City Builders Breaking the Mold

Okay, some philosophical musings right up top. Do mechanics limit our understanding of genre? Do we reject things because how they play comes with expectations of how they should feel? And if we do, is that holding us back? Thanks so much to Factor for keeping us well-fed fast. James just told me about a wild experience he had. He played two games that completely belied his expectations in ways so subtle that he actually had to sit back for a minute and think about them to realize exactly what they were doing. Weirder still though, they were both city builders. Now, a long time back we talked about how genre is kind of a weird thing in games. In literature or film or television, genre pretty much tells you how something is going to feel. A horror movie is going to be scary, a comedy will try to be funny, etc. Music's a little different of course, as there are aesthetic implications. It doesn't really matter if it's a love song or a political battle cry, a grunge song is going to have distorted guitars, and a baroque piece is a lot more likely to

feature a harpsichord. But game genres are usually named for the actions a player performs. First-person shooter, city builder, role-playing game. But these names don't actually always mean what they say they mean. For instance, Portal is a first-person shooter, but I think that most people would call it a puzzle game. And sure, in the case of Portal you can argue that that's because the emphasis of the game was on the puzzle aspect, but that does still leave us in this weird nebulous space where something that is primarily played through first-person shooting isn't a first-person shooter. So that says to me that our genres do actually have more meanings to them beyond what their name implies. First-person shooter doesn't just mean shooting in first person. It also means action, violence, conflict. It means tension and danger overcome by tests of precision. And it's actually amazing what you'll find once you start unpacking genres like this. However, the very fact that there is a mismatch between the label and actual player expectation can cause problems. Because some substrata of our brain know the underlying core behind game genres and so sets up subconscious expectations for

us. Which brings us nicely back to city builders. James saw this game called Ixion. It's this weird city building on a colony ship thing with some interesting narrative that teased just the sort of hard sci-fi crunch he was looking for at the time and he loved it. But then when we looked at the Steam reviews, we noticed a bunch of negative ones and a light bulb went off. A thought that got us rethinking genre. It was because this game is hard. Like Dark Souls hard. What does that even mean though? The Dark Souls of city builders. It basically means that you'll lose a lot. You'll have to restart from scratch. It means that decisions you make 10 minutes in will come back to haunt you hours later. Oh, and it's great. But it's not a city builder. It's an RPG that just happens to be using city building as its main mechanic. But because it looked like a city builder and played at least on the surface like a city builder, players were coming in with their expectations from city building games. So, what are those? What really is the city building genre right now? Well, I'd posit they're optimization games about efficiency and

growth. They're based on the joy of watching something you've created spring to life. Of shepherding something to reveal a more and more magnificent and delicate structure. They're strange amalgams of puzzles and toys that give you a set of tools and say build. But here, friends, is where it gets interesting. Even though these games are optimization problems, almost none of the major ones require true optimization. Sure, the more you optimize the faster you'll progress. But in most of them, if you were inefficient or make a mistake in the beginning, you just wait on the resources you need to progress. They're sort of zen games when you think about it whose most common mode has no goal or end point. They're there for you to create risk-free. And that last part is really important because it's so baked into the genre that even hardcore city builders like Anno don't really let the player lose or hit a failure state. But getting behind the genre label to the fundamental assumptions that underpin the genre lets us examine those assumptions and start to question them. So, was bringing risk

back into city building a good thing? Well, ignoring the genre question and ignoring the fact that doing so might not make it what most people call a city builder, what happens when you take city building mechanics and add risk? First, it lets you tell a more compelling story. Because, let's be real, it's hard to have a story without stakes, you know? Second, it adds urgency to the optimization problem. You have an incentive to find better solutions. But, interestingly, because you are fundamentally on a clock, racing against resources into resources consumed, it actually relieves you of the burden of finding the perfect solution. Good enough to survive is good enough. It doesn't require the absolute finicky optimization of something like a Factorio, for example, but that's still a whole different genre. Most powerfully, though, it gets you invested in the fate of your city. Whereas, SimCity is famous for allowing you to unleash natural disasters on your creations because at a certain point, when there's nothing left to do, no clock to beat, or optimizing more starts to feel tiresome, you can have a good laugh and throw an off-brand Godzilla at the place. Which then lets you rebuild

and do the engaging part of the game over again. And I think this shows how clearly the people working on SimCity realized that it was the act of building that players would care about in their game, not having the player get invested in the people who inhabit their city, or even the towers of glass and steel that made up the city itself. But, adding stakes gives us that. So, I think there's grist there. You know, something to mine to reinvigorate the genre, or perhaps give us a new genre altogether that utilizes the mechanics the city builder is named for. Again, a genre I'm actually excited about. Now, remember at the beginning of this I said James found a second title? Well, that was Against the Storm, a city building roguelike. You heard me right, a city building roguelike where each run, what buildings you're actually able to build are drafted as you go. And you have to figure out how to complete objectives while working around what might be an incomplete supply chain. And it's fascinating as well because it foregoes the narrative aspects that Ixion uses. The reintroduction of risk into city building and instead really leans into different gameplay aspects. It uses the

very real prospect of failure to make every choice feel meaningful and interesting. So where Ixion is an RPG, Against the Storm is much more akin to something like a magic draft, continuously keeping you tacking back and forth to accomplish your goals while the game keeps giving you new problems to work around. There's just a huge amount of unexplored design space here and that's just awesome. And of course we've seen some games poking around these types of things for a while, but it was really these two games that made it click for me because they made me think past just mechanics and reexamine genre and actually what genre even means in games anyway. But enough from me, what do you all think? Are there any other genres you think have a definition that goes way past just what it says on the tin? Is there anything that could be pushed in order to create play experience with the same core mechanics? Or better yet, are there games out there that you know of that are already doing so? Please let us know in the comments or tweet at us if you're watching this on Nebula, thank you for that. And maybe after we've tried out a bunch of them, we'll do another episode examining some other genre and the bending therein. But

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