I’m Not Very Good at Strategy Games, But I Can’t Stop Playing Them
It may look like a spreadsheet vomited onto a bunch of hexagons, but to a man with a brain as broken as mine, this is what ultimate satisfaction looks like.
Games like Crusader Kings, Civilization, and the Endless series fill my Steam account. I tend to go on binges with this sort of game because the loop of indulging in the varying faction dynamics while charting a path towards imperial domination is the sort of unholy satisfaction which worries me about some yet-unearthed pathologies in my psyche.
Thing is, I don’t actually care to put in the effort it would take to get good at any of them.
I love how deep and complex these games are, but I rarely want to take the time to really get a handle on how their mechanics work together. I know I could get into some wild marriage alliance shenanigans in Crusader Kings II, but boy does that seem like a lot of effort to figure out. Yeah, I know I could save up all of my great scientists in Civ and strategically time when I build Oxford University but like… that’s annoying and I’m impatient and just don’t want to have to think about that.
A comfortable plateau of stability
A lot of the time, my turns in a 4X game involve me doing whatever I can to smack that “next turn” button as quickly as possible. My goal is less to create an efficient domination machine and more to make a minimal amount of decisions while still feeling dominant and in total control. This complacency is exactly what led Jinny to beat me in a game of Civ V, because while I was coasting my way to an eventual cultural victory, she starved her population in order to sneak a science victory out from under my nose. I was going to win eventually without doing much, I thought, so I wasn’t paying much attention.
My hope with these games seems to be to get better through the act of just playing and not actually contemplating and strategizing about what I’m doing. Sort of like the strategy game version of muscle memory. I don’t make grand plans for world domination or try and work multiple plans at once — I do one thing, then sit pretty for a bit, then do another thing, before stabilizing for a while. Real strategic.
It’s odd because I like playing strategy board games a lot and have no problem putting in the effort to grapple with various systems so I can discern a well-considered path forward. I think the difference is in scale. Board games can only have so many systems, only be so complex. I can get my brain around the whole thing and the numbers and calculations are often easy and right in front of me. With video games, everything is so much bigger that trying to look at how things lock together just makes me confused and I go “screw it” before plowing ahead dumbly.
The video games I get into are the sort that can obsess people who like to come up with the most Optimal and Efficient way of doing things. Those people probably like Microsoft Excel in sexual ways. Not that I don’t love a good spreadsheet too. I am also a loser, you see.
I’m clearly getting something out of these games though — what is it?
Hyper-optimization holds little interest for me. It’s why I tend to run into a wall with games like Factorio. I like being competent enough to be flexible. I like being able to create a little empire that can pivot to deal with whatever comes up without sacrificing too much. Someone is buying up the allegiances of all the city-states? Well, I’ve got a decent economy so I’ll buy some up too. That sure is a lot of tourism being generated by that other nation. Let’s crank out some world wonders. Those soldiers look awful close to my border. Well, since I’m further ahead technologically, let’s build a guided missile or two just to be safe.
I both hate it when my perfect plan is messed with, but in a paradoxical twist, it’s also what I love. I love creating stability, then using that stability to deal with something unexpected, even if I get initially annoyed by my beautiful order being disrupted. I’m rarely a schemer. I don’t concoct galaxy-brained plans to pit nations against each other or take the time to set my troops up in the best position of a surprise attack.
That’s part of why I got super into Crusader Kings. Being good at the game isn’t really important. It’s easy enough to create a stable little fiefdom, but the fun for me is in all of the random events that can happen. Maybe you get seduced into a journey for eternal life. Maybe your mother locks you in the dungeon for seemingly no reason. Maybe the Mongols are coming and you’re all doomed. Being intimately familiar with the game’s intimidating tendrils of systems isn’t something I come close to feeling like I need to aspire to because the fun comes from engaging in unforeseen dramas.
Being a master of wits is not what I get out of strategy games. What I do get is a sense of being in control, of being capable.
I feel competent.
Even if I’m not running the most efficient machine or don’t even fully know what it is I’m doing, I think ultimately what I get out of these games is that feeling of easy competence.
My biggest fantasy is merely being a competent person? That’s sad.
Yes it is.
Look, I’m not an incompetent person. I don’t think. I was used to getting good grades in school without a huge amount of effort. I test well. When being taught, I often pick up being “good enough” fairly quickly and get my mind around basic concepts without much trouble. I’m very good at getting the gist of things.
In recent years, I haven’t had much of that easily competent feedback. I’m not graded any more, my dayjob is a mixed bag of activities I am good at and suck at, and my writing? Man, the quality of what I write is so subjective, especially since I don’t have a clue when other people are going to see most of what I’ve been writing in a fully realized form. When I’m the one grading myself, I’m very harsh. I don’t give myself a lot of “competence points”, so seeing something tangible like, say, my faction spreading across a campaign map like cream cheese on a bagel is really satisfying.
Ultimately, it’s just nice to feel in control.