"The Hidden Biases of World Building" is a new essay of mine for the development blog of Seed, the hugely ambitious MMO where players will rebuild society from the ground up, which Lawrence Lessig is helping craft a political system for. The Seed development team asked me to write a series of essays on world building as their own world takes shape, so this first one looks back at the worlds which have come before:
The assumed primacy of military dominance is so deeply ingrained in games, it’s embedded in a subgenre’s name -- with genocidal overtones no less: 4X, for eXplore, eXpand, eXploit, and eXterminate.
Scott Jennings, a longtime designer and MMO analyst, explains this focus on gaming’s origins: “Strategy games tend to view problems as only requiring one (very well armed) tool to fix because for the most part that's what customers expect and want -- wargames, simulations of the military aspect of conflict resolution (and the more detailed in many cases the better),” as he puts it. “[A] lot of this comes from gaming's history in the pen and paper wargame days of the 1970s.” Given that background, many game designers miss the opportunity to move beyond combat; however, as Scott points out, there are notable exceptions that have succeeded: "’Crusader Kings’ for example is one of Paradox's top-selling titles in its list of strategy games, specifically because its focus is less on medieval warfare (although it has plenty of that) and more of the interactions between the political figures of the day -- marriage between factions, intrigue, betrayal, all the things that make Game of Thrones interesting.”
Of course I also relate the history of world building to the founding of Second Life, which was inspired by Burning Man:
Wouldn’t it be marvelous, the inspiration went, if people from all over the world could attend a Burning Man online?
My assignment was to track the emergence of the virtual community of early users -- and beyond some small pockets of idealistic players, much of what I saw was little like the utopia the creators imagined: Full-fledged wars over real life politics. A decadent hookup scene with so much virtual adultery, private detectives flourished. It was anarchic, it was unpredictable… it was more thrilling and multifaceted than a short-term party in the desert could ever offer.
Much more here, and much more soon.
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