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This is part of our yearly Advent Calendar, which publishes an essay a day each year during advent. Find the rest of this year's and previous years' calendars here.
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I’ve been playing a lot of Timberborn lately, one of those simulation games we call ‘city builders.’ Traditionally, they’re games in which the primary objective is to grow a village into a thriving and commercially successful metropolis where all of your citizens’ needs are met. Timberborn is that but with cute beavers.
As your beavers multiply and your colony grows, you plan for drought and build levees and dams to divert water from doomed rivers into reservoirs.
In beaver culture, water is life.
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I realized, when beginning this essay, that I spend so much in-game time at the macro level—expanding Beavertown, battling water physics—that I never stop to appreciate the day-to-day of my beavers and all we’ve worked for. So, in celebration of this day on Essay Daily’s Advent calendar, I bring you a glimpse into the lives of my beaver buddies.
Industrious beavers harvest sunflower seeds.
Some beaver facts: The first ‘true’ beaver evolved in Germany between 10–12 million years ago, and the largest beaver known (Castrorides ohioensis) lived in Canada between 1.4 million and 10,000 years BC. (Because this is an Advent calendar, and because I have some leftover Catholic nostalgia for the holidays, I’ve chosen to retain the English abbreviation for ‘Before Christ.’) The largest beaver stood 3 feet tall, measured up to 7 feet from nose to tail, and weighed as much as a black bear.
Beavers typically eat bark, twigs, aquatic vegetation, and lily roots. In Timberborn, they also eat carrots, sunflower seeds, bread, grilled potatoes and chestnuts, and maple pastries. In their natural environments, beavers cache the buds and twigs of their favorite trees—willow, alder, osier dogwood—in the mud outside their lodge. In Timberborn, they build stackable warehouses that contribute to the game’s ‘verticality,’ the ability to send beavers into the sky.
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Lumberjack Chikyil gnaws on a pine.
I’ve been reading about emergence, a multidisciplinary study of complex systems and the properties and patterns of behavior that come into being only through the interactions of individual components within a larger whole. (Google a murmuration of starlings.) Somehow this led me to the 2013 issue of Theory, Culture, and Society that celebrated the work of Friedrich Kittler. In the introductory remarks, Geoffrey Winthrop-Young reviewed the multiple interpretations of the German cultural theory Kulturtechniken [1], first translated into English to refer to ‘environmental engineering,’ large-scale processes like irrigating land, straightening rivers, and building reservoirs. (What beavers do. [2]) The word has since been co-opted by theorists to refer to ‘cultural techniques,’ the past and emerging technologies that shape society and culture. Cornelia Vismann offers this frequently cited example:
To start with an elementary and archaic cultural technique, a plough drawing a line in the ground: the agricultural tool determines the political act; and the operation itself produces the subject, who will then claim mastery over both the tool and the action associated with it. Thus, the Imperium Romanum [3] is the result of drawing a line—a gesture which, not accidentally, was held sacred in Roman law. Someone advances to the position of legal owner in a similar fashion, by drawing a line, marking one’s territory—ownership does not exist prior to that act.
Kulturtechniken has more recently been applied to new media technologies. Radio, television, the internet: they’ve been called democratizing forces—the internet, especially, the bastion of free speech. We see where this has gone.
You could ask what video games have done to (or for) human society, though it’s hard to generalize across genres, between role-playing games, survival games, first-person shooters, and so on).
A critique [5] of the traditional simulation and city-building genre is that its core mechanical systems are based on the industrial model of urbanization, consumption, and exploitation of the natural environment and the poor working class. Despite Timberborn’s ‘light ecological message,’ [6] the game borrows the common trope of society vs. nature. (With beavers.) You’ll eventually send your unwitting beavers into the ruins of human civilization to harvest scrap metal used to build excavators, sluices, and mechanical pumps.
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Azra hauls a box of maple pastries across a levy that connects the Watertown and Ender districts.
Political theorist Langdon Winner famously asked the question: “Do Artifacts Have Politics?” In that essay, one of many he wrote on the subject, he warns against technological determinism—the belief, for example, that the plough determined the political act responsible for our concept of ownership (and empire).
But to say that technologies are inherently neutral—that it isn’t the tool but how it is used that determines its place on the spectrum of good and evil—is a simplification. Concerning technological legacies [7], where a society invests its time and money shapes the form and function of what comes. Ten thousand years ago, around the time the last giant beavers paddled around Canada, the agricultural revolution dawned. And from pottery to the wheel to construction and engineering, we’ve ordered the world to our benefit.
Who ‘we’ and ‘our’ encompass makes the difference, both politically and socially, [8] a reality I’ve been trying to escape through video games.
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A young Folktail visits a shrine to contemplate nature.
There are two factions in Timberborn: the Folktails and the Iron Teeth, who are unlocked after you reach sufficient happiness in a Folktails game. (The beavers, it seems, have had their own agricultural and industrial revolutions.) As characterized by the game’s developers, the Folktails’ primary identity is attributed to their respect for nature. They live by the simple motto: “Comfort, food, and sturdy wood.”
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Talis floats in a mud bath and ponders the meaning of life.
Iron Teeth, on the other hand, defected from their traditional ways. Through their mastery of iron and science, they achieve progress through ‘ingenuity, efficiency, and disregard for the environment.’ Their motto: “Work hard, work hard.” When I tried to play the Iron Teeth faction, I quit soon after I discovered they don’t breed naturally—they just stick water and berries inside a breeding pod; five days later, a beaver baby pops out.
There’s an aesthetic difference I found difficult, too. Where a Folktail would erect a bucktoothed scarecrow, an Iron Tooth would place a scrap metal bell that sounds at the begin-and-end of each work day and evokes a punch card industrial hell. (With beavers.)
I’ve decided the Iron Teeth are for a different kind of player, possibly a different kind of human, than me. But what Timberborn’s developers have done, for better or worse, is give its players the ability to choose.
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Notes
- Friedrich Kittler, a philosopher and media theorist, once argued that software doesn’t ‘exist,’ and by consequence, that the bulk of modern texts composed on electronic mediums like WordPerfect exist not “in perceivable time and space but in a computer memory’s transistor cells” and that writing itself is a thing of the past.
- In the ‘real world,’ beavers are attracted to the sound of running water, streams and culverts alike, which makes them a pest in human society. Even though we’ve learned they’re important ecological engineers, people have put a lot of time and energy into designing contraptions to try and prevent beavers from flooding land we want to keep dry.
- Imperium Romanum is the title of a 2008 city-builder developed by Haemimont Games. In a positive review on Steam, a user named ‘praxis’ liked that the game didn’t “skirt around the issue that slavery was a common practice. Slaves will do all the building and hauling here, and they get separate ‘housing’ and will not be able to fill the ‘free’ jobs that your settlers will take. If you overwork your slaves (i.e. don't build enough slave shelters) then they are likely to revolt until you get their workload under control.”
- Vismann, C. (2013). “Cultural Techniques and Sovereignty.” Theory, Culture & Society, 30(6), 83-93. https://doi-org.ezproxy.library.uvic.ca/10.1177/0263276413496851
- A couple years ago, Edwin Evans-Thirlwell published an article in which he wonders how the realities of climate change will effect the developers of city-builders. He reviewed a handful of games that have responded to this ‘crisis of conscious’ in interesting ways.
- It’s unclear to what extent Timberborn’s developers believe the game responds to current ecological issues, but it’s played a minor role in their marketing strategy at least.
- On the ‘About’ page on Langdon’s website, he lists some of the ‘bad habits’ we’ve inherited from our industrial. This list includes things like the ‘needless destruction of living species and ecosystems;’ the ‘exploitation of working people;’ ‘surveillance as a means of social control;’ the ‘celebration of technical toys as if great social accomplishments,’ among others.
- As he also points out, the technologies we’ve developed to order our world also order human activity. “In the processes by which structuring decisions are made,” he writes, “different people are differently situated and possess unequal degrees of power as well as unequal levels of awareness” (Daedalus, Winter 1980). As we’ve seen, people don’t always understand what they’re voting for.
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