You can read about what Syphilisation is here and the manifesto for the game here.

Work Done

This week just had some fleshing out of the expansion phase. I put in the most basic version of temples so far. These are buildings that you can place on the map and which grow better with time. At this point in the feature, they do not take away any of the natural features of the tile. This feature requires a tremendous amount of fleshing out still. I need to put more weight into religion as a whole because of how deeply it was integrated with both Gandhi’s philosophy and with colonial justifications.

I’ve also designed out the currency conversions that are going to be a critical part of the experience. The economics of colonialism are fundamental to any understanding of it and I want to give the game some space to mirror those.

Besides that, I just put in a couple of small things to help the game flow correctly. I drastically simplified the way city boundaries work. This will both reduce complexity for the user and highlight the most interesting part of the feature. I also added some projects for the basic build menu. As building a unit takes population from a city, I needed to put in an infinite production sink that didn’t affect city growth.

Interesting Fact

I took the time to read Hind Swaraj last week, which was a fun and very quotable work. When responding to the question of whether there has ever been a successful case of Satyagraha, he replied “But if it [history] means the doings of kings and emperors, there can be no evidence of soul-force or passive resistance in such history. You cannot expect silver-ore in a tin-mine.” Another point that I felt memorable was “when I fancy a particular delicacy, I do not wait till others taste it; that to make a national effort and to suffer are in the nature of delicacies; and that to suffer under pressure is no suffering.”

What I found the most fun though was the life of the Allan Octavian Hume, an ICS member. He was a political reformer and saw The Revolt of 1857 as a result of misgovernance. After his retirement, he organised the first meeting of the INC in 1885 with the aim of obtaining a greater share of the government for educated Indians. The INC didn’t become a major player until quite a while later, but its roots are unquestionably in this first meeting.

What’s interesting though is that Hume is probably known less for this than for his ornithological work. He not only studied the birds of the areas where work took him extensively, but made a point of travelling around India to study more and would send a trained bird-skinner to accompany officers in areas of ornithological interest. He also compiled multiple books on the birds of India, a journal Stray Feathers and a collection of over 82,000 specimens of which over 75,000 eventually made it to the British Museum.