Age Of Empires 3 Campaign

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• Beth A. Dillon

  'Onahote,' the Iroquois warriors seem tosay as the player squares off selection around them and right-clicks the mouse tosend them forward. Blue circular outlines highlight the selected units at theirfeet. The mounted warriors spawn at the corral and announce 'Forward!' in thevoice of the European characters from Age ofEmpires III. The units are replicas of one another sent to encounterconflicts, collect resources, and reveal the map until they meet the end of thegame world at black edges.

  During the American Revolution, you as theplayer are tasked with traveling to an Oneida Iroquois village with your UncleKanyenke to set up defense against the Mohawk and Hessians. Your mother iskidnapped, which sends you on a search across the land to free villagers, taketrading posts, and find her. Once you have her, the Iroquois Confederacy isdisbanded, and you bring together Militia volunteers with Oneida to aid George Washington againstthe British and Mohawks. You are now known as Captain Black, it is a coldwinter in 1776, and this is your story.

  TheWarChiefs, an expansion of the Age of Empires III Real-Time Strategy (RTS)game for the PC, follows the stories of two descendants of the John Blackcharacter from the first game in the single-player campaign Fire and Shadow. Inthe campaign mode, narrator Amelia, Nathaniel Black's daughter, and ChaytonBlack's mother puts retell these characters' lives in the context of the RTSgame mechanics. The chapters of Act I and II-Fire and Shadow-recount differentbattle scenarios with various maps and terrain, playable units and buildings,possible allies, and definite enemies. The Fire and Shadow campaign uses all ofthe available elements of games to signify, as 'games can signify in ways thatother narrative forms have already established: through sound and image, materialand text, representations of movement and space' (Zimmerman, 2004). However,games signify in unique ways. This paper, which views games as 'explicitlyinteractive narrative systems of formal play' (Zimmerman, 2004), touches oneach of these methods of signification in order to glean their meaning in thecontext of game design aesthetic.

  As Eskelinen (2004) asserts, 'There's noguarantee whatsoever that the aesthetic traditions of the West are relevant togame studies in general and computer game studies in particular.' However,games designed and developed in the West certainly are influenced by Westernaesthetics, and thus should be considered in this light. To take up Eskelinen'schallenge to find other aesthetic traditions to analyze games, this paperintroduces the ludic qualities of the RTS genre, and then compares Indigenousand Western perspectives of interactivity, space and time, and narrative in aclose reading of Age of Empires III: TheWarChiefs. The WarChiefs uses bothWestern and Native representations in game mechanics, sound, image, text, andnarrative elements. By interweaving these aspects, the analysis addresses how The WarChiefs, and thus the RTS genre ingeneral, signifies Western design aesthetic while also considering thepossibilities of Indigenous design aesthetic.

  Challenging the Conventions

  RTS games, including the genre-defining StarCraft and Warcraftseries, and the genre-refining Command andConquer and Age of Empire series,position players to engage in actions in the moment with the intent of militaryor territorial dominance over another player or the computer. The term'real-time' simply refers to the player's the ability to make choices at anytime, which differs from strategy games with turn-based play. Otherwise, thesetwo wargame genres are quite similar. Core game mechanics centralize resourcemanagement, unit development, and competitive conflict. Resource management isbroken down into gathering and using; the object is to control as many resourcesources as possible to support unit development (Chan et al., 2007). Unitdevelopment consists of making units, upgrading units, and building; in turn,this cycle perpetuates further abilities to make new types of units out of newbuildings, which need new upgrades, and so on. Ultimately, the goal is tomaster the time it takes to gather enough resources to push forward developmentthat will cause the player to defeat his/her opponent in battle. Competitiveconflict includes actions such as defending, attacking opponent units andbuildings, and taking over resource sources. Exploration is key to this genre,since each step from a unit uncovers a hidden part of the map-the architectureof the game space-where the opponent or resources may be found.

  The challenge in the design of a RTS gameis to offer the player the ability to make both strategic and risky choices sothat the player can experience variety in gameplay. Players balance rationaland economic choices against irrational and daring choices in their use ofresources and options for exploration and attacks. For example, it may be to aplayer's advantage to risk sending the hero and a small group of units on anexploration at the start of the campaign level. In initial skirmish mode, thehero and the hero's team of units have the opportunity to attack an opponent'sbase before the opponent can build and spawn more units. However, withoutprior scouting, the player is unaware of the opponent's capacity to defend orcounterattack. Risk can mean pay off, a set back in spent resources, ordefeat.

  

  While playing a RTS, players managereal-time planning, making decisions without confirmed information, learningand modeling opponent behavior, reasoning out the changing environment,allocating resources, path-finding with units, and sometimes collaborating withother players in a multiplayer skirmish or alliances in campaign mode (Cheng& Thawonmas, 2004). Content theme issecondary to gameplay in the RTS genre, but still calls for analysis, as thecontent largely defines a background for the design choices in the context ofthe history of the design elements of wargames.

  Playing the Interface

  In game genres such as First PersonShooters (FPS), players enter a mode of immediacy where the medium istransparent, meaning players are able to look through the screen. In the caseof The WarChiefs, and the RTS genreoverall, there is an emphasis on hypermediation, or an awareness of the medium,as the player is constantly looking at the screen and its interface tonegotiate the gameplay (Bolter & Grusin, 1999).The interface boxes the map and switches between the HomeCity, rows of icons representing the various shipments you cansend to your base, and a 3D capture of a colonial town, no matter what yourcurrent Nation or HomeCity is. All interactions with the interface consistof single-clicks, right-clicks, and occasional dragging when performing actionssuch as determining the resources you want available for shipments from the HomeCity in future gameplay.

  Indigenous media suchas storytelling emphasizes experiencing the story in a collective space withoutexpression of authorial ownership over knowledge. The storyteller employsmethods of immersion so that the listener is not listening to the storyteller,but rather experiencing the knowledge inherent in the story. In contrast, The WarChiefs uses cut scenes in-between campaigns to tellthe progressive story as narrated by Amelia. Interactivity during cut sceneshas long been an issue in game design-games such as the Half-Life series and the recently released Assassin's Creed have attempted to remedy this lack of playercontrol by allowing character movement during in-game cut scenes. Allowing theplayer agency of movement during these narrative info dumps at least gives theplayer a sense of participating as opposed to merely witnessing. However, theplayer is still unable to effect change to the pre-designed event. In the caseof The WarChiefs, the player is not put in the role of acharacter during cut scenes, but is instead told a story through Amelia'svoiceover and accompanying visuals.

  Interactivity, as described by gamedesigner Eric Zimmerman (2004), can be broken down into four overlappingcategories: cognitive interactivity, an interpretive participation with a text;functional interactivity, a utilitarian participation with the text; explicitinteractivity, participation with designed choices and procedures in a text;and meta-interactivity, a cultural participation outside the experience of asingle text. Certainly, interactivity can be applied to media such as books,but taking a closer look at explicit interactivity can highlight ways in whichgames are unique as interactive narrative systems of formal play. Indigenousmedia, such as storytelling, also includes interactivity, and emphasizes everyparticipant as being in an interactive and enactive space when listening andinterpreting.

  In the RTS genre, the mouse serves as yourcommunication piece for in-game actions. When you left-click on a building, yousee its state of development or need for repair, as well as icons representingwhat units and upgrades the building can give you, depending on your resources.Icons are hued red when they are inaccessible due to your TownCenter's 'age.' When you roll your mouse over an icon, the stats of theunit or upgrade appear in a pop-up box with additional information, such as thecost of the unit or upgrade. If you are unable to choose the unit or upgrade,the resources you are low on will appear as red text. If you have the requiredresources, you can successfully left-click an icon, and a new row with yourqueued actions will appear at the top of the icon rows at the bottom of yourscreen.

  When your unit is generated, you canleft-click and drag the mouse to highlight the unit, then right-click todesignate an action. Actions are dependent on where you right-click. Open spacegenerates movement, clicking on an enemy means attack, and in the case ofvillagers or settlers, clicking on resources translates to automaticcollection. Only hero class characters, such as Nathaniel Black, Kanyeke,Chayton Black, and Billy Holme, can collect treasures. These treasures caninclude items that translate to resources or characters that turn intoadditional units.

  You are given tasks, which either simplygenerate additional experience, or must be completed in order for you tosucceed in the chapter and progress through the campaign. In order to build upyour base and your units, you must gather resources as quickly as possibleusing your villagers or settlers. Your primary objective is to gather, build,and conquer. The more resources you gather, the faster you can progress throughthe ages-Discovery, Colonial, Fortress, and Industrial. Your age determineswhat classes of buildings, units, and upgrades you can choose from.

  Regardless of whether you are playingcolonialists or Natives, the mechanics remain largely the same: mine copper,silver, and gold; chop down trees; gather berries; kill animals and collectmeat; kill treasure guardians and collect treasure; walk and reveal the map;attack and defeat enemies or defend territories; build trading posts andreceive resources or allies. When playing Natives, you do receive an additionalbuilding unique to them: 'Tasking Villagers on your Fire Pit invokes power foryour Tribe and will give you access to unique Native abilities.' The Fire Pitis a circle with blue flames that your Villagers dance around. Dances includeFertility Rate, which speeds up the creation of units; Gift Dance, whichincreases your trickle of experience over time; Holy Dance, which creates'Medicine Men;' Mother Dance, which increases your population allowance; andFire Damage, which gives you more damage against enemy buildings.

  Given these mechanics, the player is forcedto enact the narrative in a colonialist manner, concerned only with expansionand depleting resources. Once resources in your area are depleted, you areencouraged to defeat nearby enemies to take over their resources. In the'Trust' chapter of Shadow, you are tasked with earning the trust of the Siouxand gathering resources by destroying the moving wagons of the outlaws as theytrek to their destination. In earlier chapters, you destroy existing tradingposts to put up your own.

  Henderson points out the use of terror and fear as abasis for power and law in modern European political thought. As propagated bythe seventeenth-century English political philosopher Thomas Hobbes, 'In thestate of nature, a scarcity of desired things created competition forresources, distrust ('diffidence'), and glory (war and conquests)' (Henderson,2000). When this outlook is filtered through the game design of The WarChiefs, the result is gameplay which isunrepresentative of North American Indigenous peoples, or as Hobbes defined them,savages of the Americas.

  Even when playing Native characters, youare still bound to needing food, wood, and gold to generate buildings, units,and upgrades. Although the first two are understandable, the latter iscertainly questionable, as Indigenous peoples of North America and other regions were supported by a tradeeconomy before the arrival of settlers and forts.

  In contrast to the Eurocentric perspective,Indigenous peoples do not believe that we are separate from the natural world (Battiste & Henderson, 2000), and thus we have worldlyobligations to nature as to ourselves. It is unprecedented, then, to think thatNative characters in The WarChiefs would be designed without mechanics such as replantingtrees, gathering and making medicines, using all parts of an animal (not justmeat), and trading. But indeed they are limited to the colonialist viewpointsof success and a sense of progress, which results in a 'You are victorious!'announcement on the screen when you win the final battle of a chapter.

  Understanding Space as Time and Time as Space

  In TheWarChiefs, the player is enacting a plot with certain gameplaymechanics. The RTS genre in general relates to Jenkins' concept of spatialstories, in that 'Spatial stories [privilege] spatial exploration over plotdevelopment. Spatial stories are held together by broadly defined goals andconflicts and pushed forward by the character's movement across the map. Theirresolution often hinges on the player reaching their final destination'(Jenkins, 2004).

  Given that 'game designers don't simplytell stories; they design worlds and sculpt spaces' (Jenkins, 2004), in The WarChiefs, the space is represented maps.You see the terrain map where your units and buildings are seen from theGod-view with faded out black space either representing where you have nottraveled yet or the end of the map. You also have a 2D mini-map that shows thelocations of your town center and units (usually represented by blue icons) aswell as the locations of enemies in various colors, treasure marked by X, andresources that have either been discovered as you walk the map or revealed toyou during the in-game voiceovers with allies.

  This definition of space as mapped andmarked territory follows colonialist depictions of ownership over land. Whenyou reach the end of the game space, that which is not on the map, you areliterally confronted with black nothingness that you are unable to walk into.An overhead view further enhances this representation. Understandably, gameshave limited space that can be accessed during any one level or in any openworld due to media limitations. However, some game genres use illusions such aslandscape views from a first-person perspective to provide a sense of spacebeyond the conflict directly in front of you. The design of environment in The WarChiefs suggests that space is defined byterritory and that unmapped territory is non-existent and thereforeunimportant.

  Figure 1. Space as Mapped and OwnedTerritory

  Land and water are chartable in the scenarios,depending on the depth of water on an individual map and your choice to build adock to create ships to either attack buildings and other ships or move unitsacross water. Often, scenarios emphasize either land or water, but occasionallyequally utilize both. In the 'Crossing the Delaware' chapter, Nathaniel Black takes militia into small boats across theriver to land and destroy tents around the Hessian town center without alertingthe patrol. You are unable to cross certain icy or watery divides on the landby foot and must use the boats to change locations before landing andprogressing to your final destination by foot.

  Buildings are inaccessible as spaces, butare instead used to generate units or upgrades. Characters can go into certainbuildings as a form of defense, similar to ships, but you as the player neversee the inside of the building. Once a building is destroyed, all of the unitsappear where the destroyed building once was-negating the logical possibilitythat people inside a destroyed building would too be injured or killed.

  As you place buildings, you encounter spaceas it concerns terrain that can be built on or obstruction from overlappingbuildings. Buildings can be placed very close to one another, as long as thepixels don't overlap. The same is true of moving boats and ships through bodiesof water, although representations are generalized in favor of gameplay andthere is no regard for weather conditions affecting movement.

  Weather is only used once in Fire andShadow, in the chapter 'Valley Forge' where you need to send your militia out to chop wood to buildtents inside the camp near the fires. The cold can kill them, and the longerthey are away from the fires, the lower their health gets. By returning to thefire, they regain health. In this instance, their health bars become a kind ofrepresentation of the duration of time they have either been near or away fromthe fires. The healing 'aura' of the medicine man units has a similartime-based response.

  To understand the model of time in games, agame must be broken down by game state, play time, event time, mapping, speed,fixation, and cut-scenes (Juul, 2004). In addition to representing space, themini-map also serves to provide a visual representation of the game state, thestate of the game at a given time. The play time of each scenario can lastanywhere from twenty minutes to an hour and a half depending on your choices togain more experience spending extra time destroying all enemy buildings orcompleting all the secondary tasks. The event time triggers new tasks andfollows the level design progressed by a plot. Although the represented time isprone to jump years or generations in TheWarChiefs, it remains linear, with gaps filled in with cut scenes.

  In the setting of this territory-orientedspace, time is purposefully manipulated for playability and mapping. JesperJuul says in his 'Introduction to Game Time':

  The relationship between play time and eventtime can be described as mapping. Mapping means that the player's time andactions are projected into a game world. This is the play-element of games; youclick your mouse, but you are also the mayor of a fictive city.

  When you initiate the creation of a unit byclicking on a building and then clicking the unit you want to make, the icon ofthat unit in the rows at the bottom of the screen appears faded. The fadegradually ticks away in a clock-like manner against the background of the fullycolored icon until the unit appears on the map. This visualization of game timeis also used to represent how long it will take for the unit to 'arrive' atyour town center. This also appears as a pattern in the HomeCity screen, where you can choose units or resources often without cost,and the icons line up on the left-hand side of the screen in the order youclicked on them. Only one unit or resource can be sent at a time. However, inboth cases, time relates to the icon, not how many of one unit are beingcreated. It takes the same amount of time to make one unit as five, but theicon caps out at five units. As a gameplay strategy, then, it is advisable forthe player to make as many of one unit at once if time is a major factor in thescenario.

  Sending a villager to build results in theappearance of a partly constructed building graphic appearing at the locationof your placement. The more villagers you task on building, the faster theprocess. Of course, as this is a game, time is greatly manipulated in thatbuildings take well under a minute to complete, which adds to '.. Lastpass change password manually. themanipulation or completion of multiple relations [that] takes place in time - akind of general economy of games' (Eskelinen, 2004).

  Speed, then-the relation between the playtime and the event time-is not representative of time as modern society sees itrepresented in seconds, minutes, hours, et cetera, but rather in days and weeksplayed out in a matter of minutes or hours of 'real time.' Real Time Strategyrefers to the way in which the game state changes based on passing time ratherthan claiming a rigid hold to 'real time' as represented by clocks.

  TheWarChiefs also has clear fixation, or historicaltime of the event time. There are event references that generate time meaningand also years, such as 1776 and 1781 mentioned in Amelia's narration in Fire.This usage is, of course, representative of the Gregorian calendar and C.E.(Common Era).

  Innis, in theoften-referenced TheBias of Communication, usesthe space-based and time-based properties of medium to derive the reasoning forthe rise and fall of empires:

  According to its characteristics [a medium ofcommunication] may be better suited to transportation, or to the disseminationof knowledge over time than over space, particularly if the medium is heavy anddurable and not suited to transportation, or to the dissemination of knowledgeover space than over time, particularly if the medium is light and easilytransported.

  He references, for example, thetransportability of papyrus and declares its influence for Egyptians but notesits lack of preservability, which clay and stone by comparison win over (Innis,1951). However, in provoking us to ask how a medium might be space-biased ortime-biased, there is a direct concern with their ability to conquer eitherspace or time relative to the context they are presented in, which furtherinvokes a Western perspective.

  The design of The WarChiefs drives to conquer space and timein the gameplay itself. Western culture seems fascinated with its own abilityto conquer but also the abilities of other cultures, as if to glean insightinto how to create a dominating empire, relevant to the goal in the Age of Empires series.

  In contrast, Indigenousperspectives of space and time usually merge the two or emphasize space. In aPlains Cree mindset where existence consists of energy-animate, imbued withspirit, in constant motion-interrelationships between entities put space abovetime in importance (Little Bear, 2000). As with non-linear storytelling,concepts of time and space are also cyclic and take a step back to look at thewhole and patterns visible from this viewpoint. Time is thus dynamic andreflective, as it represents patterns to expect, not forward-moving progressionas seen by Western perspective.

  In many Indigenouslanguages, such as the Maori of New Zealand, time and space do not haveseparate words, but rather the two are intrinsically linked concepts (Smith,1999). Additionally, the structure of Indigenous language itself suggests aconceptualization of time. Most Indigenous languages are action or process-orientedwith an emphasis on verbs and the descriptions that weave together events oractions rather than objects (Little Bear, 2000).

  In light of therepresentations of space and time in The WarChiefs,certainly Indigenous perspectives are not included, but rather Western time ismanipulated for gameplay and Western space is represented. An Indigenous designmight incorporate a slower movement for the player situated around more actionswith references to seasons and cycles with greater reaches of land that holdmeaning for every entity within that space.

  Storytelling Trapped in Linearity

  The definition of theterm 'narrative' and the nature of its use are largely debated in game studies.For the sake of a holistic view, narrative is considered with multiplemeanings, but main concepts derived during this analysis draw from HenryJenkins' argument that games have narrative elements. This is not to suggestthat story is the main ambition of The WarChiefs,but rather to emphasize the relevance of analyzing narrative elements thatprovide background to the ludic qualities of the game. Considering narrativeelements is also particularly important in the context of the relationship ofNorth American Indigenous peoples to storytelling. Traditional storytelling relatesto understanding the world, why things are the way they are, and how to be within the world. These aspects of Indigenous storytellingare transferable to games when they are seen as an interactive space thatconstitute a storytelling event.

  In the single-playercampaign Fire and Shadow, narrative is certainly used in the sense of 'a chainof events in the cause-effect relationship' (Bordwell & Thompson, 1996). Inthe case of this RTS design, a conflict, tension, and resolution occur withineach chapter, but these elements also add to the narrative arc of a larger war.This definition of narrative is mainly used for historical context and puts theplayer in a state of re-enacting but also re-envisioning history by modifyingoutcomes using factual names and semi-factual situations. Games in the RTSgenre often pull from historical time periods, but even in cases where the gamecontent is entirely fictional (e.g., StarCraft), theyincorporate the narrative arc of conflict, tension, and resolution. In NorthAmerican Indigenous storytelling, individual stories are not told with lineartime or in a pattern of conflict, tension, and resolution. Stories are oftenshort but relate to a network of knowledge so that it is uncertain where onestory ends and another begins. The central focus of each story is a happeningand its effects on the people, the land, and the culture.

  In The WarChiefs, the completion of the narrative arc is ensuredby the game design. You are given tasks in each chapter to complete that drivethe narrative forward. Some of these tasks are optional, but the narrativedoesn't change whether you complete these or not, as these only result inadditional experience points that allow you to add cards to your deck ofresources or units you can send from your HomeCityto your base in the game. The player can't change outcomes undesignated by thedesigner, since the primary required tasks are either completed or failed. Ifyou fail, you must restart the chapter. The designer, in this design strategy,asserts authorial control over the plot of the Fire and Shadow campaign.

  You as the playerrepresent the main character of each Act. Nathaniel and Chayton each have theirown pre-determined traits, but you are put in the role of carrying out theiractions. Your level of control of the actions is minimal in that you need to dowhat is required to complete the task to either move on to the next task orsucceed in the chapter. (The player's role as an enactor of these actions willbe discussed later.)

  In Fire, you play asNathaniel Black, a loyal patriot, the son of Nonahkee the Iroquois and JohnBlack the Scot and former leader of the Falcon Company. You lead OneidaIroquois and militia at varying capacities based on the scenario through aseries of battles with Cornwallis, the British, the Hessians, and the Mohawks.You face off with Colonel Kuechler at the Battle of Morristown and conclude bywinning at the Battle of Yorktown.

  In Shadow, you skip ageneration to play Nathaniel's grandson Chayton Black during Red Cloud's war.Advised by Billy Holme, you must set up trading posts and a railroad, whichstirs up attacks from the Sioux. You negotiate a truce with Red Cloud and CrazyHorse that holds for almost a decade. Times change when Holme is Sheriff and agold rush hits the Black Hills; the truce is off. You return to protect themining camps from Natives, build trading posts, and defend against incomingSpanish. You change sides when you realize Holme is just after gold at anycost, which pits you against Colonel Custer as well. You must earn trust withthe Sioux and Cheyenne by killing Holme's outlaws and facing off withHolme in a mining cave. In the Battle of Little Bighorn, the object is to bringthree Warchiefs to your base, lead skirmishes before Custer arrives to destroythe nearby enemy buildings that he will otherwise get forces from, and defendyour main camp. Once Custer arrives, you don't need to defeat his entire force,but instead simply target him with a single right-click and kill him to win thecampaign.

  Historically, duringwhat was referred to as the Indian Wars, settlers did indeed push furtherwestward and Plains Tribes led attacks to prevent the placement of railroads.In order to take over the Black Hills, and thus the gold, the U.S.government declared that all Lakota Sioux and Northern Cheyenne who refused to be placed on reservations were to be considered hostileby 1876. Colonel Custer was defeated in the Battle of Little Bighorn, in partdue to dividing up his military. Although historical accounts have been sketchyconcerning whether or not Custer sympathized with Natives, The WarChiefs certainly presents him in the light of theunrelenting enemy. He refers to the Sioux and Cheyenne as a'bigger problem' and later confronts Chayton, who suggests they meet withSitting Bull and Crazy Horse to negotiate peace, by asking, 'Are you white orIndian?'

  These two narrativeelements are presented in the form of cut scenes, which Henry Jenkins (2004)refers to as a form of micronarrative. Between each chapter is a brief cutscene that presents the basis for the next conflict. After a narration byAmelia, the cut scenes feature your character and his interactions with othercharacters in the context of the past on a larger linear timescale but presentin terms of your progression through the storyline.

  Figure 2. Cut Scene of Kanyenke andNathaniel Black

  Amelia also plays arole as a storyteller, although her telling follows the linear pattern ofWestern story. Her narrations also add opinion to the plot. You see her in onlyone cut scene when she visits with Chayton just as the decade-long peacebetween settlers and Natives has been interrupted. Interestingly, although sheherself is mixed blood Iroquois and Scottish as the daughter of NathanielBlack-Scottish and Iroquois-and an Iroquois woman, Chayton Black only refers tohaving an Iroquois grandmother and Lakota-Sioux father when he is first askedabout looking 'Indian.' The extent of Amelia's background rests in who she wasborn from and her hand in leading the Falcon Company before passing it on toChayton. At the end of Shadow following your victory at the Battle of LittleBighorn, she concludes with a point on Chayton's decision to change sides:'Whether or not he made the right choice-history will be the judge of that.'The game, in this way, points to its own revisions of history, a new media playon the cinema of attractions moment in which there is an attempt to break downthe barrier between audience and actor (Gunning, 1990), or in this case, playerand designer.

  Occasionally,micronarratives are shown in the map mode at the completion of a task. In the'Ambushed!' chapter of the Shadow campaign, you fight your way through Nativesas Chayton Black to reach Crazy Horse's camp to negotiate peace (nevermind theirony that you can't avoid fighting and demolishing their camps on the way),only to witness your ally Sheriff Billy Holme come up around the other side ofthe hills and throw explosives down on Crazy Horse's camp once you've distractedhim. This is an unexpected event and adds to a later decision your charactermakes.

  There are also timeswhen micronarratives are used during gameplay in the form of subtitledvoiceover interactions that happen during action. These are used to alert youof changes in the game state-new tasks, your progress with tasks, and changesin alliances. In the Shadow chapter, after trying to defend Americancolonialists chopping wood from ongoing Natives to help build a large fort,Sheriff Holme tasks you with destroying the Native villages of women andchildren nearby. During a voiceover, you are alerted that Chayton makes thechoice to change sides, and you as the player then need to create tradingposts, develop your Native forces with few resources, and destroy the fort youjust built.

  This matter of ethics brings up theplayer's construction of a story when interpreting their gameplay. Kurt Squire,when using the popular RTS Civilization IIIin an educational context, found that 'students usedconcepts such as infrastructure, natural resources, or isolationism tointerpret and analyze gameplay. As students suffered defeats, they discoveredthe importance of geography. By the end, several students were using gamingexperiences as conceptual tools, explaining how a scarce natural resource suchas oil could destabilize global politics' (Jenkins & Squire, 2003).However, Jenkins & Squire (2003) also discovered that 'few detected thegame's geographical, materialist bias, or realized that CivIII minimizes therole of historical figures and cultural factors.'

  When breaking down thereviews of Command andConquer: Generals, anotherRTS, Geoff King (2007) gleaned that 'far more players devote attention toissues relating to gameplay than to the specific historical or geopoliticalcontext in which the game is set.' However, it is arguable that the gameplayitself is also a narrative when using J. Hillis Miller's interpretations.Similar to the RTS war-based genre, 'Chess certainlyhas a beginning state (the setup of the game), changes to that state (thegameplay), and a resulting insight (the outcome of the game). It is arepresentation - a stylized representation of war, complete with a cast ofcolorful characters. And the game takes place in highly patterned structures oftime (turns), and space (the checkerboard grid)' (Zimmerman, 2004).Additionally, 'turn-based strategy games such as Civilization seem to favor causal relationsover temporal ones to create event structures that have remarkable similaritiesto complex board games' (Eskelinen, 2004). Although The WarChiefs is a RTS, the gameplay mechanicsand representations of space and time are largely similar, and these causalrelations fall back to the cause-effect form of narrative.

  In TheWarChiefs, each playable chapter has an initial starting state whereyour units, allies, enemies, and resources are placed, changed by your movementand actions in the space, which results in winning or losing the designatedtasks. As a RTS, it also represents war with lead heroes and repeated baseunits. The game occurs in purposefully modified time and a map of terrain to be uncovered. Understandably, the campaign modediffers greatly from the random mode and customizable mode. The campaign haspre-established design to reinforce the narrative, whereas the other modes relysimply on the game state, gameplay, and outcome to be generated by programmablerandom factors or player customization.

  Across all modes of play, character unitsare depicted in physical appearance, abilities, and oral responses to playercommands. These immediate responses to the player's clicking actions also fallinto micronarratives. Language is minimized to a few words, and in the case ofNative characters, both English and a few 'Native' words are used across allpeoples without recognizing regional difference ranging from Aztecs toIroquois. Since the passing of knowledge inIndigenous cultures is centered around language and symbol, it is also a strongbelief that language is sacred and that 'any attempt to change Indigenouslanguage is an attempt to modify or destroy Indigenous knowledge and the peopleto whom this knowledge belongs' (Battiste & Henderson, 2000). If the gamedesign had taken this into account, the use of language as a micronarrative formwould be specific to each culture and unit.

  Figure 3. Icons for Character Units

  Despite these numerousnarrative elements, each retains the linear Western form of narrative in The WarChiefs. In the very narration of Amelia, who is mixedblood, you still follow a Western timeline from grandfather to grandson, onebattle to another, charting across territories in a straight-ahead manner.Although you are re-enacting the past, you follow a linear progression.Indigenous storytelling is non-linear by comparison. Stories are told toexplain why things are the way they are and how to be in life. The storiesusually give a lesson about ethics and morality. Although Chayton does make anethical decision in the Shadow Act, it is not presented as a personal lesson hehas learned, but rather a heroic choice he has made to save Natives who wouldotherwise be unable to protect themselves.

  Following the Circle

  The implications of applying clearlyWestern, and more specifically colonialist, design aesthetics to a game withIndigenous characters without regard to incorporating Indigenous aesthetic isone of misrepresentation and simplification of a culture to game mechanics useduniversally throughout the Age of Empires series.Notably, the game design makes an attempt to address a different mechanic bygiving Natives the Fire Pit, but in so doing, reduces prayer and dance tomanifestations of strategies for imperial improvement.

  The Real Time Strategyand Turn Based Strategy genre shares similar themes in their design. Poblocki,in his article 'Becoming-State: The Bio-Cultural Imperialism of Sid Meier's Civilization,' asserts:

  In CivilizationI the clash was mainly military, economic, and technological, whereassubsequently it became also cultural. By embracing nineteenth century models ofsocial change and by brutal projection of the Western history onto contingentgrounds of randomly generated maps, random civilization names, random startingpositions, random distribution of resources and the like, [Meier] essentializesthe story of the Western success, suggesting their causes lie in personalabilities, rationality, high administrative skills and other qualities of theWesterners, reducing culture to an imperialist checklist (one either has it ornot), and suggesting that starting conditions (both ecological and cultural) donot matter in the absorbing of new advancement..

  This can also be saidof The WarChiefs gameplay found in the Skirmish mode, which mixesall races for head-to-head competition, although this is primarily seen in thesingle-player campaign Fire and Shadow when you are able to play Nativecultures at certain points. In both gameplay states, the mechanics apply theperceived abilities of Westerners to Native cultures. This suggests theirsuccesses in war and survival would have been much greater had they had adifferent worldview or been guided by mixed blood leaders who could appear asNative but who held what is presented as the logical and fruitful colonialistexpansionary view.

  One RTS-like game that does make an attemptat representing Indigenous concepts of space and time is the wildlife tycoon Venture Arctic, by independent design companyPocketwatch Games. In the game, you learn about Inuit representations of thecycles of life and death and the seasons by making animals interact with oneanother and the environment based on their individual traits. For example, twopolar bears can mate, survive throughout the winter cold, and eat certainanimals. The game relays concepts such asenvironmental sustainability, the necessary cycle of life and death, and thesun, moon, and seasons as depictions of time, all without using representationsof people. Unlike the wargame RTS style, VentureArctic presents the computer-nature-as acollaborator that helps you determine the best play choice to make during agiven season or in a particular event.

  In The WarChiefs, the designers signify colonialist aestheticfrom visual representations of people to the geopolitical implications ofgameplay mechanics, despite putting the player in the role of playing Nativesin some chapters. As Jenkins and Squire point out: 'There is no such thing as aneutral simulation; they all embody assumptions about the way the world works'(Jenkins & Squire, 2003). This is certainly the case for simulations butalso for games in general, which are systems of signification. Analyzing themeaning of a game's signification adds to an argument that designers shouldtake care in the implications of the game they are designing. How the player interacts,how the player experiences space and time-if the two are even to be dividedwhen concerned with an Indigenous perspective-and how the player interprets thenarrative elements should inspire unique interactive narrative systems offormal play. The RTS genre in general needs new mechanics in order to properlydesign play that is relevant for simulating North American Indigenous peoplesand their culture. As is, The WarChiefs failsto properly represent the peoples and culture due to its inherent Westerndesign that originates from the development history of the RTS genre andsimulation wargames overall. Addressing this fault offers possibilities for newinnovations in a genre that has mostly focused on improving aspects such asgraphics and ping time rather than developing on the design and core mechanics,the most essential part of any game.

  References

  Battiste, M. & Henderson, J. (2000). Protecting indigenous knowledge andheritage: a global challenge. Saskatoon, Saskatchewan: PurichPublishing Ltd.

  Bolter, J. D. & Grusin, R. (1999). Remediation: understanding new media. Cambridge, Mass.: The MIT Press.

  Bordwell, D. & Thompson, K. (1996). Film art: an introduction(5^th ed.). New York: The McGraw-Hill Companies.

  Chan, H.; Fern, A.; Ray, S.; Wilson, N.; and Ventura, C.(2007, September). Online planning for resource production in real-timestrategy games. Proceedings of the International Conference on AutomatedPlanning and Scheduling, Providence, Rhode Island.

  Cheng, D., Thawonmas, R. (2004, November). Case-based planrecognition for real-time strategy games. Proceedings of the 5th Game-OnInternational Conference.

  Eskelinen, M. (2004). Towards computer game studies. In N.Wardrip-Fruin, & P. Harrigan (Eds.), First person : New media as story, performance, and game(pp. 331). Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press.

  Gunning, T. (1990). The cinema of attractions. In A.Barker, & T. Elsaesser (Eds.), Early cinema : Space, frame, narrative (pp. 424). London:BFI Pub.

  Henderson, J. (2000). The context of the state of nature.In Battiste, M. (Ed.), Reclaimingindigenous voice and vision (pp. 11). Vancouver, BC: UBC Press.

  Innis, H. (1951, reprinted 1999). The Bias of Communication. Toronto, Ontario: University of Toronto Press.

  

  Jenkins, H. (2004). Game design as narrative architecture.In N. Wardrip-Fruin, & P. Harrigan (Eds.), First person : New media as story, performance, and game(pp. 118). Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press.

  Jenkins, H., & Squire, K. (2003, September).Understanding Civilization III. Computer Games, December 3, 2006 from http://www.educationarcade.org/node/66.

  Juul, J. (2004). Introduction to game time. In N.Wardrip-Fruin, & P. Harrigan (Eds.), First person : New media as story, performance, and game (pp.131). Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press.

  King, G. (2007, September). Dimensions of play: gameplay,context, franchise and genre in player responses to Command and Conquer:Generals. Paper presented at the Digital Games Research AssociationInternational Conference, Tokyo, Japan. December 1, 2007 from http://www.digra.org/dl/db/07311.18043.pdf.

  Lammes, S. (2003, November). On the border: Pleasure ofexploration and colonial mastery in Civilization III play the world. Paperpresented at the Digital Games Research Association International Conference, Utrecht, Netherlands. September 15, 2007 from http://www.digra.org/dl/db/05163.06568.

  Little Bear, L. (2000). Jagged worldviews colliding. InBattiste, M. (Ed.), Reclaimingindigenous voice and vision (pp. 11). Vancouver, BC: UBC Press.

  Poblocki, K. (2002). Becoming-state: the bio-culturalimperialism of Sid Meier's Civilization. Focaal European Journal of Anthropology, 39. December 3, 2006 from http://www.focaal.box.nl/previous/Forum%20focaal39.pdf.

  Zimmerman, E. (2004). Narrative, interactivity, play, andgames. In N. Wardrip-Fruin, & P. Harrigan (Eds.), First person : New media as story,performance, and game (pp. 154). Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press.

  ...">Age Of Empires 3 Campaign(26.03.2020)

• Beth A. Dillon

  'Onahote,' the Iroquois warriors seem tosay as the player squares off selection around them and right-clicks the mouse tosend them forward. Blue circular outlines highlight the selected units at theirfeet. The mounted warriors spawn at the corral and announce 'Forward!' in thevoice of the European characters from Age ofEmpires III. The units are replicas of one another sent to encounterconflicts, collect resources, and reveal the map until they meet the end of thegame world at black edges.

  During the American Revolution, you as theplayer are tasked with traveling to an Oneida Iroquois village with your UncleKanyenke to set up defense against the Mohawk and Hessians. Your mother iskidnapped, which sends you on a search across the land to free villagers, taketrading posts, and find her. Once you have her, the Iroquois Confederacy isdisbanded, and you bring together Militia volunteers with Oneida to aid George Washington againstthe British and Mohawks. You are now known as Captain Black, it is a coldwinter in 1776, and this is your story.

  TheWarChiefs, an expansion of the Age of Empires III Real-Time Strategy (RTS)game for the PC, follows the stories of two descendants of the John Blackcharacter from the first game in the single-player campaign Fire and Shadow. Inthe campaign mode, narrator Amelia, Nathaniel Black's daughter, and ChaytonBlack's mother puts retell these characters' lives in the context of the RTSgame mechanics. The chapters of Act I and II-Fire and Shadow-recount differentbattle scenarios with various maps and terrain, playable units and buildings,possible allies, and definite enemies. The Fire and Shadow campaign uses all ofthe available elements of games to signify, as 'games can signify in ways thatother narrative forms have already established: through sound and image, materialand text, representations of movement and space' (Zimmerman, 2004). However,games signify in unique ways. This paper, which views games as 'explicitlyinteractive narrative systems of formal play' (Zimmerman, 2004), touches oneach of these methods of signification in order to glean their meaning in thecontext of game design aesthetic.

  As Eskelinen (2004) asserts, 'There's noguarantee whatsoever that the aesthetic traditions of the West are relevant togame studies in general and computer game studies in particular.' However,games designed and developed in the West certainly are influenced by Westernaesthetics, and thus should be considered in this light. To take up Eskelinen'schallenge to find other aesthetic traditions to analyze games, this paperintroduces the ludic qualities of the RTS genre, and then compares Indigenousand Western perspectives of interactivity, space and time, and narrative in aclose reading of Age of Empires III: TheWarChiefs. The WarChiefs uses bothWestern and Native representations in game mechanics, sound, image, text, andnarrative elements. By interweaving these aspects, the analysis addresses how The WarChiefs, and thus the RTS genre ingeneral, signifies Western design aesthetic while also considering thepossibilities of Indigenous design aesthetic.

  Challenging the Conventions

  RTS games, including the genre-defining StarCraft and Warcraftseries, and the genre-refining Command andConquer and Age of Empire series,position players to engage in actions in the moment with the intent of militaryor territorial dominance over another player or the computer. The term'real-time' simply refers to the player's the ability to make choices at anytime, which differs from strategy games with turn-based play. Otherwise, thesetwo wargame genres are quite similar. Core game mechanics centralize resourcemanagement, unit development, and competitive conflict. Resource management isbroken down into gathering and using; the object is to control as many resourcesources as possible to support unit development (Chan et al., 2007). Unitdevelopment consists of making units, upgrading units, and building; in turn,this cycle perpetuates further abilities to make new types of units out of newbuildings, which need new upgrades, and so on. Ultimately, the goal is tomaster the time it takes to gather enough resources to push forward developmentthat will cause the player to defeat his/her opponent in battle. Competitiveconflict includes actions such as defending, attacking opponent units andbuildings, and taking over resource sources. Exploration is key to this genre,since each step from a unit uncovers a hidden part of the map-the architectureof the game space-where the opponent or resources may be found.

  The challenge in the design of a RTS gameis to offer the player the ability to make both strategic and risky choices sothat the player can experience variety in gameplay. Players balance rationaland economic choices against irrational and daring choices in their use ofresources and options for exploration and attacks. For example, it may be to aplayer's advantage to risk sending the hero and a small group of units on anexploration at the start of the campaign level. In initial skirmish mode, thehero and the hero's team of units have the opportunity to attack an opponent'sbase before the opponent can build and spawn more units. However, withoutprior scouting, the player is unaware of the opponent's capacity to defend orcounterattack. Risk can mean pay off, a set back in spent resources, ordefeat.

  

  While playing a RTS, players managereal-time planning, making decisions without confirmed information, learningand modeling opponent behavior, reasoning out the changing environment,allocating resources, path-finding with units, and sometimes collaborating withother players in a multiplayer skirmish or alliances in campaign mode (Cheng& Thawonmas, 2004). Content theme issecondary to gameplay in the RTS genre, but still calls for analysis, as thecontent largely defines a background for the design choices in the context ofthe history of the design elements of wargames.

  Playing the Interface

  In game genres such as First PersonShooters (FPS), players enter a mode of immediacy where the medium istransparent, meaning players are able to look through the screen. In the caseof The WarChiefs, and the RTS genreoverall, there is an emphasis on hypermediation, or an awareness of the medium,as the player is constantly looking at the screen and its interface tonegotiate the gameplay (Bolter & Grusin, 1999).The interface boxes the map and switches between the HomeCity, rows of icons representing the various shipments you cansend to your base, and a 3D capture of a colonial town, no matter what yourcurrent Nation or HomeCity is. All interactions with the interface consistof single-clicks, right-clicks, and occasional dragging when performing actionssuch as determining the resources you want available for shipments from the HomeCity in future gameplay.

  Indigenous media suchas storytelling emphasizes experiencing the story in a collective space withoutexpression of authorial ownership over knowledge. The storyteller employsmethods of immersion so that the listener is not listening to the storyteller,but rather experiencing the knowledge inherent in the story. In contrast, The WarChiefs uses cut scenes in-between campaigns to tellthe progressive story as narrated by Amelia. Interactivity during cut sceneshas long been an issue in game design-games such as the Half-Life series and the recently released Assassin's Creed have attempted to remedy this lack of playercontrol by allowing character movement during in-game cut scenes. Allowing theplayer agency of movement during these narrative info dumps at least gives theplayer a sense of participating as opposed to merely witnessing. However, theplayer is still unable to effect change to the pre-designed event. In the caseof The WarChiefs, the player is not put in the role of acharacter during cut scenes, but is instead told a story through Amelia'svoiceover and accompanying visuals.

  Interactivity, as described by gamedesigner Eric Zimmerman (2004), can be broken down into four overlappingcategories: cognitive interactivity, an interpretive participation with a text;functional interactivity, a utilitarian participation with the text; explicitinteractivity, participation with designed choices and procedures in a text;and meta-interactivity, a cultural participation outside the experience of asingle text. Certainly, interactivity can be applied to media such as books,but taking a closer look at explicit interactivity can highlight ways in whichgames are unique as interactive narrative systems of formal play. Indigenousmedia, such as storytelling, also includes interactivity, and emphasizes everyparticipant as being in an interactive and enactive space when listening andinterpreting.

  In the RTS genre, the mouse serves as yourcommunication piece for in-game actions. When you left-click on a building, yousee its state of development or need for repair, as well as icons representingwhat units and upgrades the building can give you, depending on your resources.Icons are hued red when they are inaccessible due to your TownCenter's 'age.' When you roll your mouse over an icon, the stats of theunit or upgrade appear in a pop-up box with additional information, such as thecost of the unit or upgrade. If you are unable to choose the unit or upgrade,the resources you are low on will appear as red text. If you have the requiredresources, you can successfully left-click an icon, and a new row with yourqueued actions will appear at the top of the icon rows at the bottom of yourscreen.

  When your unit is generated, you canleft-click and drag the mouse to highlight the unit, then right-click todesignate an action. Actions are dependent on where you right-click. Open spacegenerates movement, clicking on an enemy means attack, and in the case ofvillagers or settlers, clicking on resources translates to automaticcollection. Only hero class characters, such as Nathaniel Black, Kanyeke,Chayton Black, and Billy Holme, can collect treasures. These treasures caninclude items that translate to resources or characters that turn intoadditional units.

  You are given tasks, which either simplygenerate additional experience, or must be completed in order for you tosucceed in the chapter and progress through the campaign. In order to build upyour base and your units, you must gather resources as quickly as possibleusing your villagers or settlers. Your primary objective is to gather, build,and conquer. The more resources you gather, the faster you can progress throughthe ages-Discovery, Colonial, Fortress, and Industrial. Your age determineswhat classes of buildings, units, and upgrades you can choose from.

  Regardless of whether you are playingcolonialists or Natives, the mechanics remain largely the same: mine copper,silver, and gold; chop down trees; gather berries; kill animals and collectmeat; kill treasure guardians and collect treasure; walk and reveal the map;attack and defeat enemies or defend territories; build trading posts andreceive resources or allies. When playing Natives, you do receive an additionalbuilding unique to them: 'Tasking Villagers on your Fire Pit invokes power foryour Tribe and will give you access to unique Native abilities.' The Fire Pitis a circle with blue flames that your Villagers dance around. Dances includeFertility Rate, which speeds up the creation of units; Gift Dance, whichincreases your trickle of experience over time; Holy Dance, which creates'Medicine Men;' Mother Dance, which increases your population allowance; andFire Damage, which gives you more damage against enemy buildings.

  Given these mechanics, the player is forcedto enact the narrative in a colonialist manner, concerned only with expansionand depleting resources. Once resources in your area are depleted, you areencouraged to defeat nearby enemies to take over their resources. In the'Trust' chapter of Shadow, you are tasked with earning the trust of the Siouxand gathering resources by destroying the moving wagons of the outlaws as theytrek to their destination. In earlier chapters, you destroy existing tradingposts to put up your own.

  Henderson points out the use of terror and fear as abasis for power and law in modern European political thought. As propagated bythe seventeenth-century English political philosopher Thomas Hobbes, 'In thestate of nature, a scarcity of desired things created competition forresources, distrust ('diffidence'), and glory (war and conquests)' (Henderson,2000). When this outlook is filtered through the game design of The WarChiefs, the result is gameplay which isunrepresentative of North American Indigenous peoples, or as Hobbes defined them,savages of the Americas.

  Even when playing Native characters, youare still bound to needing food, wood, and gold to generate buildings, units,and upgrades. Although the first two are understandable, the latter iscertainly questionable, as Indigenous peoples of North America and other regions were supported by a tradeeconomy before the arrival of settlers and forts.

  In contrast to the Eurocentric perspective,Indigenous peoples do not believe that we are separate from the natural world (Battiste & Henderson, 2000), and thus we have worldlyobligations to nature as to ourselves. It is unprecedented, then, to think thatNative characters in The WarChiefs would be designed without mechanics such as replantingtrees, gathering and making medicines, using all parts of an animal (not justmeat), and trading. But indeed they are limited to the colonialist viewpointsof success and a sense of progress, which results in a 'You are victorious!'announcement on the screen when you win the final battle of a chapter.

  Understanding Space as Time and Time as Space

  In TheWarChiefs, the player is enacting a plot with certain gameplaymechanics. The RTS genre in general relates to Jenkins' concept of spatialstories, in that 'Spatial stories [privilege] spatial exploration over plotdevelopment. Spatial stories are held together by broadly defined goals andconflicts and pushed forward by the character's movement across the map. Theirresolution often hinges on the player reaching their final destination'(Jenkins, 2004).

  Given that 'game designers don't simplytell stories; they design worlds and sculpt spaces' (Jenkins, 2004), in The WarChiefs, the space is represented maps.You see the terrain map where your units and buildings are seen from theGod-view with faded out black space either representing where you have nottraveled yet or the end of the map. You also have a 2D mini-map that shows thelocations of your town center and units (usually represented by blue icons) aswell as the locations of enemies in various colors, treasure marked by X, andresources that have either been discovered as you walk the map or revealed toyou during the in-game voiceovers with allies.

  This definition of space as mapped andmarked territory follows colonialist depictions of ownership over land. Whenyou reach the end of the game space, that which is not on the map, you areliterally confronted with black nothingness that you are unable to walk into.An overhead view further enhances this representation. Understandably, gameshave limited space that can be accessed during any one level or in any openworld due to media limitations. However, some game genres use illusions such aslandscape views from a first-person perspective to provide a sense of spacebeyond the conflict directly in front of you. The design of environment in The WarChiefs suggests that space is defined byterritory and that unmapped territory is non-existent and thereforeunimportant.

  Figure 1. Space as Mapped and OwnedTerritory

  Land and water are chartable in the scenarios,depending on the depth of water on an individual map and your choice to build adock to create ships to either attack buildings and other ships or move unitsacross water. Often, scenarios emphasize either land or water, but occasionallyequally utilize both. In the 'Crossing the Delaware' chapter, Nathaniel Black takes militia into small boats across theriver to land and destroy tents around the Hessian town center without alertingthe patrol. You are unable to cross certain icy or watery divides on the landby foot and must use the boats to change locations before landing andprogressing to your final destination by foot.

  Buildings are inaccessible as spaces, butare instead used to generate units or upgrades. Characters can go into certainbuildings as a form of defense, similar to ships, but you as the player neversee the inside of the building. Once a building is destroyed, all of the unitsappear where the destroyed building once was-negating the logical possibilitythat people inside a destroyed building would too be injured or killed.

  As you place buildings, you encounter spaceas it concerns terrain that can be built on or obstruction from overlappingbuildings. Buildings can be placed very close to one another, as long as thepixels don't overlap. The same is true of moving boats and ships through bodiesof water, although representations are generalized in favor of gameplay andthere is no regard for weather conditions affecting movement.

  Weather is only used once in Fire andShadow, in the chapter 'Valley Forge' where you need to send your militia out to chop wood to buildtents inside the camp near the fires. The cold can kill them, and the longerthey are away from the fires, the lower their health gets. By returning to thefire, they regain health. In this instance, their health bars become a kind ofrepresentation of the duration of time they have either been near or away fromthe fires. The healing 'aura' of the medicine man units has a similartime-based response.

  To understand the model of time in games, agame must be broken down by game state, play time, event time, mapping, speed,fixation, and cut-scenes (Juul, 2004). In addition to representing space, themini-map also serves to provide a visual representation of the game state, thestate of the game at a given time. The play time of each scenario can lastanywhere from twenty minutes to an hour and a half depending on your choices togain more experience spending extra time destroying all enemy buildings orcompleting all the secondary tasks. The event time triggers new tasks andfollows the level design progressed by a plot. Although the represented time isprone to jump years or generations in TheWarChiefs, it remains linear, with gaps filled in with cut scenes.

  In the setting of this territory-orientedspace, time is purposefully manipulated for playability and mapping. JesperJuul says in his 'Introduction to Game Time':

  The relationship between play time and eventtime can be described as mapping. Mapping means that the player's time andactions are projected into a game world. This is the play-element of games; youclick your mouse, but you are also the mayor of a fictive city.

  When you initiate the creation of a unit byclicking on a building and then clicking the unit you want to make, the icon ofthat unit in the rows at the bottom of the screen appears faded. The fadegradually ticks away in a clock-like manner against the background of the fullycolored icon until the unit appears on the map. This visualization of game timeis also used to represent how long it will take for the unit to 'arrive' atyour town center. This also appears as a pattern in the HomeCity screen, where you can choose units or resources often without cost,and the icons line up on the left-hand side of the screen in the order youclicked on them. Only one unit or resource can be sent at a time. However, inboth cases, time relates to the icon, not how many of one unit are beingcreated. It takes the same amount of time to make one unit as five, but theicon caps out at five units. As a gameplay strategy, then, it is advisable forthe player to make as many of one unit at once if time is a major factor in thescenario.

  Sending a villager to build results in theappearance of a partly constructed building graphic appearing at the locationof your placement. The more villagers you task on building, the faster theprocess. Of course, as this is a game, time is greatly manipulated in thatbuildings take well under a minute to complete, which adds to '.. Lastpass change password manually. themanipulation or completion of multiple relations [that] takes place in time - akind of general economy of games' (Eskelinen, 2004).

  Speed, then-the relation between the playtime and the event time-is not representative of time as modern society sees itrepresented in seconds, minutes, hours, et cetera, but rather in days and weeksplayed out in a matter of minutes or hours of 'real time.' Real Time Strategyrefers to the way in which the game state changes based on passing time ratherthan claiming a rigid hold to 'real time' as represented by clocks.

  TheWarChiefs also has clear fixation, or historicaltime of the event time. There are event references that generate time meaningand also years, such as 1776 and 1781 mentioned in Amelia's narration in Fire.This usage is, of course, representative of the Gregorian calendar and C.E.(Common Era).

  Innis, in theoften-referenced TheBias of Communication, usesthe space-based and time-based properties of medium to derive the reasoning forthe rise and fall of empires:

  According to its characteristics [a medium ofcommunication] may be better suited to transportation, or to the disseminationof knowledge over time than over space, particularly if the medium is heavy anddurable and not suited to transportation, or to the dissemination of knowledgeover space than over time, particularly if the medium is light and easilytransported.

  He references, for example, thetransportability of papyrus and declares its influence for Egyptians but notesits lack of preservability, which clay and stone by comparison win over (Innis,1951). However, in provoking us to ask how a medium might be space-biased ortime-biased, there is a direct concern with their ability to conquer eitherspace or time relative to the context they are presented in, which furtherinvokes a Western perspective.

  The design of The WarChiefs drives to conquer space and timein the gameplay itself. Western culture seems fascinated with its own abilityto conquer but also the abilities of other cultures, as if to glean insightinto how to create a dominating empire, relevant to the goal in the Age of Empires series.

  In contrast, Indigenousperspectives of space and time usually merge the two or emphasize space. In aPlains Cree mindset where existence consists of energy-animate, imbued withspirit, in constant motion-interrelationships between entities put space abovetime in importance (Little Bear, 2000). As with non-linear storytelling,concepts of time and space are also cyclic and take a step back to look at thewhole and patterns visible from this viewpoint. Time is thus dynamic andreflective, as it represents patterns to expect, not forward-moving progressionas seen by Western perspective.

  In many Indigenouslanguages, such as the Maori of New Zealand, time and space do not haveseparate words, but rather the two are intrinsically linked concepts (Smith,1999). Additionally, the structure of Indigenous language itself suggests aconceptualization of time. Most Indigenous languages are action or process-orientedwith an emphasis on verbs and the descriptions that weave together events oractions rather than objects (Little Bear, 2000).

  In light of therepresentations of space and time in The WarChiefs,certainly Indigenous perspectives are not included, but rather Western time ismanipulated for gameplay and Western space is represented. An Indigenous designmight incorporate a slower movement for the player situated around more actionswith references to seasons and cycles with greater reaches of land that holdmeaning for every entity within that space.

  Storytelling Trapped in Linearity

  The definition of theterm 'narrative' and the nature of its use are largely debated in game studies.For the sake of a holistic view, narrative is considered with multiplemeanings, but main concepts derived during this analysis draw from HenryJenkins' argument that games have narrative elements. This is not to suggestthat story is the main ambition of The WarChiefs,but rather to emphasize the relevance of analyzing narrative elements thatprovide background to the ludic qualities of the game. Considering narrativeelements is also particularly important in the context of the relationship ofNorth American Indigenous peoples to storytelling. Traditional storytelling relatesto understanding the world, why things are the way they are, and how to be within the world. These aspects of Indigenous storytellingare transferable to games when they are seen as an interactive space thatconstitute a storytelling event.

  In the single-playercampaign Fire and Shadow, narrative is certainly used in the sense of 'a chainof events in the cause-effect relationship' (Bordwell & Thompson, 1996). Inthe case of this RTS design, a conflict, tension, and resolution occur withineach chapter, but these elements also add to the narrative arc of a larger war.This definition of narrative is mainly used for historical context and puts theplayer in a state of re-enacting but also re-envisioning history by modifyingoutcomes using factual names and semi-factual situations. Games in the RTSgenre often pull from historical time periods, but even in cases where the gamecontent is entirely fictional (e.g., StarCraft), theyincorporate the narrative arc of conflict, tension, and resolution. In NorthAmerican Indigenous storytelling, individual stories are not told with lineartime or in a pattern of conflict, tension, and resolution. Stories are oftenshort but relate to a network of knowledge so that it is uncertain where onestory ends and another begins. The central focus of each story is a happeningand its effects on the people, the land, and the culture.

  In The WarChiefs, the completion of the narrative arc is ensuredby the game design. You are given tasks in each chapter to complete that drivethe narrative forward. Some of these tasks are optional, but the narrativedoesn't change whether you complete these or not, as these only result inadditional experience points that allow you to add cards to your deck ofresources or units you can send from your HomeCityto your base in the game. The player can't change outcomes undesignated by thedesigner, since the primary required tasks are either completed or failed. Ifyou fail, you must restart the chapter. The designer, in this design strategy,asserts authorial control over the plot of the Fire and Shadow campaign.

  You as the playerrepresent the main character of each Act. Nathaniel and Chayton each have theirown pre-determined traits, but you are put in the role of carrying out theiractions. Your level of control of the actions is minimal in that you need to dowhat is required to complete the task to either move on to the next task orsucceed in the chapter. (The player's role as an enactor of these actions willbe discussed later.)

  In Fire, you play asNathaniel Black, a loyal patriot, the son of Nonahkee the Iroquois and JohnBlack the Scot and former leader of the Falcon Company. You lead OneidaIroquois and militia at varying capacities based on the scenario through aseries of battles with Cornwallis, the British, the Hessians, and the Mohawks.You face off with Colonel Kuechler at the Battle of Morristown and conclude bywinning at the Battle of Yorktown.

  In Shadow, you skip ageneration to play Nathaniel's grandson Chayton Black during Red Cloud's war.Advised by Billy Holme, you must set up trading posts and a railroad, whichstirs up attacks from the Sioux. You negotiate a truce with Red Cloud and CrazyHorse that holds for almost a decade. Times change when Holme is Sheriff and agold rush hits the Black Hills; the truce is off. You return to protect themining camps from Natives, build trading posts, and defend against incomingSpanish. You change sides when you realize Holme is just after gold at anycost, which pits you against Colonel Custer as well. You must earn trust withthe Sioux and Cheyenne by killing Holme's outlaws and facing off withHolme in a mining cave. In the Battle of Little Bighorn, the object is to bringthree Warchiefs to your base, lead skirmishes before Custer arrives to destroythe nearby enemy buildings that he will otherwise get forces from, and defendyour main camp. Once Custer arrives, you don't need to defeat his entire force,but instead simply target him with a single right-click and kill him to win thecampaign.

  Historically, duringwhat was referred to as the Indian Wars, settlers did indeed push furtherwestward and Plains Tribes led attacks to prevent the placement of railroads.In order to take over the Black Hills, and thus the gold, the U.S.government declared that all Lakota Sioux and Northern Cheyenne who refused to be placed on reservations were to be considered hostileby 1876. Colonel Custer was defeated in the Battle of Little Bighorn, in partdue to dividing up his military. Although historical accounts have been sketchyconcerning whether or not Custer sympathized with Natives, The WarChiefs certainly presents him in the light of theunrelenting enemy. He refers to the Sioux and Cheyenne as a'bigger problem' and later confronts Chayton, who suggests they meet withSitting Bull and Crazy Horse to negotiate peace, by asking, 'Are you white orIndian?'

  These two narrativeelements are presented in the form of cut scenes, which Henry Jenkins (2004)refers to as a form of micronarrative. Between each chapter is a brief cutscene that presents the basis for the next conflict. After a narration byAmelia, the cut scenes feature your character and his interactions with othercharacters in the context of the past on a larger linear timescale but presentin terms of your progression through the storyline.

  Figure 2. Cut Scene of Kanyenke andNathaniel Black

  Amelia also plays arole as a storyteller, although her telling follows the linear pattern ofWestern story. Her narrations also add opinion to the plot. You see her in onlyone cut scene when she visits with Chayton just as the decade-long peacebetween settlers and Natives has been interrupted. Interestingly, although sheherself is mixed blood Iroquois and Scottish as the daughter of NathanielBlack-Scottish and Iroquois-and an Iroquois woman, Chayton Black only refers tohaving an Iroquois grandmother and Lakota-Sioux father when he is first askedabout looking 'Indian.' The extent of Amelia's background rests in who she wasborn from and her hand in leading the Falcon Company before passing it on toChayton. At the end of Shadow following your victory at the Battle of LittleBighorn, she concludes with a point on Chayton's decision to change sides:'Whether or not he made the right choice-history will be the judge of that.'The game, in this way, points to its own revisions of history, a new media playon the cinema of attractions moment in which there is an attempt to break downthe barrier between audience and actor (Gunning, 1990), or in this case, playerand designer.

  Occasionally,micronarratives are shown in the map mode at the completion of a task. In the'Ambushed!' chapter of the Shadow campaign, you fight your way through Nativesas Chayton Black to reach Crazy Horse's camp to negotiate peace (nevermind theirony that you can't avoid fighting and demolishing their camps on the way),only to witness your ally Sheriff Billy Holme come up around the other side ofthe hills and throw explosives down on Crazy Horse's camp once you've distractedhim. This is an unexpected event and adds to a later decision your charactermakes.

  There are also timeswhen micronarratives are used during gameplay in the form of subtitledvoiceover interactions that happen during action. These are used to alert youof changes in the game state-new tasks, your progress with tasks, and changesin alliances. In the Shadow chapter, after trying to defend Americancolonialists chopping wood from ongoing Natives to help build a large fort,Sheriff Holme tasks you with destroying the Native villages of women andchildren nearby. During a voiceover, you are alerted that Chayton makes thechoice to change sides, and you as the player then need to create tradingposts, develop your Native forces with few resources, and destroy the fort youjust built.

  This matter of ethics brings up theplayer's construction of a story when interpreting their gameplay. Kurt Squire,when using the popular RTS Civilization IIIin an educational context, found that 'students usedconcepts such as infrastructure, natural resources, or isolationism tointerpret and analyze gameplay. As students suffered defeats, they discoveredthe importance of geography. By the end, several students were using gamingexperiences as conceptual tools, explaining how a scarce natural resource suchas oil could destabilize global politics' (Jenkins & Squire, 2003).However, Jenkins & Squire (2003) also discovered that 'few detected thegame's geographical, materialist bias, or realized that CivIII minimizes therole of historical figures and cultural factors.'

  When breaking down thereviews of Command andConquer: Generals, anotherRTS, Geoff King (2007) gleaned that 'far more players devote attention toissues relating to gameplay than to the specific historical or geopoliticalcontext in which the game is set.' However, it is arguable that the gameplayitself is also a narrative when using J. Hillis Miller's interpretations.Similar to the RTS war-based genre, 'Chess certainlyhas a beginning state (the setup of the game), changes to that state (thegameplay), and a resulting insight (the outcome of the game). It is arepresentation - a stylized representation of war, complete with a cast ofcolorful characters. And the game takes place in highly patterned structures oftime (turns), and space (the checkerboard grid)' (Zimmerman, 2004).Additionally, 'turn-based strategy games such as Civilization seem to favor causal relationsover temporal ones to create event structures that have remarkable similaritiesto complex board games' (Eskelinen, 2004). Although The WarChiefs is a RTS, the gameplay mechanicsand representations of space and time are largely similar, and these causalrelations fall back to the cause-effect form of narrative.

  In TheWarChiefs, each playable chapter has an initial starting state whereyour units, allies, enemies, and resources are placed, changed by your movementand actions in the space, which results in winning or losing the designatedtasks. As a RTS, it also represents war with lead heroes and repeated baseunits. The game occurs in purposefully modified time and a map of terrain to be uncovered. Understandably, the campaign modediffers greatly from the random mode and customizable mode. The campaign haspre-established design to reinforce the narrative, whereas the other modes relysimply on the game state, gameplay, and outcome to be generated by programmablerandom factors or player customization.

  Across all modes of play, character unitsare depicted in physical appearance, abilities, and oral responses to playercommands. These immediate responses to the player's clicking actions also fallinto micronarratives. Language is minimized to a few words, and in the case ofNative characters, both English and a few 'Native' words are used across allpeoples without recognizing regional difference ranging from Aztecs toIroquois. Since the passing of knowledge inIndigenous cultures is centered around language and symbol, it is also a strongbelief that language is sacred and that 'any attempt to change Indigenouslanguage is an attempt to modify or destroy Indigenous knowledge and the peopleto whom this knowledge belongs' (Battiste & Henderson, 2000). If the gamedesign had taken this into account, the use of language as a micronarrative formwould be specific to each culture and unit.

  Figure 3. Icons for Character Units

  Despite these numerousnarrative elements, each retains the linear Western form of narrative in The WarChiefs. In the very narration of Amelia, who is mixedblood, you still follow a Western timeline from grandfather to grandson, onebattle to another, charting across territories in a straight-ahead manner.Although you are re-enacting the past, you follow a linear progression.Indigenous storytelling is non-linear by comparison. Stories are told toexplain why things are the way they are and how to be in life. The storiesusually give a lesson about ethics and morality. Although Chayton does make anethical decision in the Shadow Act, it is not presented as a personal lesson hehas learned, but rather a heroic choice he has made to save Natives who wouldotherwise be unable to protect themselves.

  Following the Circle

  The implications of applying clearlyWestern, and more specifically colonialist, design aesthetics to a game withIndigenous characters without regard to incorporating Indigenous aesthetic isone of misrepresentation and simplification of a culture to game mechanics useduniversally throughout the Age of Empires series.Notably, the game design makes an attempt to address a different mechanic bygiving Natives the Fire Pit, but in so doing, reduces prayer and dance tomanifestations of strategies for imperial improvement.

  The Real Time Strategyand Turn Based Strategy genre shares similar themes in their design. Poblocki,in his article 'Becoming-State: The Bio-Cultural Imperialism of Sid Meier's Civilization,' asserts:

  In CivilizationI the clash was mainly military, economic, and technological, whereassubsequently it became also cultural. By embracing nineteenth century models ofsocial change and by brutal projection of the Western history onto contingentgrounds of randomly generated maps, random civilization names, random startingpositions, random distribution of resources and the like, [Meier] essentializesthe story of the Western success, suggesting their causes lie in personalabilities, rationality, high administrative skills and other qualities of theWesterners, reducing culture to an imperialist checklist (one either has it ornot), and suggesting that starting conditions (both ecological and cultural) donot matter in the absorbing of new advancement..

  This can also be saidof The WarChiefs gameplay found in the Skirmish mode, which mixesall races for head-to-head competition, although this is primarily seen in thesingle-player campaign Fire and Shadow when you are able to play Nativecultures at certain points. In both gameplay states, the mechanics apply theperceived abilities of Westerners to Native cultures. This suggests theirsuccesses in war and survival would have been much greater had they had adifferent worldview or been guided by mixed blood leaders who could appear asNative but who held what is presented as the logical and fruitful colonialistexpansionary view.

  One RTS-like game that does make an attemptat representing Indigenous concepts of space and time is the wildlife tycoon Venture Arctic, by independent design companyPocketwatch Games. In the game, you learn about Inuit representations of thecycles of life and death and the seasons by making animals interact with oneanother and the environment based on their individual traits. For example, twopolar bears can mate, survive throughout the winter cold, and eat certainanimals. The game relays concepts such asenvironmental sustainability, the necessary cycle of life and death, and thesun, moon, and seasons as depictions of time, all without using representationsof people. Unlike the wargame RTS style, VentureArctic presents the computer-nature-as acollaborator that helps you determine the best play choice to make during agiven season or in a particular event.

  In The WarChiefs, the designers signify colonialist aestheticfrom visual representations of people to the geopolitical implications ofgameplay mechanics, despite putting the player in the role of playing Nativesin some chapters. As Jenkins and Squire point out: 'There is no such thing as aneutral simulation; they all embody assumptions about the way the world works'(Jenkins & Squire, 2003). This is certainly the case for simulations butalso for games in general, which are systems of signification. Analyzing themeaning of a game's signification adds to an argument that designers shouldtake care in the implications of the game they are designing. How the player interacts,how the player experiences space and time-if the two are even to be dividedwhen concerned with an Indigenous perspective-and how the player interprets thenarrative elements should inspire unique interactive narrative systems offormal play. The RTS genre in general needs new mechanics in order to properlydesign play that is relevant for simulating North American Indigenous peoplesand their culture. As is, The WarChiefs failsto properly represent the peoples and culture due to its inherent Westerndesign that originates from the development history of the RTS genre andsimulation wargames overall. Addressing this fault offers possibilities for newinnovations in a genre that has mostly focused on improving aspects such asgraphics and ping time rather than developing on the design and core mechanics,the most essential part of any game.

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  Battiste, M. & Henderson, J. (2000). Protecting indigenous knowledge andheritage: a global challenge. Saskatoon, Saskatchewan: PurichPublishing Ltd.

  Bolter, J. D. & Grusin, R. (1999). Remediation: understanding new media. Cambridge, Mass.: The MIT Press.

  Bordwell, D. & Thompson, K. (1996). Film art: an introduction(5^th ed.). New York: The McGraw-Hill Companies.

  Chan, H.; Fern, A.; Ray, S.; Wilson, N.; and Ventura, C.(2007, September). Online planning for resource production in real-timestrategy games. Proceedings of the International Conference on AutomatedPlanning and Scheduling, Providence, Rhode Island.

  Cheng, D., Thawonmas, R. (2004, November). Case-based planrecognition for real-time strategy games. Proceedings of the 5th Game-OnInternational Conference.

  Eskelinen, M. (2004). Towards computer game studies. In N.Wardrip-Fruin, & P. Harrigan (Eds.), First person : New media as story, performance, and game(pp. 331). Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press.

  Gunning, T. (1990). The cinema of attractions. In A.Barker, & T. Elsaesser (Eds.), Early cinema : Space, frame, narrative (pp. 424). London:BFI Pub.

  Henderson, J. (2000). The context of the state of nature.In Battiste, M. (Ed.), Reclaimingindigenous voice and vision (pp. 11). Vancouver, BC: UBC Press.

  Innis, H. (1951, reprinted 1999). The Bias of Communication. Toronto, Ontario: University of Toronto Press.

  

  Jenkins, H. (2004). Game design as narrative architecture.In N. Wardrip-Fruin, & P. Harrigan (Eds.), First person : New media as story, performance, and game(pp. 118). Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press.

  Jenkins, H., & Squire, K. (2003, September).Understanding Civilization III. Computer Games, December 3, 2006 from http://www.educationarcade.org/node/66.

  Juul, J. (2004). Introduction to game time. In N.Wardrip-Fruin, & P. Harrigan (Eds.), First person : New media as story, performance, and game (pp.131). Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press.

  King, G. (2007, September). Dimensions of play: gameplay,context, franchise and genre in player responses to Command and Conquer:Generals. Paper presented at the Digital Games Research AssociationInternational Conference, Tokyo, Japan. December 1, 2007 from http://www.digra.org/dl/db/07311.18043.pdf.

  Lammes, S. (2003, November). On the border: Pleasure ofexploration and colonial mastery in Civilization III play the world. Paperpresented at the Digital Games Research Association International Conference, Utrecht, Netherlands. September 15, 2007 from http://www.digra.org/dl/db/05163.06568.

  Little Bear, L. (2000). Jagged worldviews colliding. InBattiste, M. (Ed.), Reclaimingindigenous voice and vision (pp. 11). Vancouver, BC: UBC Press.

  Poblocki, K. (2002). Becoming-state: the bio-culturalimperialism of Sid Meier's Civilization. Focaal European Journal of Anthropology, 39. December 3, 2006 from http://www.focaal.box.nl/previous/Forum%20focaal39.pdf.

  Zimmerman, E. (2004). Narrative, interactivity, play, andgames. In N. Wardrip-Fruin, & P. Harrigan (Eds.), First person : New media as story,performance, and game (pp. 154). Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press.

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