William Chen (University of Massachusetts, Amherst)
The philosopher Bernard Suits once described a phenomenon called the “Alexandrian condition of man.” When scholars finish sprawling, years-long studies, their first instinct is to begin the next. When Alexander saw that there were no more worlds to conquer, he was filled not with satisfaction, but with despair. Suits was talking about why we play games.
Video game modding is a very Alexandrian pursuit. It’s a common joke that modders do not actually play the games they mod. The punchline goes that when asked why, they respond, “well, I have to make it fun first!” Nobody ever seems to accomplish that, but they do make very good mods.
Really, there’s also something of an Alexandrian paradox about the relationship between our mod, Rajas of Asia, and its parent game, Crusader Kings 3. Let me explain.
On the one hand, Crusader Kings is a game about imperial conquest. It’s often compared to Game of Thrones. The comparison isn’t a bad one: there’s all sorts of salacious soap opera plots to engage in, from seducing your enemies’ wives to planning multi-generational eugenics campaigns. But like Game of Thrones, ultimately, CK3 is about war. It’s a wargame. Fans often complain that the most fleshed out playstyle is “blobbing” — spreading your country’s name and borders to cover greater chunks of the map. Even playstyles that don’t technically involve blobbing, like “playing tall,” developing the economy small piece of land, still heavily involves raiding and launching coups against neighboring kingdoms.
On other hand, Rajas of Asia is a mod with, as our lead dev put it, “a strong attachment to underdogs, minorities and the otherwise unseen.” Much of our team comes from people traditionally underrepresented in video games: we are Filipino, Indonesian, Circassian, Taiwanese, Bihari, and Comanche. Our mod aims at greater representation, whether literally adding regions onto the map or radically reshaping pre-existing areas. In our eyes, this is crucial work: on the last anniversary of the Circassian genocide, a Circassian dev remarked to me that most people had only ever heard of Circassians from CK3’s sister game, Europa Universalis 4. In the official version of CK3, they simply don’t exist.
There’s a kind of contradiction between the nature of our mod and its parent game: Our mod aims to take the side of the historically downtrodden. Those are the cultures we add content for. At the same time, just about the only fun way to play CK3 is rapacious military expansionism. By adding new countries to CK3, what we’re also doing is creating new worlds for Alexander to conquer. There’s something strange, even potentially perverse, about adding the historically oppressed just for them to be conquered in-game as in real life.
So far I’ve described above how a system’s fundamental gameplay loop — conquest — can conflict with goals of representation. But for that matter, there’s something more broadly problematic about grand strategy games like Crusader Kings, and that lies in the perspective they give the player.
See, one of the long-running struggles of our mod has been the simulation of “Stateless” government forms. Inspired by the work of political scientist James Scott, and admittedly the political sympathies of many of our developers, we’ve represented many of the societies of upland Southeast Asia and the Caucasus as not independent democracies which not only lie outside the state, but resist the state. This is an extraordinarily difficult task in the CK3 engine. There’s a certain amount of existing representation for republics and popular revolts, but a truly directly democratic society? Zilch. CK3 is, first and foremost, a rulership simulator: trying to represent societies without rulers, we’re left with contrived solutions like using individual elders as stand-ins for larger decision-making bodies.
And while CK3 is unusually personality-focused for a game of its genre, nearly all grand strategy games are equally centered around the perspectives of rulers. After all, the core conceit of the grand strategy game is playing at war, diplomacy, trade, investment, construction, administration and espionage. It would not be a grand strategy game without owning provinces, leading armies or allying with other nations. But this way of representing the world also resists the sort of bottom-up perspective that’s often necessary to respectfully represent cultures historically victimized by those forces of war and governance. (For a sister game, Victoria 3, I once led a mod adding numerous real-world indigenous societies to the Americas. The project imploded once we realized there was no way to actually play natives in Victoria 3, and we were just diversifying the terra nullius available to colonizers.)
To be clear, all this isn’t a critique of modders working on greater cultural representation in grand strategy games. After all, we’re still working on Rajas of Asia, to tremendously positive public support from non-Western gamers, many of whom are just excited to be represented at all. And I also don’t think we should abandon grand strategy games as potential spaces for representation. It’s only because of the truly international scope of CK3 that our mod can bring together developers and researchers from places as distant as Turkey, the Virgin Islands, Poland, and Shandong.
But I encourage readers to think more carefully about
what it is we’re talking about when we discuss cultural representation in games. What kind of games are we representing history in, and what are they saying about that history? Whose perspective are we playing from?
Rajas of Asia is available on Steam: https://steamcommunity.com/workshop/filedetails/?id=3212205438
You can also download the development build here: https://github.com/Rajas-of-Indochina/mod
Thank you William for such an interesting insight into the potentialities of modding!
As a long-time and happy fan of mods myself (I only play EU IV modded, just to give an idea), particularly those allowing players to explore cultures, groups, polities normally under-represented (or ignored altogether), be sure that I’ll take my chance with Rajas of Asia! But in the meantime, I wanted to ask you a question that came to my mind while reading your text: how would you deal, in the mod, with changes in political structure, radical or less radical alike? Many of these cultures experienced processes of change from ‘stateless government’ to more structured forms of rulership (not necessarily monarchical, of course), and viceversa, sometimes due to exogenous factors, but often also to endogenous changes in their own social, economic, and cultural systems. These changes are, in my opinion, one of the most potentially interesting topics in historical research, for many reasons, incluing the fact that they contribute to help us removing too rigid theoretical boundaris between the concepts of ‘organised polities’ and ‘stateless governments’.
I don’t know if my question was clear, but, anyway, good work, again!
Thanks for this William, this is a really great paper (and an awesome mod). I’ve sunk far too many hours into Crusader Kings, and very much agree with you that its mechanics promote expansionism/imperialism even if there’s a lot of work gone in to other areas of the game. I was wondering if you’d had much success at tweaks to the game to reduce the emphasis on conquest, or if you have any thoughts as to how this could be accomplished?
This is brilliant, William! Congratulations to you and the whole team for the impressive work!
Could you talk a bit more about how you implemented James Scott’s interpretation of stateless societies into the mod? Are there factions that are not ‘tied to’ a particular polity, and/or can roam? Did you also follow Scott in linking statelessness with particular terrain features (e.g. mountains, swamps, etc)?