Playing Empire Games With Descendants of the Colonised - Mary Flanagan | grokludo 26

What do we talk about when we talk about 4X?

We think about abstract systems, resource management, efficiency, growth... But what about all the invisible things attached to eXploitation, and eXtermination?

Mary Flanagan is a game designer and academic, and the author of Playing Oppression: The Legacy of Conquest and Empire in Colonialist Board Games.

The book looks at the history of board games and how they encoded the values of their time and place – from ancient games through to the explosion of complex strategy systems and 4X.

For those unfamiliar, 4X is a subgenre that typically involves large colonial empires. The four Xs are Explore, Expand, Exploit, and Exterminate. In the fantasy of the game, we play the decider, not just moving resources around for efficiency, but also deciding the fate of those crushed under the imperial boot.

To better understand the other side of that story, part of Mary's research involved sitting down and playing these games with descendants of the people who've been exploited and exterminated.

4X games are fun. I love them. They scratch that efficiency and optimisation part of my brain. This isn't about saying they're bad, or that players are incapable of separating games from life. It's just good to take a step back sometimes and analyse the underlying assumptions of systems we engage with.

And, a large part of our Western civilisation, and indeed its values, are built on the flawed concepts of Terra Nullius, might makes right, and always being ashamed of the last colonial project, while denying the current one.

It can be a bit of a "what is water?" moment, when we examine the assumptions we've built our belief systems on. But if you look for it, you'll notice it everywhere – how the abstractions of modern life conceal dehumanisation.

Maybe it can't be any other way? Maybe when trying to understand complex systems like an economy, our simplified abstractions are still cognitively challenging despite the tiny insights they carry, and adding a morality element makes it unworkably hard.

In such situations, I think it's okay to examine these systems and acknowledge what they are while making use of them – though as Mary shows in her book, examples in the board game space range from amoral to immoral.

A striking aspect of the history of these board games is how utterly similar they were for hundreds of years. The Goose Game involved a track full of different squares, and players would roll a die to see where they landed – not unlike today's Monopoly. This format was repurposed countless times with different themes and narratives.

With my game designer's hat on, and an intoxicating dose of hindsight, it's astounding to me how long it took for games to innovate past the "track game" format. But that was what a "board game" was back then. What is water?

So what's our version of that? Never mind what we'll evolve into, what about what we're evolving out of – our water? I think Mary captures a piece of that in her book, and she talks about the difficult tasks of not just changing aesthetics, but inventing new mechanics and systems.

It's easy to see how territorial domination maps out neatly onto the design of a board game or 4X. The play space is simply a shrunken version of changing borders in real life. The systems are simplified resource exchanges and combats.

But we can also look to real life for different systems that can be modelled, and given the game design treatment. Ideas like the commons, which Mary incorporated into her game Monarch – and to be fair, board games experiment more often with these competitive/cooperative hybrids than digital games.

I hope you enjoy this episode, and thank you for supporting grokludo!