Syphilisation is now fully released, but there are some postcolonial principles that I never got to implement in the game.

The Commons

I recently read Slow Down by Saito Kohei and it did a great job of arguing for the importance of the commons for a sustainable future. I gesture at the commons a bit in the report in Syphilisation and in the shifts in the postcolonial Stardew Valley proposal. It’s a principle that deserves more space though. A common space that all players can use and can replenish is a great postcolonial feature. It’s a very concrete space for shared responsibility and shared benefit and that underscores the principles foundational to a game like Syphilisation.

I could imagine it working very well as an option for Syphilisation’s regions. Right now, the game has you jostle with other players for control over them. Giving the player the option to leave them as commons instead of taking control feels very promising to me.

Attractive Labor

Lsbor is often reduced to an equation of inputs and outputs. Capitalism tends to further reduce labor to drudgery in search of efficiency and to better fit the shape of the capitalist structure. Games often reproduce this, finding the fun in the network of inputs and outputs and losing the fun of the process along the way.

To return to Stardew Valley, there’s pleasure in finding the exact tree for the wood that you want, in cutting along the grain of the wood, in letting the materials determine something of the final product, that have all been abstracted away. I don’t actually have solutions prepared for this issue, but I do want to highlight it as something of an open, unsolved problem in video game design.

B-Sides

Here’s a non-exhaustive list of ways that Syphilisation fails as a postcolonial game:

  • Reducing all of the facts to content.
  • The majoritarian politics of region control
  • The dynamic of learn about campaigns comes too close to wars of discovery. I’m trying to expand the definition of a campaign, but I don’t think I fully succeed.
  • It still doesn’t understand faith.
  • Way too much Great Man in the history.
  • The land is still too static
  • Too much growth for the sake of growth.

Things about myself that Syphilisation has taught me to work on:

  • The pollution mechanics of the game are a good metaphor that helps me understand the value of taking some healthy time away from work.
  • I’m trying ahimsa with some of the worst comments on my game. It’s certainly not a silver bullet, but it might be better than just ignoring them and it’s definitely better than picking fights online. I don’t have it down to a science yet though.