Humankind

Back in my short-lived career as a math teacher, I would open up the year with my sales pitch for our chosen field of study. The main objective was to disabuse my students of the notion that math was all about the numbers. Numbers, I posited, are not the point here. We use numbers because they are reliable – one will always be one, two will always be two – but we deal with them only in the service of uncovering some greater truth. We aren't here to stare at the numbers, we're here to examine their context. The numbers are just the what. We're here to find the why.

Nearly a decade since that presentation last poured out of a school district's standard issue ceiling-mounted projector, we have HUMANKIND, a game that is content to bandy about numbers without a single thought to their context. A game that mimics the features of the 4X games that clearly inspired it, but shows no understanding of what those features are meant to accomplish, or how they fit together. A game that makes no effort to recreate the messy-but-fascinating stories of its namesake. A game that is twenty five gigabytes of what, and no why.

And the what of it all should look very familiar to anyone who has so much as glanced at a historical nation-building 4X game like, oh let's pick one at random here... Civilization 6. You'll lead a society from the stone age to the near future, all while building cities, waging wars, and guiding the civil, scientific, and religious direction of your nation. Cities will pump out a variety of familiar resources like food, industry, money, faith, and influence, which represents something between cultural dominance and political capital. You'll do all of the things which, if you've played this kind of game before, you've done plenty of already, but would probably be happy to do again if given a good enough reason.

HUMANKIND does not provide that reason, instead offering a string of thinly-connected systems which themselves feel incomplete. Take religion: as your population grows, you'll be given the chance to found a religion, choosing from a set of tenets which offer benefits such as increased food production or slightly hardier soldiers – and support its spread both at home and abroad by building faith-generating holy sites. It's a solid enough place to start, but in HUMANKIND, this is where religion ends. In one match, I glanced at a foreign continent – one on which my people had never set foot and with whose inhabitants I had done practically no diplomacy – only to find that it had completely converted to my religion. I had no active role in this. I did the one thing I could do in HUMANKIND to enforce my religion – I built a total of four holy sites to increase my faith output – and that was that. My involvement with the religion system – indeed, the entire range of possible involvement – started and ended with me increasing a single number. Replace “faith” and “holy site” with “influence” and “theater” and it will completely cover my experience with HUMANKIND's “sphere of influence” cultural mechanic, down to the detail of that same foreign continent falling under my spell sans any active participation on my end. Such is the way of things under the HUMANKIND ethos, one in which the most interesting thing about a resource is not how it is used or where it comes from, but how much of it can be produced. In HUMANKIND, you're not charged with taking your supply of faith and using it to actively shape the world in a way that creates a compelling narrative – you're just asked to produce a little more of it and observe the results. According to HUMANKIND, the fascinating thing about the twelve apostles of Christ isn't how they overcame great adversity to spread their faith – it's that there were twelve of them.

HUMANKIND's tendency to settle for less is also apparent when it comes time to deal with the world's other inhabitants, which come in two flavors: players and “independent people.” Interacting with those other players, the ones leading their nations on equal footing (or as equal as it can be when it's an AI player that makes up for its lack of prowess with some very obvious cheating), means firing up the diplomacy system, which may at least be HUMANKIND's sturdiest feature. Most of the standard 4X wheeling and dealing options, like alliances and research treaties, are here, as is a “war score” system (as seen in Paradox-developed strategy games like Stellaris or Crusader Kings 3) for determining the victor and stakes of armed conflicts. Resource-trading has been streamlined to remove the tiresome haggling and counter-counter-offers that can slow down similar games, and diplomatic beefs are presented as discrete “grievances” that can be used to press demands or justify wars. In a game where so many interactions are divorced from clear results, the line-itemization of grievances provides a welcome bit of concreteness. Sadly, most of those international grievances are generated via the spread of religion and culture, a process which, as we've discussed, is far too passive to serve as an interesting springboard. This dramatically undercuts the system's ability to connect player actions to diplomatic consequences – a tragic misfire for a game that is starved for ways to put the player's actions into some larger context – and most of my interactions with grievances came down to dismissing the pop-up messages saying that I had the right to be angry with someone because my religion had spread to one of their cities. But all told, the diplomacy system is a reasonable but flawed mix of old standards and new twists that provides decent-enough tools for declaring war and keeping the peace.

But that's all it does. There is a giant gap when it comes to dealing with rival nations, a massive no-man's-land between outright belligerence and peaceful coexistence. There are no acts of espionage, no proxy wars, no jockeying for control of some United Nations stand-in, no “soft power,” and no understanding that when it comes to international relations, war is, to butcher a little Clausewitz here, just one tool, not the entire box. In HUMANKIND, other nations exist to be either conquered or ignored. The same can be said of “independent people,” unaffiliated cities that operate on their own until they either disband after a number of turns or are annexed, be it peacefully over time or quickly by force. Peaceful annexation is as easy as waiting for an opinion meter to fill and claiming the city for a nominal fee. It's another chunk of HUMANKIND that is purely transactional, serves no narrative or emotional purpose, and does nothing to connect the player with the world they are navigating.

If humankind – the lower-case one, the collection of humanity – has a story to tell, it is certainly in the rise and fall of our cultures, of coming together and drifting apart. Somewhere between who we were and who we are is the question and why did we change? It's in answering that question that we get to see the full spectrum of the human experience. Conquest, disease, famine, religious persecution, freak natural disasters, political upheaval, economic ruin – all dramatic agents of change, and all of them part of a canvas that a game with the word “HUMANKIND” on the box could use to paint fascinating stories. But once again, HUMANKIND is largely uninterested in those stories, opting instead to view all of a nation's history and accomplishments through the lens of a single number. Enter the “fame” system, which doubles as both a means of gating progression through the eras of history and as the only determinant of victory. Fame points are largely doled out via “era stars” which are earned naturally in the course of going through the game's motions – expanding your cities, growing your population, and winning battles, to name a few. (In what must be the most on-the-nose example of HUMANKIND's inability to see past its own numbers, two of the seven categories of era stars – those things that supposedly represent a nation's legacy – are awarded for simply earning money and influence. Not spending it, of course. Not using it to create history by commissioning artists, swaying mercenaries, or silencing political enemies – just acquiring it.) Earn enough stars in a given era and your nation will advance to the next one, giving you a chance to adjust to an ever-changing world by swapping out your nation's culture for a new one to gain access to unique bonuses, buildings, and military units. In this way you may, for example, trade your ancient Egyptians for classical Carthaginians to take advantage of new trading opportunities. It's the rare mechanic in HUMANKIND that offers a meaningful choice with immediate impact, though I did find that the constant re-branding made it hard for me to get a grasp on my nation's identity. Earning stars gives you fame points, and whoever has the most points when the game ends, be it by turn limit or when any player triggers a game-ending event, is declared the winner. On one hand, it's a flexible system, allowing players to pick up points on the fly without committing to any rigid long-term plan. On the other, it's completely aimless. At no point did I ever feel like the stars I had been awarded were directly connected to my chosen playstyle and the choices I had made. Instead, they felt like a general assessment of how well I was doing overall, with no relationship to the particular history I was allegedly writing. And in the absence of any connection to the rest of my experience, those stars and points never rose above feeling like consolation prizes, more numbers that HUMANKIND shortsightedly pushed not as places to start interesting stories, but as worthy ends with inherent and self-evident value. I constantly looked for a way to get my hands dirty in HUMANKIND's soil, to not just increase my numbers but to actively take them out into the world and put them to use, to leverage my quantitative position into something qualitative, but it was not a dream that HUMANKIND shared. I wanted playing HUMANKIND to make me feel like a river carving a path through the stone with great intent. Instead, I felt adrift at sea, left to wash up on whatever shore the game deemed appropriate.

When I triggered the game's end by researching every technology, many of which I would never have the means or need to leverage in the game's decrepit final act, I was deemed the winner. I had the biggest number. What I didn't have was any sense of accomplishment. I had no pride in my globe-spanning religion, my array of identical cities, or my ability to outfox my opponents, who may as well have not existed in the last third of the game. I had victory, which admittedly has always been an odd concept for the civilization-building flavor of game. If the real Earth were to be rendered completely uninhabitable by pollution, it would be hard to call that a win for anybody, but when it happens in HUMANKIND, triggering the final score tabulation, there must be a winner, and odds are good that on account of the fame points earned via their technological achievements and massive, smoke-belching cities, it will be the nation who most thoroughly trashed the planet. It's a fitting end for a game whose calculus is only equipped to describe a journey as a collection of unrelated destinations.

It shouldn't be surprising that a game so inept at creating context is also completely uninterested in understanding its own. Many of HUMANKIND's problems are not new in the 4X genre... but neither are the solutions. Civilization 5's Brave New World expansion largely solved the late-game doldrums and recognized the importance of allowing players to interact with each other in ways that lie somewhere between war and peace, and it did so all the way back in 2013, so long ago that I was still a teacher. That series also has its city-states, which offer a rich menu of possible interactions and complicate the diplomatic landscape in fascinating ways. By comparison, HUMANKIND's independent people are empty vessels, less like proud institutions and more like the buffer pieces that get placed on the RISK board when there aren't enough players. Civilization 6 emphasized the importance of rich and varied terrain, and of connecting cities to that land in a way that makes each city feel unique. In HUMANKIND, I dotted the bland, featureless map with cities that differed only in their size, but otherwise felt like nearly-identical resource factories, more soulless husks in the service of HUMANKIND's numerical obsession. It's bewildering how Amplitude, in its fourth foray into the 4X genre, has managed to unsolve so many of these problems. In a vacuum, HUMANKIND would be a forgettable, barely-competent curiosity. Against the backdrop of the games that it so clumsily imitates, it's downright unforgivable.

There was another presentation I gave in my teaching days, this one specifically to my geometry classes. See, geometry is a bit of an oddball course; it leans heavily on prerequisite algebra skills, but it isn't concerned so much with expanding them as is it with applying them to novel problems, often physical or visual in nature. Geometry's real claim to fame, though, is that it's where most students get their introduction to formal proofs. It's a language-heavy section that on more than one occasion inspired my students to ask “how is this math?” I'm sure they regretted the question as I cued the projector and launched into my pitch. I reminded my students that math is the thing that is happening behind the numbers, which might make proofs the mathiest things they've ever encountered. Proofs are about taking a single piece of concrete information, like the measure of an angle, and using broader, fundamental truths – the math – to leverage that information into something more interesting, not unlike the parable of someone starting with a paper clip and step by step trading their way up to a mansion. In short, proofs are about relationships and how a single fact can paint a much larger picture – a sudoku puzzle seeded with just a few visible numbers – but only if we focus on those relationships. In neglecting such relationships, HUMANKIND dooms all of its many numbers to languish in isolation, unable to escape their own tiny orbits to be part of something larger. It can't let us create our own history because history is found not just in the numbers, but in the connective tissue between them – the causal threads that meander from the scientific output of Arabia to the wealth of Venice to the size of America. That's where humanity lives, and HUMANKIND dies.