4X games may sound incredibly reductive on the surface. After all, this is the only genre of game whose name is also a decree about how you should play – eXplore, eXpand, eXploit, eXterminate. But as any fan will tell you, 4X games are actually bustling sandboxes that can be tackled in all kinds of ways. For some players, that could mean eschewing military action or research or trying to make do with a single settlement. For others, it could mean trying to rewrite the historical events depicted – whether out of mischief, or in an effort to challenge narratives about the past that loom large in present-day politics.
Some 4X games lean into this spirit of eXperimentation. Take Syphilisation from Indian developer Nikhil Murthy, a “post-colonial 4X” and intricate parody of Civilization, centring on colonial India during the time of the British Raj. The game includes familiar 4X concepts and systems, but attempts to reframe “human struggle as a common striving for a better world rather than a competition between ourselves”, though whether this ideal comes to fruition is up to the player. Rather than a government or ruler, the game casts you as one member of a group of research students, who put together their own interpretations of figures like Gandhi and Churchill while moving units and building cities.
I’m fascinated by Syphilisation, and got chatting with Nikhil on Twitter earlier this year. In one of those magical opportunities, it turns out he’s friends with Ryan Sumo, a prominent member of the Philippine gamedev scene and developer of cute-but-cutthroat election sim Political Animals, who is nowadays a business owner for Europa Universalis IV and Victoria 3 at grand strategy household Paradox Interactive. Ryan, it transpires, is friends with Firaxis veteran Jon Shafer, designer of Civilization IV: Warlords and Beyond The Sword, and lead designer of Civilization V. We all got together one very nerdy Friday afternoon to discuss uninvestigated possibilities in collaboration systems and map design, and how this most imperial of genres can shapeshift in the hands of players and developers from former colonies. The below is a transcript of that conversation, edited for length and clarity.
Edwin: Perhaps we could start by talking about the inspiration and concept for Syphilisation, Nikhil, and how it’s evolved over time?
Nikhil Murthy: So I started this game because I was reading Ulysses by James Joyce, and there’s a moment in an Irish pub, where they’re discussing the British Empire, and he had the pun “syphilisation” for British civilization. And at the time, I was also kind of thinking about parody in games, and it just clicked. With other mediums, we have a rich history of parody, we take the structures we find and we subvert them to make other things. Gulliver’s travel is a subversion of adventure stories, right? And parody doesn’t have to just be humorous. So I was thinking like, what if I make a game that criticises another game and its genre through the mechanics, rather than writing an essay saying these are the flaws, or whatever. And I was thinking about that as I read this pun, and it just clicked. Yes, I can make a post-colonial 4X game – of course, 4X games have a lot of colonial ideology just kind of baked in.
So we’ll start with the two major pillars of 4X games that I think really hold a lot of ideology. The first is the idea of one winner, that you’ll end your 4X game and one nation has emerged pre-eminent over all the others, right? Either they dominated the world, or went to space, or whatever. The second is growth for the sake of growth, which is really baked into 4X games. And in the current moment, that really feels like it’s running up against reality, because we’re seeing climate catastrophe. We’re seeing the limits of growth for the sake of growth, in the world around us. It’s just we don’t see it in the games that act as translations of the world. So those are two really foundational points where a little pushback can be interesting, right? It just expands the space of the genre.