A blog called Critical Distance provides writing prompts for game bloggers, and I’ve decided to give this one a go (although I can’t promise how successful I’ll be). Here’s the prompt:

Being Other:

Games, like most media, have the ability to let us explore what it’s like to be someone other than ourselves. While this experience may only encompass a character’s external circumstances–exploring alien worlds, serving with a military elite, casting spells and swinging broadswords–it’s most powerful when it allow us to identify with a character who is fundamentally different than ourselves–a different gender, sexuality, race, class, or religion. This official re-launch of the Blogs of the Round Table asks you to talk about a game experience that allowed you to experience being other than you are and how that impacted you–for better or for worse. Conversely, discuss why games haven’t provided this experience for you and why.

I imagine that a lot of responses are talking about gender or race. Which are very valid things to talk about as we approach games critically. However, I’m going to touch on something a little different. I’m going to provide a sequel to my earlier post “A Spreadsheet With a Soul” and talk about what it’s like to be the bad guy in a game. I’m not talking about picking the dark side path in a Bioware RPG. I’m not talking about roleplaying a jerk character in an MMO. Here, let me show you what I’m talking about.

I’ve been on a big Europa Universalis 3 kick lately. Currently I’m playing Portugal and taking over the Americas, just for giggles. Let me tell you how that went down: I sailed over to the new world and found some unclaimed land (denoted as gray on the ingame map.) Some of this land was inhabited by “natives”, which was no big deal, because my infantry could destroy them in a matter of seconds if they chose to fight. I slaughtered several thousands of these natives that way as I slowly began to turn the map from gray to green.

Then I encountered something else. Aside from the nameless “natives”, there were actual native nations on North America. Huron, Iroquois, Cherokee, Shawnee, and others all had little patches of color on the map denoting their territory. If I clicked on their territory I could see the names of their leaders. I could also see that they were eying me rather warily.

At first I decided to be nice. They weren’t bothering me and I was taking land that was rather far from theirs, so I gave them gifts of gold in order to befriend them and then I let them be.

For about, oh, fifty or sixty years or so.

Because that was when my lust for territory had taken me all the way down to them and their little blobs of color on the map were interfering with my lovely solid green. I checked the technology chart– they had nothing compared to me. I clicked on their territory to see what they thought of me. We weren’t friends, by any means, but they “trusted me implicitly”, probably due to decades of peace and the gifts I’d given them.

No matter. I declared war, stormed in, easily killed off their little armies and occupied all their territory. (The “casus belli”– cause for war– that I gave here in order to not take such a hit in various game attributes was that they “owned territory that was rightfully mine”.) They sent me peace treaty after peace treaty– first just begging me to stop and then offering to give up some of their land– and I turned them all down. I wanted nothing but full annexation. I wanted them gone from the map.

It didn’t take long. First the Iroquois were gone. Then the Huron a few years later. I let Cherokee and Shawnee live for another decade or so (they were more out of my way), at which point they banded together and declared war on me and I retaliated by annexing them. Just as I’d wanted, these cultures were now gone from the map and it was all mine.

Now I know what some of you are probably thinking. That this is an absolutely awful and atrocious game and how could I play it in good conscience and how could anyone find this fun?

Well here, let me tell you something. By the time I quit WoW I had over ten thousand PvP kills on my main character alone, not to mention the hundreds of thousands of NPCs that I’d killed, and I never batted an eye or thought about the implications of it.

I’ve killed hundreds of people in Skyrim and not blinked.

I’ve Planet Bustered away portions of entire continents in SMAC and giggled.

These were all clearly fiction. The enemies were not real. It was all abstract and didn’t matter.

EU3 is different. EU3 is making you recreate events that actually happened (or would have happened, in some crazy world where Portugal took over North America). EU3 has made me stop and think about myself. Sure, I can rationalize every day that I wouldn’t ever do something like this in real life. But you know what? I bet the monarchs back in Europe in the 17th century were seeing it exactly as I was. These other cultures were offending patches of the wrong color on their maps.

Maybe we weren’t so different after all. What a thing to chew on.

It’s just a game, sure. But it’s a game that lets you step into the shoes of history, for good or for ill, and because of that, it’s a very valuable experience.

“Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it” – George Santayana