While trying to use propaganda posts in Sins of a Solar Empire last week, I started thinking about cultural control in strategy gaming, how culture assimilation is an either/or proposition, how an homogeneous culture is assumed to be better than one with spillover from neighbors, how rival cultures bring nothing with them but trouble.
Then I noticed that Michael Akinde already wrote this essay. So I don’t have a lot to add. He covers it nicely and says a lot that I was thinking of. (He has an update on his game, today, too.)
It is interesting to consider what blended culture would look like in game terms. I love to talk historical reality versus game theory, but it does eventually need to find its way into a design.
Let’s take Civ IV as an example; an interesting example since you can make a case that the strongest Civ nation has multiple religions (more temples, more cathedrals) but a single culture.
If your Persian Empire is next to a stronger Greek culture, then bit by bit your cities will become Greek. They may eventually flip to your rival. The Greek culture brings no knowledge, no traditions…only the risk of defection. Could you let a multicultural empire use the minority culture’s unique units and buildings, with perhaps an upkeep penalty? Could you have a slow bleed of research from the more advanced neighbor, making it easier to discover things that the Greeks had researched? On the negative side, could you increase upkeep in multicultural cities, to model remittances and maybe policing ethnic tensions.
The chance of having a city with more than two significant cultures in it is pretty small in Civ, so it probably doesn’t deserve it’s own civics tree, but the civics already model the unsteady movement from primitivism to modernity. And there are many historical instances of foreign cultures being embraced and sometimes leading to new fusions. Could a civics culture tree give you greater tolerance for foreign population? You’d need more than that, of course; the beauty of the Civ IV civics menu is that you can conceive using all them options in specific circumstances, even when more modern options come available. You could also put cultural conditions on existing civics; mercantilism could slow the growth of foreign cultures but as a penalty give a specific hit to relations with neighbors who have free trade, which promotes culture. Representation could make cities with large minority populations more or less likely to revolt.
But that’s Civ. Galactic Civilizations and Sins of a Solar Empire also have a zero sum approach to culture and there’s no clear way those mechanics could be altered to create a new paradigm of interstellar culture. I mean, I assume that there are interstellar immigrants, right? Europa Universalis, spanning an era that saw both the acceptance of foreign rulers by large populations and the rise of nationalism, assumes that multiple cultures means instability and slower research.
Once it comes down to it, it’s all about representation. What does each game mean by “culture”? Sins has it purely in terms of propaganda and government broadcasts, so a cultural mechanic that focuses on territorial control probably makes sense. In EU, culture is a specific population that must be placated. But Civ has culture wrapped up in theaters, temples and libraries – education, religion and the performing arts promote culture. So why should these make a foreign city revolt? Does the cultural percentage represent love of new music, the movement of immigrants or both?
We want to keep culture as a mechanic, of course, since it is points out a pacific path to victory. Build enough museums and great wonders and you should be rewarded for not focusing on beating in heads. But when culture is boiled down to a population figure, it gets a little disjointed as a representation of the Pyramids and Oxford.
Read Akinde’s essay, since it covers the historical ground pretty well.
