]

Once upon a time . . .
There was (and probably still is, I haven't kept up with Board Game designs and sales for over 20 years) a classic board game called Diplomacy in which one of the most common 'victories' was a Stalemate in which two sides or coalitions could make no headway against each other and so the game ended with, depending on their point of view, either all members of the two sides (or more) or none coming away as 'Victors'.

The other, even more interesting thing about the game was that it Required you to make agreements with the other players (the basic game was designed as a 7-player game) in order to do virtually anything. Therefore, in order to achieve an outright victory, sooner or later you had to betray your Ally: a process known to Dippy players as 'The Stab' (short for 'Stab In The Back').

Given that Outright World Conquest, though often contemplated by historical Leaders, has never even come close to accomplishment, and that No Alliance has ever lasted more than a generation or so IRL, one could say that Diplomacy's Stalemate Victory is, in fact, a model of the most common outcome of any 4X game like Civ, and the Diplomatic or Military Stab In The Back the most common in-game Event.

Something to think about the next time anybody sits down to design or redesign a 4X Grand Strategy title.

 

[martindo]

View attachment 668263

Yes, that is a long title.
Eurogamer has published a new article with exactly this title, "Can you make an anti-imperial empire game? The 4Xperts behind Civilization, Syphilisation and Victoria 3 discuss eXperimental 4X design".
The mentioned "4Xperts" are Civ5's Jon Shafer, along with Nikhil Murthy, the designer of Syphilisation, and Ryan Sumo, who is working at Paradox for Victoria 3 and Europa Universalis IV. And as it turns out, these three know each other and are friends, as it is not uncommon in the game dev scene.
In this interview, they talk about the challenges in 4X games, how some of the concepts are intertwined with ideology (especially of imperial/colonialist idelogy), and how 4X games don't only have to be about strategy, but can also tell a story (not necessarily the Civ games, but e.g. the Paradox games, or as we know, Alpha Centauri).

An excerpt from the interview:


You can read the whole article here.

Once upon a time . . .
There was (and probably still is, I haven't kept up with Board Game designs and sales for over 20 years) a classic board game called Diplomacy in which one of the most common 'victories' was a Stalemate in which two sides or coalitions could make no headway against each other and so the game ended with, depending on their point of view, either all members of the two sides (or more) or none coming away as 'Victors'.

The other, even more interesting thing about the game was that it Required you to make agreements with the other players (the basic game was designed as a 7-player game) in order to do virtually anything. Therefore, in order to achieve an outright victory, sooner or later you had to betray your Ally: a process known to Dippy players as 'The Stab' (short for 'Stab In The Back').

Given that Outright World Conquest, though often contemplated by historical Leaders, has never even come close to accomplishment, and that No Alliance has ever lasted more than a generation or so IRL, one could say that Diplomacy's Stalemate Victory is, in fact, a model of the most common outcome of any 4X game like Civ, and the Diplomatic or Military Stab In The Back the most common in-game Event.

Something to think about the next time anybody sits down to design or redesign a 4X Grand Strategy title.

Yes, Diplomacy was popular in the 1970s and 1980s, I recall. It was more of a negotiation game for alliances. Very minimal activity on the "board" each turn.

 

[martindo]

Syphilisation: what a joke! I wonder if that title was cooked up by the same gamers who didn't read history and thought "Indonesia" should be the name for the historical Majapahit led by a guy born > 700 years ago. Well, at least they used "Siam" instead of "Thailand".

Why is it a joke? Because Nikhil the Self-Righteous doesn't know that syphilis most likely came from the New World *to* the Old World:

Syphilis - Wikipedia

en.wikipedia.org

Gonorrhea went the other way, but anti-colonialists conflate the two origins because, well, they just like to rewrite history.