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i will give civ 6 shit for continuing to encode the series' casual racism into the series despite seemingly completely redesigning the series to reflect the geographic turn

i will give civ 6's music shit for encoding this casual racism into the music by, for example, making civs' themes in the Industrial era a rendition by a Western orchestra, thereby inextricably linking progress with Westernization in a game that is like, sorta trying to not do that as much as it can

but at the end of the day, i gotta hand it to em, cause that game's score is the reason i know of the song Tsaiqvanes Tamar Kali


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in reply to @bigstuffedcat's post:

what would the hy libre 4X / society simulator game look like… now that’s the kind of question is mortals can scarcely dream the answer of

god i dont know. i think the real answer is "on a saturday alone, i get a whiteboard and 2d6, draw a map, make up some blorbos, and watch them fight with the rules i make up somewhat ad hoc".

i feel a weird affection for 6 because i feel like it's partway there. making things depend on geography as much as they do is very appealing to me, and I like the Eureka system a whole lot. not sure what the other half is. part of me thinks maybe adding in more people-- you're a democracy, and the guy whose platform was building 6 redundant farms surrounding the holy site won reelection, but this generation has grown up swimming in the religious propaganda one of your blorbos published to get the holy site to exist, etc.

but more than anything i want the game to be more ideological, in the way that Twilight Struggle makes you as a player have to believe in the domino effect and brinksmanship to win. not that it's not ideological, but it feels like it believes that there are Civilizations and Barbarians and I somehow want it to not

idk how it is on the Ideology standpoint but to your first point here you might wanna take a peep sometime at Old World which i've been told is basically Civ with Crusader Kings-light dynasty mechanics. might capture some of what you're asking for here from what we've heard about it.

For that matter I feel like Crusader Kings 3 is pretty good on this front although it's a very different style of game. I've joked in the past about CK3 being a game about how every single feudal lord is terrible, but I think that's kind of a key point that has to do with the self-reflexivity it feels like you're envisioning here. It is not a game that thinks the right of kings is cool or real, it is not a game that believes in the manifest right of Europe to own the world, it's a game about how All That Stuff is used as justification for the pettiest possible power struggles but as a player you have to get more and more invested in those struggles or you sink.

it's always interesting how blatantly ideology tends to come through in grand strategy games. i mean obviously they're there in any work but strategy games tend to be so specifically about going "here's a representation of how i think the world functions."

i've talked in the past about my eternal frustration with citybuilders (and really any kind of build and expand strategy game) and the way they so deeply express a colonial and capitalist understanding of communities and social organization. Most people making games about building communities and spaces are so much expressing this idealization of endless expansion, exploitation. and, often textually, profit. Which is a shame because what does an anarchist city builder look like, right? well, i suppose there's Banished and funnily enough i feel like there's a degree to which Dwarf Fortress also sidesteps replicating these logics.

Anyway tangent i suppose but i feel like it's a similar case with the casual racism of civ and its general very englightenment very western forward progress narrative. it's interesting how these kinds of games so deeply express the ideology they're built from.