Perhaps my most memorable gaming moment came playing one of the early Civ games. Earth map, playing as a European power. Finally got my neighbors dominated and the tech to cross the Atlantic. Landed my conquistadors on the North American coast only to have them casually obliterated by the Aztecs’ armored battalions.
Lovely to see that Brothers Karamazov bit in the wild, I love the interlude with Alyosha and the children. How many Dostoyevskies have you read now? I remember you mentioned reading The Idiot a while back.
Three, technically. Read Crime and Punishment for a class in high school before I was equipped to appreciate it properly, so I hesitate to count it. Now that I’m through Brothers K and The Idiot, I’m basically dead-set on finishing the rest of his catalogue. Also find myself wishing I’d done so a decade ago.
And yourself? Which do you reckon I should hit next?
I'm about the same, plus The Possessed (which is great) and some of his short stories. I had to stop with the shorts, as they were such excruciating parables of social embarrassment, I couldn't cope.
Excellent piece as always! Your thoughts on emergent narrative give me some encouragement, as a fellow member of that ilk. I may use this to spin off my own post about the fact that scholars are obsessed with failure in gaming cultures
I look forward to your articles, this one was a gem. I get the same cathartic rush for a well earned loss through the folly of man from games like Battle Brothers as well. Theres nothing quite like building up your medieval mercenary company only to have them reenact Custer's Last Stand against goblins
When you ask about other colony games having you displace an existing sapience, naturally my first thought was Sid Meier's Alpha Centauri, where, at the risk of spoiling a nearly 30 year old reveal, the relevant planet's surface is host to a massive fungal network that is slowly understood to act as a neural net, growing more and more aggressive, powerful, and coordinated, until finally the human colonists figure out a way to communicate with it and it tells them what it thinks of the alien parasites that have recently infested its body. AC is also a landmark colony sim in that, rather than just conquering and displacing nature, the final victory is in equal parts reaching total, transcendental harmony with Nature, and obliterating the fundamentally natural aspects of Nature, turning Nature into just one more conduit of human Will - a feat that is only possible once humanity has probed not just the deepest, darkest secrets of physical laws and beyond singularities, but also grappled with the structure of consciousness, the foundations of ethics, and a complete understanding of Will itself.
Incidentally every one of my old DF fortresses fell prey to the same fate - eventually, one of my most gifted dwarves would lose his mind, start creating a string of abhorrent Artifacts, usually made of the flesh and bone of his own compatriots, and going on a rampage that saw the colony shattered and horrified. I still remember the time a guy made a chair out of a child's bones and then fistfought the entire garrison on a bridge in one last epic stand before punching the bridge in half and drowning everyone including himself.
Perhaps my most memorable gaming moment came playing one of the early Civ games. Earth map, playing as a European power. Finally got my neighbors dominated and the tech to cross the Atlantic. Landed my conquistadors on the North American coast only to have them casually obliterated by the Aztecs’ armored battalions.
Lovely to see that Brothers Karamazov bit in the wild, I love the interlude with Alyosha and the children. How many Dostoyevskies have you read now? I remember you mentioned reading The Idiot a while back.
Three, technically. Read Crime and Punishment for a class in high school before I was equipped to appreciate it properly, so I hesitate to count it. Now that I’m through Brothers K and The Idiot, I’m basically dead-set on finishing the rest of his catalogue. Also find myself wishing I’d done so a decade ago.
And yourself? Which do you reckon I should hit next?
I'm about the same, plus The Possessed (which is great) and some of his short stories. I had to stop with the shorts, as they were such excruciating parables of social embarrassment, I couldn't cope.
Excellent piece as always! Your thoughts on emergent narrative give me some encouragement, as a fellow member of that ilk. I may use this to spin off my own post about the fact that scholars are obsessed with failure in gaming cultures
Thanks so much! I’d be absolutely delighted to read such a post.
I look forward to your articles, this one was a gem. I get the same cathartic rush for a well earned loss through the folly of man from games like Battle Brothers as well. Theres nothing quite like building up your medieval mercenary company only to have them reenact Custer's Last Stand against goblins
When you ask about other colony games having you displace an existing sapience, naturally my first thought was Sid Meier's Alpha Centauri, where, at the risk of spoiling a nearly 30 year old reveal, the relevant planet's surface is host to a massive fungal network that is slowly understood to act as a neural net, growing more and more aggressive, powerful, and coordinated, until finally the human colonists figure out a way to communicate with it and it tells them what it thinks of the alien parasites that have recently infested its body. AC is also a landmark colony sim in that, rather than just conquering and displacing nature, the final victory is in equal parts reaching total, transcendental harmony with Nature, and obliterating the fundamentally natural aspects of Nature, turning Nature into just one more conduit of human Will - a feat that is only possible once humanity has probed not just the deepest, darkest secrets of physical laws and beyond singularities, but also grappled with the structure of consciousness, the foundations of ethics, and a complete understanding of Will itself.
Incidentally every one of my old DF fortresses fell prey to the same fate - eventually, one of my most gifted dwarves would lose his mind, start creating a string of abhorrent Artifacts, usually made of the flesh and bone of his own compatriots, and going on a rampage that saw the colony shattered and horrified. I still remember the time a guy made a chair out of a child's bones and then fistfought the entire garrison on a bridge in one last epic stand before punching the bridge in half and drowning everyone including himself.
I wish I had the time to get sucked into colony sims, but I know myself, and I’d never emerge from that abyss.