One small step for douchebag, one giant leap, for douchekind.

Tuesday, April 6, 2010

reluctant timesinks [bitch & moan]



I didn't have internet for a few hours while I got my oil changed (that's what she said).  So I wrote a blog post.


Anyone that's played a 4X game in the last few years has their personal favorites.  There are the Civ variants (Civilization, Rise of Nations, Empire Earth), the MoO variants (Masters of Orion, Sins of a Solar Empire, Galactic Civilization, Sword of the Stars).  Okay, that last one, Sword of the Stars, is actually unapologetic in its focus on combat.  It's a timesink that I'd rather not discuss, like a threesome turned into a drug deal turned into a Mexican standoff.

First of all, I'd like to applaud Civ and Sins for addressing nonkinetic competition through expansions, namely Beyond the Sword and Diplomacy.  They allow turtlers to open up a race-wide stat war that is comparatively cheaper than fleet production.  I've only installed Beyond the Sword and never really gotten any play out of it, so pretend I don't know shit about it.  Likewise, Diplomacy is too far down my play queue to warrant a time commitment.

Pre-DLC, Sins was a great 4X game.  Its cultural aspect was sadly, limited to a single planetary structure and its research tree, while better than the mostly multi-linear path of most strategy games, was still limited to economic and expansion buffs.  Sure, these are design decisions that keep the gameplay constrained to a tight mix of statistics, but it poses as an aggregate for the arts and entertainment.  I'll go as far as to say that warfare and culture are inseperably related, and that their implementation in contemporary strategy games is now irrelevant due to the very thing that made them so popular--computer networks.

Strategy games have greatly benefited from the internet, allowing groups of basement-dwelling nerds to do more than play Warhammer or Age of Empires on a LAN.  It's ironic that the fruits of the technology ignore the other resultant cultural phenomenon.  For instance, Latin America has a fairly large heavy metal following, but mostly limited to suburban teens who had no other means of sharing their interests than niche communities such as the internet.  It allowed communities to be formed around interests rather than ethnicity.  There's no such representation in strategy games.  In Sins, culture is a singular statistic belonging to a single state, competing with cultures from competing states.

The best representations of communities formed around interests within states are (and get ready to groan), are from Battlestar Galactica.  Yeah, I managed to drag BSG into this, shut the fuck up.  First, there's the reconciliation movement pre-Occupation.  A mostly underground movement, aspects of the internet allowed it to thrive--anonymity and memology of message.  Sure, we can extrapolate to past movements using flyers (even fake ones, such as the meme of Atlas in Bioshock).  Second, there's Baltar's radio program--lack of anonymity, but insanely popular.  The equivalent of a fireside chat (or, a more lol-worthy example, Glenn Beck's daily psychopathy), exists within a nation where the state is hostile to such a message, without necessarily a state-based sponsor.

Let's spew random historical examples of my hypothesis!  Information always travels faster than conventional combattants.  A viral video will travel faster than a cruise missile, from CONOPS (idea for video) to payload delivery (lulz).  During the age of Ancient Warfare (your 1st generation warfare), messengers were dedicated channels of rapid information delivery.  If combatants were faster than information, there'd be no reason to cipher "ATTACK AT DAWN" (by the way, this is a classic encryption text).  It's also why AWACS and other early warning radar platforms are built--because were it not possible to intercept using time-sensitive targetting data, we'd just keep a contingent of intercepts in the air at all times (as well as completely flooding airspace to dangerous levels).  So why is it that it takes me a damn hour to culturally undermine a planet and only 30 seconds to bombard and colonize it?

Where are the nonstate actors in strategy games? Well, there are creeps/pirates but they're almost always dealt with kinetically.  The closest examples we have are your various infection/mind control units (see: Starcraft) and ambush troops from the GLA in C&C Generals.  State-sponsored insurgencies are worthy of exploration, even at the expense of game mechanic simplicity.

I wouldn't be a pretentious douche unless I brought up the origins of Hellenistic culture--it was Macedonian conquest (and in turn, subjugation) that created a lasting effect on cultural exchange.  Resisting urge to bring up BSG again.

One last fucking topic:  the influence of religion in strategy games.  The British split from the Catholic Church fueled generations of legitimate and insurgent conflicts.  We've yet to see a strategy game that can capture the mechanics of the Irish civil War.  This style of insurgent kinetic operations would really appeal to fans of micromanagement.

In any case, I can understand the various design decisions that abstract nonkinetic aspects of warfare into an ineffectual last ditch for turtling players, but it's as if the onus to provide clear victors stifles any efforts to capture the cyclical nature of conflict and its relationship to culture and media.

I've already decided that Civilization 5 will be boring, Firaxis sux, and fuck you for pointing out that I'll end up spending 20 hours in the game.

Coming next time is a spray and pray, I promise.

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