Guest Post: A Story of Mechanical Consequences

In my household, my husband, T. Nikolai Voloshko, is the resident video game expert. We have lots of discussions about crossover principles between video and board games. Yes, this story is about the unintended mechanical and thematic consequences of exploiting mechanics, but it is also just a really funny story. —Sarah

Hello. I'm the living husband of the designer of Deadly Dowagers—a game about killing your husband in order to inherit his stuff so you can marry someone richer—and I'm here to talk with you about unintended consequences of design choices in games.

One video game, specifically; Medieval Dynasty. If you're unfamiliar with this iron age cottagecore gem, no worries. While a complete lack of context would undoubtedly make this entire debacle considerably funnier, it might also make me appear villainous. Therefore, in the spirit of heading off unintended consequences, let's lay a little foundational knowledge to build the very silly looking structure of this story.

In this game, you play as a young gentleman who has escaped tragedy with little more than an oat roll in his pocket and the ability to learn new things. You meet with some people who help you out, and begin establishing your own village in a pretty lush but fairly sparsely populated area in a fictional medieval area, which you may further populate by inviting wanderers at campfires in other villages. Your character gains experience points in various skills by performing actions related to these skills; you get better at chopping down trees by chopping down trees, you get better at planting and harvesting crops by planting and harvesting crops, and you get better at smithing tools by smithing tools. As you level up in these skills, you gain skill points that you can use to purchase specific perks that give you some benefit. This could be a perk that keeps your tools from degrading as quickly when you use them, or a perk that helps you harvest more of a certain resource such as ore from mineral deposits or meat from animals. In the case of the diplomacy skill, there is a perk which can be selected multiple times which adjusts buying and selling prices in your favor.

There is also an achievement for getting to level ten—the maximum level—in diplomacy, having one million coins on your person. I love getting achievements, so of course I decided I needed to figure out how to get a cool million coins. After a little consideration of the game's economy, I realized this was an Achievement with a capital 'A'. You really, really have to grind in order to make it happen, and one of the critical parts of my plan to make it happen was to develop my character's diplomacy skill in order to maximize the amount of money I could get.  The problem with this was that there are few ways to really grind out actions that gain experience points in diplomacy; there are quests you can do which help, and everything you buy or sell gives you a very small amount of experience points, but there are only so many quests you can do per season, and it can be tough to sell a sufficient number of goods to nearby merchants in order to deplete their cash reserves for the season—especially early in the game. I discovered, however, that there was a way to increase my experience points in diplomacy which could be repeated several times daily, (by default, there are three days per season; it sounds silly but it works for the pacing of the game) did not cost a penny, and occasionally provided me with absolutely solid gold pickup lines that I could repeat to my wife—flirting with eligible young ladies.

The only negative that I could find was that there were a maximum of three eligible ladies per village. There are ten villages on the map on which I was playing, and you could not be assured that there would even be a single eligible lady there. Sometimes there was a mix of men and women around the campfire where eligible folk linger, or sometimes it was only men. Because of the constraints of the game, my character was unable to flirt with perfectly eligible men during dialogue, and every attempt I made to do so by doing things such as picking flowers or making very manly-looking items like stone knives and then dropping these gifts upon them was met by vacant stares and a complete lack of experience points.  I did, however, find it rewarding to watch the charming way the game's model for a bunch of dandelions tumbles over a character's face, down their legs, and into the campfire. None of that brought me closer to my goal, unfortunately, and the process of running around to each village was time consuming. I could not very well both exploit this passively renewable well of experience points while also reliably acquiring goods to sell.

So I formed a cult.

You may recall I mentioned earlier that you can invite wanderers at campfires to join you. As long as you provide a house in which they may sleep, along with food, water, and firewood, they will more or less happily work any task to which you assign them; harvesting lumber, hunting animals, working farms, you name it. If you assign an eligible woman and an eligible man to the same house, after a time they will marry and produce offspring, who will eventually grow into contributing members of your society. You can flirt with a woman—and therefore gain diplomacy experience points—as long as you and she are both within ten years of age of each other and not married to someone else... so I decided to simply not invite eligible men into my village. Before long, I had no fewer than thirteen eligible ladies in my village, all tilling, hunting, smithing, mining, and doing everything a man could do.  As great as I like to think I am in terms of village planning, it became a bit of a chore to locate these women throughout the day in order to flirt with them until they were tired of me, but I noticed that they would all sit down on benches or chairs in the mornings before work, and in the evenings after work.  To make things easier in my pursuit of grinding out my diplomacy experience points, I placed several benches for them to sit upon.  These benches were all situated around a bell that I made and hung from a little wooden tower about thirty feet tall. This entire setup was right next to the kitchen, so that they could smell what I was cooking. I do not think that the game actually has scent-based mechanics, but every morning around seven in the morning when I was cooking potage, I would turn around to see a gaggle of eligible young ladies all sitting around the bell with wholly neutral expressions on their faces, saying things like, "I don't want to be lonely anymore," and "I know not every marriage is built on love, but at this point I'd love to have a loveless one, at least." I took this as my cue to immediately flirt with each of them in turn. While it did take some time, and occasionally the bell inexplicably rang on its own, signalling the beginning of the workday and therefore the departure of anyone not engaged in conversation, all of my village's inhabitants would return to the seating area in the evening. Anyone I missed in the morning, I could flirt with at night.

This went on for eight years in the game. I continued to invite more eligible ladies to my village in order to maximize the number of diplomacy experience points I could easily gain per day, and eventually I reached my goal of achieving level ten in diplomacy. I remember that moment well; it was the last day of winter, and I was making potage—as is my custom. To celebrate, I hopped onto my horse and rode to every village on the map, and acquired husbands for every single lady in my village.  This was more of a task than it might first have seemed; most of the ladies in my village were eight years older than they had been when I first invited them, and as previously mentioned you cannot pair someone with a potential spouse with an age difference of more than ten years. I accomplished my goal for all of the women but one—so my character married her.

This created a boom in my workforce. Literally overnight, the population of my village doubled. The women in my village had been working their respective craft for eight years straight in most cases, and had become quite skilled. While their husbands were not apprentices per se, their level of skill may as well have earned them this title, but they contributed to the wealth and welfare of my village all the same. Everything was going very well, and I was steadily getting closer to earning one million coins.

Then, about a year later, each of these women gave birth.

In the game, when a female villager produces offspring, she ceases to work, and takes care of the child full time for two years. This is an excellent long term investment, because the child inherits what appears to be the average level of skill between their father and mother.  Hilariously, I could look at the character sheet for the infant and see that they were more skilled than their dad in many areas, although they would not be capable of actually utilizing those skills in workplaces until eighteen game years passed. In the short term, however, all of the skilled workers were no longer eligible to work—all of them. Literally overnight, the workforce of my village was cut in half, and because the remaining half of the workforce was half as skilled by comparison, the production output of my village came screeching to a near halt. Suddenly, instead of liesurely roaming around and admiring the fantastic foliage effects in the game, I had to buckle down and pick up the slack. I had to till the fields, make the fertilizer, smith the tools, cut the trees, dig out the ore—everything.  This created a cascading effect of systems failures; the mine workers could not produce enough ore because there were not enough of them and none of them were skilled, which bottlenecked production at the smithy, which choked the lumber industry and the agricultural sector depending on the tools the smithy produced, which created a firewood crisis wherein people were burning all of the sticks that the smithy needed to use for tool handles. The kitchen could not produce prepared meals quickly enough, so people were eating raw foods like whole heads of cabbages without anything to go with it. Prepared food goes a longer way than raw food does, and I could see that my village was beginning to head down the path to famine.  None of the men in my village were good enough to do their wives' jobs, and I had the diplomacy to show for it.

Game years later, I am still feeling the effects of this occurrence, which is largely a little sheepishness on account of the fact that I hold an ARM (Associate in Risk Management) designation, yet failed to anticipate the personnel risk which accompanied the decisions I made in this game. While it is clear that everything that occurred was baked into the mechanics of the game, I cannot imagine that the game designers anticipated it might have happened on the scale in which it did.  If I am mistaken in this, however, then I am quite proud of the developers for punishing people for forming cults.

[NB, the game mode described above is the original version of Medieval Dynasty. There is a newer version where you can play as a woman as well as a man.]