The Melancholy of Lost Civilizations in RPGs

Gamasutra recently reported on a presentation by veteran RPG designer Ken Rolston, in which he noted that world-building often means creating objects and settings from days gone by:

Often, that melancholy comes when exploring the remains of long-dead civilizations, seemingly something of a preoccupation of Rolston, and one that frequently makes its way into his games by way of in-game artifacts.

"Melancholy, I think, is the underlying tone in most of the role-playing games I've done," Rolston said, adding, "I know games are all about fun, but there's an underlying tone I'm always trying to speak to."

That aspect of RPGs never struck me before... but how appropriate that a sense of melancholy is consciously integrated into the design of most RPGs!

By its nature, the typical RPG conventionally contains several things, among which are a relatively well-developed world and characters roaming that world killing each other. Well, what does it say about these worlds that it's considered normal for people to go around killing each other without being clapped in irons immediately as a danger to society?

As worlds in which the player character can run around killing people, that naturally suggests some kind of breakdown of order. This makes it almost inevitable that the created history of the world of a computer-based roleplaying game must include lost civilizations, in which a Golden Age of the past was more civilized than the Hobbesian present.

It's virtually commonplace to see cultural and architectural fragments of former civilizations in a fantasy milieu. Michael Moorcock's Elric, last emperor of languid Melniboné, is regularly described as melancholic. In computer RPGs, there were the Ayleid Empire of The Elder Scrolls and the Tevinter Imperium of BioWare's new Dragon Age. But a more aesthetically advanced past is almost always part of other well-developed RPG settings as well -- the mythically idyllic pre-invasion past of the Fallout series, for example, or the Republic before Palpatine corrupted it, or the pre-catastrophe world before The Computer took over Alpha Complex in Paranoia (another game Ken Rolston worked on).

In such worlds, where you can't swing a sword or fire a bullet without hitting some burnt-out ruin, any character capable of thinking beyond moment-to-moment survival must feel some sense of melancholy for a life that might have been. It's a natural way of lending some emotional depth to what otherwise could have been a simple action-oriented killfest.

Consider the choices and placement of objects in Bethesda's Fallout 3. The use of artifacts in Fallout 3 are a graduate-level course in how the objects placed in a gameworld can define the narrative of that world.

Fallout 3 was filled with what might be called "microstories." Open a door to a bathroom and see a skeleton in a bathtub, surrounded by empty bottles of booze and a pistol. Look into a small bedroom and find an array of children's toys, seemingly abandoned in the moment of play. Peer into a closet in a tunnel and discover a rat's-nest of useful items guarded by a lone teddy bear. (And let's not forget the "plunger room" or the Rube Goldberg-style trapped grocery store....)

In every place where people lived, there are artifacts posed in ways that tell a small story of the moments just before The Big One... or the grim and hopeless days after. I can't imagine even the most hardcore gamer, who cares only for how many Super Mutants he can kill, being insensitive to the pathos of the little stories and the overall sense of lives meaninglessly snuffed out that they tell.

Is that "fun" in and of itself? I suppose not. "Experience feelings of loss!" will probably never be part of the advertising materials for a game. But did the care that went into telling those sad microstories make Fallout 3 more memorable -- more fun -- for me?

Absolutely yes. More generally, I would say they contributed to making Fallout 3 a more satisfying game for many gamers.

But should that sense of melancholy be a part of every RPG with aspirations of worldiness?

The question for RPG designers is, do they want to continue to create worlds in which emotional heft is supplied by an elegiac regret over the remnants of lost civilizations?

Or is it possible to build a deep RPG world that includes all the lethal conflict that gamers seem to want, but that takes its emotional depth from some place other than comparison to "a more civilized age?"

Civil War in the United Federation of Planets +

Meanwhile, back on the question of civil war within the Federation, it certainly seemed for a while as though Star Trek's producers really wanted to get into this question. Could the Federation survive a threat to its existence with its utopianism intact? Or is it necessary that some within the Federation practice realpolitik even if doing so to save itself undermines the very principles on which it was founded?

Both Star Trek: Insurrection and several of the later episodes of DS9 (those dealing with the mysterious "Section 31") seemed to want to explore this question. But both VOY and ENT appeared to take the franchise back toward the traditional view of the Federation as a pure force for good (at least, for ENT, once it was founded).

So when all is said and done, my guess (and that's all it is) is that the main storyline of Star Trek Online will not be an internal fight, with the profound brother-against-brother emotional dramas of such a conflict. I suspect it's more likely to be a much simpler straight-up fight for survival against a Major Foe -- basically another Dominion War, except that this one will be unwinnable for as long as Star Trek Online lasts.

Which is a bit depressing.

Arguing against that rather mundane scenario are the possibilities in the idea of the kuvah'magh, Miral Paris. I really liked what Perpetual was thinking of doing with this bit from Mike Sussman's VOY: "Prophecy" story. The grave discomfort Starfleet had with a Starfleet officer also being an important religious figure was touched on occasionally with Sisko. But a Starfleet officer who becomes a spiritual leader to thousands of Klingon warriors, especially at a time when it may be necessary to rally all the major polities of the Alpha and Beta quadrants... wow.

It would have been interesting to see whether Miral Paris was treated as an unacceptable problem for the Federation, or as a desirable tool... or both.

Civil War in the United Federation of Planets +

Originally Posted by eventhorizen:
I'm not sure I particularly agree with Flatfingers posts either. It seems an awfully simplistic analysis of only a cursory look at the most well known and widely recognisable states in history, but has some immense flaws.

Well, in my defense, I wasn't trying to provide an in-depth summary of Quigley's model. My aim wasn't to discuss civilizations per se, but to describe enough of the core concepts of an interesting model of civilizations to serve as one possible framework for thinking about how the Federation might find itself falling into civil war.

Not that I don't enjoy discussing this stuff in a friendly, "what do you think?" kind of way. I would, for example, take pretty strong exception to confusing states with civilizations; misdefining those could lead to some rather ahistorical conclusions.

In fact, I've been wondering lately whether Sid Meier's Civilization might be responsible for some of the confusion. I've really enjoyed that game, burning more hours on it in all its incarnations than I care to admit, but "France" and "Russia" and so on aren't civilizations! They're the political entities we call "states." Civ called these states "civilizations" because it needed a bunch of AI opponents and there haven't been enough real civilizations to fill the bill. And neither "States" nor "Nation-States" was as good a marketing title as "Civilization."

So I understand the likely reasoning, but I do wonder whether it's led a lot of people to mistakenly believe that nations like Nepal and Burkina Faso and the U.S. are "civilizations" when they are no such thing.

Even worse, I wonder if people now believe that places like France and Germany are so culturally different from each other (despite the whole EU thing) as to be considered different civilizations when they're actually different but related states within Western civilization. And that matters because creating false distinctions makes it harder to talk usefully about the real differences that distinguish true civilizations from each other -- something that's become pretty important lately.

But as noted, this thread is for talking about how a civil war in the Federation might be useful as a plot device for Star Trek Online, so let me get back to that.

Actually, there will probably be gamers who bump into this page and immediately wonder what in the world we're babbling about. "...? Dude, it's just a game! Who cares whether it's Federation citizens or Red Lectroids from Planet Ten, just tell me who to shoot so I can be Lord High Admiral of the Universe as fast as possible."

If these folks are going to constitute a significant proportion of those who subscribe to play Star Trek Online -- or, more pointedly, if ST:O's developer is actually thinking of trying to attract such gamers with features -- then maybe what we really need is something in between a "clash of civilizations" and "it's just a game." As a practical matter, probably the best route is just to devise some justification that sounds plausible in both a real-world and Star Trek sense, and then simply say, "here's why" and move on to designing and implementing actual gameplay features.

To get there, we need more than random, arbitrary events but less than a hardcore theory -- in short, what we need is a literary justification. If the point is to have a civil war within the Federation as part of a game, then all we really need is a reason for internal conflict that sounds good and serves as an effective driver for storytelling and action without having to fit neatly into some model of cultural morphology.

Examples given so far include:

• extermination of the Borg as a species


• extending membership in the Federation to the Romulan Star Empire


• suspending the Prime Directive (shades of Lincoln's suspension of habeas corpus) for the exigencies of total war


• power-hungry politician (e.g., Caesar, Palpatine)


• deliberately misattributed use of WMD such as a biogenic weapon


• perceived failure of the Federation to insure the security of its member states


• economic disaster (dangers of using warp drive or replicator technology)


• discovery of widespread use of eugenics technology


• Section 31 instigating a "phony war" ("Oceania has always been at war with Eastasia.")


• neural parasites return to destroy the Federation from within


• negative popular reaction to militarization of Starfleet

Any other ideas? Bear in mind the two great requirements for effectiveness as a plot device:

• It should evenly divide Federation members or citizens.


• It should be severe enough to bring them to the brink of open conflict against each other.

Which immediately gives me another idea: the perceived subjugation of entities who might be sentient (androids, holograms). For example, if being an effective hologram means having the capability for self-programming, how far is that from free will? Would everybody in the Federation be OK with sending self-aware entities off to spend eternity scrubbing plasma conduits, even if doing so had significant economic value by freeing up humans from dangerous or tedious tasks?

"Holoslavery" would be a pretty direct analog to the "peculiar institution" that led to the U.S.'s War Between the States, and could be considered somewhat controversial. But Star Trek copied history and tackled controversial topics all the time. I think players of a Star Trek game would buy this.

Civil War in the United Federation of Planets +

The "identity crisis" the Federation might face is exactly the kind of thing I think of when I talk about "ethical exploration" as a primary theme of Star Trek. It's the question that goes right to the heart of any individual or group: Who are you when it really counts? The best gameplay I've ever experienced (and the best SF I've ever read, for that matter) has been driven by that level of humanistic storytelling. I'd love to see it play a major role in guiding the gameplay of Star Trek Online.

Actually, to take a step back for a moment, it's interesting that we all seem to be good with the idea that a Serious Threat to the Federation will be part of the game. It's not a requirement; you can make a perfectly good MMORPG without imposing some Looming Disaster... but it does seem like a pretty obvious idea, doesn't it?

If Star Trek Online's developer is thinking along these lines, then the big question is whether they're thinking mostly internal or external. External threats (the Dominion War) are great for slam-bang action. Internal threats (Section 31) are superb for meaningful story-driven roleplaying.

But maybe there's a threat that's both internal and external? Something that could drive both action and story in a massively multiplayer game for years to come...?

Me, I like the idea of a critical technology (such as warp drive or replicators) going kerflooey and the barbarians banging on the gates to take advantage of the problem, but that's me. I could easily go along with the Eugenics Wars Part II as long as this internal threat also had some external component.

And frankly, I'm still waiting for those darned neural parasites from TNG's "Conspiracy" to make their long-awaited reappearance. Maybe a civil war is fomented from inside the Federation itself.... (cue the spooky music)

Civil War in the United Federation of Planets 1

To consider how the Federation might break down, let's look first at how this happens in the real world. Republics become empires, and empires fall... but how?

This aspect of history -- what is it that causes civilizations to fail? -- is one that has fascinated me for years. The best answer I've seen yet came from a Georgetown University professor named Carroll Quigley.

Quigley's analysis (in his wonderful book, The Evolution of Civilizations) followed in particular the works of Spengler and Toynbee. For both Spengler and Toynbee, civilizations emerged, matured, decayed, and died, in that order and always.

As Quigley looked at Western civilization, however, he concluded that Western civilization didn't fit that one-way pattern, but had somehow recovered from challenges similar to those that had destroyed earlier civilizations. In fact, the West reinvented itself not just once, but twice.

To Quigley, this was undeniable evidence that Spengler and Toynbee, while right in many things, were wrong in this one critical thing: the decline and fall of a civilization is not inevitable.

From this, and from the related data of history, Quigley surmised the following:

1. Civilizations progress through roughly seven stages:

1. Mixture
2. Gestation
3. Expansion
4. Age of Conflict
5. Universal Empire
6. Decay
7. Invasion

2. Civilizations grow (in territory, population, wealth, and knowledge) as long as they have an "instrument of expansion." Examples of instruments are religious tribute (Mesopotamian civilization), political tribute (Egyptian), slavery (Classical), feudalism (Western), and capitalism (the West again). In each case the instrument allowed the civilization to invent (to produce a surplus beyond what's needed for survival), to save (to concentrate that surplus in a few hands so that it has more effect), and to invest (to apply the surplus to additional invention).

3. But all instruments institutionalize -- eventually, the special interests in whose hands the surplus is concentrated reduce their level of investing in further invention and begin retaining the surplus for themselves. As the public becomes discontented by a decline in the rate of expansion, the civilization enters the period of imperialist wars and popular irrationality that Quigley characterized as an Age of Conflict.

4. Unlike Spengler and Toynbee, Quigley believed history demonstrates that it's possible to recover from the institutionalization of an instrument of expansion, that civilizations can return to an age of Expansion. He concluded that there are two ways to do this: by reforming the broken institution back into a working instrument, or by circumventing the old institution with a new instrument of expansion. In either case, the civilization returns to the Expansion phase.

5. Civilizations that fail to reform or circumvent the institutionalization of their instrument of expansion proceed to becoming a Universal Empire. This appears to be a golden age, but only because the civilization's resources are being spent in a final burst of consumption. Once this happens, there's no going back -- that civilization will inevitably proceed to decay and be invaded, and its cultural assets will be divided among its conquerors.

All of which is probably way more than anybody wanted to know. But now we can look at the world of the Federation with an eye toward what could make it enter an Age of Conflict.

To do that, we first need to consider: What was the Federation's instrument of expansion? And second, who controls that instrument, and why would they begin to keep for themselves the surplus it creates?

My off-the-cuff guess for the instrument that allowed the Federation to expand would have to be "warp drive." I think replicator technology would actually have more of an impact in the real world, but in the world of Star Trek it's warp drive that has enabled the access to resources and cultures that enabled the Federation's remarkable expansion through the Alpha Quadrant. (Many Star Trek: Enterprise episodes seem to support the idea that effective warp drive actually allowed the creation of the Federation itself.)

So who in the Federation controls warp drive? Simple: Starfleet. But why would the people running Starfleet (and remember, these aren't just humans) start thinking of the rewards of warp drive as finite, and therefore that they only "win" by accumulating those rewards to themselves instead of reinvesting them back into invention that benefits the whole Federation? What limits to additional warp drive-fueled expansion has the Federation finally encountered?

I have some ideas there, but I'll leave these questions as an exercise for anyone who's managed to read all this. I will suggest, however, that a threat to warp drive capability is the kind of thing that could pose a grave and long-term danger to the Federation. As such, it could work well in driving the ongoing story action in a persistent-world Star Trek MMORPG.