Nikhil Murthy's Syphilisation

I like the use of a strategy game as a complex social metaphor that this presents. Even though I couldn't complete any game of it due to crashes, trying to fathom the mind of the author was worth the price of admission.

The use and subversion of the 4X genre to challenge conventional ideas of what a strategy game should mean (and the underlying colonial heritage that comes with strategy games) is excellent. The systems and broad ideas take a bit of time to come together, but the overall goal and the research in making the game show throughout its runtime, making it a worthwhile experience. Keeping the spotlight on India's colonial history deepens the goal of the video game to reshape the idea of a 4X game.

It's a neat idea, and it has a good heart. I am going to keep playing, trying to finish a game. However, I have absolutely no idea how it works and I am just clicking on things as they appear.

This is a very detailed subversion of traditional expand/research/conquer gameplay to create a "postcolonial 4x game." It's also interestingly meta: it's a game about students PLAYING a game as they work on a research project about a particular historical moment, and research in the game can be progress in that research project. RPS has good coverage of it here: https://www.rockpapershotgun.com/nikhil-murthys-syphilisation-is-a-ferociously-in-depth-empathic-reworking-of-civilization-and-other-4x-games

This game is really cool! I'm still learning how to play but it has the feeling of starting something deep and complex and interesting.

This is an amazing piece of work. Videogame-as-critique. Like many i expect, I'm well aware of the many critiques of the inherent imperialism and colonialism that form the basic structures of any civ-like game (and yet enjoy playing them anyway). The framing as playing as "a student doing a report on Gandhi, Churchill and colonization" works. In fact, playing the game made me realising that some kind of framing like this is necessary to meaningfully critique the genre. Whilst I understood all the problems inherent with the ways civ-likes rely upon colonialist forms of understanding in the way they represent and structure the games around space, landscape, territory, peoples, science, progress, etc. What I hadn't quite fully realised, until playing this game, was that the very premise of playing "as" a civilization (or civ-leader) is the key decision, from which all of these colonialist epistemologies become necessary to create a civ-like. In short: If you like civ-likes, but want to be prompted to reflect upon the presumptions built into how they operate, this game does it more directly than any number of essays on the topic.

For various reasons I prefer to leave reviews on Backloggd these days (https://backloggd.com/u/Wojit/review/3246989/), but I wanted one here to draw more attention to this fun little game, and really cool and effective game design experiment. Though the implementation has some issues, It's so thoughtfully designed and completely realised as an alternative kind of game in a genre that is crying out for more novel, diverse, and politically aware games.