TBH the easiest “win” condition in Stellaris is the diplomatic one involving building a big Federation. I basically only play Stellaris as pacifist (or at least non-aggressive).
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I think about this a fair bit. Probably for the same reasons that Rob does, and I think that a lot of players do. Here’s some sort of disconnected thoughts on the theme that I’ve had. I’m not sure if I can synthesize them into a good thesis, really.
FWIW, my definition of a strategy game is that it generally has to involve allocation of scarce resources - which is a pretty expansive definition.
Most games are fundamentally collections of puzzles to me. They’re about presenting you with a series of challenges and using the resources available to you to overcome them. That could be five dudes in a room and you with a rifle in every first person shooter, or Towers of Hanoi in a bioware game, or whatever. Stripped down to it, most mechanic- and systems-driven games that I like are basically puzzle generators.
That’s a big part of why I love Into the Breach, which strips everything non-essential out and just gives me these tiny but intricate puzzles forever.
I tend to play a lot of strategy games, because strategy games present me with the kinds of puzzles that I frequently enjoy.
I realize that my reasons for enjoying a genre of game are not everyone’s reasons for playing a game. There are a lot of Southern Lost Causers, and Neo-Nazis, or whatever out there, and a lot of them like the same games I do. I feel weird about that, but it’s not unique to strategy games. Neo-Nazis play all sorts of games.
I quite like Paradox’s Hearts of Iron games, which are ostensibly WW2 grand strategy games. In reality, they’re logistics puzzles with some minor wargame trappings, but let’s leave it like that. I personally refuse to play as Germany, or at least as Fascist Germany. I did once convert Germany into a Republic just to do it.
And yeah, like most WW2-set games, there is a hefty proportion of the fanbase that is toxic bullshit Neo-Nazis, or even just Wehraboos. (As an aside, trolling Wehraboos in Steel Division: Normandy 1944 is Very Fun).
Yet at the same time, I wouldn’t necessarily judge someone who chose to play as Germany in Hearts of Iron. Germany dictates the entire flow of the game - every nation reacts to them, essentially. Key mechanics don’t open up for non-aligned nations until the world tension is driven high enough, and Germany is the primary escalator.
I haven’t liked the last couple Civilization games because they feel too board-gamey. Their possibility space is too limited, and they feel like they are balanced to be too zero-sum. That’s fine for a more traditional War Game on the tabletop, but for a big title like Civilization, it doesn’t work for me. As I get older I find myself more and more bothered by the traditional model of “here, at the beginning of history, we have these randomly-sited civilzations, surrounded by Empty Space.” Why aren’t there people in the Empty Space? It bothers me.
A lot of games are driven by conflict or conquest. The best game of all time, of course, is irretrievably pro-monarchy and that bothers me too - surely if the pawns got together, maybe suborned a bishop or two, they could have a democracy in a couple of moves - but this isn’t a problem unique to strategy games.
There’s a lot of games about World War 2 because, in a lot of senses, it is the biggest “Event” in human history, certainly the biggest conflict. It did encompass almost the whole of the globe. Setting conflict-based games in that setting makes a lot of sense - the possibility space is enormous. If you have a game that involves conflict that you want to make, you can probably find somewhere in WW2 to model it.
I don’t think there’s anything inherently wrong with playing something like Operation Barbossa on tabletop, even it’s a fairly bad simulation of actual events. In the limited focus of the game, it presents a series of movement and random challenges to the player. I don’t know if every game involving Nazi Germany or Stalin’s USSR needs to come with an automatic dope-slapper that informs you that you’re moving little cardboard chits around that represent armies that would also perform horrible atrocities.
The concept that strategy games are somehow responsible for the fact that fascists play them bothers me. The whole approach strikes me as a little too similar to the “video game violence causes real world violence,” just applied to a niche genre. Fascists play strategy games because people play strategy games. Most games involve conflict, it’s just frequently more obscured than in games that are explicitly about war. But #notallstrategygames are about war, either. In Twilight Struggle, after all, the person who starts the war loses.
A big part of the appeal of historical wargames to me, btw, is that it has enhanced my understanding of history. I can read a lot of books about, say, Napeoleon’s Russian Campaign, but something like Command & Colors can really give me a sense of how that whole thing worked, the sense of desperately chasing around the countryside with your dwindling forces just praying for a chance to actually fight.
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I mean I think there are a lot of much deeper discussions to be had re: the simulation of history and how to represent in sincerity the human horrors of the world and how to deal with those systems interacting or becoming game mechanics, but I think the occams razor answer to the topic question is historical strategy games allow Nazis and white supremacists to play as “their side” with no judgement from the system or narrative from the game. They can just rewrite history to their liking.
I think about this a lot, because I would consider strategy games as probably my favorite genre of game but as I’ve grown older and my awareness of the world has crystallized more, it has created a lot of internal questions and turmoil that I’m not really sure how to answer
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Everyone just broadly throwing around Pdox and it’s got me humoring “wait, what’s terrible about Cities Skylines?”
Same thing that’s terrible about all city builders, the power fantasy of being a single person who can manipulate the living environment of an entire city worth of people for your own whims and, the real clincher, being able to build on seemingly unoccupied land without dispute of any kind even though the game is set in modern day, millenia from the last time any land could be truly considered unclaimed.
Excuse me, that was off topic.
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when people talk about Paradox Games they usually mean the ones that Paradox develops, not just what Paradox publishes I think
I could go off on The Sims as a republican fantasyland but I think it’d be getting pretty far afield
I noticed in the Steam reviews for Stellaris (god save me), a lot of people were complaining about the update because they felt like it made being a “dominator” more difficult. I found that really frustrating and kind of disturbing.
Here’s my theory: There are virtually no strategy games that do not put the player as the prime executor, that do not reward the maximization of profit and consumer goods, and do not have a complex suite of war options. Authority, capital, and power. The systems are geared towards and encourage right-wing play. When all these games are designed to reward or even allow for far-right behavior, right-wingers can flock to the fantasy being presented.
Austin Walker wrote a great article on formalism and so on and so forth, but he talks about his experience with the game Subterfuge, and how, near the end of the game, he decided to change his goals, refusing to measure himself by the metrics the game set out. He focused on supporting his allies instead of winning himself: “According to Subterfuge I came in third place. But, seeing as one of my allies took first, as far as I’m concerned we absolutely won.”
I’d like to see more strategy games experiment with what “success” looks like. I’m not a strategy game scholar, but I feel like you rarely see strategy games that encourage mutual cooperation, vehement pacifism, or really anything that doesn’t emphasize exerting dominance over or being better than others.
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Something I think is important that hasn’t been touched on yet - in many of these games, you play an immortal, transcendental spirit of The Nation. You are France, you have always been France, you will always be France. You will get bonuses and penalties for embodying France that will never change; the spiritual character of The Nation is indestructible and ignores time and history. You could go back to 200 AD and you would still be in some sense presented as France the Nation.
It should be clear why something like this speaks to fascists and other right-wing nationalists on a deep level. For them race and nation are mytho-historical things with absolutely clear lines of lineage throughout the whole of human history. There are people at any given point in time who, in their eyes, are characteristically French and characteristically white, and those who are not. The entire framing of a good chunk of grand strategy games is you taking on the guiding national spirit over the course of 100, 200, 500, a 1000 years. This scheme presents states not as organizations made up of actually existing people in a specific time with specific legal practices and a specific geopolitical place - instead states are tied to some invisible force that gives them their character which exists in basically the same place for all of history.
I feel like I’m just saying the same thing over and over different ways, maybe I’ll come back to this later and try to elaborate further, but I think all together the point I mean to make is clear.
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I think part of why I like StarCraft so much as a strategy game is because how its economy is overly simplistic and how rooted in fantasy all the action is. There’s probably a bunch of icky stuff in there if I look closer, but otherwise the gameplay is kinda just a cartoon abstraction of generic sci-fi violence. Age of Empires 3 doesn’t sit too well with me due to its central theme (literally colonialism), but I still enjoy the gameplay in there as long as I don’t think too hard about who is working on these plantations.
Also worthwhile to say this is a part of the appeal of the genre period. This understanding of capital N Nations and race is core to most politics in our world, not just those of fascists, though they are especially fixated on and animated by it.
Pertinent to some other conversations in this thread, I don’t think the right-wing playerbase has much to do with how you can ignore the particular details about colonization, imperialism, fascism. I’ve never known a fascist who didn’t revel in that stuff. There’s a reasons tons of nazis are involved in/come up through online gore “communities.” Holocaust denial is only a strategy because publicly exulting genocide is not, in most places, seen as okay, at least not in explicit terms.
You could have some text that flashes constantly on the screen saying “YOU ARE EVIL” and reinforce that mechanically and narratively and most of them would still enjoy it. Part of the specific appeal of nazism is that it is at least nominally disapproved of by most people, so they get to have their reactionary politics and be edgy and fashionable and counterculture.
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Yeah, these things you list are features of every materialist philosophy, capitalism is not alone in turning people into numbers. I’ve heard from quite a bit of “class, not race” people over the past 2 years who equate identity politics with neoliberalism.
I think the basic attraction of right wing people to strategy games is that the games present a basic meritocratic version of history where all of the messy contingencies of the world are boiled down to a synecdoche of citizen and territory. The question of the citizen belonging to the state, or vise versa, is set aside for a moment, and the player can return to a world of philosopher kings who embody the will of the territory.
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I imagine that some of it is also a combination of fetishization of military virtue (intertwined with authoritarian leanings, natch) and a cultural desire to be one of the ‘great men’ of history. Basically the Arnold Rimmers of the world who know that deep down they would be great generals and strategists if this kumbaya world hadn’t taken away their chances for conquest and glory
In a nutshell: a salve against masculine insecurity
How does one quantify that win condition? What are the obstacles? This is a very interesting and difficult creative proposition. However, I wouldn’t say that the reason we don’t see games modeled around these win conditions is strictly caused by creative limitations. I believe there are massive developmental challenges in creating a game that is abstract and complex enough to measure the minor everyday successes of peace and cooperation.
And even then, how would the game determine if you did ‘better’ than another nation/civilization/culture who went to war and dominated adjacent populations? Would the player declare their intent at the start, and the game would then measure them against their chosen play model?
I can think of games of Civ that I’ve played that, for all intents and purposes, were meant to be cultural victories, but some adjacent civ just hated me so much that I was forced to develop a military with which I could defend myself. In the end, I had irrevocably blown my money on a massive force and would never catch up culturally, so I had to change direction and go for a militaristic victory. I guess what I’m getting at is I just don’t know how a strategy game could allow for this fluidity of play and somehow end up measuring a pacifistic play model against a financial or militaristic play model when the game ‘ends’.
Maybe the answer is to have no win conditions at all. I wonder what that would be like. Would the simulation be enough, or do players need assigned, mechanically-recognized goals? It’s all so very complicated!!!
I think there’s a key difference is between “success” and “win”. Winning entails a win-state, and often can imply a zero-sum game situation. I think of success as non-failing conditions. I think there’s also something to be said for multiple players working towards a mutual win state. I think it would be interesting to focus on successful and stable societies rather than developing powerful nations. This is just me, though. I’m in no way saying all strategy games should be like this, I just think there’s a missed opportunity here. And, again, I can’t stress enough how little I know about these games.
Here are some examples of some success-conditions, though:
- Maintain positive relations with other parties
- Work towards a common goal with other players
- Recover from a travesty
- Develop social, political, or economic reform
- Broker deals that mutually benefit everyone
- Maintain a stable society
- Do not go to war
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I don’t think it’s strategy games themselves, so much as what most strategy games tend to be about. Military history, history in general. I think certain subject matter just attracts more people of a right-wing political stance.
How many strategy games aren’t about war vs. how many are? How many strategy games not about war, but have it as an option put you in a position where you’ll have to fight one whether you want to or not?
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I think you hit the nail on the head here. I wanted to share this video I just came across that somewhat relates to the point, and digs into Germany in particular.
…A portrait is drawn, over thousands of years, looking from the present backwards, begetting an inverted family tree: from Angela, to Adolf, to Alte Fritz, to Aachen, to Arminius. All remarkably different societies, though all differences forgotten and remembered as a single idea, “Germany”.
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Is this common in other parts of the U.S. because our history classes were nothing like that in Texas which is very much right leaning. 90% of the content taught in classes was to get you ready for end of the year state regulated testing and it was a thing schools prided themselves on when students did well. This of course means there is no room to do deep dives into content the teacher cared about but it does mean everyone more or less learns the same content.
Military stuff was never fetishised and I would go the other way and say it was somewhat looked down upon. We watched things like “The Blue and the Grey” in our Texas history class and “Glory” then wrote essays about wasn’t the civil war pretty fucked up and gee Texas wasn’t exactly on the correct side. We talked about things like the world wars but it never felt like it was being framed in an “America#1” light either. We definitely talked about things like how our country sold guns to both sides before Pearl Harbor as an example.
I remember we even spent a week watching and discussing Hotel Rwanda in our world history class and why is it that we as a nation more or less turn a blind eye to travesties in less developed countries unless someone shoves it in your face.
It’s kind of bumming me out that y’all didnt get a chance to look at the darker side of our country because I found it incredibly interesting as a teen who up until high school just assumed our country was perfect. Now don’t get me wrong we definitely had an air of Texas pride especially around things like the Alamo but no one was trying to sell us on the idea that Texas or America has never and can never do no wrong.
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This is definitely not normal from my experience. I went to school in Southern California and had a less critical historical education than what it sounds like you had by far. We were taught almost nothing that made America “look bad” and it took me getting into punk rock in high school to start thinking “Hmmm…maybe America isn’t the greatest country in the world after all??”
One thing I will say in defence of the Paradox forums is that one of the regular criticisms was that they didn’t make peacetime interesting enough to play in games like Europa.
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In their mainline games, Stellaris is the only one with an actual win condition outside of a very abstract “score” system that I’ve never paid any attention to, as well.
I’ve found a ton of right-wingers adore war as a concept. They love collecting the memorabilia, watching the history channel, read Tom Clancy books. They love what they see as the order of it. Of the being able to apply their sometimes very black and white brand of politics (I mean that more as clear cut, but of course, race too). Many of my right wing family members can’t get enough of war in general. I think the strategy games give them the emotional distance the crave when they think about war. They love the idea of pieces on a board because it is almost antithetical to understanding it on a human cost level.
