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Soren Johnson gave a keynote speech at the Game Developer's Conference (GDC) earlier today. In the talk, titled "Theme is not Meaning", he looks at the separation between the mechanics of a game and it's theme, arguing that the meaning is derived from the former much more so than the latter. One example he gives of this is the board games of Risk and Diplomacy: while they have the same themes, they have very different meaning as a result of the differences in their mechanics: the simultaneous and rule-based nature of Diplomacy makes it a game about diplomacy, while the turn-based and randomised mechanics of Risk make it a game about risk.
A detailed summary of the talk is available at the Edge Online website, and the actual slides of the presentation can be downloaded from Soren's Blog -- both are highly recommended reading.
In the talk Soren addresses a number of Civilization-related points. He notes that Civ's theme is world history, but the meaning is being god-king. Civ's mechanics and therefore its meaning cannot be about history, as having the mechanics closely approximate world history would make it a failure as a game: consequences would often not be fair or clear, the player would lose a lot of control and the outcome would be entirely deterministic, as explained in Guns, Germs & Steel. Soren explains he tried to incorporate elements from GG&S into Civ3 but that led to some of the game's biggest flaws, like the resource placement algorithm that could lead to entire continents ending up without key resources.
Soren argues games with social themes should not attempt to model society or history, but rather the life of historical figures. In the epilogue of the Powerpoint presentation, Soren gives a fascinating explanation about the meaning of Civlization 4, citing specifically the Civics system and Mount Rushmore as examples of why to him Civ4 is about the failure of ideology. Also, elsewhere in the sheets he explains why Tetris is a game for Nazis.
Update: A very detailed summary (almost a transcript) of Soren's talk can now be found on Destructoid.
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Theme: world history / evolution
Mechanics: create empire / create creature
The only difference I see between the two (and obviously commercial success) is that Civ is marketed as "Create an Empire" and Spore is marketed as "Evolution in a box".
Civ is just that, Spore is not.
However Civ4 has and still is the game I keep coming back to, be it a vanilla MP game or seeing what the latest developments are in mods
Since I suspect many people will not bother downloading Soren's PPT presentation, I'll repost the epilogue, which I thought was fascinating (the rest of the slides are pretty interesting as well but you'll have to get off your lazy arse and download those yourself
What would an industrialist from 1909 think of 2009 America?
If the twentieth century has a single theme, it is that ideology itself is a dead-end, a failure. The growth of mass media enabled ideas to motivate people in ways never before imagined. Time and time again, these ideas allowed dogmatic leaders to demonize the “opposition,” which usually meant helping the strong to terrorize the weak. From the Nazi death camps to the Soviet gulags to China’s Cultural Revolution to America’s McCarthyism, the twentieth century was full of ideas that gave power to autocratic leaders not afraid to destroy the lives of those who resisted. Much as we hate to admit it, these leaders were supported by the masses of people who believed blindly in the ideas they represented. Before becoming a dictator, Hitler was initially elected to power. (”People will more easily fall victim to a big lie than to a small one.”) For much too long, Stalin had an embarrassing number of communist apologists all around the world. (”One death is a tragedy; a million is a statistic.”) They are now primarily remembered as mass murderers.
I personally despise ideologies because they inevitably lead to a belief that there is one set of solutions to the worldÂ’s problems. One set of solutions means all other options are heretical, which means they must be controlled. Ideologues put ideas above people, which is the beginning of terror and oppression. People are more important than ideas; in fact, people are more important than everything because they are, in fact, the only thing.
I donÂ’t imagine that Civ4 tackles these issues as well as it could have, but I do know that my inherent distrust of ideologies does lurk under the surface of the game. Take the civics system, for example. Unlike previous Civ games, which let you could choose between broad labels like Democracy or Communism, Civ4 lets you build your government Ã* la carte. You can mix State Property with Free Speech, or a Police State with a Free Market, or even Slavery with Universal Suffrage. Ideologues love labels because they dehumanize and obscure the opposition; both sides of the Cold War made liberal use of the terms “Communist” and “Capitalist” to differentiate each other, even though the United States government has slowly adopted communist programs piece-meal over the last century. Why exactly was the U.S. - a country with social security, medicare, welfare, a minimum wage, labor laws, and trade unions - fighting to keep Communism out of Vietnam? In fact, if you took a typical Red-fearing, trade-union-busting industrialist from 1907 and sent him 100 years into the future and explained how America now works, he would assume that the Communists won after all! Labels exist to separate and control people, and I wanted the civics system to encourage people to look behind the labels and at the actual choices a society needs to make when governing itself. It was no accident that I attached Mt. Rushmore to Fascism; carving mammoth statues of your countryÂ’s greatest leaders into a MOUNTAIN is fascist, even if we do not live under Fascism. Our own self-labeling as Democratic and Capitalist does not protect us from charges that our country is damaging the world when our policies hurt people, real people.
thanks for the post wouter
The epilogue was definitely the most interesting. Thought-provoking indeed:
I am intrigued by this comment:
I think he reaches a bit by tying Mt. Rushmore to fascism -- I'm not sure I see the difference between that and any other monument to past national leaders, except in scale. (Unless he means to say that any such veneration is on the road to fascism...perhaps that's not an unreasonable position, too. At that point, though, weren't the Pyramids fascist?)