Super Nerd Sundays Presents: 4X Games And the Do It Yourself Story!

4X games aren’t traditionally looked at as bastions of storytelling. The Total War series, for example, doesn’t have any preset story elements. Certain events might be inevitable, like the Roman civil war, but Brutus isn’t going to show up on each playthrough and stab Caesar. Although it is possible, especially if you’re the Brutii and you use your commander aggressively against enemy cavalry. The Civilization games have the same “dearth” of the scripted moments we’ve come to interpret as a story in gameplay. We’re instead given a map, a cast of characters, and a set of rules through which to engage them. That’s hardly a story at all.

Anyone who’s studied literature at length will read what I just wrote as “sarcasm.” Those are the key ingredients in stories, the things that actually make them interesting. The events of stories are almost always re-treads of the same tired plots. Revenge, romance, redemption, we can normally see through the twists and turns of these tales if we try hard enough. It’s the characters and settings which distract us from them and draw us into fictional worlds, places where we feel something impossible in our normal lives is not only possible but inevitable.

Games are slowly learning this lesson. Very slowly. Most games still operate on high concepts with poorly drawn characters. In Doom you’re a space marine fighting demons on Mars. Great description, but I decry you to define the elements of character and setting which resonated with you while playing Doom. Did those aforementioned adjectives and nouns really effect the game at all? Did those hellbeasts fight differently from the Nazis of Wolfenstein, or just look different?

Doom, of course, is a straw man, an old game from the era when stories were a luxury. But all of the criticism I levied against Doom could be brought to bear on contemporary titles. Wolfenstein’s recent reboot, Overlord’s generic fantasy world, and the wreck of the Ishimura are all guilty of the same crimes against story. Two of those games were games I enjoyed, true, but not for their stories (Dead Space’s atmosphere was pitch perfect, but its use of character and setting was derivative at best and generic, worse than poor, at worst). Plenty of contemporary games introduce story hooks and generic overarching storylines in order to draw players in and get them playing, then string them along with characters so thin they blow away in a slight breeze and a setting which might as well be made from cardboard.

It’s a crying shame that the industry seems so concerned with hook rather than the substance which makes games more interesting and playable. There are certainly plenty of authors who don’t commit this cardinal sin. Tim Schaefer, Erik Wolpaw, Chet Falsiek, Dave Jaffe, Jordan Mechner, Clint Hocking, Ron Gilbert, Jerry Holkins and Patrice Desilets, just to name the first handful that come to mind. But these people don’t represent the entire industry or the discussion surrounding it. Most people telling stories in video games want to tell their story in a “traditional” way, where “traditional” means “in a fashion normally utilized by a non-interactive medium.” As a result they build a plot and forget that the most important parts of any story are a compelling set of characters and a vibrant world for them to inhabit. Given these things stories manifest themselves. Without them stories flounder as we’re asked to make leaps as readers and viewers, to essentially do the author’s job for them developing characters. Without these things we’re left with R.A. Salvatore novels, power fantasies which, while mindless and cathartic, aren’t terribly compelling or enriching.

So what the fuck does any of this have to do with games like Sins of a Solar Empire or Sword of the Stars? I’ll tell you: these games are all about setting and character. Some, like Sins, offer up a detailed, if largely unspoken, backstory and impart it on every element of their game. Their units are just bursting with personality, from the tiniest scout to the Kol-iest battlecruiser, and their universe is filled with cultures, largely imperfect, who interact with one another in a largely illogical way. Normally these interactions are hostile and alliances are formed only out of necessity. And Sword allows characters to build their own ships and truck them from unique world to unique world, battling AIs and players with their own quaint strategic preferences. In each of these cases ships are our characters – their crews our dramatis personae, galaxies our settings. It’s not something that has a parallel in any other genre or medium, which is part of what makes 4X games such a compelling medium for storytelling: their unique willingness to back off and let a player choose their level of involvement. It almost always leads to the player immersing themselves in a world which is most of the time procedurally generated.

Civilization manages a similar feat by allowing people to play as various world factions, generating outlandish scenarios between familiar parties. Aztecs can defeat Nazis in Civilization, entirely through the machinations of the player, and that’s an impressive bit of iterative storytelling. But for it to work units must be imbued with personality and importance by the players. In Civilization that’s a bit of a stretch.

The Total War games fix this problem. By adding generals and creating visually distinct units capable of gaining experience they create a mechanical incentive for forming attachment to units. A good general is a valuable thing, a battle seasoned group of legioniares worth three times their number in raw recruits. An army of veterans marching from your capital in Rome: Total War is a strangely cinematic moment, even though it’s represented by a tiny man with a helmet walking away from a 2.5 dimensional city. The personality these signifiers are imbued with, and the attachment we form with them as players almost as a matter of necessity while playing, make for a heady combination. Paired with a familiar setting, filled with historic factions with plenty of personality flair and lots of cities with old timey names which demand conquest, the Total War games are almost tailor made for the sort of storytelling 4X games do best – the kind which gives players all the tools and then places the onus upon them to generate an actual narrative for the characters they’re given.

It’s certainly not for everyone, and no story worth telling ever is. But it’s a compelling form of storytelling with its roots in the sort of playful narratives I remember creating for action figures in my youth, and it’s something only 4X games can really do. A game with a preset story would attempt to guide my progress, but in Rome: Total War my goal of conquering Ireland is mine and mine alone. I can defeat the problems which stalled the Roman invasion and tell the zany story of a governor who develops a drinking problem while coming to relate to his new barbarian subjects.

There’s certainly something to be said for more controlled efforts at storytelling in games, but 4X games remain a largely unsung hero in the courage and character they bring to storytelling in games. They aren’t the only means of telling stories, but 4X games lay the heart of storytelling in games bare – that the input of the player must be present for any meaningful sort of story to be told – and they deserve more credit for exposing us to this simple truism.