Paradox Interactive: Game Worlds and (Political) Social Simulation
Author: Enthusiastic A-Jiang
Reviewer: Saito Shin
Everyone has played a game by “Paradox,” right? (Figure 1 shows Paradox’s official logo.) Anyone who enjoys historical strategy or simulation games will know the famous company. Headquartered in Stockholm, Sweden, Paradox has created many classic game series. Its games go on sale every year from April to May, so if you have not played one yet, now is the time. You may find something you like.
Why is Paradox so famous? Its players are said to be the most inhuman people in gaming history. Search for “Paradox players,” and you will see descriptions such as “demons” and “perverts.” But why are they considered inhuman? Take Stellaris as an example. Ordinary players fly spaceships through space, make friends with aliens, and discover unfamiliar civilizations. Paradox players capture aliens for food and purge alien species at the slightest disagreement. Every Paradox player has probably eliminated populations numbering in the hundreds of millions. In Cities: Skylines, meanwhile, they flood the world with sewage. In short, every Paradox player is an “Old Man of Ten Perfections” (Complete the old man).
The rest of this article will focus on two Paradox series that I think you will find interesting.
I. The Stellaris Series
First is Stellaris, a science-fiction epic comparable in scope to The Three-Body Problem and addictive from the first playthrough. Stellaris has moderate difficulty and is extremely open-ended. You can develop freely in a galaxy of almost any size. The entire Milky Way forms its setting, and the vast universe contains almost everything. You are not alone: the galaxy is home to other empires with different systems of government, species, and ideologies. You can expand, declare sovereignty, colonize Earth, develop technology, conduct diplomacy with other empires, sign agreements, wage war, and enslave or exterminate other species. You can instead coexist peacefully, establish a federation with other empires, encounter alien civilizations, and translate their languages. All of this can happen in Stellaris. The most exciting events, however, are the three late-game crises: Void Demons, the Extradimensional Invasion, and the Contingency.
(Interested readers can look them up on Baidu.)
If you are a science-fiction fan with plenty of time, you really, truly should play Stellaris. Even if you do not know how to play, you can still admire the vastness of the universe. Trust me: you will not regret it.
Beginner-Level Gameplay
Players say that Stellaris is a game about exploration. At the start, you first configure the civilization you have imagined—in plain terms, you create its character. It looks roughly like Figure 3 below (hhhhhh).
Once you finish creating it, the system assigns your civilization a personality based on the points you selected. The most common setup is a machine civilization (Mechanical civilization): an advanced defense system that continues to operate after the apocalypse of its original creators. (This makes the game much smoother, almost like playing Anipop: anyone with hands can do it.) The game then automatically divides the system into sectors, though there are also choices such as Skynet, Earthnet, and defense systems.
Take my own game as an example. I originally set my defense system as a Determined Exterminator, which meant that ideologically I had to wipe out every biological (organic) species. But while preparing to eliminate a civilization forgotten by love, I discovered that my system had mastered the hyperdrive long ago, which meant that I could not exterminate other organisms. A black hole near the home system, however, had a peculiar gravitational field that distorted the hyperlane between that system and the main galaxy. Even with hyperspace-jump technology, the civilization could not use it normally and remained trapped in the system like a prisoner. Since the system contained many planets, a civilization could begin on only one planet, then explore space and invade the life-forms on other worlds—the aliens of our real life.
The two original powers on the planet had been at war without end, and centuries of hatred had sunk into their bones. One of them was Li Shanchang. Its hyperspace technology had brought its black-hole and wormhole teleportation systems close to completion, and it was on the verge of leaving that godforsaken place for the vast galaxy. In a system dominated by a mechanical civilization, however, hostile powers will destroy your defense systems and level everything you have built. It feels like losing all your progress overnight, but the experience is still very nice. Most importantly, the game presents a realistic simulation of the universe. Many scenes from The Three-Body Problem appear in it, making the experience comparable to dozens of American blockbusters.
II. The Victoria Series
This is a relatively uncommon kind of economic and social-structure simulation, in which every social class has different economic and political demands. In Victoria, a policy cannot be implemented merely by clicking a button. It is unlike a single-player-like mobile online game such as Honor of Kings, where you can switch off your brain for an entire session. (I am not talking about Honor of Kings itself, of course, but about a brainless player like this editor. Boo-hoo! Have you ever suffered through nineteen consecutive losses? Do not follow my example and get so used to being reported.) Instead, policies receive support or resistance from different interest groups. Those groups may be pursuing private gain, or the livelihoods of a million grain-transport workers may depend on the issue.
Supporting and opposing interest groups exert their influence and compete with one another. The stronger the opposition, the more likely a reform is to become mired in argument and stagnation. For example, if the Qing gentry’s interest group is too influential, changing the education system to make private academies focus primarily on science becomes very difficult. Workers may want an eight-hour day while capitalists demand a twelve-hour one. Amid this endless exploitation, capital in the game rivals capital in real life.
(Here are a few examples everyone will know. At Foxconn, national regulations prescribe an eight-hour workday and treat anything beyond it as overtime. Yet the company uses twelve-hour shifts that rotate between night and day. I experienced this firsthand during the winter break of my first year at university; it was hell on earth and a miniature version of the game. Having looked at the bottom tier, consider the middle: the “Chrysanthemum Factory” should be familiar to everyone. I had the chance to intern there in my second year. “996” may be only a label; more than two-thirds of the time, the schedule was 9 a.m. to 11 p.m.—a full fourteen hours. Yes, really. Some people will say that the pay is high, and it certainly is… But that is not our focus. The point is to introduce the appeal we can find in the game. I think students of politics, management, and finance will enjoy the Victoria series.)
In the game, the player acts as the ruler, holding supreme power but also bearing the greatest responsibility and mission: serving the people, promoting the establishment of labor laws, and enabling people to live in peace. Because wealthy capitalist interest groups wield excessive influence, however, labor laws can be difficult to pass. The game lets players experience the enormous efforts that historically late-industrializing countries made to protect the growth of their domestic industries during the early stages of industrialization. At times it feels less like a game simulation than a miniature version of reality.
In many games, technology simply means domestic development and strength, and building a factory immediately produces money. The Victoria series does not present modern industrialization so simplistically. Its ideas are more advanced because they come from both our past and our present. Different buildings in the series have different statistics and effects, allowing the game to simulate populations more realistically. To operate, for example, a factory needs raw materials, workers, and customers. From the workers’ perspective alone, inadequate education may leave the factory unable to recruit enough literate employees. Independent farmers with stable lives may be so accustomed to that stability that they refuse factory work no matter how high the wages. If production exceeds demand and the products cannot be sold, the factory may also fail after exhausting its cash reserves.
The Victoria series sold poorly and received an average response when it was first released. Perhaps because of the era, the series was discontinued. Later, as time passed, the world economy recovered, and education in China gradually improved, more players discovered the distinctive framework and central ideas of the games, and the series slowly gained recognition.
Victoria’s Materialist View
Compared with Paradox’s earliest titles, Victoria II no longer constructs its world according to a historical timeline. Instead, it tries to identify the logic behind history. If Britain had not done so, could another feudal country have become the first to complete an Industrial Revolution by resolving its own problems? After the Industrial Revolution, everyday goods became scarcer than ever before, the population surged, and advancing industrialization put large numbers of artisans out of work. Might that country have begun migrating to the New World in the Americas before Britain in order to solve its population problem? The Industrial Revolution also produced too many goods. When a crisis emerged, might this country have sought to resolve it by dumping those goods (The Opium War of 1840 was Britain’s attempt to dump goods into China), and gone to war with a self-sufficient country that had not completed a modern industrial revolution? Once the world market had been fully divided, might imperialist wars have broken out among industrial countries? The game’s distinctive framework and materialist conception of history contain a fascinating internal logic that builds a complete virtual world.
Advice for Readers Who Want to Play Victoria
Victoria 3 is now available. It makes detailed changes to the earlier games, such as reducing their historicity, leaning further toward today’s diverse society, and fixing known bugs. The results are quite good. I am an engineering student who has played Victoria for three years, so if your budget is tight, I suggest waiting before buying it because it is rather expensive. Another option is to look for a “mirrored” version on certain shopping or secondhand platforms.
All right, that is the end of this installment!!
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