Computer Games and Worldbuilding

Formative Years and Early Lessons

Image from civilization.com shown under fair use doctrine for commentary purposes.

I’m an 80s kid and was in high school when dial-up internet was cutting edge.

Growing up, I loved paging through atlases — memorizing flags, capitals, tallest mountains.

Beyond a childhood of imagining stories and creating maps with crayons and colored pencils, computer games were my first serious foray into worldbuilding.

The Civilization franchise had a huge impact on me. Civilization 2’s Multiplayer Gold Edition provided a platform to design complex worlds. I don’t know if the joy can be overstated. This combined my love of history, fascination with geography, and imaginative storytelling.

I got to shape worlds that I could share with friends, and we could make our own homebrewed world history.

Here I also learned some of my earliest worldbuilding lessons. Special thanks to everyone who played in these games over the years, especially some high school friends who helped test out the earliest designs.

A TALE OF TWO CITIES

With Civilization or other grand strategy games you get to see history unfold. Differences in starting conditions can have a great influence on the course of the game.

If you haven’t played Civilization, don’t worry. The following paragraph is the only one that will go into the minutia of game play and detail how there can be more to initial conditions than may first appear.

If a city had +1 food surplus production per turn compared to a rival city, extending this minor difference over 50, 100, 200 turns is actually significant. For those not familiar with the game, as the city grows [levels up], it can acquire even more resources to further its growth. These additional resources could mean the growth differential between the two cities would be even greater than the linear +1.

Players’ choices definitely factor into the mix. Some players prefer to focus on exploration and new settlements, some on science, some on military conquest. While starting conditions for each player were never identical in the games I designed, if the base conditions and mathematics were off enough, then I would be setting up lop-sided experiences for the players which was never my intent.

So, what’s the worldbuilding lesson here if you’re writing a story?

As I wrote in Setting Your World Up, Setting Your World in Motion:

Does the world you are building have a past and a likely future in addition to the present? Does the world begin when the story begins? Or, is the world in motion and the reader is welcomed into it?

What conditions have you set up in the world? For example, if a comparatively technologically advanced, comparatively centralized empire (country A) borders a less developed polity (country B). What is the state of affairs between these two entities? Sterile, benign co-existence seems a lacking answer for centuries of contact.

As an initial starting point, let’s consider the following question: why has country B not already been conquered or made a vassal of country A? As with any worldbuilding question, there are many ways to answer, but that prompt seems more reflective of the underlying power dynamics.

In one of my early Civ 2 worldbuilding attempts, I thought starting conditions were balanced. They were not. A friend who always prioritized science production ended up 10+ technologies behind the leading player. When these two players’ spheres of influence finally collided, the power dynamic was so tilted that the tech-starved country didn’t stand a chance.

EXPECT THE UNEXPECTED

If you give players resources, they will use them. It took me some time to appreciate fully this simple fact. My scenario design had to evolve.

When I gave players large garrison forces in each of their cities, they didn’t just keep the forces idle. They would take most of them and invade the neighboring country, whether player- or computer-controlled. I put large armies in the initial scenarios wanting to ensure that players would feel defensively secure. Instead, it had the opposite effect and incentivized more aggressive play.

Some players would get swamped and knocked out early. It’s always that balance in designing a game — you want the game to be exciting (worth the time to play) but also give players some run time before a clear winner emerges.

The largest game I designed was in Civ 4. There were 7 players with anywhere between 20-50 cities per player at the start of the game. Go big or go home! Believe it or not, we played by emailing the game file. Each player took a turn and then emailed the file to the next player. Over the course of a week or so, one round of turns would be completed. Patience is a virtue.

In terms of game design, I shifted to more of a scarcity model. Don’t give players enough units to garrison each city and have field armies. Make them strategize, wrestle with trade-offs, and seek alliances or non-aggression pacts as they grow their economies. Also tossing in some barbarians to distract and occupy their attention during the initial rounds helped.

Worldbuilding lesson? Passivity is the exception not the norm.

One of my friends once said, “In Civ, if you’re not expanding, you’re losing ground.” Keeping up with the Joneses also applies in worldbuilding and storytelling.

That powerful wizards’ faction with world-bending knowledge that has retreated into seclusion… why? Always a possibility, but that easily could look like a deus ex machina situation later when the wizards emerge to turn the tides in the penultimate chapter of the book.

If factions have resources, why aren’t they using them? It doesn’t mean that this always needs to take the form of overt conflict. Competition and jockeying for position take many forms — cultural influence, threats, subterfuge, controlling trade routes, technological breakthroughs, diplomatic maneuvering, etc.

Leave a comment with your thoughts.

What worldbuilding lessons have you learned from playing competitive or collaborative games?

Did you play or world build in the Civilization franchise or other grand strategy games? What was your favorite scenario?

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