Briefly, On the 'What-Ifs' of Mods

Written by JFD

Civ is often spoken about in terms of being a historical fantasy; a 'what if?' sandbox in which America can exist from 4000 BC and the Aztecs can discover Flight. But when you look deeper at the game, you realize that such an ethos is only skin-deep – all civs follow the same, linear path; a path that – paradoxically – is at once coated in a liberal-progressive sense of time and at another manifestly realist thanks to its technologically determinate measure of progress and its preoccupation with power politics as the impetus for play. The ‘what if?’ factor really only exists at a surface or even merely at a nominal level – what if this thing we call America – which plays just the same as this other thing we call Assyria – can exist from 4000BC, and what if this thing we call the Aztecs – which just plays the same as this thing we call England – can discover Flight? In the end, the answer is not particularly interesting because they play out with very similar goals – to get to the end of the game in one aspect of victory or another.

For this reason, I’ve always found the true application and manifestation of the ‘what if?’ ethos to lie in the hands of modders and mod-users. This is not so much in how any given mod makes changes to the game in and of itself as it is in how the internal rules of a mod work to construct its own, specific sense of the ‘what if?’ question; one that poses the issue of the great filter – when all civs have their own obstacles to overcome, what if they overcame them? Modded civs – being easily the most familiar kind of mod going for this ethos – tend to be far more involved than any of the vanilla civs; often demanding that the player induce certain historically or thematically analogous conditions before their unique abilities are unlocked – rather than merely handing them out to make play easier in some regard, as is the case for the majority of vanilla civs. In this sense, modded civs tend to come with their own set of sub-goals that exist independently (though oftentimes still supplementary) of the game’s main goal of victory. Take, for instance, my Great Qing under Cixi: to get any benefit out of their unique ability, one must actively seek out to modernize their military – just as the historical Cixi attempted to do in an effort to prevent China’s subjugation to greater Western technologies. Although the historical stakes might not be clear to all players, such a design works to induce a deeper semiotic level of play; to give the civ its own internal rules and in so doing helping to give that civ a sense of purpose aside the purpose that comes in playing the game itself (which is to say victory). This in turn works to construct its own specific sense of the ‘what if?’ question; one that becomes far more introspective about what it means to overcome a certain challenge (and oftentimes, one that historically wasn’t overcome) and whether overcoming said challenge is sufficient to compete with others that overcame their own challenges for victory. Modded civs thus circumvent the issue – you can’t really get a worthwhile answer out of the ‘what if?’ question that the game poses when the rules of that game are the same for everyone and when differences between players are superficial at best, but you can construct a new ‘what if?’ out of a mod that focuses on what it means to overcome a historically contingent set of obstacles and whether, having overcome them, you are now in a position to continue on the path to victory. In this way, a new ‘what if?’ emerges, and it is one that I find to have a more worthwhile answer than that which the game poses.