Medievalist Capitalism
Making things work in Manor Lords
There was a time when I would - somehow - have played more Manor Lords by now. Back when my contributions to History Respawned were more consistent this would have been a must. And it would have been a pretty obvious gig for me. City builder meets Crusader Kings? You had me at… etc. etc.
Having said that I am working my way through Manor Lords well enough. It’s reason for existence and premise occupy the same position to a certain extent: we just can't quit vaguely European medievalism. It helps I suppose that the game's sole - ahem - developer is from Poland and named his studio after a Witcher reference. It's also a pretty great setting. The game feels deep, in the sense that the mechanics that drive your play have clearly historical trappings. The marketplace for example; a key element of Manor Lords is how it insists you interact with its systems. Those systems in turn aren’t very visible at first. You don't just build a granary and move on like you have in about 1,852 other city builders. Now someone has to run the place and move things from place to place. Though now and again things might get a little slow and you can send them all to build a church down the road. It helps to have oxen by the way. Plural.
So, the marketplace. You need one, because this is where the food gets distributed. Not just food either but, as you grow, clothes and other goods. It is a move that will warm the hearts of historians arguing for incipient capitalism everywhere, and it also makes your village immediately feel lived in. The game actually demands you bring these ideas on board. Sure, it makes sense that you should have villagers live fairly near to where they work, but if you try and ignore this mechanic it will show up in the game, gradually and over time, and you have to start over. It's all terribly clever and just feels tight. Which in and of itself is great stuff for an early access game. The secret ingredient for me is that I’m still playing the game. I find Manor Lords to not be terribly easy - I keep starting my town over - but it's somehow not very off-putting. I know it will work this next time if I don’t let the population grow too fast and prioritize a farm. I know it.
But back to the merging together of player understanding of context and game mechanics. I've been reading Half-Real by Jesper Juul this week for the next book project and he talks about this a lot, the blending of rules and fiction, as he puts it. Essentially, according to Juul, who in turn is building off the work of others, the player plays in a game world created by the game which itself of course exists in our broader world. The real world if you want to call it that. But I'll leave that part up to you and where you are in the Matrix movies. Juul takes it a little further by pointing out that there are different "worlds" being created here. In a FIFA (sorry, EA FC) game for example the game world is all about the conditions that rule playing the game from throw-ins to regulations on time and the like, simulating a professional game of soccer. But as Juul points out, a wider world is implied, of world cups and other tournaments and in more recent years player endorsements and fantasy games played online. That meshes with our own actual understanding of the real world versions of these "gameplay" elements. So, in essence, the idea that the “game world” is walled off from player experience and assumptions is itself a bit of a nonsense. Most obviously with a game like EA FC or The Show or what have you, but also in plenty of games like, well, Manor Lords. You have a rough idea what you think a medieval village looks like, don’t you? Or at least some kind of stand-in? Mine is the witch trial from Monty Python and the Holy Grail.
How many players play sports games because it feels cool to win the Champions League, a real thing that exists, or to pitch a perfect game in clinch the World Series for the New York Mets, a thing that is unlikely but nonetheless real? So, when Manor Lords tells me the villagers should live near the sawpit so that production increases by a small but meaningful amount, and when it becomes clear that making villagers walk across the entire settlement to get to the farm actually makes the farming appreciably slower, even cripplingly so, it makes sense. It takes me longer to walk places too! Also, if one adopts the basic capitalist assumptions of the game in playing it, no one says you have to LIKE those assumptions. Do you want to live in a world where you have to take your oxen to carry wooden planks from one place to the next on terms completely dictated by someone else without even a modicum of your control even politely acknowledged? Me neither! Does that sound like a peasant experience? Well... yes.
Yes and no. My historiography is getting very mid-twentieth century here (with a healthy dose of Monty Python thrown in). At the same time, in the context of growth and production peasant agency is understood in very specific ways. Hence the marketplace, in this case. My point, when I’m not sidetracking myself with the complexities of how postwar historians in particular found themselves motivated to frame peasant experiences in the medieval period, is that separating the mechanics of gameplay from the storytelling in Manor Lords is a difficult thing to do. So far at least, when it comes to storytelling Manor Lords does in fact emulate Crusader Kings, though I haven’t yet gotten to the things that prompt the comparisons between the two games. The player is left to their own devices to generate story. So, in Manor Lords the mechanics/gameplay and the storytelling - the rules and fiction as Juul has it - don’t work without each other at all. And yes, that is ostensibly true of every game ever made but effectively presenting the player with a relatively deep economy/labor assignment model without really making the player feel like it’s all that deep is a heck of a trick.
The game also does that thing where roads curve around the place automatically and that's cool. Actually the game got the first "ooooh" out of me when I realized I could build burgage plots (houses basically, but also other things) with a considerable amount of freedom. Live in this trapezoid and thrive, you commoners, and derive pleasure from my willingness to bless you with more corners than expected.
I’m determined to persist in Manor Lords in part because I'm so excited about the Old World cities I might build. None of this grid based nonsense for me thank you very much. Truth is I've barely scratched the surface of this game. I have not been this excited about a city builder in - well let me clarify. I've been excited about lots of city builders in the last couple of years because I tend to get excited about city builders. I am however still excited about this one a few hours in and that has not happened in a long time. I think Surviving Mars was the last one.
It also makes me want to read a book on the Thirty Years' War, which I suspect is a phenomenon specific to me, but who knows. I am interested to see how things progress. I'm currently guilty of growing a little more quickly than I build basic infrastructure to support life, but the game is not short of Malthusian solutions. Malthus may have liked this game in fact. His fingerprints are all over it.