Curious Expedition, Seven Cities of Gold and Colonialism

In Curious Expedition you must choose a white (with 1 exception) explorer head outside Europe to to the loot the shrines, temples and tombs of indigenous people and kill hunt wildlife for trophies. Eventually you will move from recruiting villagers to killing villagers and buying slaves and you'll will begin to hunt peaceful elephants for cash.  We have only beat the game once and it would have been impossible without a completely ruthless attitude.

You could not loot and try to survive by collecting butterflies and trading with locals but you won't make enough cash to equip yourself for the 6 levels of increasing difficulty - you will died horribly. Figuring out the combat dice system was the turning point in our progress, it made guns into killing machines. We can still cut ripped up by a pack of 3 raptors.

The first time I played it I attempted to 'roleplay' the character of Richard Burton by wrestling with moral questions: Should I bring a missionary and endanger the indigenous culture?  Show I use alcohol to keep up morale? Should I loot this holy temple? Should I hire a guide? Every time I made the decision that failed to maximized my statistical chances I was penalized. Soon I was leaving every land I visited de-populated, often dynamited and occasionally destroyed by earthquakes or desertification. The last two acts of mega-disasters are visited upon the land for my violations of taboo and desecration.

In my last game. plucky Marie Curie, her loyal dog Cooper, Sir Rook the horse and her chaperon Brother Tristian, a Dominican Friar, were like the Four Horseman of the Apocalypse to any county they visit, and 90% of everything we looted was sold to private buyers.

The setting and sometimes the game itself bring moral questions but the 'boardgame logic' of actual play means there is often only one 'correct' choice. Gun down the villagers, loot the shrines, kill the elephants, dynamite the mountains, escape back to Europe to sell golden statues and ivory tusks. I could collect butterfly, write anthropology reports and sketch naturalistic pictures but only at the cost of my score.

Let's go back to 1984 and a C64 game called Seven Cities of Gold. Reb and I use to play it. Its' was a computer version of an Avalon Hill wargame whose gameplay was way ahead of its' time. There is a great article on its' creation and if you are interested in game design at all, it is a must read. The part I want to quote is this:

You can give them gifts or try to “amaze” them by acting the part of one of their gods, but it’s always an uncertain, tentative communication that could erupt into violence at any time. Many times you will find yourself all but forced into massacring a village — or being massacred by them — by an inadvertent push of the joystick or a single panicked shot by a member of your own army who goes out of your control. It’s a superb simulation of how these encounters between two utterly alien cultures without a single word in common between them must have actually felt to the participants, and a lesson in just why they so often ended in violence even when both parties entered them with the best of intentions. Incredibly for a game of this vintage, the natives remember and communicate with one another. Attack one tribe in a region and the others will be much more suspicious. Try to “amaze” a group of natives too many times and it starts to become old hat — and they start to become suspicious.

For the desperately idealistic Dan, who was always eager to instil “a meaningful message,” the moral dimension of these encounters and the impact they would make on the player’s psyche were key not only to his game but to his very sense of his own worthiness as a person:

   “The people I admire are the people who went to jail instead of Vietnam, or who go to India to do some good, or who are really committed to the environment. Those are the people who are really admirable. What I’m doing seems less important. I want to make a significant impact in a person’s life.”

Yet Seven Cities doesn’t preach; it leaves you to your conscience. Unquestionably, violence in Seven Cities often does pay, just as in real history, and the problematic nature of this was not lost on Dan:

   “Many of the Conquistadors treated the natives horribly. Theirs was an arrogant and prideful approach to a society that had its own history and roots. But to be historically accurate required that we had to include violence. I don’t like the idea of players hurting other things, but there’s no alternative or you’re forcing your own moral decisions on an audience that ought to have a choice themselves.

   “Bill and I were real Indian sympathizers when we were growing up. We always sided with the Indians instead of the cowboys. It just seems like such a neat, romantic culture to us, so in tune with the earth. Then to write a game where at least part of the game is wiping out Indians — that’s problematic.”

Seven Cities comments on your behavior toward the natives in only one way: if you get truly savage, the king will eventually tell you to please stop killing so many of them. But these words are never backed by any action, and the priority always remains to keep the gold flowing. The crown refuses to acknowledge that the gold and the killing that produces it are often inseparable. Such half-hearted carping is, as Dan noted, lifted straight from history, where it provided a way for those back in Spain to feel morally absolved while still benefiting from the killing and plundering of their countrymen.

The designer of Seven Cities of Gold openly wrestled with the moral questions that colonialism produces but were so constrained by their need to make a marketable game that they found themselves trapped into repeating the nightmare of history. A historical simulation game that played like a infinite loop of massacres and exploitation.

Curious Expedition is not a historical simulation but a board-game with the setting of exploring Africa (with a touch of Jules Verne/Doyles/Burroughs' 'Lost Worlds' added) it is not history that traps you into massacring indigenous people but the game designer's decision to give better loot for killing nameless indigenous people than for catching new butterflies. The moral wrestling is gone.

The game also has a Lovecraftian edge to it, your main stat is Sanity; madness, obsessions and cannibalism are problems; followers can turn into Abominations or return from the dead, you can get high on coca leaves and magic mushroom; you can peer through clairvoyant stone circles and hire shamans to conduct exorcism; you can loot the Necronomicon and open dimensional gates that let the void pour through.

All cool stuff but Lovecraft spent much of his life as a deeply conservative Anglophile imperialist and saw indigenous cultures as degenerate devil-cults worshiping cold cosmic alien-gods. Here is 'Call of Cthulhu':

[quote="HP Lovecraft"]

Examined at headquarters after a trip of intense strain and weariness, the prisoners all proved to be men of a very low, mixed-blooded, and mentally aberrant type. Most were seamen, and a sprinkling of negroes and mulattos, largely West Indians or Brava Portuguese from the Cape Verde Islands, gave a colouring of voodooism to the heterogeneous cult. But before many questions were asked, it became manifest that something far deeper and older than negro fetishism was involved. Degraded and ignorant as they were, the creatures held with surprising consistency to the central idea of their loathsome faith.

They worshipped, so they said, the Great Old Ones...

Adding Lovecraft to African Exploration is a good fit because both genres overlapped in the Pulp writing of the early 1900s. Desert explorers were classic Lovecraft protagonists and every Jungle Adventure had a dash of dark indigenous gods and cults. Both were deeply imperialistic in outlook and in colonial imperialism it is near impossible to avoid racism.

I'm bring all this up because I have to keep wrestling with it. When I stop wrestling and let it be 'just entertainment' I feel like I betray something. It is not Political Correctness that drives this question but the idea that ghosts of those people portrayed in the games are looking over my shoulders when I play, they still bear all their scars and dreams and humanity, I wonder what they feel as they watch the icon of the white explorer approaching an indigenous village...

"History is a nightmare from which I am trying to awake" - James Joyce

I have yet to complete the game. Part of that is likely that I couldn't play it as a cut throat pillager. I often picked Darwin and the butterflies as it seemed so much less violent. I kept good relations with the natives and never stole from them. Of course by expedition 4 all I would have left is 3 pieces of choclate and one rope...before heading into the desert to die. I have also wrestled with games that have no morality to them and just collect loot or points for the sake of doing so. A good game has to have a backbone for it to continue to be playable or it has to be so far removed from reality that moral questions aren't raised.

Even kn project zomboid I question how to play it sometimes and often I would rather create an interesting story than succeed. By role playing it we can give some games a back bone they miss. It is also part of why I like modifying or creating our own games.

As I tried to show in my Curious Expedition play-through there is enough elements to start role-playing with the game: a variety of characters (including many women), characters keep making little comments, they go mad, the environment is intriguing. But to progress in the game you have little actual choice in your actions.

It is the type of game where a primary goal is to realize what actions are items are useless - so you actually have less choice as you get better at the game.

I would 'mod' the game:

1) there are more paths to advancement than loot and kill - so if you want to be a 'respectful' looter the game is hard but not impossible

2) make the Fame race something else besides a one winner competition that you will never win (see below)

3) so the game does not encourage you to kill the 'Natives' for profit - either toughen them up or have them domesticate a tiger or raptor occasionally (even if this remains morally questionable)


Here is a FAME chart I made so that donating to the museum is worth it:

100 National Headlines
200 Plant Species named after you
250 Best-selling Account of Expedition
300 Animal species named after you
350 Make Global Headlines
400 National Museum Named after you
450 Nobel Prize in Geography/Anthropology/Ect...
500 University named after you
550 Declared President of Royal Society of Science
600 Made a Lord/Lady
700 New Country named after you
800 Declared President of home country

In the last week of playing Curious Expedition I found that I can regularly rank in first place (and keep it with a large margin) after the second or third expedition but it is through approaching the game as a logic problem (without thinking or worrying about ethics/game story) .  However, it is often difficult to complete the game still due to un-winnable last maps (i.e. last temple is unreachable unless you have a *hefty* amount of dynamite or there are not enough moonstones provided on the map-even after keeping some from a previous level and searching every cave, shrine and temple!).

I believe that the game could be winnable through ethical actions using the logic I learned from playing the other way.  I will post later my experience of trying to play ethically.