By Pratama Wirya Atmaja, Andreas Nugroho Sihananto, and Gredy Christian Hendrawan Putra (University of Pembangunan Nasional “Veteran” Jawa Timur, Indonesia)
Regardless of the world’s increasing globalization, every nation still relies on its history to anchor its identity and inspire its future paths. Among modern media through which history can propagate successfully are games, whose “ludo-narrative” mechanics bring historical stories to life (McCall, 2020). More specifically, these mechanics deliver procedural rhetorics that frame history in a specific way (Jacobs et al., 2021), whether to glorify one’s nation, cast its rivals as evil oppressors, raise a “what-if” question, or achieve other things.
Regarding “what-if” scenarios, the Civilization series is notable for reimagining historical nations as if their regionalities mattered little (Bijsterveld Muñoz, 2022), and this reimagining raises intriguing yet underexplored questions about the value of such a nation’s traditional culture on the global stage. We explore these questions by close reading (Fernández-Vara, 2024) the Majapahit-era Indonesia (Hall, 2016) in Civilization V (Firaxis Games, 2010), specifically its Brave New World expansion pack (Firaxis Games, 2013). By employing the lens of conceptual blending (Eppe et al., 2018) and Figure 1’s world, storytelling, asset, and UI layers of ludonarrative media (Atmaja et al., 2024), our close reading uncovers with precision how the game blends Majapahit’s culture with 4X gameplay mechanics (Ford, 2016) and other design elements to deliver procedural rhetorics on the global role of Indonesia’s traditional culture.
Our results comprise some of the game’s blends of design elements and each blend’s conceptual blending procedure: composition, completion, or elaboration (Eppe et al., 2018). Firstly, the “Spice Islanders” unique ability in Figure 2 blends Gajah Mada-led Majapahit and 4X’s exploration and expansion aspects into Indonesia’s thalassocratic gameplay rules in the world layer. Procedure-wise, this blend is composition-oriented since it takes the historical strength of Majapahit and the flexibility of 4X to compose the ultimate thalassocracy: one that lasts over millennia regardless of the distances between its islands. When this quality further blends with Civilization V’s world maps, the resulting gameplay dynamics elaborate the potential for a global-scale and enduring thalassocracy.
Three other blends involve the Kris Swordsman combat unit, the wielder of the renowned Kris as seen in Figure 3. The first happens in the world layer between the myth of Kris’s mystical power and 4X’s combat aspect. This completion-oriented blend adds something new, i.e., carried by neither Kris’s myth nor typical 4X combat, to “complete” the Kris Swordsman: a permanent attribute chosen randomly from a set of many powerful attributes and a few debilitating ones. This exciting yet risky mechanic then blends with the game’s unit upgrade mechanic, allowing the mystical attribute to carry over to the modern era should the medieval Kris Swordsman survive that long to evolve into newer units. In turn, this evolution’s strange gameplay dynamics—e.g., real-world mechanized infantry does not normally repel attacks as if protected by a supernatural aura—implicitly elaborates how preserving its mystic-nuanced traditions may accelerate or hinder Indonesia’s progress in a rational and globalized world. The anachronistic blend between the Majapahit-era unit and 19th-century Balinese soldiers (Figure 4) in the storytelling and asset layers further highlights this elaboration.
In the conference’s proceedings, we will sketch the educational use of the blends for critical historical thinking (Lévesque & Clark, 2018).
References
Atmaja, P. W., Sugiarto, Maulana, H., Kartika, D. S. Y., & Via, Y. V. (2024). The Many Ludonarrative Professions of a Ludified and Narratified Future Society. In Money | Games | Economies (pp. 255–279). University of Krems Press. https://doi.org/10.48341/29jx-be71
Bijsterveld Muñoz, A. (2022). National identity in historical video games: An analysis of how Civilization V represents the past. Nations and Nationalism, 28(4), 1311–1325. https://doi.org/10.1111/nana.12845
Eppe, M., Maclean, E., Confalonieri, R., Kutz, O., Schorlemmer, M., Plaza, E., & Kühnberger, K.-U. (2018). A computational framework for conceptual blending. Artificial Intelligence, 256, 105–129. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.artint.2017.11.005
Fernández-Vara, C. (2024). Introduction to Game Analysis (3rd ed.). Routledge. https://doi.org/10.4324/9781003355779
Firaxis Games. (2010). Civilization V. Digital game directed by Jon Shafer, published by 2K and Aspyr.
Firaxis Games. (2013). Civilization V: Brave New World. Expansion pack designed by Ed Beach, published by 2K and Aspyr.
Ford, D. (2016). “eXplore, eXpand, eXploit, eXterminate”: Affective Writing of Postcolonial History and Education in Civilization V. Game Studies, 16(2).
Hall, K. R. (2016). Majapahit Empire. In The Encyclopedia of Empire (pp. 1–3). Wiley. https://doi.org/10.1002/9781118455074.wbeoe134
Jacobs, R. S., Werning, S., Jansz, J., & Kneer, J. (2021). Procedural Arguments of Persuasive Games. Journal of Media Psychology, 33(2), 49–59. https://doi.org/10.1027/1864-1105/a000278
Lévesque, S., & Clark, P. (2018). Historical Thinking: Definitions and Educational Applications. In The Wiley International Handbook of History Teaching and Learning (pp. 117–148). Wiley. https://doi.org/10.1002/9781119100812.ch5
McCall, J. (2020). The Historical Problem Space Framework: Games as a Historical Medium. Game Studies, 20(3).
Thanks so much for your paper! I’m interested in this ‘conceptual blending’ framework for analysis, you’ve identified some of the different types in your examples here but could you explain a little further what the value is in using this model for looking at historical games, beyond identifying what is happening in the text? For example, do any of the blending forms seem to work better than others for historical games? Has your categorisations of game texts into these three types of blending revealed any trends or correlations, maybe between game genre and common modes of blending used?
Thanks, Tess! My team and I have just started using conceptual blending in analyses of games (this is our second blending-related paper), so I can’t say much about it. But that (revealing trends/correlations through categorizations of blends between game design elements) is a GREAT idea for future research. So far, we haven’t discovered any trend.
So the “spice islanders” mechanic would seem to be predicated on a way of pushing Indonesia into a much more expansionist logic, requiring it to found things on new continents. What do we know of Majhapit strategy, and does this control-of-trade logic apply well to the region’s medieval past?
Yes, in-game Indonesia is heavily biased toward maritime expansion, significantly more than historical Majapahit since in-game Indonesia’s second, third, and fourth islands/landmasses always benefit from the Spice Islanders ability regardless of their locations or distances. This allows in-game Indonesia to spread its cities over a great distance on the world map. This is quite different from real-world Majapahit, which for the most part exerted control over different islands as its vassal states instead of actually colonizing the islands. We can use this difference to explain why, unlike real-world thalassocracies, in-game Indonesia can last for millennia regardless of how many islands it controls.
Yes, in-game Indonesia is heavily biased toward maritime expansion, significantly more than historical Majapahit since in-game Indonesia’s second, third, and fourth islands/landmasses always benefit from the Spice Islanders ability regardless of their locations or distances. This allows in-game Indonesia to spread its cities over a great distance on the world map. This is quite different from real-world Majapahit, which for the most part exerted control over different islands as its vassal states instead of actually colonizing the islands. We can use this difference to explain why, unlike real-world thalassocracies, in-game Indonesia can last for millennia regardless of how many islands it controls.