civilization and ludic eurocentrism

Sid Meier's Civilization is a eurocentric game.

Now, I know what you're going to say to me. You're going to say to me "No way, Jake! You're full of crap! Look at the balance of western vs. non-western leaders and civilizations portrayed in the game. Look at the fact that those leaders speak their accurate native languages (or close approximations thereof), and that the units you control do also! Raargh, I'm angry that you're wrong!"

Well, hopefully you won't say that last part. But you're right! Civilization as a series does have a very good track record of representing traditionally marginalized societies and groups. It uses as a measure of who should be included not only expansionist success and historical fame, but also internal political achievement and successful defense against colonialism, as well as making an effort to include nations that might have been great had they not been outright exterminated.

But centrism is about more than that. It's not merely the erasure of certain peoples' contributions to history, which Civilization laudably doesn't do. It's instead a totalizing system of values that emphasizes some things and de-emphasizes others. It tells us--in the case of Civilization, through gameplay--what is important and what is not important. Civilization is Eurocentric not because it whitewashes history or under-represents certain groups, but because of what it is about: expansion, conquest, and technology.

As I see it, these have been the things that seem to have been viewed as important to western powers, at least in our understanding of them. What do we study in Western Civ 101? The expansion and conquest of the Roman Empire. The wars of the middle ages. Colonialism. The Renaissance. The Enlightenment. The Napoleonic wars. The world wars. The cold war. Granted, we do hit religion, industrialization, the rising middle class, and the change in theories of government, but I feel that the balance lies on the side of foreign policy and the Idea of Progress over the social.

For any historians who take issue with this, I am willing to concede that this might be a historiographical problem on my part. But if it is, it is a history that the designers have also bought into and that informs their decision making. Expanding your territory and researching new technologies are the two things that are absolutely critical to success in the games. Later entries have allowed a more peaceful and less expansionist approach, but even these are either dependent on earlier expansion (economic, cultural) or also easily facilitate the militaristic path (diplomatic, scientific).

This type of centrism is necessary, and we shouldn't fault Firaxis for participating in it. In fact, that's such an important point that I'm going to repeat it. We shouldn't fault Firaxis for participating in eurocentrism to the degree that they have. Because of game mechanical concerns (what some scholars have taken to calling Ludic elements), you could not have a non-centric game, or at least not a successful one. A game that attempted to give equal weight to all of the things that nations, states and societies have viewed as most important and have focused on would be terrible. It would be a nightmare for the player to micromanage and contain so many interconnected systems that it would collapse under it's own weight. Because Civilization is a game series and not a historical analysis, it must necessarily emphasize some things at the expense of others.

But...what would a different Civilization game look like? What if we made a conscious effort to emphasize the traditional concerns of East Asian civilization, for example? I am not a historian or an East Asian studies major, so my understanding is limited, but I'll speculate.

Given collectivist tendencies, a sinocentric game might focus a great deal more on internal rather than external strife. Your empire could have a "harmony" value that represents your overall social cohesion. Let it fall too low and face the risk that groups of your cities could attempt to break away into independent empires, or that pretender armies might try to seize power. You could be forced to balance the competing demands of accumulating technologies from foreign trade and preventing foreign cultural influence. If ahead in tech, you could play the cultural colonialist role and sell your advances for influence or exotic resources. Expansion and warfare would still be a big part of your strategy, as these are things that every state has struggled with, but they might have an impact on your harmony stat or your foreign cultural influence. It's a matter of what's emphasized.

This is obviously a cursory speculation, and if anyone with more knowledge about both East Asian culture/history and strategy games wants to fill out my ideas, or call me out on where I'm wrong, I'd look forward to hearing from you.

at the crossroads of GIFT and teamwork

So, I'm reading Playable Pedagogy, specifically Alex's comment on being a noob in Dota 2.

I hesitate to play any real matches against real opponents because my teammates warned me that if I play with others, I will be verbally torn apart if I can’t play decently. This is the main reason I stay away from collaborative gaming.

As a friendly gamer who regularly joins pick-up groups in MMOs, this is incredibly disheartening to hear. I know what she means; Gaming in multiplayer for nearly twenty years has given me my fair share of interactions with the slime and human detritus that lie waiting in the gutter of the gaming community. What I mean is that it's incredibly disheartening to hear that yet another person has been turned off from gaming with strangers because of this. I hear it all the time and, unless it subsides or we can change the conversation, it's going to continue to damage the reputation of the hobby and turn away the more thoughtful people who might help make great games and great multiplayer experiences.

Maybe I'm different in not being as bothered by these things. I grew up in Quake II, where trash talking was simply one of the rules of the road. You didn't have to instigate—I never did—but you at least had to tolerate it. There was also respect there if you could bite back sharply and cleverly after you were bitten—but only once; making a big deal out of it was seen as getting emotional and thus embarrassing. I'd liken it to the way stand-up comics are expected to deal with hecklers by making a joke at their expense and then moving on.

But trash-talking is probably the least disquieting form of internet abuse in most cases, especially because you expect it coming from the other team and because it has a long history in competitive activity outside gaming. It's another thing entirely to hear your own teammates rip you open and tear out your entrails.

This is a phenomenon that's fairly unique to internet competition. For example, can you imagine what the reaction would be if, during a post-game interview, an NFL quarterback blamed his offensive line for folding up and his receivers for dropping clean throws and also refused to address what he could have done differently? He'd be canned before they could get him off the air. There's no place for this in athletic competition, so I don't buy the often stated argument that people playing Dota or other MOBA games are more aggressive because they're more competitive.

One of the things at work here is clearly GIFT. In 2004, Mike Krahulik, who draws and sometimes writes for Penny Arcade, articulated in a simple formula what internet veterans had unconsciously known on some level for years: why people are jerks on the internet.

Fig 1. John Gabriel's Greater Internet Fuckwad Theory

This is, of course, comedy, but it's important because it articulates in an extremely accessible way a foundation for further understanding. Personally, I think it's an oversimplification that is essentially true nonetheless. On the academic side, psychologist John Suler was writing contemporary to Krahulik and published a well-cited paper on what he termed the Online Disinhibition Effect, citing six primary factors for the change. Whatever the specific reasons, it is well documented that online interactions do cause people who otherwise might be reasonably helpful, or at least neutral, to become hostile.

So how does this influence Alex's concerns about being a noob and the particular brand of hostility directed at new players? She has a point there:

I think what experienced gamers get out of noob-shaming is more self-serving than that. I think experienced gamers reinforce their experienced-gamer-culture in part through noob-shaming.

Maaaaaaybe. I'd need to know in more detail what she means by "experienced-gamer-culture," but I'm skeptical. I know many experienced gamers across many different games and in many different communities and only very rarely is a part of that culture an exclusion of outsiders. A preference for insiders and a respect for knowledge and expertise, possibly, but not a closing of the culture.

What makes more sense to me is to explain it as a form of blaming the thing. There's a video of a chimpanzee eating a lemon, clearly disliking the sour taste, and then attempting to smash the lemon in apparent punishment for the foul flavor. You can see this in humans too sometimes; people who stub their toes very hard on an object will sometimes kick the object out of a reflexive anger that comes from a wholly irrational place. By shifting blame onto others, we can avoid the shame of our own failure.

I mentioned that I wasn't as bothered by these things; I game with strangers in spite of their occasional hostility to me. For a long time I felt like getting used to this was a process that everyone had to and would go through, a forging-in-fire that resulted in stronger people and the ability to shrug off trolls. But if the number of friends who have vocally expressed their aversion to gaming collaboratively is any indication, I'm clearly wrong on this.

We need more thinking and scholarship on the issue as it relates to gaming if we want to create a more welcoming environment for people who aren't willing to go through that fire. Playable Pedagogy, "tag you're it."

giving up on compromise

(This post assumes a basic amount of familiarity with some of the terms of tabletop role-playing, more commonly known by its most popular variant Dungeons and Dragons. If you've got no experience or knowledge at all, please bear with me! Google or Wiki terms that you don't understand.)

So, I've been reading a fair amount of Deeper in the Game this past little while (thanks, /r/rpg!) and I've found some incisive gems. This section on flag framing, for example, is just about the most useful idea I've ever heard for the setup of a role-playing game, and is basically a formalization of what groups composed of players with a decent amount of experience under their belts tend to do informally. However, I've got to take issue with A Way Out (a post intrinsically connected to The Same Page tool, which Bankuei's blog is probably most known for) because, at least as written, it seems to imply that everyone must have the same goals for the game and want to have the same kinds of experiences at the table.

Bankuei's central thesis seems to be that most problems come from players wanting different things out of the game, which are in some way impossible to merge. That is,

"Most of your 'problem players' are just people who want to play a different game and are either under the illusion that you were playing a different game to begin with, or that different games could be mixed."

This idea relies on GNS Theory [1]. Click that link and read through if you haven't already; it's basically required reading for a person who wants to GM a successful game with new players whose play-styles she isn't familiar with. To give it a woefully inadequate summary, basically, we either want to win, we want to experience a story, or we want to build a world.

I don't see any reason why a single game, or even a single session, can't encompass all these goals. Many different events will happen in an average session. There will be descriptions of the environs. Characters will be attacked. Skill challenges will need to be passed. The characters could be betrayed. The characters could betray an NPC. The characters could betray each other! The 4E DMG does a really, really good job at hitting this point home hard, in a way that should have been front and center when 3E first came out (Onyx Path could take a hint from here too.) There's a "The Players" chapter that further breaks down gamists, narrativists and simulationists into more categories, explaining what they probably want from the game and giving suggestions on how to engage them.

The problem comes—and yes it does come often—when players or the GM can't expressly [2] agree to let some things be in service to some player's goals while letting go of others. And this is where I'm in greatest disagreement with Bankuei. To suggest that different styles of gaming can't be mixed is tantamount to suggesting that, as gamers, we're too narcissistic to brook even a momentary breach of our expectations, even when we know it's in service to someone else's fun. That we're so entrenched in the sacrosanctity of our idea of how the rules of the game should function that it would be impossible to negotiate a compromise.

If I'm a narrativist and want to experience a good story, and I'm sitting down on a Friday night with my friends, some of whom are gamists and love the kick-in-the-door and fight to win style, I should know that the story might be derailed by a really good or really bad dice roll, and it's up to me and the GM to get it back on an interesting path. Railroads aren't necessary for a great story. Conversely, if there's something that would make for an exceptionally interesting twist and would make me jump out of my seat and exclaim "No way!", the gamists should know and be prepared for the possibility that the GM might fudge a die roll once in a while to make it happen. Failing once because because the GM needed something to happen doesn't negate the three or four other times you kicked the werewolf so hard he fell off the cliff.

The key is trust and being on the same page [3], though. If I expect that every good plot twist is being thrown out the window because the player on my left has an optimized character that is chewing through everything the GM planned, I'm probably not happy. And if the player on my right assumes that every enemy is unreasonably strong because they need to survive for a plot, she's not happy.

To be fair, I'm probably not giving Bankuei enough credit, considering the quality and depth of analysis found on the rest of his site. He probably understands this well, given his focus on understanding what players want out of a game. But it's way too important a point to be glossed over: we can and should accommodate (and ourselves be accommodating of) multiple reasons for coming to the table, even in the same group. If we can't compromise, how can we game together?

[1] GNS Theory was later expanded into The Big Model, which I'm much less familiar with, so I won't address it here. But yes, I know it exists.
[2] Experienced groups sometimes do this implicitly, but that's a poor substitute.
[3] See what I did there?