Big History: or the Curse of Storytelling in Human Knowledge
Big Data is upon us, and it looks like it’s here to stay. Has Plato’s old dream of bias-free knowledge finally come true?

Perhaps we’ve indeed found a way to make that Ancient Greek sage happy with our metaphysical data clouds, and infinite server farms. But does all this technology mean we’ve actually solved the problems of bias in knowledge? Problems like our need for real-life examples when we try to generalize anything in the form of a law – the experience bias. Or, our penchant for discourse over the intuitive graspings of the mind – the language bias. Worse yet, the way that old worm of pattern shows up even in the most abstruse set of mathematical axioms – the perception bias. It’s as if every particle of energy, or smidgen of matter, shows traces of a story, our story.

True. But inside the Ivory Tower, it seems that the war for knowledge is being won by the proponents of Big Data. Indeed, 2500 years after Plato, 300 years into the modern scientific revolution, the last bastion of storytelling in the sciences – History – has finally embraced the power of number. Inching away from the humanities to join the Brave New World of modern social sciences, History is leaping, both feet together, into the paradigm of Big Data. An old chapter is closing, a new one opens. The longue durée (long-period history) movement inaugurated by the French Annales historians five generations ago, have finally found a home, it appears, in “Big History“.

Should we celebrating the end of an era, and a new beginning? To be sure, to the stalwart scribes of History, this change of program is causing puzzlement over the fundamentals of their discipline. Put simply:

If (Number is King);
else if (information processing is Truth);
then ("The Word is dead?");
In other words, with the advent of Big Data, are we truly rid of the “curse of literature” in science?

Humans: worldly, and wordy

Alas, language and storytelling is a stubborn trait of human nature, and, as we will see, an inherent part of History, if not science. Begin by squinting your eyes and peering just ahead: everywhere at the extremities of the Big Data space, storytelling rears its ugly, incarnate head. The signs of it are legion. Big Bang theologians, both secular and religious, endlessly dispute mathematical models of the universe’s creation, and humanity’s ultimate end. On the mucky side of the data-verse, images of human drama endlessly recur on the nightly news and in our social media feeds, like a hyperreal collective fiction, too pressing to ignore. And the Cold War era practice of computer simulation, previously content with abstract modelling, forecasting and prediction, is now taking every opportunity for human-machine interfacing with VR, the quantified self, and smart prosthetics.

Disembodied data, it appears, screams for new bodies, new subjects, new territories to conquer. And it seeks new ways to tell old stories: witness the rising popularity of digital games. So did we call the End of History too soon? Or is the tiny sphere of human events heating up one more time before its final disappearance into the limitless horizon of Big History, and the simulation space?

Histoire, degré zéro

In this four-part article series, I want to ask: what does Big Data portend for the making of History, and what does this means for us, the “old subjects of History”, storytellers of human events? As more and more details and domains of the human story fold into the simulation space, how shall we account for lived experience, and the memory of this lived experience? Will the “sentient” beings of the future learn the lessons of life and history from simulations? Bots, zombies, humanoids, transhumans: who will be the future protagonist of Big History? What will become of us in our great quantification experiment?

My answers to these questions will come from two apparently contradictory sources: the controversies of old-school historians, and video games that simulate the “degree zero” of History: basic human survival. My aim is to determine which conditions are needed today to write History. When all the old moorings of History are untied – chronology, cartography, notable people and events – and we are left with huge and complex data sets to interpret, where do we start?

In article 1, I will revisit the age-old question “what is History”, and how different generations of historians have tried to answer it. I will diagnose Big Data as one of the many symptoms related to History’s recent distancing stance from the humanities. I will look at the new role of the Big Data historian as authoritative interpreter of “historical” (long-term) datum. I will also examine how the humanities can, perhaps more than ever, serve as a bridge between experience and technology, and a compass for survival in the landscape of simulation.

Live to Tell the Tale: What Survival Sims Can Teach us about History

Articles 2, 3 and 4 will then look at how human events are to be “written” in simulation-based history. Specifically, I will look at three different examples of storytelling in digital simulations, that posit the problem of survival (and extinction) as their core narrative premise. I will analyze how each game generates narrative based on the trappings of its genre, on the problem-space of the player, and endgame scenarios. To do this, I will select titles that express three fundamental human perspectives in survival: solitary survival, survival in small bands, and survival as a small culture group.

For the sake of clarity, I will also highlight the traits of each survival perspective with an appropriate trope:

“Last man alive”: solitary survival in The Long Dark

“Victims of History”: small group survival in This War of Mine

“It takes a village”: culture group survival in Banished

Human survival is, in many ways, the condition for all storytelling. Because of its narrow “problem space”, I have selected the survival theme to highlight how simulation reconfigures the act of writing history, based on the criteria of experimental science: hypothesis-testing, repeatability, falsifiability. For the games listed above are not just about survival, but about the best ways to survive. And the memory function in these games, as we will see, will not only service survival strategies and tactics, but also unsuccessful survival experiments, with their residual names and places.

In the end, survival is all that matters. I’ve read the writing on the Cloud: what I am proposing to you is an apocalyptic account of the future, of technology’s attempt to erase Story from History.

And why this programmed erasure is doomed to fail.

As we will see, the failure to reduce human experience to models and numbers, is inscribed into the very heart of simulation. And a popular trend in video games – the rise of the so-called “Survival Sims” – will pave the way for to the new primacy of story in future, data-driven, History-making.

Oddly enough, this story of simulation begins with the saga of the historians. This will be the subject of our first article.
Big Data: Endgame of Virtual History

At face value, it might appear to the casual reader of Play the Past, that the main focus of this blog is the treatment of historical experience in the medium of games.

This is, however, only a first-level reading of Play the Past authors. There is also an undercurrent of analysis on Play the Past that seeks to address the more complicated issue of how games and simulation are impacting the social sciences, and the discipline of History itself.

This concern is shared by many Play the Past “regulars”, as well as guest writers. For example, historian and educator Jeremiah McCall’s very first post on Play the Past tackled the issue of historical causation in history-themed simulation games. In his analysis of Civ City Rome, McCall linked his practice of teaching historical concepts modeled in game mechanics, to hypothesis-making in historical research. McCall went on to write many posts on Play the Past on how to best use games in history education, and even published a book about the subject.

Pushing the educational envelope even further, Trevor Owen’s propositions for ludic pathways into scholarship – required reading if you’re interested in this question – suggest three ways “games media” can serve historical research: to reach broader audiences, to operationalize models of change and causation, and to breach the limitations of linear narrative. Owens’ own playful approach to “serious” games with history students suggests creative ways historians might enhance their toolbox – despite the many hang-ups scholars still have toward games culture.

On the “theory” front, digital media scholar Mark Sample’s great introduction to “platform studies” demonstrates how a multi-layered analysis of simulation media can also serve as a rich mode of historical investigation into technological culture. Attentive to complex issues of mediation, Sample has also explored in his writings the new culture of digital evidence in play spaces, and the possibilities (and perils) of historical revisionism opened up by digital media. In a similar vein, one of Play the Past’s most prolific authors, Peter Christiansen, has critically reviewed the deterministic assumptions of “historical development” in many history-themed games, most especially strategy games. Christiansen’s analysis of game mechanics as historical frameworks, highlights the way many historians today distance themselves from commonly-held ideas of “historical progress”.

Play the Past guest authors have also been fruitful contributors to the dialogue between game culture and historical research. Andrew Salvati’s address to the International Network for the Theory of History (INTH) in 2013, excerpted on Play the Past, examines the conflicted status of historical narrative, fudging the boundaries between play and research. In a similar same vein, Richard Bell’s analysis of 2013 sleeper hit Gone Home drew attention to the game’s mimicking of the process of historical research, in a dramatic setting. Perhaps more in line with the argument I will be presenting below, Jim McNally, President and Lead Designer at Longbow Games, previously discussed the process of “caricature” – or ideal-typing – required in designing game mechanics that reference historical facts. Finally, my own article on the current popularity of Civilization-style strategy games, highlighted how deep-seated philosophies of “historical progress” still run unchecked in both academic research and popular media.

Counterfactual History: Here to Stay
Perhaps the best example of gaming culture’s cross-fertilization with historical research is the burgeoning field of counterfactual thinking in academia and popular fiction, in which games and simulations play a leading role. As Wikipedia defines it:


“Counterfactual history, also sometimes referred to as virtual history, is a form of historiography that attempts to answer “what if” questions known as counterfactuals. Black and MacRaild provide this definition: “It is, at the very root, the idea of conjecturing on what did not happen, or what might have happened, in order to understand what did happen.” The method seeks to explore history and historical incidents by means of extrapolating a timeline in which certain key historical events did not happen or had an outcome which was different from that which did in fact occur. It has produced a book genre which is variously called alternative history, speculative history, or hypothetical history.”


Though controversial amongst historians, the counterfactual approach has gained a sufficient foothold to become established practice, at least to the more experimentally-minded academics, and top brass in military and business schools. As a result, many mainstream historians in the English-speaking world today argue for a more diligent and qualified use of counterfactual “method” in historical research, rooted in historical evidence.

But here’s the thing. Beyond this overall trend – and the many themes identified above – there are harder-to-detect affinities between games “media” and historical understanding that have, in my opinion, not yet been adequately voiced. And the nexus of issues contained in them could have a decisive impact on the future of historical inquiry. These undercurrent affinities manifest themselves in the malaise of Total History that regularly plagues the discipline, despite the best of intentions. Put simply, whenever historians seek to master the human event-horizon with exhaustive understanding, they inevitably default back to good old storytelling. And digital games, of all things, uniquely manifest this mania of omniscience – and its contradictory result – into one swell package.

It is my contention that the latest quantification craze in our culture will only prove this more so. And as I am hoping to persuade you, this below-the-radar issue of narrative “bias” in quantification deserves a fair hearing, considering where we are headed in both historical research and gaming culture. If there’s a single salient reason why you should read on, that would be to bear witness to the coming unification of the social sciences under Big Data – or, see how games might prevent this horror, and contribute to the renewal of the humanities.

History: Misfit of the Knowledge Economy ?
There are many signs that university disciplines are about to undergo a major shift in the next decade or so. For one, with changes in workplace demographics and an overall increase in university populations, universities are under intense pressure to specialize in order to attract their “core clientele” – either first-time students looking to complete basic or advanced degrees, or returning professionals, in the middle of a career transition. Changes in the university’s “DNA” have also been noted, from many quarters. As universities are set to become the research powerhouses of our globalized knowledge economy, they have set about to restructure core university disciplines to fit emerging vocational standards and attract top students and researchers at home and abroad.

Now for the “trickle-down” effects. The structure of research funding, and the competition over university funds has also caused a lot of soul-searching for those traditional disciplines not attached to professional training, or “fundamental” research – namely, the humanities. In order to preserve themselves from the fate of their Japanese brethren, traditional humanities disciplines have recently attempted a face-lift to keep up with the times: witness the rise of “digital humanities” departments, conferences, associations and advocacy groups. For the moment, the humanities are staying “current”, and are being sold to career-minded folks as unique pathways to complex workplace “soft” skills.

Amidst this turmoil, it is no secret that the discipline of history has been doing a lot of soul-searching. Interestingly, this is not directly tied to the structural changes listed above, but rather to the dual status of history as both a social science and a humanities discipline. The chaotic trends in our global economy and techno-culture are only exacerbating the crisis long-felt in history departments. We only need to look at how the discipline describes itself, to find the innumerable fault lines cracking the edifice. Indeed, take a “Introduction to Historiography” course in any major university, and you’ll be confronted with the following (simplified) picture of the discipline:

Until the nineteenth century, “history” was for the most part a specialized branch of rhetoric destined for elite consumption.
History turned into a profession in the nineteenth century by claiming for itself the status of a “science”. In order to do so, its main practitioners had to devise of standards for writing objective history. To bolster the legitimacy of the modern nation-state, historical production also sought a more mainstream audience, beyond national elites.
From historical materialism, to long durée social history, to “cliometrics”: every major new “school” of historical research in the twentieth century repudiated its nineteenth-century forebears as “positivistic” (i.e. falsely factual), while promoting new ways of making history… more “objective”. From the 1930s onwards, historical readership split into professional and enlightened amateur audiences.
Postmodern critics from the 1970s onwards emphasized the narrative nature of all historical writing, and the partiality of every historical fact. The discipline of history has since become fragmented into various camps – cultural history, new social history, microhistory, etc. – and succumbed to hyper-specialization. Outside of academia, historical “consumption” is now for the most part a mass culture phenomenon.
Historians of the World, Unite!
Slow moving institutions like universities aren’t necessarily the best places to see the coming tidal waves of change. But to the few professional historians who have sought to analyze the deeper trends of institutional change, the following picture has become evident: history is poised to become either a fully-fledged social science – and be invited to the policy table – or go the way of “digital humanities”, and continue to argue its “relevancy” in the face of diminishing funding.

Or at least, this is how I am reading the claims of academic historians. Take Jo Guldi and David Armitage, authors of the recent History Manifesto. Guldi and Armitage, both professional historians involved in the advocacy of their discipline, are spearheading a movement to upgrade the discipline of history to the status of policy advisory think tanks. Historians, Guldi and Armitage argue, are specialists trained in the analysis of social change through time (diachrony). As such, in a world stuck in chronic short-termism, with political elites incapable of fathoming the long-term crises that cloud the future of humankind – climate change, global governance and inequality – historians are poised to be increasingly in demand in the near future, by virtue of their unique training and skill-set.

To be sure, Guldi and Armitage’s advocacy for historians as courtiers to power – or as they put it, as a “counter-balancing” to the domination of near-sighted social scientists in elite think tanks – is controversial, if not questionable. And I would argue that their appeal for the “niche expertise” of professional historians is, on a deeper level, symptomatic of the erosion of the humanities as a tradition in the modern university, and in our wider culture. Put in starker terms: if you peer under the hood of their apologia, you will see that Guldi and Armitage are advocating for nothing less than the absorption of history into the regime of Big Data.

The tell-tale sign of this is their treatment of Big Data as a “tool” – for research, analysis, and experimental modelling. Certainly, Big Data “tools” are poised to enrich the possibilities for comparative history-making. There is, however, no reflexive treatment of the impacts of Big Data on historical thinking in the History Manifesto. Guldi and Armitage’s argue that the “tools” of Big Data will bolster long-held habits of historians, and enhance their relevancy. To be sure, comparative analysis of massive and diverse sets of historical data will allow historians to propose, as a matter of course, multiple theories of causality. Thus as interpreters of “complex historical data”, historians as social scientists will be uniquely positioned to help policy makers interpret complex cause and effect.

But let’s be frank. At bottom, Guldi and Armitage are making the case for a new type of futurology, avec les historiens. To them historians are the type of data experts best equipped to make judicious, “non-reductive”, use of Big Data. Certainly, this is a sincere, if not clever way of reinvigorating a discipline finding itself with less and less of a basis for claiming that it is engaged in “fundamental” (i.e. non-utilitarian) research. But lest I repeat myself, these appeals will also further push the academic discipline of history over the edge of the social science and humanities divide, squarely in favor of future “governance” disciplines.

Historians beware: Big Data is a not mere “tool”, it is a Zeitgeist.

Big Data: Sink or Swim
In response to such capitulations, I would like to argue for a new way of broaching the knowledge divide that has long beset the discipline of history, for the reasons already outlined above. In the next articles of this series, I will go straight for the Big Data jugular. Like my Play the Past forebears, I will take an experimental stance and play with the Zeitgeist, in order to present the humanities from a position of strength, rather than weakness.

The program will go like this.

By looking at three “case studies” of game design around the theme of human survival, I will argue that there is an irrepressible need for story – or “narrative” – implicit to all social sciences. Specifically, I will demonstrate that a strange “return of narrative” is brewing in Big Data-boosted history, resulting from having pushed the quantification gambit to its limits. And, as I’ve said above: there’s no better place to see this than in digital games.

Why? Because of the way social sciences design their experiments. In a nutshell: if the aggregate behaviors studied by social sciences are to have any explanatory value, they must first be packaged into abstract concepts – or to use Max Weber’s term: ideal-types, before being tested, as hypotheses, against the mess of real-world behavior. Put simply: sociology, economics and statistics cannot function (i.e. explain real-world phenomena) without transforming “social actors” into aggregate concepts, or ideal-types: “gender”, “social class”, occupational types, age groupings, etc.


This is where digital games come into the equation, and survival games in particular. The core of any digital game is the gameplay loop – the set of actions a player must repeat over and over again, with incremental difficulty, in order to master the game, or complete its objectives, or story. My central hypothesis is that the core gameplay loops of sandbox-type “realistic” survival games are laboratories for constructing aggregate behaviors, or ideal-types, in a narrative format. If survival game characters tend to have personalized features for fictional purposes, they act nonetheless, by virtue of being playable, as anonymous and abstracted vectors of a story type. Through constant trial and error in a constrained possibility space – the survival “sandbox” – structured as a “compulsion loop”, the survival game player experiences the story of an ideal-type – an abstracted, “archetypal” collective character: “the survivor”. In this way, I argue that playing a survival hero(ine) or survival group in a sandbox-type game is analogous to telling the story of macro data from the micro perspective.

In the next three articles, I will examine three different examples of digital storytelling in simulations that posit the problem of survival (and extinction) as their core narrative premise. I will analyze how each game generates narrative based on the design of its gameplay loop and “sandbox” (or problem-space). Finally, I will tie the thematic features of each survival sub-genre to a type of aggregate actor  – solitary, small group, or culture group – in order to connect the different story forms to experimental models in the social sciences. My aim, once again, is to demonstrate how the storytelling qualities of digital media mirror the Big Data Zeitgeist, to use the “micro” scale to shed light on the “macro”.

To say the least, this is a peculiar outcome to the quantification craze we are currently experiencing in our culture. If you’ve followed me all the way here, then perhaps you’ll agree with me that we need to shed much-needed light on our relationship to data, and “information” (i.e. simulation) technology. If anything, it is our irrepressible need for pattern, and meaning – the real “survival” hero in this story – which needs to be rescued from the clutches of Big Data. And if only experts – professional historians included – are to be equipped to swim in the maelstrom of numbers, then let’s just say that we haven’t learned a thing from all these years of experimenting in the digital playpen.

Let Big Data take over, it will make us into data points, into social objects. And for the moment, sadly, we seem unperturbed at the loss of our subjecthood, in exchange for these “gains”.

The Long Dark: the Last Lonely Days of the Quantified Self

“You’ve faded into the Long Dark”…

Thus ends each “survival trial” in the frozen and hostile, yet beautifully alive, adventure space of The Long Dark.

As always it is a frustrating, and disappointing moment – sometimes bitterly so, considering the personal investment involved in each play-through. It can also come as a relief, when you’ve fallen into a spiral of negative outcomes, with no foreseeable way out. But above all, every ending is thoroughly predictable. Just like in real life: you will end. It’s just a matter of time. And with this game, the “last moments of life” clock is really in your face.

Lucky for you, it’s just a game. Game over? Press start to begin a new game…

Sometimes though, after a glorious and protracted multi-day struggle against the elements, the idea of restarting a fresh play-through just seems off. You can’t bring yourself to press that start button so casually. The video game “life” you lost, oddly enough, meant more to you than you expected. It’s as if the “you” of the video game has somehow become of part of you, the player.

In other words: you’re feeling the pangs of loss. It’s like that dear pet of yours that just passed away, and you just don’t have the heart to run out and get a new one. Or at least not so quick. Mourning needs time, because that anonymous video game character you were rootin’ for somehow got under your skin.

So you’re sitting there, feeling empty, looking at the (beautifully-crafted) main game menu. Some action is required to sort out through your contradictory feelings. So you go to the journals menu, and quietly look at your in-game journal and stats.

There you have it. It’s all there in front of you: your days, hours and minutes survived, locations discovered, percentage of word explored, hours awake, hours rested, hours indoors, hours outdoors, total calories expended, average calories per day, distance traveled in kilometers, fires started, wolf close encounters, can openers found…

The list goes on.

And yet, all these numbers don’t even begin to tell your story. Nor do the point-blank journal entries that summarize where you’ve been, what you seen, and what happened to you.

So you decide to write a review of the game on Steam, or in the discussion forum… and the memories start to come alive again, of your heroic attempt at surviving against all odds: that time you pulled a two-day marathon with very little sleep in the craggy areas of Pleasant Valley, just to stumble upon a moldy wolf carcass, and eat your last poisoned supper…; or that time you miraculously found a little to cove next to a waterfall to save you from a blinding blizzard, only to be mauled to death by a bear at night in your makeshift shelter; or the perilous crossings across the ridge train tracks that left you breathless at the other end, happy to be alive; or surviving two back-to-back bouts of hypothermia just to get to that barren island at the far extremity of Desolation Point; or the many private campfires you were able to start in the cold cocoon of a discovered cave, with rabbits hopping outside, in the quiet snow…

The Long Dark is brimming with memorable moments such as these: the good, the bad and the ugly. Indeed, what you experience in-game is so vivid, it seems that only writing it down and sharing it with the community could do justice to what you went through.

Welcome to storytelling in the age of the Quantified Self.

Simulations don’t die, they just reboot
Now with this mourning rigmarole done with, there’s a stranger question that crops up here: just who is that “you” that’s being invoked in The Long Dark’s (nicely quotable) endgame formula? We’ve already evoked the personal investment of players in the game. To be sure – and as we will see – every design decision that has gone into the game has kept to this player-centric approach. But still, isn’t that moment when your digital body passes and your human soul mourns a little strange? True, The Long Dark players are, as a rule, heavily invested into the digital self that is mediated by the game. And again, the endgame is totally predictable.

And yet, most are them compelled to come back, like flies to a burning light.

Why? Given this predictable outcome, what is it about The Long Dark that makes it so replayable? Beyond learning about optimal survival strategies, what’s the real payoff for The Long Dark players? And what does the game’s survival premise have to do with it? Or the digital medium that brings it all to life?

As I am hoping to demonstrate, the realistic solo survival theme and game mechanics of The Long Dark (TLD) are an encapsulation, in dramatic form, of the contemporary techno-culture trend going under the name of the “Quantified Self”. In this article, I propose to show how the game’s structural components – core mechanics, aesthetics, pacing, feedback systems and player self-management model – mirror the activity of self-tracking practitioners, i.e. people using the latest technological tools to “self-improve”. In my view, the sharply honed survival theme of TLD provides us with an opportunity to make sense of self-tracking behavior, by highlighting how users make decisions based on their interpretation of real-time personal metrics. Better yet, I am hoping that this under-the-hood examination of TLD might also help us understand what effects self-tracking practices are having on us, beyond the “benefits” carrot dangled before us by Quantified Self evangelists.

If you are what you eat, what happens when you eat data?
So what is this so-called Quantified Self “movement”, and what does it have to do with a solo winter survival simulator?

Like any self-respecting technology trend, the Quantified Self (QS) has an online HQ. Unfortunately, as the The Quantified Self’s website’s about page is rather circumspect, we’ll have to turn to good old Wikipedia to have the basics spelled out for us:


“The Quantified Self is a movement to incorporate technology into data acquisition on aspects of a person’s daily life in terms of inputs (e.g. food consumed, quality of surrounding air), states (e.g. mood, arousal, blood oxygen levels), and performance (mental and physical). Such self-monitoring and self-sensing, which combines wearable sensors (EEG, ECG, video, etc.) and wearable computing, is also known as lifelogging. Other names for using self-tracking data to improve daily functioning are “self-tracking”, “auto-analytics”, “body hacking”, “self-quantifying”, “self-surveillance”, and “Personal Informatics”. In short, quantified self is self-knowledge through self-tracking with technology.”


If QS evangelists are at pains to point out that the practices of self-tracking are historically-rooted – for example health journaling across the ages – one can’t help but notice the coincidental growth of such a movement with the historical appearance of computers, and its even neater intersection with the technological regime of Big Data – barely half a decade old as we speak. As the name suggests, the Quantified Self (QS) movement combines detailed and pervasive technological monitoring of bodily processes with contemporary neoliberal “practices of the self”. Thus the theories, practices and values promoted by the movement seek to seamlessly blend technology and flesh for the ostensible goals of individual self-improvement, health management, and lifestyle optimization.


Though it has a predominantly individual focus, the Quantified Self movement is also poised for new configurations of “optimized individuals” with the various “social” layers of the Big Data regime. A recently-published book on the QS movement by sociologist Deborah Lupton, identifies five modes of tracking that pertain to these new, Big Data-enabled practices of the self: private, pushed, communal, imposed and exploited tracking. These five modes exist in a continuum where individual agency is, to various degrees, being perceptibly and/or imperceptibly acted upon by analytics operators, for purposes not always known to the user.

Indeed, the key way to differentiate each mode of self-tracking is the nature of the consent involved in each type of use: from complete in the case of “private” use, to fully absent in the case of “exploited” use. If Lupton is at pains to remain neutral and descriptive in her assessments of the QS movement, the more I read her book, the more it seems to me that the hopes and promises pushed by the movement’s evangelists are tantamount to a “phishing operation” on its users. That is, under the guise of enhancing individual quality of life and self-knowledge through an avant-garde and cool “tech movement”, the Quantified Self movement aims to subsume individuals into the regime of Big Data, on a voluntary basis.

The Long Dark: Making Stories Out of Metrics
Let’s look a little closer at this “voluntary” aspect of the QS elevator pitch, and see how it fares in the simulation space. My contention here is that The Long Dark (TLD) is a sort of “negative mirror” of the Quantified Self. That is, in the guise of a first-person “walking simulator” set a fictional survival problem-space, TLD shows the player what every QSer is ultimately reduced to: his/her vital statistics, and what to do about them.

To develop my argument, I want to delve into some of the key features of TLD, to demonstrate how the team at Hinterland Studios have turned the banal activity of vital stats monitoring into an engrossing (virtual) wilderness adventure – full of tension, highs and lows, and the occasional breath-taking moment of gladness and respite.

First, the setting. The Long Dark, it must be said, is a truly beautiful game. To be sure, the game’s integrated visual and sound design aesthetic is a core pillar of the dev team’s original vision for the game. That said, if you were looking for CryEngine style of realism, you packed your gear for the wrong kind of wilderness simulator. TLD is both visually stylized and acoustically fully-rendered to give the player a sense of presence in the great, frozen outdoors, full of lonely dread and wonder. As such, the unique integration of visual and sound elements of the game work together to create a sense of heightened awareness in the player.

Punctuated with atmospheric music, the experience of roaming through this foreboding environment opens up play to a surprisingly wide variety of emotional ranges, despite the stress of moment-to-moment survival. Thus the immersive quality of TLD comes from the players slow, plodding, and often gut-wrenching traversing of a beautifully crafted visual and soundscape. As it stands, it’s a splendid aesthetic achievement.

Of course, TLD is no Proteus. You’re not wandering around for the pure joy of discovery. You are, in effect, desperate. You’ve got four status bars to constantly attend to: body temperature, fatigue, thirst and hunger. Failure to monitor these, and respond appropriately, results in swift death. To beginning players, just trying to grasp what exactly must be done in order to fend off doom seems like an impossible affair. Why? The people at Hinterland have a stated design philosophy never to indulge the player with any hand-holding.

And it shows. There’s no mini-map, you get lost all the time – even as you learn to get your bearings – you have to search everywhere and everything, and you have to cut your losses on a regular basis. You’re also not told which buttons to push, or how to do anything. Its “real” survival, my friend: you’ve got to figure it all out by yourself.

Yet mysteriously, the game somehow “shows” you the way, in its interface design, feedback mechanics, and simply by virtue of pushing you ever onward to find the next granola bar, or safe site to light a fire, eat and rest. You learn the various ways to feed and clothe yourself, and how to craft the various materials you manage to find, and transform. Giving credence to Sid Meier’s design adage that “games are a series of interesting decisions”, the Hinterland design team has made self-management and survival crafting into a constantly fascinating, if not nail-biting, creative puzzle. Every skill you learn is tied to a progression system, that opens up the variety of uses of the little things you find on your path. Find a deer carcass, you’ll learn to harvest meat, or hide, or gut, for their many uses, tied to real-life survival knowledge.

Cure the hide indoors for enough days, and you’ll be able to fashion for yourself some optimally-warm clothing, especially useful for exploring in stormy conditions, or surviving outside during night-time. You can never lose sight of your vital stats, though. Carving out a piece of meat from a deer corpse will take you time – time to freeze your butt off, become more hungry or tired, or worse – be pounced onto by a winter predator. Thus every little decision counts against other potential trade-offs imposed by your immediate environment and your current physical state and prospects… for the next few minutes, and hours.

The main “gameplay loop” of TLD is thus centered on the activities of exploration and self-management. This, I suspect, is the reason why the Hinterland team is constantly busy with game balancing. The player’s main decision-making constraints are the character’s vital statistics and the method of reasoning adopted by players in extremis – that is, how each player reacts to the situation he or she finds him or herself in, based on locale, weather conditions, inventory, perceived prospects and vital stats.

Now “balance” in interactive entertainment is a relative thing: some players just want to explore and enjoy the sights, others want to be put their skills to the mettle, and have surprises – good or bad – around every turn. Therefore, a key way of “architecting” the game for balance has been to create different kinds of maps and game difficulties, in response to different play-styles and player expectations. And though the game still is (circa June 2016) in alpha “sandbox mode” (i.e. “see how long you can survive”), the new challenge modes as well as a revamped skill progression system seem to indicate that the eventual story mode will, indeed, be the outcome of a long design process “from the ground up”.

In a nutshell, here’s how, in my opinion TLD works its magic. First, TLD tells its “story” from the bottom-up. What I mean by this is that the normally tedious and self-centered activity of self-tracking is dramatized in TLD. How does this work? First, the player face is pressed hard, so to speak, against his/her own vital stats. The degrading calculus of health stats forces the player to self-manage optimally, and eggs the player on to explore a difficult environment which also pushes against him or her, thereby creating an internal tension that besets all decision-making in the game.

Yet TLD somehow pulls this off without creating a sense of heaviness in the toil. The game compensates for this internalized tension by providing a sense of agency to the player, in the manipulation of his/her immediate environment. Except for the hopeless moments where all is lost, the player always has something to do. The relatively rare “safe” locales also serve to punctuate the vast danger zones to wander around in. Adding further contrast, the “safe” locales are generally dark, drab and empty feeling – excepting the occasional hearth, source of warmth and life – while the great outdoors, deadly if one is out there exposed for too long, are also quite beautiful, and strangely full of life.
Another layer to TLD’s “emergent narrative design” is the overlapping rhythms of game systems and states. Because of the design of its gameplay loop, TLD intersects the player’s narrow focus on self-management with the perceptual acuity and openness required for the activity of exploration. Further complexity is layered inside these “inward” and “outward” psychological pulls, with, for example, specific rhythms tied to each life metric (hunger, thirst, fatigue and temperature, and their various modifiers) as well as dynamic, interweaving world systems (day/night cycles, unpredictable weather conditions, wildlife patterns) that all impinge on each other. Thus, with the savvy and subtle layering of overlapping life-cycle rhythms, TLD is able to dissolve the tedium of micro-management into a seamless human vs. nature survival simulation experience. In this way, the obsession over vital stats and character metrics takes on a narrative quality. Thanks to this “polyrhythmic” narrative design philosophy, TLD is able to create dramatic tension out of interweaving game systems, for the benefit of player immersion.

This unique combination of core design elements – an integrated aesthetic, an effective gameplay loop, subtle game balancing, interweaving game systems and a compelling player decision-making model – mixed together into one swell package, makes TLD the perfect vehicle for peering into the “soul” of the hyper-rational world of the Quantified Self. In a nutshell, TLD dramatizes vital statistics, at the individual level. Furthermore, these reflexions on The Long Dark experience bring to the fore a less-discussed aspect of self-tracking culture: how Big Data transforms its “end users”, and how the narrow focus of self-optimization ultimately turns every user of self-tracking tools into a survivor.

Ironic, considering most of us in the West live in a world awash with material goods, and “prosperous” outlooks.

The Digital Economy: a Game of Survival for All
Here’s the point I’m driving at: The Long Dark experience can help us unpack the individualist bias of the Quantified Self paradigm, and see the self-measurement junkie as an ideal-type – a collective, abstracted individual, irresistibly drawn into aggregate behavior, by virtue of self-tracking technologies and practices. Otherwise put: at the individual level, the QSer can indeed be seen as merely “optimizing” his or her life, in line with personal goals and preferences. But at the aggregate level, s/he ultimately becomes a “lone survivor” ideal-type, reduced to adjusting his or her behavior in relation to the aggregate functions of the Big Data-scape, in line with current economic realities.

Now, there’s a reason why the devs of TLD have set their game in a post-apocalyptic, end-of-history, great outdoors setting. They wanted to make a first-person solo survival simulator. And solo survival is, by its very nature: ahistorical.
Which tells you already a lot about the historical moment we find ourselves in right now.

Indeed, this whole QS movement only makes sense when seen in its wider context. We in the post-industrialized West are told that we now live in a “knowledge economy”. Forty years of industrial gutting and outsourcing to Asia has come with a heavy price: ecological and economic disaster in the Third World, metastasizing megacities in Asia, massive unemployment and rising social unrest in the West, and the normalization of job insecurity at every level of the social ladder – sold to us, of course, as “world citizenship”, “entrepreneurial opportunity”, “workplace flexibility”, and “life-work balance”.

And my personal favorite: The 4-Hour Workweek.

By and large most of us are now used to these prospects. We’ve internalized the imperatives of self-management, and embraced its promises of self-emancipation and actualization. It should therefore come as no surprise that “spontaneous” movements like the Quantified Self have suddenly made their appearance on the tech scene, in an attempt to further sell us the virtues and habits of self-management as the best path to happiness and prosperity.

Of course, there’s a flip side to all this. If the digital economy is turning us into perpetual optimizers, our new data-enhanced, endlessly reconfigurable “liquid” identities force upon us the habits of survivors. And increasingly lone survivors, at that. And if Tesla CEO Elon Musk is in any way correct in his balderdash assertion that “we all live in a cosmic simulation”, then perhaps survival sims like The Long Dark are beginning to look somewhat prophetic.

Maybe even a little too prophetic.
This War of Mine: Human Survival and the Ethics of Care

It’s when your favorite character gets pointlessly killed that you truly begin playing This War of Mine.

It’s a psychologically jarring moment, known to produce “rage quit” for players of the game. I’ve seen people complain on the Steam game forums about the clunky game controls, where a character fails to respond to imminent danger in the appropriate way: fight or flight. And when one of my characters – Christo – opened a door I didn’t want him to open only to get shot by some anonymous thug, because I tugged at my gamepad stick in a moment of panic, that’s precisely the kind of blame and disgust I had going through my head: toward the game devs!

But there it is, that pointless death – “permadeath” in video game parlance (you can’t reboot the game session to get your character back). A plain dumb game moment, it seems, considering how it happened. What’s the point in continuing? Should you just restart with another playthrough?

Before you hit the menu button, the game takes you back to the shelter. It’s a horrible moment, because you know what’s coming: namely, a little girl who will learn that her father was killed during the night. The other two ladies living with her are either sick, or just plain aloof. In fact, Christo and his daughter Iskra were the only characters you even liked. And there they are, the three survivors – in pain, unlikable and just plain stuck together – having to face the day ahead with the news of Christo’s violent death.

It’s a heartbreaking moment. So much so I put my gamepad down, and stared at the characters in various poses of apathy or pain. I really felt like quitting, and starting over from scratch.

But that’s exactly the point of this game. Sure, take a break from the game, start a new playthrough if you want. But stare numbly at your safe house long enough, mesmerized by the human fish stuck in the war fishbowl, and you’ll suddenly be aware of that your anger and disappointment directed at the game devs can be – should be! – transposed to the stupid futility of civilian war deaths. Indeed, on the other side of the virtual mirror, someplace in the world right now – maybe even not too far from where you live – people are getting fresh news of the pointless and violent death of a loved one. And life must continue for the survivors, even if they feel emotionally dead, and beyond repair.

Isn’t this what this game is about, after all?

So if, like me, you’ve experienced this “stupid-rage” moment and have let your emotions sink in, you know that this is truly when the game begins for the player. Not when you’re tasking away in the shelter, trying to best manage your group needs. Nor when you are out rummaging in the war zone, trying to find the stuff you need to survive. No, the game begins when your morale is at its lowest and you just want to throw in the towel. Because, lucky you, it’s just a war survivor simulator. And if you can’t emotionally go past this painful moment, then you haven’t been paying much attention to This War of Mine.

War and Suffering in the Age of Videogames
Officially launched in 2014 to widespread critical acclaim, This War of Mine offers a unique take on a familiar video game theme: war. Instead of putting you on the front as a virtual soldier fighting the good fight, or in the bunker as a general ordering faceless units on a battlefield, This War of Mine proposes that you experience modern war from the point of view of civilians, trapped in a besieged city. Largely inspired by survivor testimonials of the 1990s conflict in former Yugoslavia – more precisely, the siege of Sarajevo – the Polish team of 11 Bit Studios took to the challenge of telling the story of thousands of anonymous war survivors in a medium that has traditionally favored the glorification of war, either in the action or strategy genres.

The gambit has paid off. Aside from the critical acclaim, and the many prizes that have come with the tackling such a sensitive theme in an entertainment format, game critics have also pointed out how 11 Bit Studios have taken advantage of the unique features of interactive media to tell stories of war survivors in ways not possible with “traditional” media. Indeed, This War of Mine flips the traditional association of video games with desensitization toward violence and war on its head. In the game, you control a group of characters stuck in the everyday grind of basic survival in a dangerous war zone. As an interactive storytelling experiment, the game offers new ways of building empathy between real war survivors and people who have not experienced war first hand – even if they have been exposed to (arguably desensitizing) mass media representations of violent conflict all their lives.

Indeed, one of the reasons 11 Bit Studios has received much praise has been its treatment of the topic of civilian survivors of war. Eschewing emotionalism and sensationalism, the design team has sought to immerse players in a situation in which war is the “new normal” of a trapped civilian population. The developers have deliberated chosen to focus on the ordinary over the extraordinary, and the anonymous over the historically famous. In other words, This War of Mine (TWoM) aims to raise awareness about the experience of living in a war zone, and the normalization of such pitiless environments in which countless people have to fend for their survival, and reinvent society in the face of social and institutional breakdown.

With this theme in mind, the primary goal of the team of 11-Bit Studios has also been to build a good game, and engage players through satisfying gameplay and character empathy. If game critics and players have overwhelmingly responded in positive ways to TWoM, I will not repeat what has already been said in praise of the game. Instead, I would like to focus on the historical message the game conveys, and analyze the storytelling format offered by TWoM, and its links to the study of human behavior in social science. Indeed, one of the most common statements of praise we hear about TWoM, is the uniqueness of the game in the gaming landscape. Like Limbo in 2011, it has often been said about TWoM that it has helped raise the status of games to level of Art – that is, TWoM communicates something intrinsic to being human, and that the “play” experience it offers confronts the player to stark truths of human history: war and survival.

That said, I have not read anywhere any analysis of TWoM’s storytelling experiment in reference to modern historical method. This is unfortunate, as the game beckons that we lean into the abyss of the historical record to listen for voices that have not adequately been accounted for, except perhaps in historical fiction. Indeed, the field of historical research – and historical writing in general – has often been accused of bias towards the more visible and famous historical actors and events, and bias against less visible subjects of history, namely: the anonymous multitude who have not left any real, tangible trace of their existence, beyond the long line of descendants that make human societies. TWoM is clearly a shout-out to these unknown subjects of history in their most generic manifestation: small group survival in difficult times.

This ordinary fact of history – the hardship of survival – has posed difficult challenges to historical research on many occasions. As the discipline of history is predicated on documentary evidence, modern historians have used many different rhetorical tactics to construct “collective historical actors” from existing data.

Or lack of! Interestingly, modern historical methods have often used inference – or indirect reasoning – based on lack of historical data. For example, the nineteenth century romantic historian Jules Michelet famously gave voice to the mute French peasant, using innovative literary techniques. Karl Marx proposed that history was a process that pitted the anonymous masses against their historically visible masters, a process which would invariably lead to the end of all class conflict and the resurgence of ignored historical actors, with the collapse of capitalism under its own contradictions. French Annales historians opened up the definition of “source materials” to geographic data and administrative records, in order to articulate the deeper structures of historical experience one couldn’t glean from official sources. And the more recent Subaltern Studies, originating in South Asia, have taught historians to read classic source materials “against the grain”, in order to restitute the voice of the oppressed from official sources.

It is my belief that interactive storytelling experiments such as TWoM can provide an ingenious solution to these problems of historical method. The generic scene of survival in times of war throws a sharp focus on the classes of human activities that are irreducible to all culture groups. Otherwise put, war strips bare the accumulated baggage of human culture to its basic “components”. As such, an evidence-based fictional reenactment of wartime survival such as TWoM, allows us examine the basic mechanisms – or “minimum requirements”, if you will – of group survival and cohesion. Furthermore, as a tool for historians, the TWoM story engine can provide us with an experimental model for creating social science “ideal-types”, or collective historical actors constructed out of aggregate behavior. For it is in the generic aspect of the storytelling material generated by TWoM – based on the accounts of actual war survivors – that we can give flesh and voice to the multitudes forgotten by the event-horizon of History, in the wake of destructive war.

Experiment Design: Survive the War
So how does TWoM generate a “collective historical actor” out of its gameplay?

As every game designer knows, designing gameplay is generally a “ground-up” affair. That is, the player experience goals of a game must be reflected in the overall architecture of the game, as defined by game theme, genre and aesthetics, and more tangibly, the moment-to-moment gameplay which gives rise to storytelling opportunities. In other words, to understand how TWoM tells the story of anonymous war victims, we need to examine how the people of 11 Bit Studios have implemented their player experience goals for the game, and assess to what degree TWoM succeeds in telling this kind of story.

Now obviously, the theme of the game is group survival in a war-torn urban environment. This storytelling angle, while it may seem banal as a fait accompli, conditions every single player experience goal for the design team: game genre, visual and sound style, storytelling format, game mechanics, progressions system, player objectives, etc. To keep things simple, I will focus my analysis on the primary game modes TWoM uses to tell the story of small group survival in modern, war-torn cities. The way I see it, the storytelling design of TWoM is based on an implementation of two distinct and interdependent modes of gameplay, which we will name care-taking, and hunting-providing.

For the sake of clarity, I would like to make a distinction between game mechanics and game modes, even if they are obviously intertwined. In fact, one of the key design features of TWoM is that the game mechanics that govern character movement, interactions, resource allocation and crafting activities both underpin and tie together these two game modes – one which is outward-going, the other which is inward-focused. An in-depth analysis of game mechanics will therefore not be on the table for this investigation.

Rather, I want to argue that the two primary game modes of TWoM follow anthropological constants[i], which are summarized in the activities of care-taking and hunting-providing. A few qualifying remarks right off the bat: if TWoM is careful not to attribute these two modes to classic gender roles, it does cleverly assign them to day and night cycles, almost as an inversion of gender stereotypes. Thus, in lieu of the traditional male diurnal and female nocturnal archetypes (i.e. male sun and female moon divinities in world mythology) the “female” care-taking activity is assigned to the day portion of the day-night cycle, and the “male” hunting-providing activity is assigned to the night portion.

This, of course, has everything to do with the realities of war survival, and does not reflect any explicit program to upend traditional archetypes by the design team of TWoM. Rather, the “inversion of gender stereotypes” is more akin to a flattening of identities that arises in dire situations such as small group survival, in which all members of the group tend to share in the everyday tasks of food preparation, shelter upkeep, scavenging for necessities and care-taking of others, despite individual traits and talents. Nevertheless, if the game allows player to assign missions and tasks to characters based on specific traits, occupational roles do tend to self-assign by virtue of the wartime circumstances, which, again, the design team has hard coded into two modes of gameplay with the day/night cycle.

Anthropological Constants in This War of Mine
To my knowledge, TWoM is the first game that links care-taking and hunting-providing as interdependent human activities, in the form of alternating game modes. My central argument is that the care-taking activities assigned to the day portion of the game and the hunting-providing activities assigned to the night portion, express anthropological constants the are the hallmark of human survival, and the foundation of human culture. But where TWoM truly shines, I believe, is in showing how fundamental care-taking activities are to human survival, whereas most other survival games on the market tend to focus on primitive accumulation and the activities of hunting-providing, with care-taking playing second fiddle.

With this in mind, it’s important that we not let the war theme of TWoM lead us astray from the lessons the game teaches us about this overlooked anthropological constant. Though omnipresent in anthropology, ordinary care-taking activities are a fairly rare occurrence in historical research. They have also been downplayed in many social sciences that have sought to theorize human and social development. I am reminded here of the 1980s controversy surrounding Carol Gilligan’s “ethics of care”, a feminist theory of moral development that sought to address this glaring blind spot of western thought.

A few words about this controversy, as it concerns the way TWoM handles moral dilemmas.

Feminist scholar Carol Gilligan came to prominence in the 1980s when she challenged prevailing theories of moral development, at the time largely derived from the work of Swiss psychologist Jean Piaget. Gilligan took to task her mentor Lawrence Kohlberg, a disciple of Piaget, arguing that Kohlberg’s model of child moral development was normed to masculine standards, which emphasized the logical resolution of moral dilemmas, and an understanding of the principles of justice. Gilligan noted that young girls systematically appeared “morally deficient” by these standards. Troubled by Kohlberg’s work, she set out to examine the specific ways young girls resolved ethical difficulties, in order to contrast them to the responses given by boys to moral dilemmas.


The result was a recasting of Kohlberg’s theory of moral development, inclusive of a relationship-focused style of conflict resolution. In interview after interview, Gilligan noted that girls tended to resolve moral dilemmas by assessing the relational impacts of difficult decisions. The results, greatly expounded upon in In a Different Voice[ii], came to be known as the ethics of care, a new theory of moral development that emphasized the previously-overlooked feminine “ethics of proximity”, alongside the justice-centered “phallocentric” model of ethical decision-making.

Playing the Ethics of Care
In my view, TWoM is a unique illustration of this “ethics of care” in the culture of video games. So much so that the activities of care-taking underpin all life-sustaining activities of group survival in the game, highlighting them as anthropological constants. The first and most essential layer of the care-taking model[iii] in TWoM involves the mechanics of character health and morale. Every character has vital stats that reflect his or her overall health status: fatigue, hunger, disease, and mood[iv]. As war is experienced as attrition, the daily toil of scarcity and fear is reflected in the degrading physical and psychological health of every character living in the player’s home base. Thus the main concern of the player throughout the game is to maintain health and morale for his or her crew, alongside finding what is needed for survival.
As the game pushes scarcity down the player’s throat, the player is inevitably confronted with making difficult resource allocation decisions for his characters. This is where moral dilemmas make their first appearance in TWoM, bringing the ethics of care to the forefront. As time goes on, a player may be tempted to focus on some characters, at the expense of “bottom feeders”. In Lawrence Kohlberg’s moral decision-making model, this is akin to the traditional “moral trade-off” type of decision. Difficult decisions amount to maintaining some lives, and letting go of others – war as an expression of “survival of the fittest”. This is certainly a possibility in the game, and a typical one for video games in general: get rid of the obstacle, and let self-interest dictate the morality of one’s conduct “for the sake of the tribe”.
Were it that simple! This moral weighing of “costs and benefits” decisions in TWoM is compounded with psychological consequences. Disposing of the weak potentially removes a vital link in the general ecosystem of survival. That sick character that’s dragging everyone down is also part of the bigger picture of health and morale. The presence of a vulnerable human being one must take care of keeps the other care-takers motivated, and ready to take risks in order to acquire basic necessities, and much-valued medicine. Thus players find themselves constantly attending to collective morale alongside individuals wants and needs, through care-taking interactions and potentially risky hunting-providing.

After all, all it takes is one desolate child, mute to all entreaties, to bring the whole house down to a grinding halt.

This everyday morale upkeep is largely achieved by the interactions between the characters in the player’s shelter. One character can prepare a meal, and provide this meal to someone sick and bedridden. Or the player can choose to allot a given portion of food or medications either to a needy character, or a relatively fit caregiver who needs to stay fit for the sake of others. As the game progresses, the player must ensure that the characters are always talking and interacting with one another, and generally making the home base cozy, warm and secure. Failure to pay attention to these critical details can quickly devolve into a downward spiral of collective ill-health and despair.
11 Bit Studios have also decided to tactfully present the issue of death from illness and despair, especially with the addition of children to the game with The Little Ones DLC. Stark Polaroids are presented to the player at important story points, to announce for example the disappearance of a character from the shelter. This muted approach to storytelling allows the gameplay to remain focused on whatever the player can do, within the realm of the possible actions, while allowing the player to let go of what he or she can no longer control, or act upon.
A final touch to this care-taking mode is the link between hunting-providing and care-taking activities. As I’ve already said, the developers of TWoM decided to make these two game modes complementary. One simply cannot survive for long in one’s shelter without risking contact with the outside world, against potential friend and foe. Nor can one be a scavenger for long, without the knowledge that one can retreat back to home base for rest and sustenance, no matter how meager the resources.

During the night-time scavenging missions, the mechanics of movement and interaction that allow the player to build and allocate resources at home are stripped down to their essentials. Fighting interactions are also added to the night-time portion in case of hostile encounters. But lest players get too comfortable with this typical video game way of solving problems, aggressive players pay the additional penalty of a “morale pushback” in the case of wanton disregard of other people’s lives and property, with the rapid moral decline of the offending character. Thus, the responsibility of care-taking is fully thrust into the player’s hands, by showing that ethically questionable decisions – even if taken under duress – can have potentially catastrophic effects on everyone, if players opt for a purely self-centered strategy.
War: What is It Good For?
In short, perhaps the greatest achievement of TWoM is in its bold and unambiguous demonstration of the dead end of War, without ever succumbing to moralizing, or pulling emotional strings. Try a few playthroughs of TWoM, and you’ll become convinced that war time living conditions cannot be humanly sustained in the mid- to long-term. TWoM teaches us that surviving in a society that has succumbed to war reduces the perspective of life to a matter of hours, days and weeks. At most. And as the historical record has shown many times over, those who succeed in surviving the ordeal of war are forever altered physically and psychologically, never quite able to readapt to regular peacetime society.

On a deeper level, as I have tried to argue, TWoM has brought back to the table of historical research an essential aspect of historical experience: the activities of care-taking which, alongside activities of hunting-providing, structure both pre-historical and historical societies. In my view, TWoM’s dual-mode gameplay provides a useful summary of these two anthropological constants, and demonstrates their interdependence. And if we have lost sight of small-scale interdependency in our technologically-advanced and politically-emancipated societies, then perhaps This War of Mine can remind us of how fragile we remain, underneath the veneer of civilization.

Banished: It Takes a Village to Raise a Surplus

Kaplunk: “Your reserve in tools is low.” Kaplunk: “Your reserve in firewood is low.” Kaplunk: “Your reserve in food is low.”

Kaplunk, kaplunk, kaplunk. It’s that sound, familiar to any Banished player, announcing low resources, or villager deaths. The sound that keeps you attentive to your village’s “vital statistics” – the resource stockpiles and citizen head count – like a surgeon monitoring the vital stats of a patient on the operating table, with a distracted eye.

Like a surgeon, you know you’ve got to stay calm, and focused on the task at hand. In Banished, this means effectively building up your colony and allocating your labour pool to various specialized production tasks – agriculture, mining, forestry, or manufactured goods. But you can’t let your attention drift away too long from your village’s vital stats. Let any of your stockpiled resources fall too low, and you may soon end up getting swallowed down into a spiral of negative collateral effects.

Food is a fairly straightforward affair: if the stockpile grows thin, your villagers will begin to starve, and die off. Ditto for firewood, or basic clothing : can’t keep your villagers warm? Once winter rolls around, see how many of them make it to spring.

But what about less straightforward indicators? For example, the lack of tools? Once those little yellow tool icons start popping up above your villagers’ heads, it’s only a matter of time that they’ll become unable to go about their tasks. That’s your whole village economy that’s about to grind to a halt, all because you didn’t foresee the timely arrival of iron ore and wood into your resource stockpiles, or didn’t have a village forge running properly. Keeping a good reserve of tools therefore also means keeping a constant eye on iron extraction, and making sure there’s lots of wood coming in for both home heating and tool making.

And then there’s that fluctuating birth-to-death ratio, pressing you to constantly re-allocate your narrow labour pool. Wondering why so many people are dying off, and too few births to compensate? That one took me a few dead villages to figure out. Basically, you must build new homes adjusted to your population growth. Build too few homes, and the families will bunch up together, not letting young couples do what comes natural, and bring little ones into the world. Build too many homes, and you’ll have people living in them alone, with the same dismal result. Add to this the freeing up of individual “home slots” whenever an aging worker passes, and you’ve got a population puzzle that requires constant monitoring, and tweaking.

The Art and Science of the Village Surplus
Initially a one-man development effort, Banished has, since its release in 2014, established itself as a perennial favourite in the niche market of city-building simulations, attracting a loyal fan base and a lively community of modders in its wake. The version of Banished I will be reviewing in this article is a full-fledged expansion of the game, the Colonial Charter mod. Colonial Charter builds on the basic game with a full gamut of village buildings and trade specializations that expand on the game’s quasi-historical frontier colonization theme.

That said, if the Colonial Charter mod adds a rich variety of economic specializations to choose from, it does leave the game’s core mechanics unaltered. The basic premise of Banished is simple: fail to produce a surplus of basic goods and resources, and the viability of your village will be threatened. In the wake a declining stockpiles, your population will succumb to various woes – mostly huger, cold and ill-health  – and start to die off. Sometimes you can pull through and start to build up your population again. But there is also a good chance you may never recover from a drastic population drop. Survival in Banished thus hinges on controlling production as best as the player can, to ensure there is enough of a surplus in vital product categories such food, tools, and fuel. Just how much of a surplus – and of what kind of goods – depends in turn on the player’s village design, map type, game difficulty, and population growth/village expansion patterns.

Easier said than done. Plan your village all you want, before you know it, you’re laying waste to the environment around the settlement just so your villagers can keep producing and reproducing through the winter. And how do you get over that potential village-breaking disaster? For one, you can’t let villagers stray too far away from home to gather resources, and set up lousy supply chains or risk exposure. So you’ll have to find some cottage-industry method of extracting resources, whether a mine, a quarry, or woodcutter’s shed. You discover in the process that your adorable village settlement is now a hungry economic engine, swallowing up more than it can effectively churn out. If you haven’t built out too far in the wrong direction, it’s time for a redesign. So you build new homes in small clusters, near the centers of production and resource extraction – that way your workers don’t have to travel too far to work. You also build a marketplace, to centralize distribution in between residential and cottage industry hubs. Finally you build a town hall, to monitor all town inputs and outputs more effectively.

Once you’ve got the engine of production working, it’s time to acquire what can’t be obtained from your immediate environment or production output, through trade. Thus, part of your production surplus is “liquidated” through simple barter transactions at a trading house, in exchange for new seeds, animals, and goods. If there is no money in Banished (or at least in the basic game), every good you’ve produced and stockpiled becomes a “money-form” (to quote Karl Marx) in the account books of the trading house, with a nominal value attached to it. Thus, mushrooms are worth one “unit of exchange”, while iron tools are worth eight. Accumulate a valuable and diverse set of goods in your trading house, and you’ll soon be able to bundle them together in a single transaction to equate the nominal value of herd animals, new crop seedlings or any other good not produced in your village. Thus, the problem of the surplus takes on a new dimension – commerce – nudging the player to optimize village inputs and outputs for surplus production, all the while ensuring that part of this surplus can allocated for market transactions to obtain new goods, or new production inputs.

Be careful though: it’s easy to get overconfident with a huge surplus in a given category, only to find, in the event of a sudden downturn one has to urgently transfer goods from the trading house back into the town’s market or stockpile, in a desperate attempt to alleviate a crisis. Indeed, it doesn’t take much to tip the balance you’ve painstakingly set up – say, in favour of manufactured goods destined for trade – to the requirements of food production or resource extraction tied to population increases. Thus, even if you are micro-managing your labour pool and resource production limits effectively, the economic engine of Banished revolves around the classic problem of the surplus. Master the surplus, and you’ll be able to expand at a steady and relatively stable clip. Lose control of the surplus, and Banished changes from a city-builder to a survival management game. It’s really that cut and dry.

Of Settlements and Sims
Lucky for us, Banished is considered to be both a city-builder and a survival sim. As I have already outlined, this is due to the design choice of simulating a small-scale economy of a settler society, in the city-builder genre. That Banished has a colonial setting is no mere coincidence, and I will analyze this thematic choice further down the road. For the moment being, I would like to focus my argument on the historical message carried by the simulation. The faceless villagers that live, work and die in your beautifully-crafted village hearken back to a prototypical situation that cuts across time and cultures, and yet is tied with the very idea of historical development: human settlement in a fixed geographic location. This theme of permanent settlement – and the production-based economies that gave rise to it – is often referred to by historians as “the backbone of civilization”, extending from the neolithic revolution right down to the present. And if history has given us plenty of narrative to embellish the tale, it has also unfortunately buried some of the more vexing issues of human settlement below the surface of historical awareness.

Enter Banished, a video game centered around the agonies and ecstasies of “designing” a functioning village economy, from a top-down perspective. As a game, Banished is situated on the trajectory of the well fleshed-out niche of economic simulations that go under the name of “city-builders”. City-builders have a fascinating history of their own, and as a genre they tend to focus on the organization, optimization and scaling of simulated economies – or to put it more crudely, “production systems”, with their “inputs” and “outputs”. Ever since Will Wright defined the genre with his celebrated opus SimCity, city-builders have by and large remained open-ended “sandbox” economic simulations, with minor structural or thematic variations to differentiate each new contender in the field. But the fundamentals remain the same: in every city-builder game, once players succeed in laying down basic human settlement systems, the only thing left to do is to build out, and expand. Thus, because of their “build your own economic engine” focus, settlement simulations tend to have city themes and a bias for territorial expansion.

Banished is not the first smaller-scale settlement simulation. It too, follows the curve of the typical city-builder in encouraging system optimization, and “urban” expansion. But where it differs from others city-builders, is in its sharp focus on the problem of the surplus – the “survival” angle of the simulation. Indeed, the remarkable thing about Banished is that manages to encapsulate, in game form, the Achilles’ heel of every settled human society: the production surplus. It is no accident that agricultural production and resource extraction play a central role in Banished, and that this focus on the economic roots of permanent settlements, in turn, draws players into the problem of the surplus. Banished thus simulates the prototypical survival situation of millions of anonymous village- and city-dwellers throughout history, from humanity’s first agricultural settlements to today’s bustling megalopolis, and their – indeed, our – dependency on surplus production.

Banished from Banished
Because of its focus on the “survival” issues of permanent human settlements, Banished ups the ante of economic simulation to new levels of fidelity. Designing the simulation’s problem-space around the effects of production surpluses simplifies the game’s economic model, highlighting traits common to all production settlements, whatever the scale. Indeed, Banished makes the case for production-based economies as ideal-types – as abstracted models sharing key characteristics – by demonstrating that agricultural surpluses are at the root of economic growth and decline.

Thus, gone are the high-level administrative categories found in other city-builders, such as zoning, infrastructure or budget categories – all hallmarks of city life. Despite the complexity of its game systems and the rich offerings of Colonial Charter mod, Banished plays as a streamlined, integrated whole. One key design decision for the game was to ensure that players focused on the villagers and their activities, and to make village expansion directly tied to population numbers. Ironically, this tight bounding of the player’s scope of action allows for greater creativity, compared to city-builders that give players carte blanche from the get go. In the end, if everything in Banished amounts to optimization of inputs and outputs, the game never comes across as a hyper-rationalized, top-down simulation of small-scale economies.

Which it remains, in essence. Many authors of Play the Past have noted the affinities between sims (and Tycoon-type games), and modern administration techniques. An oft-quoted reference on this blog is James C. Scott’s celebrated study of technocratic rationality, in the wake of failed modernist state reform projects. In Seeing Like a State, Scott introduces the concept of administrative legibility, to denote the utilitarian mind-set that state administrators and business managers impose upon the world, in their attempts to solve management problems. In order to “see like a state”, one must first make the messy natural or social world legible – or readable – by reducing real-world qualities to measurable and uniform identities, to be further acted upon by those in charge of harnessing living systems for productive output. Quoting Scott from his introduction:


“How did the state gradually get a handle on its subjects and environment? Suddenly, by processes as separate as the creation of permanent last names, the standardization of weight and measures, the establishment of cadastral surveys and population registers, the invention of freehold tenure, the standardization of language and legal discourse, the design of cities, and the organization of transportation seemed comprehensible as attempts at legibility and simplification. In each case, officials took exceptionally complex, illegible, and local social practices, such as land tenure customs and naming customs, and created a standard grid whereby it could be centrally recorded and monitored.


The organization of the natural world was no exception. Agriculture is, after all, a radical reorganization and simplification of flora to suit man’s goals. Whatever their other purposes, the design of scientific forestry and agriculture and the layout of plantations, collective farms, ujamaa villages, and strategic hamlets all seemed calculated to make the terrain, its products, and its workforce more legible – and hence manipulable – from above and from the centre.”[1]


Our modern world is, of course, fully-paved with such good (managerial) intentions. Indeed, we now take this once-radical epistemology so much for granted that the words and tools of our society’s coordinating classes completely permeate our lives. In this scheme of things, simulations can be seen as logical extensions of technocratic reason, where “seeing like a state” has become fully realized and naturalized, as a form of entertainment.

That said, is there a meaningful distinction to be made between simulation, and the social engineering activities of the state and of businesses? I think there is. The essential distinction lies, in my view, in the “mirror-like” quality of simulations, or the way simulations attempt to represent a given natural or social “system” (a process that critics of social engineering call reification). If social engineering extends administrative legibility to every living creature or thing, simulation limits this impulse: it places the “actionable” portions of the simulation into a specific domain of legibility, and the rest of the simulation’s underlying systems into a “black box”… of game mechanics.

This “black box” does not imply that the game mechanics of a simulation are necessarily invisible or inaccessible to the player. It means that the player’s synoptic view – or top-down grasp of the game’s systems, manifest in the control panel, or interface – is always limited in scope, by virtue of human cognitive capacity. Simply put, the human perceptual apparatus cannot fully grasp the complex and interacting sets of procedural systems churned out by computers – even if computer software is the product of human ingenuity and labour.

Indeed, the whole history of user interface design, and human-computer interactions, is beset with this issue. But I don’t want to delve into this topic here. Rather, I simply want to point out, like my Play the Past forebears, that “seeing like a state” is the name of the game of all simulations. By definition, simulations offer problem-spaces for their users to interact with. In doing this, they must put the greater portion of their underlying systems into a “black box”, outside the immediate perception of users. This is a core design issue for all simulations: how do you design an interesting problem-space for players, and achieve some degree of fidelity with regards to real-world systems modeled by computers? The answer is: by keeping the majority of the game’s systems in the “invisible part of the iceberg” – beneath the threshold of player awareness.

In the case of Banished, the “tip of the iceberg” portion of the simulation focuses the player’s attention around the problem of the economic surplus. To do this, the micro-economy “represented” in the game had to be stripped of texture and complexity, and simplified to yield measures and production units. The essence of seeing like a state. And so if Banished charms us with its bucolic visions of a settler village in colonial times – complete with smoke billows and wintry snowflakes – it also terrifies us with its single-minded focus on production and outputs, and its highly-abstracted reckoning of human effort, and life purpose. As a simulation, Banished carries with it all the pathologies of technocratic reason, simplifying life to a productivist symphony, in celebration of the many proliferating forms of pure function.

The Engine of Colonization
The last issue I want to address in this article is the value of Banished as an educational tool. In an earlier review of the game on Play the Past, educator Jeff Mummert pinpointed the strengths and weaknesses of Banished as a teaching tool, and its usefulness in demonstrating the “inner workings” of human settlements throughout history. Mummert also went on to suggest how certain game mods could be developed to provide more historical flavour to the game, as the Banished agrarian economy ideal-type can in principle be themed to different historical periods.

If you’ve followed the discussion so far, you’ll probably agree with me that we need to be careful with conducting historical investigation through the distorting lens of simulation. Mummert does provide sufficient caution with regards to classroom use of the game, and so I simply want to spell out in more detail what he has already outlined. In a nutshell: what specific distortions does Banished introduce into our assessment of human survival, as a collective endeavour?

In truth, Banished is the simulation equivalent of Adam Smith, a systematic description of “natural economies” that is far more idealized – and ideological – than it cares to admit. For example, Smith’s myth of barter and the origins of money – still found in economics textbooks today – makes the case for money-less, yet strangely money-like, form of exchange “antecedent” to money, which, because of its incommodious quid pro quo quality, was eventually supplanted by currency in order to facilitate “natural” exchange.


Banished does not make this model of barter a central game pillar – i.e. trade between villagers – but it does present a system of exchange that hearkens back to classical economics, at the micro-economical level of overall town production. Like economics theory, Banished naturalizes markets without direct reference to the state functions which, historically-speaking, made markets possible to begin with[2]. Ironically, retrofitting the Banished core game engine to an earlier agrarian civilization would require adding state functions such as taxation, policing, and even religion – something which Mummert also point to – all institutions that emerged in the wake of the neolithic revolution, over long periods of rural and urban development. And many ancient history-themed city-builders already do a fine job at this.
With these caveats in mind, it is my contention that the colonial settlement theme of Banished is no accidental choice. At the cusp of modernity, colonial settlers arriving in the New World carried with them the accumulated knowledge of post-feudal land exploitation, town settlement, and the seeds of the integrated world market. The image of the New World these settlers gave us was, for the longest time, bereft of native populations – an issue which history textbooks have finally begun to notice. Rather, European settlers encountered the “virgin” land of the new world as a tabula rasa, primed for harnessing, and exploitation. The “lessons of the neolithic revolution” could thus, in the case of seventeenth- and eighteenth-century European settler societies, come neatly packaged into portable form, for endless extension.

But European settlers, of all varieties and extractions? Without succumbing to controversy, let us at least take note of the affinities between the colonial settlers of Banished with the particular colonizing schemes of New Netherlands and New England. Spanish and Portuguese colonizers may indeed have opened the floodgates to New World riches by primitive exploitation. Overall though, they built very little independent productive capacity in the New World, aside from resource extraction and crop monoculture fueled by slave labour. Ditto for the French economy in the Caribbean – and even more so in New France, where utter dependence on the fur trade required countless live Indians to trade with. Rather, it appears that Banished has modeled for us the prototypical Dutch or English New World settlement, steadfast on virgin land and destined for economic autarky. A calvinist-derived New World, as it were[3].

Ineffably, Banished delivers us this colonial-utopia package as a template to test our theories of settlement and production, away from the hot and bloody mess of early-modern imperialism. Perhaps in ultimate homage to the spirit of capitalism, Banished requires no overt state apparatus: taxes, armies, infrastructure projects and public services. Banished allows us to see like a state, without the heavy impediments of a fully-realized state.  The synoptic view of the omniscient administrator in the game is fully-transparent, and given over to the essentials of economic production. The Banished village experiment is thus akin to the utopian mirage of a free-flowing economy sans les accoutrements de l’État[4] – a revolution long-heralded by market apologists, of all stripes and creeds.

But deploy, allocate and recombine as you may, the rules that govern life and death in Prototype Village are painfully clear. In Banished, you must optimize and expand, or die – by extinction, or by drowning in surplus production. Achieve anything “less”, and you will push your little group of anonymous settlers to the brink of nameless extinction. Banished from the historical stage, as it were, into the dissolving horizon of Progress and Markets.