“This is the first post in a series (I, II, IIIa, IIIb, IVa, IVb, IVc, IVd,IVe, V) discussing the basic contours of life – birth, marriage, labor, subsistence, death – of pre-modern peasants and their families. Prior to the industrial revolution, peasant farmers of varying types made up the overwhelming majority of people in settled societies (the sort with cities and writing). And when I say overwhelming, I mean overwhelming: we generally estimate these societies to have consisted of upwards of 80% peasant farmers, often as high as 90 or even 95%. Yet when we talk about these periods, we are often focused on aristocrats, priests, knights, warriors, kings and literate bureaucrats, the sort of folks who write to us or on smiths, masons and artists, the sort of folk whose work sometimes survives for us to see. But this series is going to be about what life was like for the great majority of people who lived in small farming households.”
All of Mr. Devereaux's work is wonderful including the series you linked, but I think that one its overly focused on the household. I think his two part series on "Lonely Cities"[1][2] is a lot better at giving you a feeling for a city. It is both less in depth and in that one he spends half his time complaining about how Hollywood gets it wrong, so of course YMMV.
Economics is something I think about all the time when playing these games or reading fantasy. We know that the ratio of farmers to non-farmers in the medieval period was something like 29:1. But so little thought is given to just the sheer amount of work and space it took to fill mouths and clothe bodies.
I'm glad there was a mention of Banished, which does a decent job of capturing the slow struggle of subsistence living. It cannot be understated how many games Banished inspired - of them Manor Lords probably comes the closest to something historically accurate. And definitely fits the author's interests in a non-linear, non-grid based city builder.
that ratio completly ignores 'women's work' which was half the labor. you don't have much a village if the naked people freeze to death, and most people like nice clothing even when the weather (and culture) allows nudism
A game with a similar feel is Frostpunk. It's set in the Victorian era during a fictional new ice age. Although it really goes in strongly for the model of a village evolving outwards from a central point, it does a lot of other things that are closer to what the article talks about. Like, it's very bleak and very hard. Your town will die a lot until you figure the game out. There are three classes of people: workers, engineers and children, and most people are just workers. You can pass a child labor law if you want children to work. Sickness and managing disease is a big part of the game. Roads can be curved and buildings are built in radiating circles, so most roads actually are curved.
It is fascinating that players would actually reject the game if it showed the true straight roads and planned layouts. We have a mental model of the Middle Ages that is wrong but we still demand that products match our expectations. The truth feels like a glitch because it breaks our immersion. We care more about the feeling of the past than the data.
Also, it is logical that we optimize the past to make the gameplay loop satisfying. Real history was full of system failures like floods and unfair taxes that prevented any real progress. We code these simulations to give players a sense of progression that the actual people never had.
Players also find it fun and satisfying when an FPS player can carry five large weapons, with 100 pounds of ammo for it, run while carrying all that 20 mph in any direction without getting tired, pick anything from the floor without slowing down or ceasing fire, etc. A realistic shooter would be much harder, and having to limp slowly after taking a stray bullet in the leg would suck.
And people play for fun, not for feeling the misery of war. Or, in that case, of the slow and restricted early medieval life.
Yeah, I think when making a game, in general, fun is the first thing to consider. All these games are lumped into the article as "city builders", but Age of Empires and Sim City are completely different genres, just as one example.
I expect an RTS game like Age of Empires to be balanced for competitiveness rather than realism.
Sim City 2000 at least markets itself as a simulation game, which I'd expect to be more realistic in terms of city building. For better or worse, though, the simulation seems rather simplistic, which could lead to unrealistic city designs or confusion around why the Sims don't want to drive over the fancy highway bridge I just spent $5000 on...
That "truth feels like a glitch" line really nails it. It's striking how quickly historical accuracy becomes uncanny when it clashes with our internalized image of the past
I had a discussion with my son son about recent (2015-2019) Need For Speed games I worked on. He asked why we didn't include keeping track of fuel and actually stopping to use the gas station like in real life (in game you just drive through and it repairs your car). And why don't repairs require you to leave the car for a few days and cost tons of money?
I told him it would be annoying rather than fun and negatively impact the pacing. It wouldn't work well in our specific games.
Actually, during development there are always so many interesting ideas which don't pan out because they wouldn't actually be fun. Some even get built then scrapped because it didn't work as well as one would think. That's the kind of thing you'll often see internet forums bring up framed like "why didn't the devs think of this?!"
Precisely; the reason for omitting many realistic elements is because they would be boring. If I wanted to play through all the steps of plowing a field, planting the grain, irrigating the field, dealing with weeds, harvesting the grain, and hauling it to a market to sell I would play Farming Simulator. If I'm playing a city builder, I'm perfectly okay with those steps being reduced to "plant crops, wait for crops to grow, harvest crops", and to have workers auto-assigned to those tasks while I'm laying out roads and palisades.
Also, having my village randomly wiped out from time to time by events beyond my control (plague, wars, etc.) would be realistic, but no fun at all in a game.
The "Johnny and the Dead" series by Terry Pratchett included a school mate of Johnny who liked to make computer games.. and he created a realistic game about flying your spaceship to some nearby star or somewhere. Everything was realistic.. you would stare at the black night of space for thousands of years (literally) while going there. For some reason people didn't flock to that game.
In particular, the complaint that 'most villages didn't grow into towns' is a pretty terrible one from a game design point of view, because you could say "Most X don't Y" about almost every game, because players want to do the _exceptional_, not the _every day_.
Also there is the question of _who you are_ in a city builder, because he seems to be assuming that the player is playing as an average villager, and not the people who actually make planning decisions (monasteries and lords, etc).
Most of these games are sort of explicitly designed to be power fantasies on some level. I am sure you could make a truly great game that is sort of down in the muck, a villager eye view, or whatever, but it might not be as popular or fun.
Incidentally, when I last played Banished there was a loophole in its simulation and you could just build a few modules consisting of like 3 or 4 basic buildings and that solved all your survival problems with no need for later intervention.
I suspect we focus too much here with good old Methodist values around improvement and work. I seem to recall a study in Arnemland (North (wet) Australia) where the indigenous population spent about 10% of their time hunting and gathering - not an 8 hour day by any means. Two points: this was normal, but of course their numbers were controlled by inconsistent weather. The feast and famine cycle over the year mean even that 10 was not evenly distributed. The people are also of course nomadic, but not as much as you might think in that the procession follows a 'route' which looks much like the seasons in agricultural society. I suspect medieval society also partied hard, and bitched about their love life mostly, with the local brute squad creaming off most of the men for their wars, or disease or crop failure decimating the population every few generations.
There is a more recent game that can be used as reference to a city-building experience called Manor Lords. You are basically building your village from scratch in the wilderness and it really looks like a medieval village.
To connect with another comment under this post, it even captures woman’s work of the era, with homes having small gardens or producing clothing that ends up being a significant portion of your economy, at least when I last played it.
RTS like Age of Empires were more geared towards combat, and base building existed only to supplement that. Whereas in games like Pharaoh and Caeser you could plan your city if you wanted to.
My iteration of The Settlers was The Settlers II (also its later 3D remake) which is very much designed around roads that units mostly had to use! This was found in other early instances of RTS but later discarded (including in The Settlers series).
It's true, however, that events like floods or the tax collector were missing. Those are more easily found in board games.
Side note, but I did not realize how unoriginal Warcraft was, until looking at these.
Medieval RTS games have a special place in my heart. But I'm almost convinced it's because of nothing but pure nostalgia, being the first RTS I ever played.
But no. It's the same reason I have a soft spot for the LotR movies, and for forests and earthy colored clothing in general, and wool clothing. There's something so... wholesome about it. Or simple. Or, je ne sais pas... preter-nostalgic?
Earthly colored clothing was not normal. Sometimes it might be forced on slaves, but humans like colors and dying clothing is a tiny part of what is needed to make a garment so anyone allowed to would do it.
of course we have a lot more colors available today, but there is every reason to think they would use all the color they could. Some of the colors decay fast (lasting longer than the garment if in use but not surviving to today if the garment was stored). Mostly this is something not written about in history so we have to guess but we have plenty of reason to think color was common.
Of course not, everyone knows there were only five Istari in total, Saruman the White, Gandalf the Grey, Radagast the Brown and the two Blue ones that were kidnapped by aliens.
After playing it repeatedly since 2002, if I find out that Splinter Cell is not a 100% accurate simulation of an NSA employee's work day, I'm going to be very upset.
One thing this article points out is that the growth of settlements is unrealistic. they follow a linear path of constant expansion whereas real medieval villages were very stable in a sort of subsistence mode for centuries.
I mean... yeah. But it's not a simulator, right? It's also not a time capsule. Should we write a blog post about how these game villages never actually existed with the people depicted in the game? Or write a blog post about how medieval villages actually existed in 3D space and not pixels on the screen? These are all true things but who was misinformed about them?
Most of these games are based around castles and towns, and so one thing they rarely feature is how monasteries were major drivers of development in their day. Not only did they keep the written records, but they pioneered certain forms of manufacturing, agricultural improvement and engineering. Some became very wealthy as a result.
I love the line drawings. They immediately seem more real than current games. Just the land use aspect alone (buildings vs farmed land). Modern sims never get that right, either, with coal power plants the same size as a high school. And so many other things out of proportion.
I guess they started with something to offer... we now have cloud feudal "lords", who started by offering services, and then make you follow their altering terms and conditions, who they can change and all you can do is pray that they don't alter it any further. Just like real feudals, the cloud feudals can one day decide you did something wrong, and there's no trial, just direct banishment.
Even worse if your income depend on these feudals (e.g. all the gig-workers who are working without the benefits that exists with an employer-employee relationship).
But to answer your question, I guess it would've started with cooperation between friends/neighbors, the "alpha" person would've led the group of people in some sort of enterprise, his son became the next leader because that's how that was done, this enterprise got bigger and stronger that it encompassed land and resources, and people would want to work for them to earn a living. Heh some even owned navies and colonized places half around the world (the various East India Companies), some are content to work locally (various Mafias).
Games and articles and anime all include "lords", as far as I can tell. But feudalism wasn't universal, there were lot of (what we today would call) countries without feudalism. There could still be (fairly local) kings, but farmers owned their lands and nobility didn't necessarily exist at all, in some places. But games (including anime) tend to focus 100% on the feudal system.
There is a strong incentive to displace the existing one, but if you're strong enough to do so, wouldn't you rather become the belligerent parasite rather than eliminate the idea of belligerent parasites? And so the cycle begins anew [0].
As a Spaniard, I have to say that medieval ages are very different over centuries. The 7th century has nothing to do with the 13th one, which is a bit closer on mindset with the Enlightenment than the obscurity times.
Of course you have no way to get some/improvement in your life as a peasant except if you wanted to join a church which could give you some education and literacy. And a granted dinning table for sure.
> Agricultural surpluses were skimmed by the church and the feudal lords
It's honestly amazing how this was the norm for so much of our history, given how much it demotivates the villages from growing more produce, which in turn means the lords can't get any more of it either (unless they wage constant wars against their peers, which they naturally did).
I enjoy going into a city building game and thinking out exactly what I’d like the city to look like beforehand. But, it doesn’t always work because the city will eventually outgrow the original design.
The need to have the city constantly growing is a real killer for realism here, I think. It basically makes super careful planning impractical.
I think most of the problems are downstream of this. For example, your fields will probably have to be moved after a couple years. The city will expand and you’ll want to replace it with higher-value industry. And you’ll be scouting out a new massive area for your new fields, which will make your old ones obsolete. So, you’ll move your fields every few years. Now, crop rotation doesn’t make sense, unless the crops destroy the soil at some ridiculous rate.
Why they're inaccurate is down to some combination of lack of research, lack of interest, or apparent conflict with making the game fun to play. (Possibly other things that don't occur to me at the moment.)
I agree, I quite liked Ostriv (I tend to play a fair few city builders) - definitely felt a lot more 'in-depth' on certain parts than, say, Foundation (which has more systems, but less detail)
Interesting insight, I personally am not a fan of medieval builders for that many kinda seem like reskinned modern builders, though to be fair modern city builders are also historically inaccurate, you can basically do anything without political ramification, no nimbys, hoas, ceqa…
OMG now I think about it, Populous is inaccurate too. I think if I was a godlike entity I would do a lot more than raise and lower land all day just to farm manna.
The tension between historical accuracy and game design is interesting because it reveals what we actually want from these games. We don't want to simulate medieval life - we want the aesthetic of medieval life with modern assumptions about growth, progress, and control. The same 'inaccuracies' appear in fantasy novels, historical films, any media that uses the past as a stage for modern stories.
Ultimately the goal of a game is "have fun", so anything that goes against that, including historical accuracy, has to make room for the fundamental property every game has to have. Even the 4x games like Victoria and Europa Universalies, no matter how accurate they try to be, is actually just about "being fun".
Problem is, these kinds of media end up pushing nostalgia for a warped version of an old time. It's like anything based in the 50s or 60s in USA and is not full of racism. My go-to example these days is the Fallout tv show.
That said, you actually can create something positive set in that time while also portraying the bad. For instance, in Bill Burr's F Is For Family.
oxfeed65261|1 month ago
It begins:
“This is the first post in a series (I, II, IIIa, IIIb, IVa, IVb, IVc, IVd,IVe, V) discussing the basic contours of life – birth, marriage, labor, subsistence, death – of pre-modern peasants and their families. Prior to the industrial revolution, peasant farmers of varying types made up the overwhelming majority of people in settled societies (the sort with cities and writing). And when I say overwhelming, I mean overwhelming: we generally estimate these societies to have consisted of upwards of 80% peasant farmers, often as high as 90 or even 95%. Yet when we talk about these periods, we are often focused on aristocrats, priests, knights, warriors, kings and literate bureaucrats, the sort of folks who write to us or on smiths, masons and artists, the sort of folk whose work sometimes survives for us to see. But this series is going to be about what life was like for the great majority of people who lived in small farming households.”
joha4270|1 month ago
[1]:https://acoup.blog/2019/07/12/collections-the-lonely-city-pa... [2]:https://acoup.blog/2019/07/19/the-lonely-city-part-ii-real-c...
HPsquared|1 month ago
You could make it as a mod to CK3. Instead of a royal household, you manage a peasant one.
Most of the same mechanics of personnel and resource management, decisions and succession still apply.
otabdeveloper4|1 month ago
I find the idea that every pre-modern peasant in every society had the same basic contours of life extremely silly.
Maybe he means British or French peasants? That's what people usually mean by "peasants".
Even within Europe the very basic ideas on when and how you marry and how you treat land ownership were wildly different.
legitster|1 month ago
I'm glad there was a mention of Banished, which does a decent job of capturing the slow struggle of subsistence living. It cannot be understated how many games Banished inspired - of them Manor Lords probably comes the closest to something historically accurate. And definitely fits the author's interests in a non-linear, non-grid based city builder.
relaxing|1 month ago
bluGill|1 month ago
lloydatkinson|1 month ago
qcnguy|1 month ago
dfajgljsldkjag|1 month ago
Also, it is logical that we optimize the past to make the gameplay loop satisfying. Real history was full of system failures like floods and unfair taxes that prevented any real progress. We code these simulations to give players a sense of progression that the actual people never had.
nine_k|1 month ago
And people play for fun, not for feeling the misery of war. Or, in that case, of the slow and restricted early medieval life.
dfxm12|1 month ago
I expect an RTS game like Age of Empires to be balanced for competitiveness rather than realism.
Sim City 2000 at least markets itself as a simulation game, which I'd expect to be more realistic in terms of city building. For better or worse, though, the simulation seems rather simplistic, which could lead to unrealistic city designs or confusion around why the Sims don't want to drive over the fancy highway bridge I just spent $5000 on...
ErigmolCt|1 month ago
michaelteter|1 month ago
A lot of realism mechanics make gameplay dreadful, boring, tedious, or frustrating. A simulation is one thing, but a game is another.
Agentlien|1 month ago
I told him it would be annoying rather than fun and negatively impact the pacing. It wouldn't work well in our specific games.
Actually, during development there are always so many interesting ideas which don't pan out because they wouldn't actually be fun. Some even get built then scrapped because it didn't work as well as one would think. That's the kind of thing you'll often see internet forums bring up framed like "why didn't the devs think of this?!"
dwd|1 month ago
https://theonion.com/ultra-realistic-modern-warfare-game-fea...
rmunn|1 month ago
Also, having my village randomly wiped out from time to time by events beyond my control (plague, wars, etc.) would be realistic, but no fun at all in a game.
Tor3|1 month ago
empath75|1 month ago
Also there is the question of _who you are_ in a city builder, because he seems to be assuming that the player is playing as an average villager, and not the people who actually make planning decisions (monasteries and lords, etc).
Most of these games are sort of explicitly designed to be power fantasies on some level. I am sure you could make a truly great game that is sort of down in the muck, a villager eye view, or whatever, but it might not be as popular or fun.
nottorp|1 month ago
Incidentally, when I last played Banished there was a loophole in its simulation and you could just build a few modules consisting of like 3 or 4 basic buildings and that solved all your survival problems with no need for later intervention.
Gamers gonna optimize.
thmoonbus|1 month ago
CalRobert|1 month ago
Peteragain|1 month ago
kattagarian|1 month ago
lovich|1 month ago
pteraspidomorph|1 month ago
My iteration of The Settlers was The Settlers II (also its later 3D remake) which is very much designed around roads that units mostly had to use! This was found in other early instances of RTS but later discarded (including in The Settlers series).
It's true, however, that events like floods or the tax collector were missing. Those are more easily found in board games.
publicdebates|1 month ago
Medieval RTS games have a special place in my heart. But I'm almost convinced it's because of nothing but pure nostalgia, being the first RTS I ever played.
But no. It's the same reason I have a soft spot for the LotR movies, and for forests and earthy colored clothing in general, and wool clothing. There's something so... wholesome about it. Or simple. Or, je ne sais pas... preter-nostalgic?
bluGill|1 month ago
of course we have a lot more colors available today, but there is every reason to think they would use all the color they could. Some of the colors decay fast (lasting longer than the garment if in use but not surviving to today if the garment was stored). Mostly this is something not written about in history so we have to guess but we have plenty of reason to think color was common.
musicale|1 month ago
It's surprising really, since Mario Kart is a completely realistic driving simulator.
pteraspidomorph|1 month ago
chihuahua|1 month ago
nonethewiser|1 month ago
One thing this article points out is that the growth of settlements is unrealistic. they follow a linear path of constant expansion whereas real medieval villages were very stable in a sort of subsistence mode for centuries.
I mean... yeah. But it's not a simulator, right? It's also not a time capsule. Should we write a blog post about how these game villages never actually existed with the people depicted in the game? Or write a blog post about how medieval villages actually existed in 3D space and not pixels on the screen? These are all true things but who was misinformed about them?
nephihaha|1 month ago
ErigmolCt|1 month ago
YoukaiCountry|1 month ago
morsch|1 month ago
btbuildem|1 month ago
netsharc|1 month ago
Even worse if your income depend on these feudals (e.g. all the gig-workers who are working without the benefits that exists with an employer-employee relationship).
But to answer your question, I guess it would've started with cooperation between friends/neighbors, the "alpha" person would've led the group of people in some sort of enterprise, his son became the next leader because that's how that was done, this enterprise got bigger and stronger that it encompassed land and resources, and people would want to work for them to earn a living. Heh some even owned navies and colonized places half around the world (the various East India Companies), some are content to work locally (various Mafias).
Tor3|1 month ago
imtringued|1 month ago
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Barracks_emperor
onraglanroad|1 month ago
SSLy|1 month ago
empath75|1 month ago
ginko|1 month ago
I don't think the same geometric approach could be taken in a town established somewhere in the Alps or modern day Norway for instance.
yxhuvud|1 month ago
m4rtink|1 month ago
kevin_thibedeau|1 month ago
anthk|1 month ago
Of course you have no way to get some/improvement in your life as a peasant except if you wanted to join a church which could give you some education and literacy. And a granted dinning table for sure.
Anonyneko|1 month ago
It's honestly amazing how this was the norm for so much of our history, given how much it demotivates the villages from growing more produce, which in turn means the lords can't get any more of it either (unless they wage constant wars against their peers, which they naturally did).
bee_rider|1 month ago
The need to have the city constantly growing is a real killer for realism here, I think. It basically makes super careful planning impractical.
I think most of the problems are downstream of this. For example, your fields will probably have to be moved after a couple years. The city will expand and you’ll want to replace it with higher-value industry. And you’ll be scouting out a new massive area for your new fields, which will make your old ones obsolete. So, you’ll move your fields every few years. Now, crop rotation doesn’t make sense, unless the crops destroy the soil at some ridiculous rate.
zahlman|1 month ago
Why they're inaccurate is down to some combination of lack of research, lack of interest, or apparent conflict with making the game fun to play. (Possibly other things that don't occur to me at the moment.)
Svoka|1 month ago
TreeInBuxton|1 month ago
zvqcMMV6Zcr|1 month ago
ChrisArchitect|1 month ago
2021 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28062677
forthwall|1 month ago
ZiiS|1 month ago
gizajob|1 month ago
lighthouse1212|1 month ago
embedding-shape|1 month ago
ErigmolCt|1 month ago
Throaway1982|1 month ago
kkukshtel|1 month ago
kkkqkqkqkqlqlql|1 month ago
That said, you actually can create something positive set in that time while also portraying the bad. For instance, in Bill Burr's F Is For Family.
pepperball|1 month ago
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sieabahlpark|1 month ago
[deleted]