Fireside Friday, February 2, 2024 (On City Building Games)

Fireside this week! I have just finished up a draft of a chapter (to be in one of those multi-multi-author companion volumes) on how video games (particularly more abstract simulation games) depict the ancient world. Writing that chapter led me to reengage with ancient city builders, particularly Caesar IV, Children of the Nile, Pharaoh: A New Era and Nebuchadnezzar. And in the process I had a lot of thoughts that didn’t fit into the chapter, so we’re definitely going to revisit this genre later this year (we’re also going to do a look at Imperator: Rome too, another fruit of this chapter). But what I want to muse on this week is how some differences in design aesthetics radically transform what city builders are about, as a way to explaining, to a degree why I think I bounced so hard off of Pharaoh: ANE and Nebuchadnezzar, despite being a longtime fan of the Caesar series and generally a fan of city builders.

I made the mistake of leaving my sweater on the little bench we have by the front door and, as you can see, Ollie swiftly colonized it, since he could sit on it and bask in the sun at the same time. It makes sense, but is still striking how much both cats are drawn to dark surfaces, where they presumably feel better hidden.

And I think the best way to do this is to contrast what we might see as two ‘schools’ of city builder design, exemplified by something like Farthest Frontier (but Banished or indeed, even Cities: Skylines would work) on the one hand and Pharaoh: ANE and Neb. on the other hand.

We can start with a simple design question: why are you able to track individual citizens in Farthest Frontier (or Cities: Skylines II), but not able to do that in Neb.? Neb. does at least give your citizens names if you click on them (Pharaoh: ANE does not), but these don’t seem to be permanent entities tracked through the game, just names pulled from a file list. If specific workers are tied to specific houses, for instance, the game gives you no way to know. Now part of the answer is clearly that Neb. and P:ANE don’t do this because Pharaoh (1999) didn’t do this, for the same reason Caesar II or III (I never played the original Caesar) don’t do this: for games developed in the 1990s, keeping individual track of the condition of thousands of unique digital people in the city would have melted your computer. Instead, houses generate an abstract set of resources (workers) and workplaces consume those workers and the player’s imagination is left to fill in the rest. Workplaces generate ‘walkers’ (delivery units, mostly), but these cities are devoid of regular traffic – no one is heading to the theater to take in a show, taking a recreational walk, or walking to their place of work and then back home.

But of course now games absolutely can track that many individual digital people and all of their routines. My current City: Skylines II city has 225,000 people in it, all individually tracked with their own homes and families (may Colossal Order have pity on my CPU).⁶⁵³ Admittedly an extreme example, but Children of the Nile came out in 2004 and was already tracking all of your citizens, complete with their own family units, nutrition, health, happiness and so on, for a much smaller number of agents. This can be done and indeed, is a pretty standard feature in most modern city builders.

And I think the answer is that there are actually two kinds of city builders: games about cities as spaces for peopleand games about cities as systems for production. Most modern city builders are, in fact, the former, interested in the city as a place for people to live and work. Consequently, the simulation is focused on people, so as soon as the technology got good enough to simulate the people themselves, it started doing so, first in really halting ways (like the MySim mode of SimCity4) and now in more robust ways. Even earlier than that, these systems also tried shifting at least some agency – some control – away from the player. SimCity zones develop based on local factors; I recall a very young me being frustrated that I couldn’t simply command residential zones to produce high rises – you had to create the right conditions for that density and then, in the fiction of the simulation, your Sims built that highrise. Even though you place every building in Farthest Frontier directly and you can directly control individual settlers, you generally don’t: the game encourages you to let them do their thing in the urban spaces you’ve created (and they’ve built).

And here, the jump backwards in design for Neb. and P:ANE was quite sharp. I knew back when I played Caesar III in 1999, I was supposed to kind of imagine a real living city underneath the systems I was interacting with. By contrast, in 2021 or 2023, the decision not to have even the fig-leaf of such a simulation is a design choice. Instead, strip off the thin layer of paint and you realize that mechanically these games have more in common with Factorio or Satisfactory than they do with Farthest Frontier or Cities: Skylines. Cities are not living, breathing spaces for people in Neb. or P:ANE but rather mechanistic mega-factories for producing specific goods (mostly armies and monuments) and so what gets simulated are the elements of industrial production; people who aren’t workers don’t matter. Hell, the workers don’t really matter all that much either – neither game bothers to have all of the workers in your brickworks everwalk home.

A really good way to think about this: does the game have any systems to make it actually a negative event for the player if some modest slice, say, 10%, was suddenly raptured out of existence? In Farthest Frontier, that’s a potentially critical loss of labor. In Skylines, for an advanced city, it’s a catastrophe because you’ve probably expended a lot of resources educating those folks. In Pharaoh: A New Era, it is barely an inconvenience, as new settlers will instantly arrive from off-map; indeed, one bug in the game is that the system for getting rid of predators right now doesn’t work (police are supposed to do it, they don’t) and you’d think having crocodiles regularly eating citizens would be a game-breaking bug, but it is actually largely ignorable – a minor disruption in supply chains and nothing more (they added an option to turn off predators in the options to ‘fix’ the bug).

I want to develop that theme more later, digging into the mechanics and how and why they produce this result, but for now I’m going to keep moving. What I find fascinating is how this design sensibility seems attached to antiquity. Now of course I know that these games are intentional ‘throwbacks’ to the older Impressions city builders of the 1990s and borrow a lot of their design DNA from them. But Lethis: Path of Progress not withstanding, this is a style that mostly lives in antiquity and I think there’s a bit of design lineage worth noting here. In particular, Tilted Mill made Children of the Nile in 2004 and the game shows a real effort to break out beyond the old Impressions formula; in some ways Children of the Nile feels almost like a proto-Banished. But then they went and made Caesar IV (2006), which was a return to the Impressions formula before abandoning antiquity to make SimCity Societies and Hinterland, games which proceeded more in the direction of more people-focused simulations (and then collapsing sometime post-2010). And then of course came the ‘throwbacks’ with Nebuchadnezzar (2021) and Pharaoh: A New Era (2023).

Certainly some of that is the old Impressions influence, but I also think it speaks to the way the ancient world is understood by developers and the public. Medieval city builders have increasingly come to imagine cities as being driven by and fundamentally being about the people who live in them (with some exceptions, e.g. Stronghold). But ancient cities are instead instrumental: economic engines for social elites to produce things they want with. Notably nearly all of the ancient city builders explicitly place the player as a ruler, a pharaoh, a Roman governor, a Mesopotamian king (in contrast to the player as a mayor or other sort of elected representative) and generally their scenarios are set by having the political powers that be set objectives for the city.

In Farthest Frontier, the narrative is that the city is built as a refuge for its citizens. The same is true in Banished. A Cities: Skylines city mostly exists for the sake of existing; the game is open-ended in giving the player freedom in the kind of city they build, but the feedback systems prioritize citizen satisfaction. But a city in Nebuchadnezzar or Pharaoh exists to fulfill specific objectives: train some soldiers, build some monuments, earn ‘favor’ with the ruler by shipping bulk goods out. The city – and its citizens – does not exist for its own sake, it exists to serve the ruling class. Indeed, in a real sense, a city in Nebuchadnezzar or Pharaoh: A New Era isn’t really a city: it is a Factorio factory that insists in pretending that its belts are people and that little people live in its factories, even when both things are clearly not true.

And to bring this musing to a close, I don’t think that is an accident, I think it speaks to the public conception of ancient cities, which views them instrumentally, from the perspective of ancient elites far more than viewing them as spaces for people. And that perception is in turn powered by a vision of ancient history where the ‘important’ things are kings, empires, armies and monuments, but not the experience of regular people living in those societies. It is a narrow, overly limited view of the ancient past and I think, quite frankly, we can do better.

And I think that is also part of why I found both Nebuchadnezzar and Pharaoh: A New Era feeling oddly empty, a bit soulless and not all that fun. After all, at this point, Factorio exists and can simulate economic mega-engines at far greater complexity than they can, without the thin veneer of ‘this is a city’ paint, so if I want to build a gigantic factory to churn out widgets (or rockets), I can play Factorio. And if I want to build an actual city that has people in it…well, I can play Farthest Frontier or Cities: Skylines II.

On to Recommendations:

I’ve written some things and been on some podcasts! In writing, I penned an article in the Chronicle of Higher Education on cost-free ways departments could be more collegial to their non-tenure-line faculty, including such basic advice as “Equally promote the achievements of your faculty members,” both tenure-track and non; I will leave it to you to guess whose department has studiously ignored that one of their own placed an article in the Chronicle. In either case, having now complained written about higher education in The Atlantic, The New York Times and The Chronicle, I have completed the higher-ed-hat-trick and now await my commemorative jacket.

For podcasts, already out now is my appearance on theHistory Hack podcast, talking about the Roman army of the Middle Republic and its astounding military capacity. Coming soon (and available already for their patrons) is an appearance talking about the army of the early Roman Republic with the always-excellent Partial Historians. I have a few others coming up as well. But on to things other people have done!

Much like the better city builders seem to target the Middle Ages, we’ve got a couple of good medieval things to share this week. Over at her blog, Going Medieval, Eleanor Janega has an excellent article talking about the global impact of the Black Death and the danger of treating it as a purely European phenomenon, a product of a supposedly uniquely backwards Europe. That fits into a broader problem of binary thinking about Medieval Europe, where it must either be the summit and cradle of all civilization (it wasn’t) or the worst, poorest most backward part of the world (not that either). In practice, Medieval Europe was, for the most part (especially post-1000) a broadly typical part of the long stretch of settled, agrarian states running across Afro-Eurasia. Neither remarkably poor, nor remarkably rich (though it was remarkably fragmented). The corrective is valuable.

Likewise well worth your time is a blog post by Fraser McNair on “Patrimonialisation,” by which he means the process by which appointed offices in the Carolingian period transition into becoming hereditary patrimonies, leading to the form of distributed hereditary rule we see in the high and late Middle Ages (and strongly associate with the whole period). A good reminder both that the fully hereditary model of local rule was not the original or only system in the Middle Ages but also in how such systems come to be; it reminded me in particular of the processes we see in some ancient empires whereby things like satrapies or nomarchies (in Achaemenid Persia or Old Kingdom Egypt, respectively) drifted into becoming hereditary.

Finally, this defense of funding for the liberal arts by Holly J. Humphrey, on the value of a broad liberal education for aspiring medical professionals is exactly the sort of defenses of the liberal arts that we need (and a tip of the hat to Joshua Nudell’s blog for bringing it to my attention).

For this week’s book recommendation, a volume I’ve long been meaning to recommend, T. Hone, Learning War: The Evolution of Fighting Doctrine in the U.S. Navy, 1898-1945 (2018). That the job of the United States Navy in the Second World War was a difficult one – starting the fight losing most of the battle-fleet and then having to engage in war in two oceans at the same time (albeit backed by a tremendous shipbuilding industry) – is not hard to see. But one of the things that remains striking about the USN’s performance in WWII is that in engagement after engagement, the USN learned. Whereas the IJN and the Kriegsmarine remained to a significant degree inflexible in their approach, the USN continually developed over the course of the war, employing new tactics, organizational systems and technologies. The result, of course, was the finely honed naval war machine of 1944 and 1945, seemingly capable of accomplishing anything even when operating half the world away.

Hone’s approach starts earlier, tracing the emergence of a new kind of officer, with broader and more deliberate training in the 1890s and early 1900s. The USN of the 1800s had been a deeply traditional institution, sharply resistant to change (as the students in my US Naval History course are learning right now), but this new approach to officer training and the new crop of officers it produced steadily transformed the way the USN learned. Officers, now motivated to improve both technologies and methods (and with the merger of engineering and general officer training, the skills to understand both) worked collaboratively (through naval boards), exercises (the famous ‘Fleet Problems’) and competition (e.g. gunnery competition to improve accuracy) to improve. The result was the USN able to roll with the punches in WWII and come back not only stronger but smarter, a pace of organizational learning which resounds from almost anything one reads about the war.

Hone has a real skill for finding comprehensible narratives that demonstrate his point, picking out key inflection points where the reader can track the development of, say, gunnery systems or surface warfare doctrine. The result is a book that, while quite valuable for the specialist, is also very approachable for the lay reader. If you are unfamiliar with the operations in question, particularly the USN’s operations in WWII, you may need recourse to Wikipedia for a map or two – the maps the book has are excellent, but relatively few, but the argument is never hard to follow and Hone sign-posts it really well. My sense is this book is already becoming a standard for the instruction of officers (some of the NROTC kids seem to have been assigned it) and it is excellent for that, but also excellent for the civilian reader who wants to understand how agile, learning organizations come to be that way.