Can Game Mechanics be Ingrained with Culture/Ideology?

[Foggy Cornslakes]

Do different systems, mechanics, and structures in games relate to different cultures (Western, East Asian, etc.), or to different Ideologies (capitalism, socialism, pacifism…), or can these things only be expressed through the content of a game (themes, plot, settings…)?
 

This topic came up on Idle Weekend, and has since been discussed at length on the forums. 

 

Here is a recap of everything relevant so far as far as I can tell:

The original Reader Mail - "What games have mechanics entwined with the specific culture, and what games merely use a culture as a dressing for a more universal game system?"

https://soundcloud.com/idlethumbs/idle-weekend-destined-for-a-reboot#t=53:00 

 

Alt-games in relation to the topic:

https://soundcloud.com/idlethumbs/idle-weekend-1816-keyframing-the-issues#t=33:22

 

The ensuing discussion took place on the forums:
https://www.idlethumbs.net/forums/topic/10652-idle-weekend-january-8-2016-keyframing-the-issues/

I think you could say in general that so far there is pretty much a consensus that mechanics can reflect ideology, while culture is reflected by content and themes.

 

I then wrote about a game I'm working on, to which this discussion was relevant (I wasn't sure if I should post it on the game development section, and decided against it since there are mainly technical questions and dev logs there):
https://www.idlethumbs.net/forums/topic/10669-idle-weekend-january-15-2016-zombie-train-beyond-earth/#entry393015

 

...and was instructed to form a separate thread, in order not to spam the Idle Weekend discussion. Sorry if this isn't the most elegant way to open a thread, but there you go.

[juv3nal]

Because of this, I feel like having a game with systems that imply that people have an equal opportunity will be both not representing of the experience these children had in their life so far, and selling them a lie.

That first point is crucial because one of our goals in combining the educational material with a narrative context is seeding the idea that there is use for the things that are learned in real life (this might sound a little far-fetched considering that the game takes place in an entirely fantastical world, but the point is to show how what the child learned can assist them in problem solving, and so we need to present our problems in a relatable way).

 

One way we approached this is designing the world around tropes and themes of middle-eastern folk tales instead of the European standard of dragons and castles of The Yawhg (think Arabian Nights instead of Grimms' Fairy Tales).

Other ways are making the game a little more "soft but unfair" as Foxmom Niamh put it. We also don't include a Wealth stat, and we randomly choose characters names from a pool of both Arabic and Hebrew names.

I was wandering how I could also change the mechanics to reflect values that will be both true to the experiences of the children (which, what with the occupation and everything, are very different for Palestinians compared to Arab or Jewish Israelis) and convey our point, which is that further fluency in technology can improve your life, open up new opportunities, and is very much a utility all around.

What do you think - am I thinking too much into this, considering that this is a really just a nice way to make the classes more engaging?

 

I don't really know (because my familiarity with such stories is next to nil) but I suspect that even within middle-eastern folk tales there are instances of stories where people who would not normally have access to such opportunities end up with precisely that kind opportunity landing in their laps, whether that's down to magic or even just the fact that their being granted this opportunity is what makes the story exceptional and worthy of being commemorated in a folk tale. I think that's something worth considering before concluding that a situation in which opportunities are not equally distributed among players/characters is the way you want to go.

[Ninja Dodo]

From the original thread:
 

I live in Israel, and am working for a nonprofit organization working to narrow the technological gap between people of different social and economic status. My work there, specifically, is making educational games. (...) The thing is – as I've said, the game will make its way almost exclusively to the hands of children on the lower end of the social-economical spectrum, who are, at least in part, victims of the capitalist system. Furthermore, some of these children are probably going to be Arab Israelis and Palestinians, who don't have nearly as many opportunities in life as Jewish Israelis do.
 
Because of this, I feel like having a game with systems that imply that people have an equal opportunity will be both not representing of the experience these children had in their life so far, and selling them a lie.
That first point is crucial because one of our goals in combining the educational material with a narrative context is seeding the idea that there is use for the things that are learned in real life (this might sound a little far-fetched considering that the game takes place in an entirely fantastical world, but the point is to show how what the child learned can assist them in problem solving, and so we need to present our problems in a relatable way).
 
One way we approached this is designing the world around tropes and themes of middle-eastern folk tales instead of the European standard of dragons and castles of The Yawhg (think Arabian Nights instead of Grimms' Fairy Tales).
Other ways are making the game a little more "soft but unfair" as Foxmom Niamh put it. We also don't include a Wealth stat, and we randomly choose characters names from a pool of both Arabic and Hebrew names.
I was wandering how I could also change the mechanics to reflect values that will be both true to the experiences of the children (which, what with the occupation and everything, are very different for Palestinians compared to Arab or Jewish Israelis) and convey our point, which is that further fluency in technology can improve your life, open up new opportunities, and is very much a utility all around.
What do you think - am I thinking too much into this, considering that this is a really just a nice way to make the classes more engaging?

 
I guess I'll just repost what I wrote in the other thread:

@Foggy Cornslakes: That sounds really interesting. Not sure how you would go about reflecting peoples' lived experiences more without going into direct allegory though, like "here is the occupation analog" etc. I guess you could take the whole being in a non-oppressed majority is 'easy-mode' analogy and literally translate that back to games, like you have the same mechanics and tools that can give you an advantage as a player (eg fluency in technology), but your starting point is more or less difficult depending on your chosen character's background, like maybe you CAN acquire those same tools but you have to work twice as hard to get them...

[Cordeos]

I think this can be most evident in strategy games and city builders. Crusader Kings is an obvious example where the developers are trying to somewhat accurately represent medieval cultures in game mechanics, it gets more and more complex as they have added Islamic, Byzantine, Steppe Horde, Indian and Pagan playable factions to the initial Christian European. It is fairly obvious that they designed the game as a Western European Feudalism simulator and have had to make sacrifices and odd tweaks to get the other cultures to function. I would love to play a grand strategy game developed by one of these other cultures as it could create a very interesting experience. 

Similarly I feel like some of the differences between Sim City and Cities: Skylines are down to having an American development team and a Finnish one respectively. There are different understandings of how cities are built and should look.

I really wish there were more games coming out of non-Western European studios because I think we may not have a good answer because of the video game world being dominated by the US/Europe and Japan. However some of the base mechanics of Western and Japanese games are now baked into the idea of what a video game is, and it could be hard to separate these concepts. S.T.A.L.K.E.R. and Witcher feel different than similar Western European games, but contain a lot of the same base ideas.

I may return to this post and add some edits as my ideas clarify more.

 

[Foggy Cornslakes]

@juv3nal

Thanks! I think I actually had this instinct when reading some tales in preperation, but you putting it in words really helped.

@Ninja Dodo

Hmm, since I'm not making the game *about* the occupation or *about* Israeli-Palestinian relationship, but rather about using the knowledge you've acquired to solve problems (specifically knowledge regarding the use of software, programming and some hardware stuff), I'm not sure I want to actually confront the subject head on. Also, because of production constraints, I can't actually create two different experiences for different audiences. That being said, there is something in common to all of the users - they were all failed by the capitalist system, don't have as many opportunities as many of the people around them, and are often being discriminated against. I don't think I have to make an ultra-realistic copy of the real state here, but I do feel that it would be irresponsible to design mechanics and/or themes that reflect the very same system that is to blame for many of the problems of these children (It is very, very likely that the occupation would have ended long ago if it wasn't for the interests of the military industrial complex in Israel, which again, goes back to capitalism).

I am not sure how much of the bad experiences of young Palestinians are consciously attributed by them to the occupation. I realize this sentence can be read as extremely patronizing, but that isn't my intention: what I'm trying to say is that by having a direct allegory to the occupation (as opposed to generally un-fair themes or mechanics), I'm not sure I'm actually making any steps toward the game being perceived as true to the real experiences of the users.

 

Regarding having different difficulty levels - that is actually a really interesting idea, and I'll keep it in mind as an option, if I have enough time to implement it.

 

Thank you very much for the response. 

 

 

@Cordeos

I think there is no question that Western and Japanese concepts are really ingrained in how we think about what games are, and thus inform games made by and about other cultures as well. Torren and Never Alone are also based on "standard" mechanics, while thematically being very much tied to the culture of the devs. But I do think that there are exceptions to this rule:
1) Some old games, that came out before many of the basic concepts that are now ingrained in games were considered the normal, like Cosmology of Kyoto, and maybe

2) really small games (aka alt games, queer games) - this was touched upon in previous posts by Foxmom Niamh
3) Games that are very much based around a culture seem to take some of it into the mechanics. The two games that came to mind are From Dust, and WiLD, which, perhaps interestingly, both relate to cultures which aren't the culture of the devs. Both of these games have main mechanics which I think channel beliefs and ideas that regardless of what thematic/narrative they are integrated with.

 

I think that given the fact that most people who have access to the tools necessary to make games also have an access to the internet (maybe I'm wrong, I haven't actually checked this), they are also more exposed and influenced by other cultures, which is why looking for different mechanics in games from different parts of the world seems to be a little bit problematic. Given the context in which games are made today, in order for a game not to be very Western in its mechanics it takes very deliberate planning on part of the developers, regardless of whether they grew up in a different culture or not.

[Gaizokubanou]

I think the initial stark differences between JRPGs (much more focus on linear stat progression) and western RPG isn't purely random but has something to do with Japan's strict ranking system in academia where every students' academic rankings are public ally posted so you would literally have #1 student, #2, etc. all the way to the last one in the school.  Bit tangential but it also explains the heavy focus with 'power level' in anime as well.

 

The lines are getting blurrier IMO cause this 'industry' is moving products and talents across the world so we have ppl in rural USA who grew up playing FF series and stuff.

 

Sim City vs Cities Skyline is interesting comparison because Sim City series brought a very archaic view of how cities grow into city builder genre (this is a view that I learned from Rob in one of 3MA episodes) and like citizens go mad if your tax goes over... 10%???  And Cities Skyline isn't so much as European take on this but weirdly traffic focused take on city builder genre cause dev team behind it made series of traffic management games.

 

@Cordeos, give Koei strategy games a shot because I think their character focused history strategy games are definitely 'different' and interesting take on the genre.

[Foggy Cornslakes]

I think this actually came up during a discussion on the Idle Thumbs podcast:

 

Also, there are multiple Errant Signal video about the subject:

I haven't played many (actually, any) city building/management games, but it seems to me that when people talk about different ideas expressed in different games of the genre, they do that based more by the win conditions than by the moment to moment mechanics.  This is interesting by itself because that means that the game frames itself around getting your city to some goal, which in itself is a very narrow way to look at construction that largely matches capitalist ideals, regardless of what this goal actually is.[/size]

 

 [/size]

Again, I'm not really familiar with most of these games, so I could be totally wrong, but that is the feeling I got from hearing discussion around this subject.[/size]

[Gaizokubanou]

I personally never noticed any sort of 'victory condition' in city builders... except for ANNO's story mode (which is more of lengthy tutorial to teach you each layer of the game per mission) it's always been about just getting bigger for getting big's sake.

 

I'm not sure what you mean when you are pairing off moment to moment gameplay to victory condition because of that... I mean the video you link states the absence of win-lose condition in Sim City as a point of criticism towards the series

[Foggy Cornslakes]

Yes, you are correct, I've used the wrong term, what I meant wasn't a "win condition", but rather the criteria which is used to measure the success of the city, regardless of whether this criteria actually results in a "you win" screen. Don't most city builders have a particular stat that you can say that the objective of the game is to get as high as possible, like happiness of the residents? Maybe not. I guess I really don't know enough about the subject to have an educated opinion.

[Gaizokubanou]

Ah.  It's mostly just how big (literally, size wise) of a city you can get I suppose?  City builders give you tons of stats to keep track of so you can use any one of those as measuring stick.  One really simple and fairly universal aspect would be population... but sometimes you are in the mood to get the skyscrapers, big factories, etc. and more modern day focused ones do tackle pollution so low impact could be another measurement.  The genre is mostly really sand-boxy so I think the main attraction is more of meeting your own personal benchmark (which have a general direction of getting bigger city but different folks settle for different size).  This is excluding Simcity 2013 of course, for the reasons stated in your linked videos.  Also Banished is another weird oddity that uses moment to moment gameplay of city builder but... isn't really a sandbox game?

[Sno]

It always seemed to me that Sim City pushed something of an environmentalist message through its mechanics, given that keeping your exploding metropolis from suffocating itself with pollution is generally the dominant conflict in those games.

[osmosisch]

It always seemed to me that Sim City pushed something of an environmentalist message through its mechanics, given that keeping your exploding metropolis from suffocating itself with pollution is generally the dominant conflict in those games.

On the one hand, yes, on the other hand, it also encouraged the idea that it's fine to pollute, you'll fix it once it gets bad enough. This of course is in many cases not so easy to say the least in reality.

[SuperBiasedMan]

Yeah from my limited Sim City play it's all about pushing capitalism first, something like environmental concern is entirely a reaction to a problem that your society has created. There's never been a sense of preserving anything natural in Sim City. The natural part of the landscape is basically either empty space, or empty space with trees etc. in the way of your city.

[Cordeos]

Yeah from my limited Sim City play it's all about pushing capitalism first, something like environmental concern is entirely a reaction to a problem that your society has created. There's never been a sense of preserving anything natural in Sim City. The natural part of the landscape is basically either empty space, or empty space with trees etc. in the way of your city.

You don't get the same bonuses for having undeveloped land vs. building a park. City sims also push urban sprawl a lot. I want to make a city in Skylines that is all apartment buildings, tons of public transit and bike trails.

[Foggy Cornslakes]

On the one hand, yes, on the other hand, it also encouraged the idea that it's fine to pollute, you'll fix it once it gets bad enough. This of course is in many cases not so easy to say the least in reality.

So, would you say that generally, in the context of city building/management games, the more "unrealistic" the mechanics are the more they convey an ideology? I mean, if Sim City had a real time particle system that actually simulated every molecule in the air, and had temperature calculated based on actual physics, so that the way pollution worked was exactly 1:1 to reality, I wouldn't consider that to be an environmentalist message, but rather just being accurate. 

 

So maybe that means that the ideology of a game mechanic can only be seen in how it differs from reality? So, for example, if your game as systems that emulate a capitalistic economy, such as stores, and money/xp you can invest or hoard, but doesn't have systems that showcase how capitalism can make life really hard of some people, then you could call the mechanics capitalistic?

 

I haven't really had much time to think about this, but I wonder what does that mean about the message of having black/white morality, or dialogue trees, which are both pretty far from how reality works.

 

To be clear, I'm not proposing that every mechanic carries a message automatically by being not 100% accurate to reality, but rather that a gap between how a mechanic attempts to represent a real life system and how that system actually works can sometimes intersect with an existing ideology, and the results can be problematic in that they convey a message which the developers maybe haven't considered.

Sorry about my English, again... 

[osmosisch]

So, would you say that generally, in the context of city building/management games, the more "unrealistic" the mechanics are the more they convey an ideology? I mean, if Sim City had a real time particle system that actually simulated every molecule in the air, and had temperature calculated based on actual physics, so that the way pollution worked was exactly 1:1 to reality, I wouldn't consider that to be an environmentalist message, but rather just being accurate. [/size]

I'd say that anything that accurately conveys the impact of pollution tends to automatically make environmentalists out of people, because it's just that bad. But that's besides your main point that abstractions tend to implicitly convey the abstractor's opionions, biases and desires, which I agree with entirely. It's like that in any field that abstracts, not just game design. I saw enough of it when I was in science.

[ewokskick]

I've yet to play a city manager (and I've played quite a few) that doesn't completely erase the impact of race on urban development. I'm a geographer with some specialization in urban studies and I find these games almost completely ignore the social factors that impact urban development. They tend to follow more of an "urban ecology" approach that sees cities developing with certain predictable patterns that are largely not influenced by political ecnomy and completely immune to social factors. While I find the games good fun, I do think they reflect a very ingrained and very disastrous view on urban development. It's the same view on cities that has failed to address the huge social inequality that is rampant in our cities. It's complicated to systematize social factors, but from what I've seen no one has even tried. You'd think that the people in the cities have no effect on them if you play those games and it is a shame.

I will say that the question of politics vs. accuracy seems to be going down the wrong road. I've never seen a system worth modeling that can be completely explained. As is the case with any systematic model, the creators will bring their assumptions to it, even picking what to model is influenced by one's preferences. So, I don't think the path way to apolitical games (why would we want that anyway?) is to fetishize accuracy.

[ewokskick]

Sorry for the double post, but there is one more thing I wanted to weigh in on. In the OP, you say that culture does not influence mechanics, but instead influences content and themes. I want to stongly disagree with this notion. Many mechanics are steeped in cultures. Take for example, the romance mechanics in a bio ware game. They simulate an idealized version of western notions of romance. As social views on non-straight relationships changed, so too have the mechanics of their romance, for example.

I think the cultural influence on game mechanics probably a bigger factor than most people are aware of because most people never examine their cultural assumptions. If you ask yourself, would these machines look the same if this game was made in a different time or different place, I think the answer would almost always be that they will look different.

[Gormongous]

I think the cultural influence on game mechanics probably a bigger factor than most people are aware of because most people never examine their cultural assumptions. If you ask yourself, would these machines look the same if this game was made in a different time or different place, I think the answer would almost always be that they will look different.

 

For instance, and I said this back in the episode thread, most progression mechanics only make sense in a modern Western context. In other places and other times, "things get better over time if you put effort into them" is hardly a given, no matter what psychology has to say about how the human brain works in the twenty-first century. To take my own speciality of knowledge, most medieval Europeans believed quite firmly that the world was slowly decaying from the perfect state in which God had left it at the moment of creation. Likewise, they also believed themselves ineluctably stained by sin, which could be alleviated by their actions and their faith but never overcome. We see this reflected even in their fiction, which is overwhelmingly about a protagonist having lost happiness and having to sacrifice much in order just to get back there, sometimes unsuccessfully. In terms of postivist tropes, redemption arcs are common but rarely unprovoked self-improvement. I feel like such a society would not make RPGs where you get points for doing basic tasks and those points make you better at whatever you want. At best, it'd be full of "abili-tease" moments like the Metroid games.

[Foggy Cornslakes]

I will say that the question of politics vs. accuracy seems to be going down the wrong road. I've never seen a system worth modeling that can be completely explained. As is the case with any systematic model, the creators will bring their assumptions to it, even picking what to model is influenced by one's preferences. So, I don't think the path way to apolitical games (why would we want that anyway?) is to fetishize accuracy.

 

Yes, I don't disagree that all video game systems are somewhat abstracted, and that this abstraction leaves a gap that is often filled by the creators ideas and assumptions. The difference is that some ideas and assumptions are rooted in actually proven concepts, while other are objectively speaking... not. I'm not saying that game mechanics *should* be apolitical, just that there is a value to looking at the political message that they inevitably carry, and consider them, which I feel is something that is very often glossed over in cases of critical writing about games. Best exception to this I can think of is the writing of Carolyn Petit, which I often find very to the point.

 

 

Sorry for the double post, but there is one more thing I wanted to weigh in on. In the OP, you say that culture does not influence mechanics, but instead influences content and themes. I want to stongly disagree with this notion. Many mechanics are steeped in cultures. Take for example, the romance mechanics in a bio ware game. They simulate an idealized version of western notions of romance. As social views on non-straight relationships changed, so too have the mechanics of their romance, for example.

I don't think that we have a fundamental disagreement about this, but rather that we don't agree on the semantics, which is probably my fault - not being a native English speaker and what not. Maybe I'm missing something - but have the actual mechanics of romance in Bioware games changed? I know it wasn't possible in the past to have non hetro relationships, but I consider this to be a change of content rather of mechanics – the model and the voice of the romanceable have changed, but the mechanics are basically the same as far as I can tell.

 

Furthermore - I think generally when people say something is "culturally western", they actually mean "ideologically western". I can't see a common thread running through the cultures of the western world apart from capitalism. Can you think of a game that has an "American" Mechanic rather than a "Western" one? Again, this is mostly semantics, but I think it's important to find some common terms in order to have a focused conversation.