A few days ago, I realized that, following a should-have-won-but didn’t game, I stopped playing King of Dragon Pass completely. An ill omen for the future of my interest in Collegia? I hope not; the question that arises from this is why my interest has subsided and how to bridge that gap in a different experience. But who’s to say where that gap lies? Talking with anbrewk (who still plays KoDP regularly), it’s clearer to me than ever how two people can seek entirely different things from the same game.

In playing the game as much as I have, I feel like I’ve seen a majority of the events, enjoying their stories and the consequences tied to them. I’ve learned, more or less, what I needed to to get by in the game and appreciated how I was forced to buy in to the lore and world setting to succeed. But now it’s become a grind. “Oh, the one about the dragon skull. Best if I do this.” “Ah, no luck for the beastman this time. Darn.” In coming to understand some of the underlying mechanics of the game, I’ve become divorced from its worldstory, which I feel is its strongest asset. To contrast, though, Anbrewk tells me the stories he’s enjoyed in the game are not those that are written, but those that emerge through play: stories about an irrepressible clan to the south, pushed to the utter brink of destruction before surging back and raiding again and again until other clans had no choice but to fall under their banner. There’s a story there, absolutely, and it’s a story that can only be told within the mechanics of this particular game. But so too is it limited by them. The actions, open to interpretation as they may be, are selected from a narrow set of possibilities. “Does this impact cows, goods, or food?” Because they aren’t the playing pieces of the game, there’s no chance for a story to emerge about the wooden toys of the village children, or the slow decline into dementia of a once-proud chieftain. That doesn’t mean these are less interesting stories; the content we project onto mechanical happenings can in many cases be far more vivid than that which is made explicit, made especially so by its direct link to player action.

So is increasing complexity the answer? Should I aspire to Dwarf Fortress so that these emergent stories are as detailed as they can possibly be? I begin to think that, as with so many things, the answer lies somewhere in the middle. Can I describe a world vividly enough that the player will embrace the storytelling context beyond that of the mechanics (“oh good! I got 1 widget and 3 berries! What a tale”) while also finding the stories that emerge within them? I suppose what I want is a mixed system of explicit and emergent narrative, woven together by a theme the player must invest in to succeed. Which is, to an extent, what King of Dragon Pass has done. It seems to me that I might again be a victim of my insatiable appetite for novelty. Maybe I’m just looking for too much of everything in a necessarily bounded experience.

What I’d like for Collegia is for the relationship between mechanics and story to take the experience above and beyond any one interaction, making it a game about actively inhabiting the world of ancient Rome. The mechanics need to run deep enough that the world functions believably and not just along clearly defined lines. But the dressing (being those explicit stories pasted on top) needs to tie back into the mechanics in meaningful ways as well; their flavour must not be cosmetic but crucial. Without the stories, the interactions wouldn’t make sense. And again, I’ve described King of Dragon Pass. So what is it that’s missing?

It sounds like I need to think about this a little more.