Advancing Together

This column is a reprint from Unwinnable Monthly #178. If you like what you see, grab the magazine for less than ten dollars, or subscribe and get all future magazines for half price.

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Analyzing the digital and analog feedback loop.

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In Nikhil Murthy’s manifesto for his Postcolonial 4X game, Nikhil Murthy’s Syphilisation, he states that he’s referencing the term and its associated political critiques from James Joyce’s Ulysses. The context for the original clever term is disparaging “Western Civilization in the form of the British from the perspective of the Irish.” Murthy’s project emerged as a way to address some enduring colonial-imperialist assumptions in the 4X classic series Civilization. While Sid Meier’s series is known for taking the historical stance of warring nations and leaders, Murthy seeks a procedural rhetoric of collaborating nations and history from the perspective of those below. The framing for his 4X game is that you are part of a student group that’s putting together a report on Gandhi, Churchill and the Raj. Notably, you can still choose to play as if you are taking the side of the powerful leaders and develop your resources according to a conquerors’ mentality, or you can choose to develop your sense of empathy for how toxic war relations and rampant production can be for everyone involved.

Not to belabor the point, but when Murthy first reached out to me to chat about his development of this title, I got hung up on – well, the title. My mind immediately thought of a more pop culture reference for the term syphilisation. Namely, a scene in Francis Ford Coppola’s 1992 reimagining of Bram Stoker’s Dracula where Van Helsing is lecturing in a London academy’s medical theater:

“Blood and the diseases of the blood – such as syphilis – concern us here. The very name venereal diseases, the diseases of Venus, imputes to the divine origin. And they are involved in that sex problem about which the ethics and ideals of Christian civilization are concerned. In fact, civilization and syphilisation have advanced together.”

While Van Helsing is talking of how to advance disease research, this quote has always captured my attention for the way his language shows the tangled coils of Western urbane progress. More specifically, he’s driving at Euro-Christian progress, speaking to British medical students as a visiting Dutch professor of some repute. This casts the want to control bodily forces like sex and disease in a stark imperialistic light. Despite this being a vampire film, the subtexts explored emphasize late nineteenth century politics of sex and control, science and the supernatural.

These subtexts highlight the potential each individual medium and its genres has for expressing systemic issues. Professor Laura Westengard has explained in her work on Gothic literature and contemporary media how vampirism and the figure of the vampire is closely related to contagion and scientific racism, as with Bram Stoker’s Dracula and Nosferatu, which practically derived most aspects of vampirism and plot from Stoker’s novel. Foreigners arrive in these stories alongside contagion and perceived social impurity. This calls to mind Mary Douglas’ social anthropological study of how any culture’s values towards disorder are revealed in their perception of what they view as unclean in cultures they define as Other to their own.

Although I’m drawing from vampire lore and its legacy of media portrayal, there are parallels thematically to game design’s capacity to highlight disease and impurities of other sorts. In short, toxicity can be culturally systemic in addition to being a physical force throughout history. In my conversation with Murthy, he was keen to note that pollution as an inevitable side-effect of colonial expansion and production was one of the core systems of Syphilisation:

“The game offers a number of ways to mitigate pollution through building improvements that generate quiet [the currency used to track your de-industrial progress], but crucially the game is built such that you cannot develop your way out of pollution. This was built to offer the player a way to slow down the effects of pollution but if a player tries to commit to it, they will find that climate change is still inevitable. It is designed as something of a mirage.”

In the game, the player can trigger an end sequence by ignoring the rampant climate change, but they can also trigger an ending based around deindustrialization if they follow certain principles and strategies. The quiet currency, for clarification, is titled and categorized as such because it can accumulate and is a value-laden token. Murthy explained to me that he chose the language as a way to emphasize the concept of Pollution being a force in the game that accumulates not just in the environment but in the more toxic interactions between the students working on the group report together.

The game is not just focusing on learning history from a Postcolonial perspective but approaching teamwork from an intersectional one that honors individual team members’ inspirations and the overlap of ideas. According to Murthy’s 4X design, the players of the team are learning (at least during a de-industrial route) to be okay with ceding control and allowing for citizens in their study of empire to self-determine their societies.

The language Murthy uses also relates to the noise and mental stress of industrialization processes as well. These de-industrialist principles and strategies are not the natural instincts of players of the more archetypal titles of the 4X genre. Murthy states, “The nature of 4X is to put the player in a position of power, but it is the existence of these positions of power that makes preventing climate change so difficult.” Syphilisation underscores the significance of not only collaborating on an alternative to imperial leadership, but of learning about the movements and frameworks that guided historical figures like Gandhi, Churchill and the Raj to make their decisions and how they came to be held up as the sole figures when each of them had movements that made their actions possible.

We need not approach the subject of toxicity from the very relevant yet literal perspective of pandemic, as Vampyr did with its portrayal of the Spanish Flu era. The Thaumaturge’s nuanced representation of early 20th century Poland was also successful at using occult magic as a way to explore class struggle and life under occupation of empire, resisting allegory in favor of letting the city of Warsaw itself be a character and locating itself in a specific physical and cultural zeitgeist. We also do not need to focus on speculative genres like the Gothic or a narrative-driven genre like RPG to effectively delve into themes of imperialism in game design. Previously, I outlined some of the many ways that even the behind-the-scenes production of games contributes to climate change and public perceptions of environmentalism, for instance.

While there are many game genres we take for granted and model games within, there is not nearly enough deconstruction and reimaginings of these genres. Especially the classic ones. The 4X genre, for instance, has come under fire before for both intentional and incidental problematic design. Murthy recently spoke at a conference about how the nature of the industry pushing against Postcolonialism manifests in various game genres as core mechanics or emergent narratives that promote the military-industrial complex as well as privileging a historical lens of conquest and lone saviorism instead of cooperation amongst many individuals and nations. He observed that in addition to these pain points when designing a Postcolonial 4X game in particular, is that series that he grew up with like Sid Meier’s Civilization limit the player’s roles from a cultural standpoint as well.

Civilization “lets you play anyone you want…as long as that’s America.” This fact of the genre doesn’t allow for the series to incorporate non-Western, Postcolonial ideologies. Likely, this is what leads to design criticisms like those of Poundmaker Cree Nation Headman Milton Tootoosis regarding the misrepresentation of real-life peacemaker Chief Poundmaker in Civilization VI. This is also a matter of overlooking the importance of intersectional consultation of nations and people being represented, a long-standing industry-wide issue. Murthy’s developer blog also explores the issues with representation inherent in this controversial entry of Sid Meier’s series. He posits in searching for potential Postcolonial design ethics that another part of this representational problem is that players’ political consciousness when playing games like these have not been developed enough.

Murthy explained in the wrap up of his talk that there’s a lot of potential for game designers of many different independence ideologies to get involved in the underexplored Postcolonial mode of game design. Murthy himself comes from an Indian Independence background and knows that it’s just one ideology to create and be informed by.

What Murthy’s design rhetoric and case study shows, for me at least, is that Alan Emrich was correct in proposing that there was potential in a 5th X to the 4X genre: eXperience. More specifically, experience as in the dynamic relationship between players and their actions which create an emergent narrative and designers by bringing a compelling set of meaningful decisions to guide the player towards that emergent narrative.

While this sounds like basic game design theory for narrative-driven games, the difference with 4X and a Postcolonial project like Syphilisation is that the genre is inherently centering emergent narrative. One that has a lot of potential for players to exercise their capacity for empathy and learning of historical events in a way that doesn’t discount the collective. There’s also a lot of potential in the academic framing of Syphilisation to enable players like me who aren’t as experienced in the 4X genre. The formatting of the game makes veterans instantly recognize it and start to make comparisons between it and more traditional titles.

Murthy took a western game he grew up with, similar to the team at Sticky Brain Studios, and consciously made the decision to bring his personal experience to it. What results is a game built from the ground up as both a needed intervention and a deconstruction of a genre that has a lot of political potential, but which often repeats its own history of design. Moving forward, Murthy told me that he’s planning for a future project, one that will iterate on the design philosophy he’s developed for Syphilisation. Even if a game isn’t explicitly Postcolonial, he plans to always keep “writing history from below, connecting ends to means, considering cooperation instead of competition, quieting the core fantasy and attacking the authority of the author” are part of his toolbox for all of his design work now.

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Phoenix Simms is a writer and indie narrative designer from Atlantic Canada. You can lure her out of hibernation during the winter with rare McKillip novels, Japanese stationery goods, and ornate cupcakes.