Dissenters Cohere in Vain

As strategy games grew beyond shuffling chess pawns back and forth, politics and political factions began making more frequent appearances, and modern descendants of Civilization or Master of Orion proudly offer faction-wrangling as a quite involved aspect of their politics systems, interweaving territorial expansion, resource management and military policies. However, diverse political factions are still presented as undesirable stumbling blocks in the player's path, subversives, opposers and accusers, Ahrimans and Satanas causing your loyal populace to stray from your one true path as god-emperor, to be eliminated or pacified into complacency with your commands. I would contend this is another slavish concession to our society's parasitic minority of multibillionaires (and to our parasitic nature as social animals, but leave that for another time) where the true advances which have so immeasurably improved both our individual lives and communal ability to shape the environment (militarily or otherwise) have come from scattered, independent but willingly interacting intellects at the middle levels of society.

Ironically, some games do play with the notion of multiple factions' diverse viewpoints... in the one category where diverse viewpoints are both absurd and meaningless: supernatural belief. Instead of giving players research bonuses for maintaining a diverse array of deluded chanting primitives, why not instead (or at least in addition) apply this reasoning to diverse ranges of practical, scientific or aesthetic pursuits?

 

Trade guilds, colleges of various knowledge, artistic enclaves, let them feed off each other as interactive constituents, with "research" points and other advanced resources being produced by these subunits' interaction, encouraged by the player via resource/space investment, with diminishing returns for any one particular collaboration forcing players to shift priorities to new developments. The new goal would be to maintain balance between them (think of the Europa Universalis sliders between army/navy) instead of promoting one particular faction to win out over the others. In a larger sense this would also tie player actions more intricately into the world they inhabit instead of singlemindedly amassing simoleons, move beyond the simplistic pinball notion of high scores in this case a single "cohesion" score.

 

Better yet, allow these creative factions to grow and dwindle in accordance with their relevance to the natural phenomena as understood by society at large, just as resource exploitation already changes along a campaign's progress. So the spacers' guild would balloon in power after the discovery of warp speeds, continue feeding progress as hyperlanes remain relevant but gradually lessen in both economic and intellectual productivity as hyperlanes are supplanted by stargates; ditto for phlogiston theory feeding academic development and dying out with more modern chemistry and physics. New art forms would take advantage of and promote new developments. Even antiquated factions could benefit from new bursts of activity whenever a new one springs up for their interaction, with occasional chances to feed a massive upheaval - for instance the newly-invented archaeology faction reviving a languishing tradition in sculpture/painting and spiraling into an interest in geometric proportion and astral motion.

Let's admit what I'm asking for here is basically Scanners Live in Vain - The TBS.

While Cordwainer Smith played his plot as a personal/spy drama, the very weirdness of the haberman process, were it an everyday reality, can easily be imagined to spiral out to medical, artistic, humanitarian and labor movements, not by decree of God-Emperor Jeff Bezos, but by the experience of seeing one's neighbour manually crank up his nephrons. Redefine social advancement not as handed down by superior social rank, but built up by unpredictable superior minds scattered among the populace.

 

Now, what grand finale you work into such a campaign is up to you, but the sake of ironic counterpoint I suggest a singularity.

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P.S.: EU4's politics are involved enough to perhaps address my complaint here, but I have yet to play an involved/extensive enough run of EU4 to confirm it.