Games Have A Context Of Their Own

Games have their own context. Reading a recent Civilization game series retrospective, I searched in vain for…..

Discussion of the context and history of the strategy game genre.
Observations about the player’s psychological and cognitive perspective of making strategy.
Awareness at all of the numerous forms of Civilization fan culture such as the fan favorite Civilization Battle Royale.

Civilization Battle Royale grew out of one redditor’s experiment of running a battle between dozens of computer-controlled players in their approximate historical starting location and seeing what emerged. It is now a huge event for Civ fans (reddit here) and receives widespread news coverage in gaming circles.

Thousands tune in to watch the spectacle on gaming video platform Twitch. By making AIs fight each other, fans and players are very much “hacking” the game’s historical determinism (which is overstated, btw) and showing how novel and emergent outcomes form from creative play and experimentation. I love the idea of it, especially the “what if?” dimension. As noted in these news links, Battle Royales see outcomes that often seem impossible in light of history or the existing game model. And they also have allowed for a way of exploring themes that are not really prominent in the game (such as pre-colonial civilizations and settler-colonial conflicts with the Other). It’s a crazy, computer-generated alternative history where “Poland was giving the Germans hell for a change, the Kingdom of Israel spread as far as Oman, and other crazy history fan-fiction happened.”

But you would have learned none of this if you only read the Longreads review of the new Civilization, which blabbers on at length about Toynbee, Huntington, ideology, the problematic roots of the term “civilization”, and almost every other tired trope of a failed model of game criticism that overdetermines some broader ideological, social, and political dimension into everything. No matter how ridiculous. And which privileges pretentious stunts like No Man’s Sky or games that advance the critic’s desire for didactic political education over something more modest (yet nonetheless rich in potential for player engagement) like Civilization. Games have their own context that needs to be privileged before making grand pronouncements about their ideological and political content. And it’s not hard to observe this context: just log onto Twitch and see for yourself.

This is why, as David Auerbach argued, game and perhaps more broadly technology criticism is failing. Critics do not want to take the time to understand the things they write about or seriously examine the way in which fans consume them. Critics instead want to project their own feelings and beliefs onto fans and become agitated when the latter object. Fans are increasingly filling the void themselves as both participants and observers of gaming phenomena that goes far beyond simply debates about which strategy or tactic is best or the theory of play. They are also producing creative and fascinating engagements with the subjectivity of the products they consume, like the AI Battle royale (an exploration of historical contingency in grand strategy).

Critics often argue that gamers are a kind of lumpenproleriat that lack understanding of games as anything except consumer products. But these days, if I want to find enlightening thinking about gaming I see it more often from fans than I do from magazine writers, journalists, or academics. After all, it is the former who often most appreciate that games have contexts of their own. As for me, I want to find out what tools are being used to run the Battle Royales. I think I may have just found a good term paper idea for a class next semester…..fingers crossed.