Cutting through the Treacle: Raiders of the Leisure Park

"He did pretend to play golf, but he could not see any particular point in stopping a good walk to wallop small balls"

Sinclair Lewis - It Can't Happen Here

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"The more you suffer

The more it shows you really care"

 

The Offspring - Self Esteem

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"There seems a broad consensus not even so much that work is good but that not working is very bad; that anyone who is not slaving away harder than he'd like at something he doesn't especially enjoy is a bad person, a scrounger, a skiver, a contemptible parasite unworthy of sympathy or public relief."

[...]

[Citing an interviewee] "it is one of the guiding principles of social relations here: if you're not destroying  your mind and body via paid work, you're not living right."

David Graeber - Bullshit Jobs

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"He had no pride in his business nor any initiative; his only virtues were not doing certain things and hard work. [...] There was a sort of base honourableness about toil, however needless, in that system of inversion."

H.G. Wells - Tono-Bungay

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I still play Northgard occasionally. While hardly the best strategy game, it continues to bait me into reinstalling every year or so. Then I end up uninstalling it for annoyance at its combat mechanics and the computer cheating as it usually does in such games. I especially hate it including a designated griefer class.

As the raven clan represents The All-Father himself, you might excuse a bit of overpower. The problem being they gave it a lot more bit. Its main gimmick is sending boats of mercenaries to raid any player at any time. Attacking without risking its own population would be a powerful enough ability in itself (the lynx clan gets by well enough with that alone) but the mercs are dirt-cheap, roughly match the growth curve of a faction's military by themselves, and give only a three-second warning when they're about to hit, giving the defender no chance to relocate his army which is probably at the other end of his territory since the shore is every player's starting zone. Sure, you can relocate your workers and let the raid complete, but simply losing access to that resource production for the duration is, again, a hefty punishment in itself. Most relevant to my upcoming point, these attacks can be spammed. You'll likely get hit more often by raven raids than by every other source put together.

 

But of course there's more to it than just giving Odin his due pomp and circumstance bonus. To game designers, the spam is a goal in itself.

 

Old World, another strategy game, turn-based this time, reminded me of this while bashing my head against it trying to actually finish a match with Hatti. The principal issue being that sometime during the past year, Mohawk ramped up one of their more annoying features I'd previously held off on disabling, distant raids. Basically, cities at the edge of the map (which would otherwise be relatively safe) get randomly hit with barbarian invasions from offscreen. Stronger ones, in fact, than you would encounter when fighting an actual barbarian city present on the map. Note the five units coming in at the top of the image, the devastation from the previous five units I'd wiped out during the last two turns, and if you check the minimap, five more little red dots below the visible area. What was once an occasional three-mook digression is now forcing you to divert all your military forces, if you can even afford it. A fifteen-mook pile-up is more or less... a war.

For a bonus, when I hit the main menu to disable the stupid raids, I discovered this previously separate mechanic had been folded into the general "difficulty" setting, making it impossible to, say, play under the harsher resource handicap without also accepting the pop-up barbies. Note they actually went out of their way to remove that setting after implementation, to restrict players' options years after the fact. This also came at the same time that raider AI was tweaked to have them prioritize causing random damage instead of trying to beat your defenders (a.k.a. griefing) and soon after disasters were implemented, which also break random improvements requiring reconstruction. Triple redundancy, all toward randomly breaking your shit with no recourse.

 

A quarter century ago, or certainly by the era of Civilizations 3 and 4, developers had gradually begun phasing out the old '90s "whack-a-mole" mechanics (like the series' nuclear fallout requiring individual cleanup) in favor of rarer events more threatening individually but less of a constant chore. Now it appears the moles are back in town.

Why?

 

I mean, sure, from the company's point of view, never ignore the timesink factor. Every designer, every screenwriter, every Dickens loves 'em sum filler, and the raids increase the number of clicks required to get through the middle portion (expand > exploit) of a campaign. Also, the newer generation of strategy games all introduce a limiting resource which cannot be increased by normal territorial/economic expansion to put the brakes on players' steamrolling. Old World's answer to AoW4 / Stellaris' influence or EU4's monarch powers is Orders, and nothing eats up orders faster than fighting. Problem being this so artificially yanks that choke-chain around players' necks that one would think they'd protest the change. Do they?

 

I caused a bit of indignation on an MMO guild forum some 15-20(?) years ago when some cretin demanded to know "you think you better than us" and I replied "yes, because I make things harder for myself" and in my defense I did not in fact consider this so heinous a departure from mundane gamer braggadocio. Every schmuck brags about having beaten difficulty level N+1. Was it so different from me refusing to use an overpowered item in order to beat difficulty N? Because I'm really quite good at making my own life harder; you don't have to help me with that. In Old World, in fact, I roleplay and self-handicap by establishing perennial Platonic philosopher king rule. (One reason I hatey Hatti is that it lacks a researcher family, but I make do with bureaucrats.) This blocks me from what gameplay options Scholar heads of state cannot undertake (like proposing alliances) and imposes a constantly mounting relations penalty from the two families whose purpurous keisters shalt never toucheth the ivory throne of academe, eventually resulting in rebel units spawning at their cities. In other words, I make my own distant raids.

 

I don't doubt that if I shop around I will find more examples of random spawns and other busywork being re-added to various genres. It fits too well with other idiot-friendly trends of the past few years like the decline of online FPS back to deathmatch or the final replacement of ever-shrinking MMO raids with individual Diablo-clone loot grinding.

 

So sure, idiot-friendly simplification is one issue, and those same idiots tend to interpret hyperactivity as excitement, and repetition can be addictive... but is that all? Because I think Old World has finally elucidated the real outrage I caused on that forum back around 2009. It wasn't about who's playing the more difficult challenge. It's the 'for myself' that rankled most. Playing an unoptimized build, giving my fighter 14 STR instead of 18, denying the desirability of the supposed 'best' status symbols for which others struggle. Smashing their tablets of virtues. All so evil.

 

Because to the average retard, all definitions must be imposed from above. The value of effort in a game is no different from the value of effort in real life, that is to say a reflection of one's affiliation with the apes at the top of the tribe's power hierarchy. So just as in real life 'work' does not count as such unless it is servitude to multibillionnaires, playing a game gets defined not by an objective weighing and multifaceted combination of advantages and handicaps, of what would make for interesting gameplay, but by ticking off lists of achievements and top scores arbitrarily defined by the marketing department. At the same time, note the powergamer outrage at anyone refusing to take every obvious advantage (e.g. min-maxing stats) despite such advantages again being defined and handed out by authority and not a reflection of the player's creativity. They want to be made to work at the game just as they play at working the job they are made to keep in meatspace. It's Nietzschean slave morality at its basest, defining oneself by the master's goals, and it's hardly the first time I've cited this tendency in computer games. *

 

It's funny, when MMOs first came out shortly before Y2K with their initial subscription models, the sheer effort involved prompted many to decry "that sounds like a second job more than a game" yet a quarter century later the only facet of online games which remains is the job aspect. Gone are forty-man raids and organization and complex character builds and malleable playable worlds. Now just do what you're told. Punch the clock religiously for your daily log-in rewards. Kill ten to the tenth rats for an achievement unlock. Cheat and sabotage your coworkers. Powerlevel. Grind the single easiest instance for constant loot. After a brief revival of more interesting gameplay around the mid-2010s, the same pattern is reasserting itself in single-player. No complex morality, no complex narratives, no complex goals. Goblin pops up. Smack it with a mallet. Get a LEVEL UP! message.

 

Sure, it's only one facet of our society-wide decline. Humans are less and less self-directed in their thoughts and actions, led by the nose by religious indoctrination and state propaganda and advertising and more recently social media echo chambers and even more recently copy-pasting chatbots. But observing how thoroughly it pervades even our escapist fantasies gives the lie to accusations of nefarious manipulation from above. It sells. It's the rabble dragging us down. It is the human animal, the naked ape which does not want to think and continually retrenches in mindless reaction of its own accord. Subhumanity kills.

 

 

 

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* If you don't think games reflect the morality of our corporate overlords, lemme ask ya this: have any of your Civilizations ever hit a crisis of overproduction? Or is maximizing profit and extracted labor always the right answer?

(There is one golden oldie which slightly bucked the trend, Alpha Centauri and Planet's revolt against industry.)