Pokémon
Pokémon is a sprawling franchise and I need to put down a couple of starting points before getting into an analysis. Firstly, Pokémon is a multimedia franchise. This is often lost in video game analyses of the franchise, but people come to Pokémon from a number of angles and they interact with each other. When I catch a Pikachu in a game, the Pikachu from the show is in my mind. An analysis needs to account for that.
Secondly, Pokémon is targeted at children. This isn’t a get-out-of-jail-free card. The game still says what it says but an audience of children is going to receive a number of things differently and ignoring that feels like reading in bad faith.
Combat
With this in mind, the cockfighting metaphor is no longer convincing. Pikachu is both pet and best friend and both of those identities take precedence over combat. The closer parallel is make-believe; pretending that your dog can breathe fire and take out a marauding pigeon.
Another strong parallel is sport. Pokémon battles have strict rituals that must be followed. You cannot run away, you cannot catch another person’s Pokémon, you wait until the battle has officially begun before attacking. Additionally, the Pokémon Leagues and the gyms are all highly structured.
More meaningfully, you shake hands with your opponents, win or lose, and if you did end up losing, you simply go train some more and then come back and try again. You play for no stakes other than pride and no loss is permanent.
These form a sharp distinction with colonial combat, which is a means to an end; colonial conquest. There are no rules to colonial conquest, as anyone with a passing grasp of the history can recognize, and there are no handshakes at the end. Colonialism is built on the assumption that some people are fundamentally better than others, sport is only fun because you compete with your peers.
Nevertheless, there are some important complications that could be implemented. Interestingly, some of these already have precedent in the show. For instance, have Pokémon that don’t want to fight. This helps provide personality to the Pokémon. Also, the nature of the game presents Pokémon almost exclusively as creatures that fight. Pushing back against that adds texture to the game.
Secondly, consider some alternative methods of conflict resolution. In the Pokémon TV show, there’s often more to the story of how Ash got a Pokémon than simply fighting and capturing the creature and this history holds weight every time you see the Pokémon after as well as making a statement on Ash’s relationship to his Pokémon and his attitude as a Pokémon trainer. It’s a shame to leave so promising an approach fallow in the video games.
Gotta Catch ‘Em All
The tagline is the real core of the game, even if a player rejects it, the play experience is centered around the idea of catching all of the Pokémon in the game. This is presented as a research task. A professor gives you the goal at the start of each game and is underpinned by the standard design pattern of collections.
This is obviously ridiculous in itself. The Pokedex is always ready with handy facts about the Pokémon. Clearly someone has caught them all before. However, this works out when considered from the perspective of a ten year old. Children are always given tasks that have already been solved countless times before and yet dressed up as somehow important. At schools, at fairs and at museums, kids go through similar charades and so see nothing strange about a similar activity in a video game. This is what allows Team Rocket and the trainer fights to work as well.
This collect-em-all approach is an outdated view of science and one with strongly colonial roots. It comes from European naturalists venturing into the colonies in order to stuff a museum or zoo full of exhibits. It’s all done in the name of science, but how much can be learned from a stuffed bird on a perch or a bleached fish in a jar or a Pokémon forgotten in an anonymous computer box?
If you are to research for the sake of science, the first step should be to try to understand local knowledge. The ideology of the colonist did not allow for the value of indigenous knowledge and so had to start from scratch every time and these games reproduce that dynamic out of video game conventions, whether in the mainline games, in Pokémon Snap or in the TV show.
Let players work together to solve issues with the people of the area and with each other. Have them work to safeguard and repair ecologies rater than just harvesting them.
The grind of random encounters and collection completion are now tired mechanics as well, especially in the context of a 25 year old franchise. The context under which people play has radically transformed, it’s time for the mechanics to update as well.
Personally, rather than getting a new game and cycling through the core loop a thousand times to have brief looks at 100 new Pokémon, I would much rather play a game with 10 or 15 new Pokémon, each of which is given some dedicated space for itself. The Pokémon TV show only ever introduced a few new Pokémon in a 20 minute episode and often limited it to one, but gave each Pokémon a story of its own and so let them shine. I think the next game should try the same.
Classifications
The game’s hard classifications are also worth looking at. Colonialism loves classifications and necessarily so as race science was fundamental to the colonial project. Even the more benign classifications tend to fall apart when faced with the complexity of the real world. Mammals don’t lay eggs, except for the ones that do. Fish need gills to breathe, except for the ones that don’t, When you start to consider individual variations, things fall even further out of control.
Ho-oh showed up both in the original games and in the first season of the show, well before it was introduced as a full Pokémon. This complication was hugely meaningful to the player, it signified a much wider world than the one that the game explicitly defines.
Furthermore, have other exceptions to the rules. Birdwatchers know that sometimes you see one well outside its normal habitat, should Pokémon not have that same freedom? Must they all learn the same move at the same level? My dog has a bunch of quirks unique to her, separate from her breed, should my Growlithe be any different?
Pokémon
Pikachu is beloved because of his idiosyncrasies. He is a Pokémon with personality. Pokémon in the games just don’t have that. They don’t have desires or preferences. Any gestures towards that would add a lot of texture.
What do the Pokémon want? Are there ones who don’t like to fight? Ones who get bored if they haven’t fought in a while? Pokémon who like to relax by a river or in a forest? Pokémon who have something they want to say? Pokémon who want a quick break to cuddle or to play? Games built around pets are very popular. It seems wasteful to leave this unexplored.
Another interesting idea is to connect the ends to the means. Did you gain the Pokémon’s respect before catching it? Did you beat it in a fair fight? Letting the Pokémon remember these things and then later overcoming initial impressions adds to the story you share between you.
Additionally, some Pokémon might be excited about the idea of going on an adventure. Some might be sad about leaving their native space. Some might be afraid of going somewhere new. It’s deeply colonial to take them without their consent. Let players build trust if they need to. Let some Pokémon choose not to go with them.
B-Sides
Some quick final points to think about:
Finally, for a lot of kids, a Pokémon is as close to a pet as they will ever get. Make the experience as meaningful as it can be.
]]>There has never been a game so stripped down to just working out what the creator is thinking as Connections. That’s the entirety of the game. It works so well because Wyna Liu makes it fun to work out what she’s thinking.
Through playing the game, you get a sense of her personality and her likes in the way that I did with crossword compilers when I did those. Her combination of archaic English and contemporary terms is very idiosyncratic.
Also, her jokes are often very funny. She put GRINDER, TINDER, BUMBLE and HINGE in a puzzle a while ago as a blind and the joke is that Grindr is spelled without the E. It feels good when you see through the blind. It makes you feel like you know the person a bit.
The same was true for Little Alchemist but Infinite Craft is more complicated. It’s at its best when you get surprising combinations. I put Continent and Apple Pie together and I got America. I put America and Destruction together and I got Trump.
But a lot of what makes this interesting is that I use Infinite Craft as a stand-in for AI as a whole and I’m still trying to see what AI is like. So, when I put Continent and Liberty together and get America, I say this is what AI believes.
This is in part because I treat AI as the condensation of general belief and so Infinite Craft feels like a window to public opinion. It’s also because I’m anthropomorphizing AI and treating all AI as one entity. Every time I come across an unusual combination, I feel that I better know AI as a whole.
Neither of these beliefs are true and both of these are going to fade with time as AI becomes less of a novelty. Even now it falls apart quickly as I keep cycling between Vampire and Dracula no matter the combination or when I ask Copilot to combine Apple Pie and Continent and get 200 words of meaningless garbage. There’s nothing interesting about getting to know an AI without them though.
Everyone who has checked a waterfall or gone the wrong way in a dungeon knows that some dialogue with the designer is par for the course. It’s a fun moment for both player and designer. This highlights the value of personality in these moments though and the value of these moments as a whole.
Instead of generic video game logic moments, this really shows the value of adding something that’s idiosyncratic to yourself and letting players recognize you over the course of your game.
It’s also just fun. I put a lot of jokes about people like Kipling and Jared Diamond in Syphilisation and I laughed at them for days.
]]>Some more notes on Against the Storm - Each game prerolls the resources you get so you can’t just open glades until you find what you want. This maneuvering around missing resources is the best bit of the game and fits very nicely with the roguelike structure. It’s very similar to adjusting your strategy to the unlocks you get and provides the player with novel challenges.
Trade does a good job of softening that harshness without just being a get out of jail free card. I have often hoped for a trader to have what I need just to roll a different trader that season. This also encourages you to buy more than you need when you see the right trader.
The amber economy is interesting. Sell orders keep amber trickling in and the higher packages get enormous amounts of amber but you also get a lot from crates and events and that often ends up deciding the path more than reputation.
Also, traders having cornerstones and blueprints is a good mechanic as it always gives you something to spend on even as the amber economy begins to break in the late game.
On that note, you can see that the game would be solved fairly quickly if it didn’t end so fast. It often feels like the win is inevitable by the late game. Your settlement ticks along nicely and you start to have plenty of surplus labor and material.
Each game is also too long for the cheap failure of the roguelike to stay true. I think each settlement is something like an hour and that’s too long for me to experiment the way I do in other roguelikes.
I like how the game uses rising hostility as a ticking clock. This is strengthened by the non-renewable resources depleting, pushing you to opening more glades. The game plays this well though. Even if people leave, it doesn’t do much hard. It just feels very bad.
The seasonality adds a lot of spice to the game. It worked well for Banished too but there’s more weight to it here and it makes for good seasoning.
]]>-It’s easy to go to the idea of the speed runner knowing the game better than their creator but I don’t think that’s true. I think that reduces the game to the code and I think there’s tension between what the game is and what the game is made up of
Half-life
Conan
VVVVV
That Dragon, Cancer
GIRP
Punch-out
Titanic Mystery
Conclusion
Neon White
Before the notes though, I would love for a literary games season - Alan Wake, Elsinore, Pentiment? Historical games would also be interesting - AoE, Civ, The Cat and the Coup. I would also like to see a sampler of cozy / wholesome games because there’s something about them that I still just cannot put my finger on and I would really like to know what it is.
&& Human Resource Machine
I think it’s important for a game like Syphilisation to go through this exercise. I don’t know if it’s possible for a truly postcolonial 4X game to exist but I do know that Syphilisation is not that game and I want to make it clear that this is just an attempt to answer the question of what such a game would look like and not a definitive answer.
I would personally like a much more fluid simulation of the land than the game currently allows. The tiles and the regions are both very fixed entities. They encapsulate very rigid blocks of space. This is the perspective of someone looking from a map, not someone living on the ground. I’m sure that a much more clever approach exists.
However, it’s important to me that this game be very recognizably a 4X game. I wanted it to be familiar to 4X players and to Civ players in particular. My goal here is to demonstrate the viability of designing games with ideology in mind. I feel that if I let the game go too far from the genre roots then it becomes very hard for players to engage with the experiments of Syphilisation. By using a traditional map, I give players a very important entry point to the game.
My other issue with my implementation of land is that my representation of extraction is not violent enough. It’s important when representing extraction not to render the violence of it invisible through abstraction. You lose a key part of the story if you do so and right now, it feels like my game doesn’t do enough to make that aspect clear.
It’s hard to escape growth for the sake of growth in a game like this. It’s baked deeply into both the genre and video games as a whole. So many of our standard solutions are built around this idea of continual escalation. The option / action systems in this game and the ways that production increases over time are all growth for the sake of growth mechanics.
Syphilisation complicates this with things like the pollution mechanics and the gear shifts, but this still runs through the game.
Additionally, the report rewards you for adding content and nothing more. Personally, I would hate to read a report like this, something that just inundates the reader with facts and has no structure or goal around it. I want my reports to be concise and to only show me what it needs to and not just whatever it finds.
Also, the tech tree in the game just keeps moving forward without reservation. Syphilisation doesn’t do much to represent the idea of how knowledge can be dangerous. It also sticks to the idea of a singular tech that the player chooses and that the civ ticks towards. This is one more place where I wanted to keep a very familiar mechanic in so that players have a good place from which they can approach the game, but it does mean that there are key concepts that the game just cannot represent.
I am a strong believer in decentralization. I think that an organization, whether government or business, that is too large to be accountable to those that it affects will no longer deliver results for those people. 4X games are always big government, a position that is in a strange conflict with the rest of their ideology but one that comes naturally from the trappings of video games. Syphilisation gestures at a more decentralized ideology through autonomous camps and the favor system but fundamentally, the player is still in charge of most of what happens and the game positions that as a good thing.
Additionally, the game only has you chasing big goals. I want a government that focuses less on national monuments and more on making my daily life a little better and Syphilisation really doesn’t have the ability to represent that at all.
There’s a lot of fungibility in Syphilisation. Every block of currency is the same as every other one. This abstraction is a key one for capitalism, where I can buy a can of Coke that’s the same as every other can of Coke, It’s opposed to the idea of craftsmanship though which recognizes that two different pieces of wood need to be engaged with in different ways.
Fungibility is particularly bad when it comes to abstracting people. I’ve tried a lot of things to get different citizens to feel meaningfully different in Syphilisation and none of them have done anything to move the needle. They all operate too far below the surface to make a difference to the player. Maybe I’ll be able to come up with something before I finish working on this game, but as of now, it’s just a problem that I could not solve.
I’ve been more unhappy with spirituality in Syphilisation than I am now. The inspiration / quiet / pollution mechanics are something like what I want. The deeper problem here is that I don’t have the spiritual roots of someone like Gandhi or Tolstoy. I can read what they have to say but I cannot really reflect their ideas in my game because I keep missing something core to their beliefs. I have a number of things planned that will make the existing mechanics clearer but I still feel like something is missing here and I’m not very clear as to what that is.
]]>A lot of what interested me was their thinking on how the player helps the game scare them. Please feel free to ping me if a note here interested you but you’re not sure what I mean. These notes are very raw. Of course, if something sounds interesting, the relevant episode will have a lot more detail than any of these notes.
Syphilisation has you working on a group report and so is nominally cooperative. As everyone who has done a group report knows, in practice there will be some amount of behavior that falls short of ideal every time, but the core of the game has everyone working toward the shared goal of getting a good grade on the report.
Also, your character would like to become friends with the other students doing the report. The game keeps track of your relationships and another of the win conditions of the game is to become close to the other players. You always have the option of being mean to the other players and certain play styles require you be, but the game gives you other options as well.
The game keeps track of your relationships with other players across multiple axes and also keeps track of the kinds of units you use against them. So, using the powerful, brutal units can give you an advantage in the immediate campaign, but will also have long term effects on your relationship with that person that may or may not be beneficial depending on the play style you adopt for that game.
To further explain the previous point, there are multiple types of campaigns in Syphilisation and they allow different types of units. Units come in four categories and lower-intensity campaigns prohibit use of the more aggressive units, much in the way that Russia had different levels of engagement when they annexed Crimea and in their current conflict with Ukraine.
Furthermore, every campaign can be resolved without any use of combat units, if you so choose. The kinds of units that you use affects your relationship with the other player and also affects the culture of your own civ. Also, the type of unit you use affects the camp engaged with, possibly causing damage or growth.
Also, when you start a campaign, there will be support and resistance from every player involved. So, there are parts of your civ that will resist your campaign and parts that will support it, as is the case for every civ involved in the campaign and you then have to pacify all of the support or resistance according to how you want the campaign to conclude.
Control of a region is determined entirely by support of a plurality of citizens of a region. There are many ways to convince citizens to support you, including completing their quests and helping their camps grow. Once you have enough citizens supporting you, you take control of the city of the region.
In addition, each region has a number of camps that each hold citizens. These camps also use citizens to determine control. Camps that controlled by a player and connected to a city controlled by the same player let that player choose their production. Otherwise, they choose what to make themselves.
Also, camps can favor the environment instead of any of the players and then will function completely autonomously. Certain events can even cause full camps to turn to the environment completely.
Pollution has a big role in Syphilisation. All production leads to pollution. The more a tile produces, the more it pollutes. In addition, there are many actions and choices that players can take that can further boost their pollution. Pollution then has heavy impact on the game. There are multiple extinction events that can happen and finally, if the pollution rises enough, all of the players immediately lose the game.
Over the course of Syphilisation, you fill out a group report on Gandhi, Churchill and the Raj. As you research these topics in the game, it presents you with hundreds of direct quotations from major historical figures of the time. You get exposure to a lot of the perspectives and arguments of the time, in the words of the people who made those arguments at that time.
Syphilisation is broken into four distinct stages and the locus of the game shifts with each new stage. In particular, in the eXploitation stage of the game, the economy shifts heavily to the usage of advanced currencies and their refinement.
The tech tree is comprised of a large number of small collections of techs and there are a lot of pieces shared between the techs, so you can unlock a building in a number of ways in one game and just as easily not see it at all in a given game.
The culture of your civ is affected both by your actions and by your explicit choices. It’s even sometimes affected by the choices of the other players and what they teach you. It’s a key part of the way the civ produces and behaves and so you have to pay attention to what you do as the long-term effects on culture may outweigh the short term rewards of a particular action.
In Syphilisation, you will sometimes receive inspirations from various events and projects and the like. You can have these take over a camp for a few turns, quieting the whole area and resulting in one of a number of things, such as the immediate conclusion of the tasks under that camp or a permanent change to civ culture.
If you’re interested in Nikhil Murthy’s Syphilisation, you can check it out on Steam or Itch.
]]>When I play the Vikings, I take my Viking Longships, sink every other ship in the sea and pillage the coast twice over. This feels fundamentally Viking, just as the previous example felt fundamentally Roman, and this feeling is one of the fundamental pleasures of the Civilization series.
This is a special case of a general concept in video games; the translation. Ape Out is the translation of being an ape escaping a facility into video game terms. An FPS is the translation of gunfights into video game terms. In fact, if we’re going to be a little more accurate, they’re translations of conceptions of these experiences into video game terms and they’re at their most satisfying when that conception matches with the player’s conception of these activities.
Key to this is that all translations are imperfect. We know that actually shooting a person is very little like mousing over a character and clicking a button. Players don’t go into a game expecting it to exactly match up. Instead, they take pleasure in the points where it does.
This is most satisfying when multiple pieces click together to make a story that resonates with the player. The dynamic of sending out legionaries or longships plays the way you expect them to and so the whole process of stepping through the actions is fun. Even a singular piece isolated from the rest of the game can be satisfying though. Seeing the conquistador on the loading screen for Spain is satisfying in itself. You get to recognize that as a unit unique to Spain and seeing the religious mechanics is like seeing a puzzle solved.
This is also true for the general pieces of the game. It’s satisfying to see a Library and understand that it increases science. Even if the real world doesn’t work by having a nation choose a technology and progress until they solve it, it feels like it makes sense to build libraries and have the science production of your civ increase, and it’s fun to see that translation. Banks and Markets are fundamentally different in the real world, but having both of them as gold-producing buildings and having the one come after the other all feels like it makes sense.
It then follows that people like to see dynamics that are in accordance with their sense of history. The Indian unique unit is not going to be a boat despite the maritime Chola and Kalinga empires. It’s not going to be the rocketeers of Mysore. It’s not even going to be chariot of Arjuna in the Mahabharata. It’s going to be elephants because everyone knows about elephants and India. Seeing an Indian elephant is satisfying, seeing an Indian boat would just be puzzling to most players.
Civilization famously draws its history from the children’s section of the library. There’s also a strain of Guns, Germs and Steel there, which is arguably worse. When a key pleasure of the game is in translating the things the player knows about history into video game terms, it becomes very hard to challenge misconceptions.
It’s very difficult to explain the defeat of the technologically advanced Mysore state by the British in Civilization. It’s much harder to explain how even after the technological advancements of the industrial revolution, British textiles were unable to compete with Indian ones in price and quality until East Indian Company rule deindustrialized India. It’s absolutely impossible to explain the American defeat in Vietnam.
Games like Civilization make you feel smarter for having played them. You feel like you better understand the systems that run the world. Sometimes this works out, like the health benefits of settling an early city near a river, but sometimes it just reinforces preconceptions that are at best radical simplifications of complex concepts.
It’s at its best though when it describes things that aren’t quite common knowledge. It’s cool to see the Hwacha and learn something new about 16th Century Korea. Here, there’s no preconception to fight and so players are receptive to new information.
The most fundamental dynamic of the 4X game is that the nation, and honestly the whole world, does better with you in charge. Even in games where beating the AI is challenging, it tends to be a result of the AI cheating. The player just makes better decisions than the computer and the player’s nation is typically the best in the world.
Let’s be honest, this is probably in accordance with the player’s beliefs as well and it’s hard for them to complain about this particular translation. This is made sharper by what the game systems choose not to encompass. There is no ruling individual in Civilization, so there can be no corruption and so many of the stranger decisions in world politics suddenly become crystal-clear when the self-interest of politicians is brought into play. It’s easy to say that you wouldn’t be corrupt, or that any other leader shouldn’t be corrupt, when you don’t have to engage with the systems that reward corruption.
It is, of course, fair to believe that you would do a better job if given the chance to govern. I even find it commendable as I feel that people should be politically engaged. However, to simply want a better person (ie; yourself) in charge without also considering the systems that bend away from good governance is shallow. It stops you from asking the question of whether those systems should be changed and whether those systems should be removed.
For more thoughts on 4X games and things of this nature, check out Syphilisation, a postcolonial 4X game in which you play a student working on a group report on Gandhi, Chruchill and the Raj.
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