This video is a few years old now, but I think it's a super insightful watch, and I come back to it a lot. Regarding the point at ~10:45 lamenting the lack of any wilderness reclamation games,...
This video is a few years old now, but I think it's a super insightful watch, and I come back to it a lot.
Regarding the point at ~10:45 lamenting the lack of any wilderness reclamation games, Terra Nil (a self-proclaimed "reverse city builder") has done just that. What I find interesting, though, is that in subverting the idea of infinite growth, in making the game instead about reclamation, the mechanics necessarily change too. The game loses that infinite expansion of your resource mill, and in so doing it becomes more like a puzzle game than any city builder that came before it. I think that's fascinating, and a form of proof that mechanics imbue meaning into games, but the sort of negative side of it is that it might mean that it's on some level impossible (or at least very difficult) to separate those mechanics from those meanings. Terra Nil is a step in the right direction there, and regardless I don't think it's bad to enjoy the colonialist mechanics of Minecraft or Factorio. Placing these things in a digital space allows for exploration without the harmful real-world impacts of the systems they reflect. Still, though, I'll return to the question that Dan ends the video on: how can we use games to argue against our own problematic histories?
If I'm playing Satisfactory I may halfway smile a bit about the ridiculousness of cutting down all flora and fauna with a chainsaw in the name of profit, but I'm mainly playing the game because...
If I'm playing Satisfactory I may halfway smile a bit about the ridiculousness of cutting down all flora and fauna with a chainsaw in the name of profit, but I'm mainly playing the game because conveyor belts go brrr and trains.
I'll never assume that doing these actions and exploiting and stripping a planet completely for any resources is anything but destructive. The developers are clearly in on the joke and wink wink nudge nudge quite often.
For what it's worth, I don't think I need a game to realize our histories (or even our current trajectory) are problematic. That's not to say there's no space for these kinds of topics and to discuss them at length or bring them to light through the mechanics of a game, I just don't think it will change or affect anyone in particular. Ultimately, people will play your game if your game is good, whether your message may be right or not doesn't really factor into that until after.
Edit to add after finishing the video:
I think I actually disagree with the entire premise that progress in and of itself is intrinsically tied to (implied western) colonialism.
Stardew Valley (or Harvest Moon for the alternative east Asian viewpoint already discredits the western angle) is a farming game. Humans settled down to farm millennia ago and isn't tied to colonialism, unless you specifically tie nomads settling to being colonialist, which I straight up disagree with.
Additionally we see humans progress in terms of settlement size and local exploitation for a similar amount of time due to the settling itself, yet this is considered a net negative by the YouTube creator. Leaving me to wonder: was human growth a net negative? And if it is, does this YouTube creator want us to return to nomadic hunter gathering?
I think we do more for balancing ecosystems and marshlands than ever before, because we know more about them than we ever have. This is not to say it should've ever gotten to this point that we have to manually alter ecosystems just to give them a chance of survival, but that's not colonialism either and rather humanity growing too large.
To close, I think the worst thing in that video is the thing he did himself without the game telling him to: forcibly transporting humans for gain. I'd even argue that it's closer to slavery and/or trafficking, but I'll concede that it's at least related to colonialism.
Terra Nil is a huge inspiration to me as a game dev! I'm currently working on a game where you clean the air by growing plants, and I also have an early prototype of another game where you use a...
Terra Nil is a huge inspiration to me as a game dev! I'm currently working on a game where you clean the air by growing plants, and I also have an early prototype of another game where you use a cute solar-powered robot to clean up a beach. I also enjoy base-building type games and I'm hoping to eventually make one myself too, with a similar theme of tending rather exploiting nature.
I think he makes an interesting point, specially about the villager kidnapping dynamic in Minecraft. However, I disagree with the assessment of putting Factorio in the same bin. I have always...
I think he makes an interesting point, specially about the villager kidnapping dynamic in Minecraft. However, I disagree with the assessment of putting Factorio in the same bin.
I have always thought one of the things that's interesting about Factorio is that it forces you to confront the cost of exploitation by forcing you to choose exploitation. There is no neutral play style. You have to kill the aliens and build the factories. When you cut down the trees, they are gone forever. When you kill the aliens, they are gone forever. The pollution gets worse, the aliens escalate. There is no diplomacy. There's not even an end goal. When you reach the nominal goal of launching a rocket, you are just beginning your journey of exploitation and that is still all you are offered.
I haven't played any of the other games he mentions, so I don't know how well his theory covers the others.
I think an interesting dynamic in Minecraft would be to implement a global reputation system that affects outcomes in the game -- something along the lines of Bioshock or Dishonored. Maybe you get more/stronger monsters and fewer drops, ore blocks produce less, etc. Having to choose which path to follow would create s different dynamic because once the explore and exploit resource production is nerfed, you really have to turn to things like villager farming and fully embrace those values to efficiently scale your play. On multiplayer servers, it would be even more if interesting if there were dynamics where players had allegiance and other players behaviors affected them.
Okay, but by giving you no choice but exploitation and pollition, it presents a reality in which such exploitation is both necessary and justified. This certainly plays into the exact same type of...
Factorio is that it forces you to confront the cost of exploitation by forcing you to choose exploitation. There is no neutral play style. You have to kill the aliens and build the factories. When you cut down the trees, they are gone forever. When you kill the aliens, they are gone forever. The pollution gets worse, the aliens escalate. There is no diplomacy. There's not even an end goal. When you reach the nominal goal of launching a rocket, you are just beginning your journey of exploitation and that is still all you are offered.
Okay, but by giving you no choice but exploitation and pollition, it presents a reality in which such exploitation is both necessary and justified. This certainly plays into the exact same type of messaging he's describing here. It would take nothing but a reskin of the aliens to make Factorio perfectly fit the ideology of an 1800s-era Manifest Destiny. And it doesn't exactly criticize these things about itself.
Fwiw, I don't think it necessarily has to criticize colonialism or even avoid playing into colonialist tropes. I'm a huge fan of the colony-sim genre myself, and those literally put "colony" in the genre name. But I don't think enioying these games precludes thoughtful analysis of their themes like this.
I suppose it depends on the lens the player brings to it. That is one way to interpret the game, but my point is that it is not the only way one might experience it. Showing the game to my...
Okay, but by giving you no choice but exploitation and pollition, it presents a reality in which such exploitation is both necessary and justified.
I suppose it depends on the lens the player brings to it. That is one way to interpret the game, but my point is that it is not the only way one might experience it. Showing the game to my daughter, her reaction was more along the line of my parent post, as was mine. I can enjoy an engineering and planning challenge, but I can't escape how it makes me feel.
I think it comes down to how sensitive one is to these themes -- similarly, some people wouldn't feel anything at the various types of villager exploitation in Minecraft he describes, while I'm...
I think it comes down to how sensitive one is to these themes -- similarly, some people wouldn't feel anything at the various types of villager exploitation in Minecraft he describes, while I'm sure others would. Factorio is more on-the-nose but fundamentally the same in its character in that respect imo.
It's strange that you post this, I've started seeing videos from this channel pop up in my feed, and I watched this video this morning. The parallels he draws between these games which seemingly...
It's strange that you post this, I've started seeing videos from this channel pop up in my feed, and I watched this video this morning. The parallels he draws between these games which seemingly lack any deeper meaning, and imperialism is very interesting—partially since now that he's pointed it out it's obvious, but I otherwise never would have made that connection. It's the same problem I struggled with when we had to do literary criticisms back in high school. It's very easy to consume a piece of media without thinking about themes and underlying meaning (whether intentional by the creator of the media or not).
Can't recommend Dan's content enough. He's been making interesting content for years, and it just keeps getting better. Especially if you enjoy long (multi-hour) video essays. One of the best ones...
Can't recommend Dan's content enough. He's been making interesting content for years, and it just keeps getting better. Especially if you enjoy long (multi-hour) video essays. One of the best ones (IMO) is In Search of a Flat Earth
Yeah, I've been watching a decent amount of long video essays lately so I'm assuming why he was showing up in my feed in the first place. First was hbomberguy's plagiarism video from a few weeks...
Yeah, I've been watching a decent amount of long video essays lately so I'm assuming why he was showing up in my feed in the first place. First was hbomberguy's plagiarism video from a few weeks ago, then I started watching his other videos. Then Jenny Nicholson popped up so I started watching her as well. Both long video essay channels, so I guess Folding Ideas is next on the list.
This video is a few years old now, but I think it's a super insightful watch, and I come back to it a lot.
Regarding the point at ~10:45 lamenting the lack of any wilderness reclamation games, Terra Nil (a self-proclaimed "reverse city builder") has done just that. What I find interesting, though, is that in subverting the idea of infinite growth, in making the game instead about reclamation, the mechanics necessarily change too. The game loses that infinite expansion of your resource mill, and in so doing it becomes more like a puzzle game than any city builder that came before it. I think that's fascinating, and a form of proof that mechanics imbue meaning into games, but the sort of negative side of it is that it might mean that it's on some level impossible (or at least very difficult) to separate those mechanics from those meanings. Terra Nil is a step in the right direction there, and regardless I don't think it's bad to enjoy the colonialist mechanics of Minecraft or Factorio. Placing these things in a digital space allows for exploration without the harmful real-world impacts of the systems they reflect. Still, though, I'll return to the question that Dan ends the video on: how can we use games to argue against our own problematic histories?
If I'm playing Satisfactory I may halfway smile a bit about the ridiculousness of cutting down all flora and fauna with a chainsaw in the name of profit, but I'm mainly playing the game because conveyor belts go brrr and trains.
I'll never assume that doing these actions and exploiting and stripping a planet completely for any resources is anything but destructive. The developers are clearly in on the joke and wink wink nudge nudge quite often.
For what it's worth, I don't think I need a game to realize our histories (or even our current trajectory) are problematic. That's not to say there's no space for these kinds of topics and to discuss them at length or bring them to light through the mechanics of a game, I just don't think it will change or affect anyone in particular. Ultimately, people will play your game if your game is good, whether your message may be right or not doesn't really factor into that until after.
Edit to add after finishing the video:
I think I actually disagree with the entire premise that progress in and of itself is intrinsically tied to (implied western) colonialism.
Stardew Valley (or Harvest Moon for the alternative east Asian viewpoint already discredits the western angle) is a farming game. Humans settled down to farm millennia ago and isn't tied to colonialism, unless you specifically tie nomads settling to being colonialist, which I straight up disagree with.
Additionally we see humans progress in terms of settlement size and local exploitation for a similar amount of time due to the settling itself, yet this is considered a net negative by the YouTube creator. Leaving me to wonder: was human growth a net negative? And if it is, does this YouTube creator want us to return to nomadic hunter gathering?
I think we do more for balancing ecosystems and marshlands than ever before, because we know more about them than we ever have. This is not to say it should've ever gotten to this point that we have to manually alter ecosystems just to give them a chance of survival, but that's not colonialism either and rather humanity growing too large.
To close, I think the worst thing in that video is the thing he did himself without the game telling him to: forcibly transporting humans for gain. I'd even argue that it's closer to slavery and/or trafficking, but I'll concede that it's at least related to colonialism.
Terra Nil is a huge inspiration to me as a game dev! I'm currently working on a game where you clean the air by growing plants, and I also have an early prototype of another game where you use a cute solar-powered robot to clean up a beach. I also enjoy base-building type games and I'm hoping to eventually make one myself too, with a similar theme of tending rather exploiting nature.
I think he makes an interesting point, specially about the villager kidnapping dynamic in Minecraft. However, I disagree with the assessment of putting Factorio in the same bin.
I have always thought one of the things that's interesting about Factorio is that it forces you to confront the cost of exploitation by forcing you to choose exploitation. There is no neutral play style. You have to kill the aliens and build the factories. When you cut down the trees, they are gone forever. When you kill the aliens, they are gone forever. The pollution gets worse, the aliens escalate. There is no diplomacy. There's not even an end goal. When you reach the nominal goal of launching a rocket, you are just beginning your journey of exploitation and that is still all you are offered.
I haven't played any of the other games he mentions, so I don't know how well his theory covers the others.
I think an interesting dynamic in Minecraft would be to implement a global reputation system that affects outcomes in the game -- something along the lines of Bioshock or Dishonored. Maybe you get more/stronger monsters and fewer drops, ore blocks produce less, etc. Having to choose which path to follow would create s different dynamic because once the explore and exploit resource production is nerfed, you really have to turn to things like villager farming and fully embrace those values to efficiently scale your play. On multiplayer servers, it would be even more if interesting if there were dynamics where players had allegiance and other players behaviors affected them.
Okay, but by giving you no choice but exploitation and pollition, it presents a reality in which such exploitation is both necessary and justified. This certainly plays into the exact same type of messaging he's describing here. It would take nothing but a reskin of the aliens to make Factorio perfectly fit the ideology of an 1800s-era Manifest Destiny. And it doesn't exactly criticize these things about itself.
Fwiw, I don't think it necessarily has to criticize colonialism or even avoid playing into colonialist tropes. I'm a huge fan of the colony-sim genre myself, and those literally put "colony" in the genre name. But I don't think enioying these games precludes thoughtful analysis of their themes like this.
I suppose it depends on the lens the player brings to it. That is one way to interpret the game, but my point is that it is not the only way one might experience it. Showing the game to my daughter, her reaction was more along the line of my parent post, as was mine. I can enjoy an engineering and planning challenge, but I can't escape how it makes me feel.
I think it comes down to how sensitive one is to these themes -- similarly, some people wouldn't feel anything at the various types of villager exploitation in Minecraft he describes, while I'm sure others would. Factorio is more on-the-nose but fundamentally the same in its character in that respect imo.
It's strange that you post this, I've started seeing videos from this channel pop up in my feed, and I watched this video this morning. The parallels he draws between these games which seemingly lack any deeper meaning, and imperialism is very interesting—partially since now that he's pointed it out it's obvious, but I otherwise never would have made that connection. It's the same problem I struggled with when we had to do literary criticisms back in high school. It's very easy to consume a piece of media without thinking about themes and underlying meaning (whether intentional by the creator of the media or not).
Can't recommend Dan's content enough. He's been making interesting content for years, and it just keeps getting better. Especially if you enjoy long (multi-hour) video essays. One of the best ones (IMO) is In Search of a Flat Earth
Yeah, I've been watching a decent amount of long video essays lately so I'm assuming why he was showing up in my feed in the first place. First was hbomberguy's plagiarism video from a few weeks ago, then I started watching his other videos. Then Jenny Nicholson popped up so I started watching her as well. Both long video essay channels, so I guess Folding Ideas is next on the list.