Racecraft à la Carte: Fantasy Assemblages in Age of Wonders 4
by Mark HinesAbstract
This article examines the changing representation of fantasy races through a ludic analysis of Age of Wonders 4. This article argues that, in response to critique of racist and essentialist depictions of fantasy racial groups, games like Age of Wonders 4 have endowed players with greater agency in producing political and racial meaning in games. Age of Wonders 4 allows for the re-combination of physical, mental and cultural traits across a racial aesthetic. In this way, players are encouraged to play both with and against generic tropes for Orcs, Elves, Halflings and various fantastic racial groups. I draw upon semiotics, Black feminist and post-Marxist theory to examine the meaning generated by Age of Wonders 4’s gameplay frameworks. These lenses articulate fantasy racial groups as floating signifiers -- symbols containing politically contested, uncertain, ambiguous or vague meanings -- more closely aligned with how race is often discursively treated in the real world. I find that, despite the immense freedom generated by Age of Wonders 4’s endlessly re-playable loop, racial essentialism and racial hostility remain cogent factors in producing meaning in the game world. Players have justified cause in disciplining racial groups based upon flexible, though powerful, racial signifiers. Indeed, because the game allows for incredible amounts of freedom through endlessly iterative and customizable worlds, racial incompatibility is seen as an eternal, transcendent factor by the game’s logic. This article closes by comparing this ludic logic to the rhetoric and worldview of rightwing technological thinkers.
Keywords: cultural studies, fantasy games, strategy games, fantasy racism, videogames, racial essentialism, fantasy, representation
Introduction
Clearly, one of the awesome aspects of white supremacist logic has been its fluidity, its ability to adjust and change according to need and circumstance. (hooks, 2012, p. 5)
The pitch for Age of Wonders 4, the focus of this article, is simple: “Create the Empire of Your Wildest Fantasies” (Age of Wonders 4 Homepage). Paradox Interactive’s host website for the game reinforces the promise of freedom and re-playability: “Craft your followers by combining bodily forms, societal traits and arcane powers. Build anything from a clan of cannibal halflings to mystic moon elves, or recreate your favorite fantasy tropes.” In creating a custom civilization, there are millions of combinations available, with combinations spinning off into even more potential after the game begins. Steeped in this original claim is the idea of player freedom and agency -- players can recreate the tried-and-true stereotypes of fantasy media, or they can subvert such tropes through creative gameplay. The primary selling point and mechanic of Age of Wonders 4 is steeped in the rhetoric of the new digital age, “new technologies that reflect and reproduce existing inequities but that are promoted and perceived as more objective or progressive than the discriminatory systems of a previous era” (Benjamin, 2019, p. 3). In this way, Age of Wonders 4 more broadly replicates the narrative of multicultural neoliberal democracy -- that any individual can become a full member of society through participating in capitalism and an adherence to a (racialized, gendered) notion of humanity. Ostensibly, Age of Wonders 4’s ludic system cannot be read as political, because it relies so heavily on player inputs and combinations. Any critique of Age of Wonders 4’s politics, the logic goes, would actually be a critique of an individual player’s psychology. Indeed, because Age of Wonders 4 lies at the locus of two supposedly apolitical formations (the fantasy genre and the game as a medium), the game is capable of evading critical discourse about the representation of racial violence in fantasy media. In the wake of GamerGate and controversies surrounding the depiction of fantasy races in Dungeons & Dragons (Wizards of the Coast) and Amazon’s The Rings of Power, it is vital to understand the relationship between our political landscape and the post-racial politics of a game like Age of Wonders 4.
The goal of this article is to 1) analyze the politics of Age of Wonders 4 through its mechanical creation of fantasy races as “floating signifiers” and 2) show that Age of Wonders 4 approach to racial worldbuilding replicates broader strategies in a “postracial” racial discourse which reproduce rather than challenge Whiteness. I begin the article by discussing Age of Wonders 4 mechanics and general gameplay. I’ll then place the game’s procedural rhetoric of the game alongside Black feminist and Marxist thought, arguing that the game generates an ethos of racial freedom through the construction of racial assemblages. I show that race in this genre of game has become a floating signifier: a signifier positioned between two (or more) competing discourses and hegemonic visions “emerging in… historical periods in which the underlying symbolic systems are radically challenged and eventually recast” (Farkas and Schou, 2018). Like “truth” or “freedom,” floating signifiers are symbols (for this article, racial symbols) contested by political factions, reflecting broader struggles for epistemic dominance in a society. Finally, I’ll discuss this ethos in the context of the history of fantasy games and how the resultant struggle over meaning relates to contemporary, real-world racial discourse.
Worlds Beyond Discourse
Age of Wonders 4, developed by Triumph Studios and Published by Paradox Interactive, is a 4X strategy game. 4X games (standing for explore, expand, exploit, exterminate) are massive strategy games, littered with information and encouraging re-playability through powerful, adaptive simulation. 4X games usually focus on the building and maintenance of an empire or city-state, and players are given an immense amount of information: economic, cultural, technological, diplomatic, militaristic, etc. In Age of Wonders 4, players progress a fantasy race/civilization through magical discovery, eventually dominating or succumbing to enemy races/civilizations. In addition to the armies and cities of their chosen peoples, players control powerful hero and ruler units, which can gain experience and equip powerful items. Players can win a game through outright defeating enemies with military might, uniting a large portion of the map, or by completing advanced magical research.
Unlike most other 4X games, Age of Wonders 4 does not present a prescriptive, authoritative list of playable factions. Age of Wonders 4 breaks from other strategic fantasy series by de-linking racial aesthetic from playstyle, culture, victory conditions and so on. Age of Wonders 4 is unique then, as it allows and encourages players to create a unique race/civilization combination with unique strengths and weaknesses. This gameplay and its unique iteration in a grand strategy game serve as a stark contrast to the essentialist depictions of race in other fantasy games and those depictions’ connections to real-world race and cultures. There are a handful of pre-generated rules and civilizations, but players are strongly encouraged to create their own. Players first select a racial aesthetic (Orc, Elf, Ratkin, Human, etc.) and then select traits and adaptations for their people (e.g., “Hardy” or “Tenacious”). Each racial aesthetic features associated traits which are based on generic expectations, but players can easily switch these out. These traits provide unique benefits through the course of the game, encouraging players to experiment and play against generic expectations. Finally, players choose their cultural archetype (Barbarian, Mystic, Industrious, Feudal, etc.) and their ruler -- a powerful, fully customizable entity which can be of a separate race from that of the civilization. The choice of cultural archetype tends to be the most lasting and crucial when creating a civilization, but this choice, similarly to that of a racial aesthetic, does not necessarily connote gameplay styles or ultimate goals. As the game proceeds, players can customize their race and civilization further. Using magic and technology, players can transform their peoples, into draconic, magical, undead, gold-skinned, etc. kinds of beings. By the end of the game, players likely feel that their faction is indeed unique. Despite these options for customization, the ultimate goals of the game operate on a “logic of hostility” (Mayar, 2021) familiar to most other violent genres in gaming. Most design choices in the game push players towards a zero-sum mentality. There can be only one winner in Age of Wonders 4, and as the endgame approaches, even the most loyal of allies may turn against a powerful faction.
Crucial to Age of Wonders 4 and most other 4X games is a fervent devotion to accuracy and depth. Most research on 4X strategy games focuses on such games’ representations of history, technology, culture, and colonialism (Ford, 2016; Meeks, 2009; Rollinger, 2020; Slocombe, 2019). Mary Flanagan and Mikael Jakobsson (2023) write that 4X games derive their mechanics and ideological perspectives from classic board games -- many of which justified and celebrated colonialism and racial domination (pp. 15-16). However, though 4X games draw on histories and systems of colonial domination, their underlying logics persist beyond directly representing the historical past. 4X games, most of which are historical or speculative, heavily rely on logics of “simulationism,” Aaron Trammell’s term for “a philosophy of game design that aims to produce an authentic and historically accurate model of a game” (2023, p. 58). This belief drives strategic games -- the logic informs players that their real-world knowledge will be useful and applicable to simulated games. I would tinker with Trammell’s assertion that this logic only applies to historical games -- simulationism is alive and well in speculative games like Age of Wonders 4. Rather than a desire for accuracy and authenticity in terms of historical fidelity, the logic of simulationism in Age of Wonders 4 and other speculative 4X games is a Goldilocks relationship to generic expectations: not too derivative, not too radical [1]. Regardless, this logic rewards player knowledge about generic history, and Age of Wonders 4 offers the most re-playability and strategic depth to players who are steeped in generic fantasy’s racial history.
Strategy games and the logic of simulationism often break across gendered lines. Studies generally find that strategy games, like those of Paradox Interactive, are preferred by men (Vermeulen and Van Looy, 2016; López-Fernández et al, 2020.; Lange et al., 2021). A great deal of this gender dynamic is the result of real-world construction of gender rather an aesthetic element of the games themselves. Discursively, strategy games tend to lay at the opposite end of the spectrum from casual and mobile games, which are infantilized and feminized. As such, games seen as intense, deep, or demanding of player ability are linked to able-bodied, masculine, White players (Cote, 2020, pp. 34-35). Much of this break is the result of essentialist rhetoric about supposedly innate differences between White men, People of Color, and women as they relate to competitiveness, logical thinking, enjoyment of violence, etc. As Sara Ahmed reminds us, “Hardness is not the absence of emotion, but a different emotional orientation towards others” (2004, p. 4), and grand-scale strategy games encourage an affective orientation of hardness, dispassion, “objectivity” towards one’s imagined subjects and the imagined world itself. These assumptions carry into design choices and discursive formations around gaming today.
Games are particularly adept at individualizing complex systems through “[their] native ability to depict processes” (Bogost, 2007, p. 14), and when this pattern coalesces around fantasy racial categories, it can be especially difficulty to disentangle. In attending to the rhetoric and outcomes of systemized forces, critical race theory offers a powerful answer. In particular, drawing on CRT’s ability to examine the re-inscription of race across time, the “social construction” of race, and the ordinariness of racism (Delgado and Stefancic, 2023, pp. 8-10) allows us to understand how fantasy games promote a strategically flexible vision of race as a discrete category. Garcia describes fantasy games’ utility for comprehending contemporary race relations plainly as “a parallel for reading other systems on which particular ideologies are interfaced and reinforced” (2021, p. 6). In the case of Age of Wonders 4, the replicated ideology is less that of a specific hatred or xenophobia, but instead the strategic logic of race-neutrality and colorblindness. Age of Wonders 4 is uninterested in using stereotypes and problematic symbols to equate fantastic races to those of the real-world; instead, Age of Wonders 4 pushes players into constructing historically, culturally situated people which are naturally antagonistic to other groups around them. As a result, players are interacting and reproducing an ideology of race and racism which recognizes them as social constructions, but implicitly advocates for a rhetoric of cultural incompatibility and racial animosity.
To put it more strongly, Age of Wonders 4 is a subtle challenge to essentialist representations of race in fantasy media. Age of Wonders 4 probes players to consider fantasy racial aesthetics and their interaction with culture, technology, morality, etc. -- all the sorts of markers for which scholars have critiqued generic fantasy for representing as monolithic (Higgin, 2009; Hines, 2023; Young, 2016; Monson, 2012). Rather than the objective realness of race in many fantasy worlds, Age of Wonders 4 draws attention to the social construction of fantasy race and racism as a matter of procedure [2]. Shorn of essentialist trappings, the game demonstrates clearly that debate over representations of race in fantasy worlds is less about essentialism but rather determinism (including cultural and religious determinism). The Orcs might be different, but they must be subjugated all the same. As I’ll discuss shortly, Age of Wonders 4 makes clear that the logic of many fantasy games still necessitates an unambiguous call for inter-cultural violence, but it does so through carefully eliding its own role in constructing such narratives.
Race as Floating Signifier
The newly popular means of representing race in fantasy games does so through representing them as floating signifiers. I’ll be drawing upon heirs to Lévi-Strauss’ (1987) theorization, Stuart Hall, Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe, to analyze new formations of race in Age of Wonders 4. Hall, in particular, provides the groundwork which inspires this article. In 1994, as part of the W. E. B. Du Bois lecture series, Hall (2017) spoke at Harvard University, articulating how racial categories and “race” itself are open to multiple, often contradictory interpretations. Calling such contested symbols “floating signifiers,” Hall’ theorization begins simply:
What do I mean by a floating signifier? Well, to put it crudely, race is one of those major concepts which organize the great classificatory systems of difference, which operate in human societies. And to say that race is a discursive category recognizes that all attempts to ground this concept scientifically, to locate differences between the races… have been largely shown to be untenable. (pp. 359-360)
Following this principle, Hall discusses past discursive formations of race: religion, culture (anthropological), science (especially genetics). Hall takes great pains to de-familiarize our reading of race -- his essay perpetually reminds audiences that their reading of one another’s bodies is not “transcendental,” but situated within our own discursive understanding of the way that culture and genetics produce race as natural and authentic (2017, pp. 369-370). As such, racial classifications and “race” itself remain upon to competing visions of meaning and value, often in contradictory and paradoxical ways. Why, then, does race remain, after its biological utility has been thoroughly debunked? Hall’s answer to this question relies upon our need for a “guarantee;” “We want somehow to be told something which tells us that the contingent, open-ended, usually wrong political choices we make can, in the end, be read off against some other more scientific theoretical template” (p. 371). This insight holds true for both racist and some anti-racist activities -- if race could guarantee us moral clarity in pursuing social justice, then we wouldn’t need to worry about the iconoclastic Black personalities like Andrew Tate or Candace Owens. Hall rightly notes that this guarantee is more than just political -- we desire this guarantee to inform our aesthetic, cultural and social judgments as well (p. 372). Despite the truth that race is ingrained in our systems and institutions and is therefore necessary to identify and discuss, race allows for powerful rhetorical and symbolic shorthand wherein we can quickly discuss which art is worthwhile, which populations most deserve funds, and why some populations seem to irk us more than others.
I want to buoy this theorization with the work of post-Marxists Ernesto Laclau and Chanal Mouffe. I bring these two scholars into the fold because their work on floating signifiers highlights their critical political function. Both authors are known individually for their work on politics, rhetoric and ideology, and I will draw from these individual works as well as their collaborations as founders of the so-called Essex School of discourse analysis [3]. Laclau’s analysis of floating signifiers emphasizes that they arise during “times of organic crises; historical periods in which the underlying symbolic systems are radically challenged and eventually recast” (Farkas and Schou, 2018, emphasis in original). In this way, I assert that the summer of 2020 constituted an organic crisis in the representation of BIPOC individuals and a racial hierarchy in the United States -- an organic crisis which spilled into the fantasy community concerning the articulation and depiction of fantasy races. These moments lead to the formation of antagonistic coalitions which form hegemonic struggles. For Laclau, hegemony is not only the domain of the powerful, but also a “process of ongoing struggle that constitutes the social” (Worsham and Olson, 1999, p. 1, emphasis in original). Hegemony, for Laclau, is the contingent formation of coalitions which can unite around floating signifiers in order to impose new meanings. Indeed, Laclau points out the necessity of floating and empty signifiers to political projects -- allowing for multiple constituencies to each lay claim to ideas and symbols can mask the inherent fragmentation of contemporary social life (1996, pp. 44-5). When differing groups lay claim to what an Orc, or Troll, or Dwarf represents, they are composing these racial groups as floating signifiers.
Laclau and Mouffe call these moments of re-fixing “articulation,” a concept which points to the critical, historicized moment of a particular discourse. According to Laclau and Mouffe, articulation is “any practice establishing a relation among elements such that their identity is modified as a result of the articulatory practice” (2001, p. 105). When actors operating within a discourse (re)articulate an idea, they are doing so in order to give the temporary illusion of permanence; it is “an attempt to dominate the field of discursivity, to arrets the flow of differences, to construct a centre” (p. 112). These moments emerge from contingent “antagonisms,” and DeLuca’s commentary elucidates Laclau and Mouffe’s (1999) overall meaning:
For example, during the history of the United States, the "American Dream" has faced antagonisms (slavery, segregation, op-pression of women, exploitation of workers) that have exposed the limits of the "American Dream" and led to struggles (the Civil War, the civil rights movement, the women's suffrage movement, the women's liberation movement, the labor movement) that disarticulated and rearticulated the “American Dream. (p. 336)
During the social movements listed above, as well as during the discursive struggle in fantasy games in recent years, actors re-contextualize or re-define ideas such that they allow for the creation of political blocs and social movements.
A Soothing Subjectivity
Despite Age of Wonders 4’s avoidance of Anglophone culture wars around race and gaming, I find the game useful because it constructs a racial worldview which is so subtly pernicious. Games, as C. Thi Nguyen (2020) reminds us, are so powerful because they can flatten the complexity and ambiguity of real life:
In games, values are clear, well-delineated, and typically uniform among all agents. But this also creates a significant moral danger -- not just from graphically violent games, but from all games. This is the danger of exporting back to the world a false expectation: that values should be clear, well-delineated, and uniform in all circumstances. Games threaten us with a fantasy of moral clarity. (emphasis added)
Games can systematize and quantify deeply complicated questions: how should I treat other people? How healthy am I? What does success mean? Age of Wonders 4 is no different; the game creates a stunningly fun loop of managing and expanding an empire. The dimensions of political power are flattened along racial and culture lines which are re-purposed into clear, quantifiable metrics. My civilization’s happiness, economy, technological process, and military might are reduced to single numbers, which I can easily contrast with those of my opponents. Diplomatic relations are reduced to predictable, algorithmic relationships predicated on a particular ruler’s personality. I can rest assured that my subjects enjoy the same beliefs and priorities as I -- it is their teleology. Although individual cities may rebel in Age of Wonders 4, they do so for predictable and calculable reasons (oftentimes, failing to adhere to cultural values prescribed by earlier choices made by the player). There are other exceptions to these principles in the game, but on the whole, Age of Wonders 4 brilliantly simplifies the complex work of managing an economy, warfare and empire bureaucracy. Additionally, I am interested in the way that this simplification, this flattening, interpellates a particular kind of identity within the player. I have already described the way that many 4X games assume values which we associate with masculinity, but I want to argue that this game (and many other 4X games) assumes and interpellates its audience as adherents to a reductive racial worldview stepped in the logic of White nationalism. Dashiell (2023) shows how heterosexuality, Whiteness and maleness can coalesce into a locus of privilege:
As heterosexual White men, the ‘default’ for gaming subculture, there is an ability to divorce one’s lived experience from the circumstance of the game. It is easy to imagine oneself as someone else, and to erase notions of racism, sexism, and homophobia as they are understood in the world, as they do not exist in the same manner in the gaming world.
The subjugation of others while simultaneously “anti-intellectually” (Dashiell) distancing oneself from real-world politics is the power this chapter examines. Age of Wonders 4 does not actively re-create or advertise harmful representations -- representations reminiscent of real-world racial groups. However, the game requires the player to believe in inherent racial conflict -- that difference is a justifiable pretext for violence and domination. While the game admits that Goblins, Orcs, Elves, etc. are pure construction and capable of re-contextualization, it simultaneously posits animosity between such groups as inevitable and natural.
This relationship is best understood in the game’s mechanics for cities and independent city-states (called Free Cities in game). Cities in Age of Wonders 4 are the most discrete political entities. Cities are the primary sites for production of buildings, armies, research and economic growth. A hero unit may be appointed governor of a city to boost certain kinds of actions in the city. Without fail, cities are racially and culturally homogenous. Even if one’s empire contains multiple racial groups, the individual cities must be monolithic. When conquering an opposing city, the player is given several choices: 1) release the city as a vassalized state; 2) raze the city, providing gold and accruing evil alignment; 3) absorb the city into their empire, keeping their population the same, or; 4) migrate your people to settle the city, colonizing the city with a different racial group and resulting in evil alignment points. Each of these choices may have strategic benefit in any particular game. Similar mechanics mark the founding of a city in unoccupied territory -- the player must choose one racial group to inhabit the city. Any armies or heroes produced by the city will be of that racial group and culture, demonstrating the game’s inability to represent mixed or heterogeneous cultural groups.
This sense of racial homogenization is buoyed by the game’s mechanics for transforming a racial group through magic -- a mechanic which is determined by racial “Keepers.” As the game progresses, magical research allows the player and opposing factions to transform racial groups according to their magical affinities. Players can, for example, grant a racial group boons of “Astral Blood,” “Supergrowth” or “Earthkin.” Each of the two-dozen-or-so enchantments provides unique strategic benefits for every member of that racial group. Transformations can only be activated by the “Keeper” of a racial group -- whichever player or NPC starts the game with or acquires a large share of a particular racial group. In this way, a player can become the Keeper of several racial groups following the defeat of their original owners. Becoming a Keeper is a powerful moment -- Keepers are capable of interacting with races in a way that circumvents other sovereigns. For example, if I were the Keeper of a racial group which also composed a portion of an enemy’s forces, I could force the entire race to undergo a magical transformation which benefited me or harmed my opponent. This mechanic implies racial bounds which exist outside the established political ties of the game. If this magical relationship is unique to the special relationship between a Keeper and a given race -- a relationship which is malleable -- members of a race seem to be further tied into a common body.
The mechanics for heroes, powerful units which embody the abject characteristics of their civilization, further support racial animosity in the game. Heroes are the means by which Age of Wonders 4’s roleplaying elements are most deeply felt; heroes level-up, equip items, employ special abilities, contain personalities and govern cities. When heroes govern cities, their magical affinities (which are innately tied to their race) give that city certain boons: nature affinity grants food income, order affinity grants gold income, astral affinity increases magic income, etc. Again, these affinities are tied to each racial group, and each player can often recruit heroes across racial lines. This means that, although I may recruit a hero to my culture/civilization, they must retain the affinities of their original group. Because Age of Wonders 4 posits these affinities as eternal qualities of the cosmos -- transcendent and unbound from history or culture -- the fact that they are innately quantified and connected to racial groups necessitates racial essentialism. Heroes are capable of leveling up and adding new affinities to their racial baseline, but these read less as cultural assimilation and more as personal ambition -- one is more likely to pick an affinity which is attached to a useful skill for an individual hero.
Several aspects of a civilization and ruler are carried over from game to game, a dynamic which further cements the transcendent quality of race in Age of Wonders 4. Upon winning, the player’s ruler is asked to join the game’s “Pantheon.” The Pantheon is composed of victorious heroes, sorcerers, and emperors (called Godir) which can travel between realms. The game justifies this ascension as the mastery over the fabric of the universe. Godir, like the player, can shape and re-shape people, the world and reality itself. Members of the Pantheon can be re-played in new environments; they can even appear in random scenarios or encounters. If ascended to the Pantheon, future rulers from that Pantheon will be encountered with the same race, transformations, affinities, and research goals with which the player originally played them. Because Age of Wonders 4 can generate an immense number of random scenarios, the Pantheon represents the game’s appeal at its most core: endlessly customizable, powerful beings waging war across endlessly customizable, fantastic environments. This mechanic makes the game feel quite impactful and reactive -- it’s incredible fun to encounter your past ruler (to whom you have strong affective ties) as a vengeful enemy in a future scenario. As I’ll argue next, this mechanic also further instills the game with an ethos of transcendent racial conflict.
Transcendent Races
That Age of Wonders 4 takes place in an incalculable number of universes emphasizes an eternal universality to its fantasy -- differing peoples will always see difference and use that difference as pretext for violent conflict. Age of Wonders 4’s endless re-playability and customization dovetails with generic fantasy’s strange relationship to time and history to create an ethos of eternal, transcendent, racial hostility. Here, I’m combining notions that generic fantasy evokes historical thinking (medieval, antiquity, Renaissance or otherwise) alongside the ideal of fantasy as myth-making oriented towards redemption and fulfillment. Although Age of Wonders 4 allows for the subversion of authoritative racial prescriptions, it does not break from the kinds of fantasy stories usual to the genre. Because it gives players the freedom to choose the kind of victory and how to accomplish it, Age of Wonders 4 disguises the fact that it cloaks racial conflict as transcendent facet of history and the future. Although a particular race or any racial signifier may be floating in Age of Wonders 4, racial discourse is instead a “master signifier,” around which other meanings may affix themselves and providing the “illusion of fullness” or coherence (Kotsko, 2008, p. 30). Indeed, race in fantasy worlds more broadly serves as a master signifier of difference -- difference is tautologically constructed via race. Race grounds participants in worlds which aim to break from established rules and norms of our own; race is the constant around which these participants can orient themselves.
It is difficult to disentangle Age of Wonders 4’s temporal thinking from that of mainstream fantasy media. In discussing the enduring qualities of fantasy, Brian Attebery writes “The fundamental premise of fantasy is that the things it tells not only did not happen but could not have happened. In that literal untruth is freedom to tell many symbolic truths without forcing a choice among them” (2014, p. 4). Fantasy, then, shares appeal with broader cultural practices of folklore, myth, and religion -- the ability to reveal deeper truths through the self-evidently impossible. The generic fantasy of this article explores these sorts of worlds -- worlds which are patently not our own, though they may be set in the distant past, far future, or an alternate reality. The endlessly iterative loop of Age of Wonders 4 evokes an interesting thought process regarding fantasy’s eternal qualities: 1) the character and realm creation screen grants the player omnipotence over a new world, 2) the player begins the game with very little, especially if carrying a ruler from a previous game, and 3) the ruler-hero may ascend into the Pantheon, becoming a transcendent figure capable of repeating the cycle. If fantasy is a vector for representing worlds without an adherence to verisimilitude, then the facets of such worlds and their internal systems can, paradoxically, reveal rules for governance, warfare and humanity which are taken for “common sense” or eternally true.
The aesthetics of this 4X fantasy worldbuilding process (i.e., “stories about stories”) enables my argument about the political stakes of fantasy media’s changing representation of racial groups. Age of Wonders 4, despite seemingly allowing for racial reaction to be a player’s choice, highlights the idealized facets of speculative rightwing worldbuilding (eugenics, hierarchy, colonialism etc.) in a way that suggests these features of culture and society as immutable across millennia and different worlds. I do not mean to suggest that fantasy games are responsible for the rise of the alt-right or fascistic governments, but rather that such games’ flattening of difference and power dovetails with rightwing political belief in everlasting hierarchies, the pursuit of an eternal order, and immutable difference. Because fantasy games commonly simplify the processes and dynamics of rule and difference, they represent fertile ground for the mainstreaming and popularization of ahistorical and anti-democratic beliefs, beliefs which lie adjacent to the disparate rightwing or reactionary groups I describe here. Because Age of Wonders 4 (unlike many other 4X games) exists outside of time, its themes are universalized across time. As contrasted to the concrete time of Civilization or Europa Universalis, Age of Wonders 4 posits a cycle of time, breaking with notions of linear progress which the alt-right finds so onerous (Stern, 2019, pp. 33-34). The most obvious aspect of this kind of thinking in Age of Wonders 4 is the game’s preoccupation with eugenicist thinking. The player is encouraged to form and re-form their subjects in a way that is most beneficial to their goals. This assembling occurs both before and throughout the game, and the unique racial transformations possible in Age of Wonders 4 perpetuate into future games. Players are encouraged to experiment on their subjects and the subjects for which they are the racial Keeper. Doing so is a core component of the game, granting it strategic depth and re-playability. By toying with the particular mechanical strengths which make up their peoples, players can play eugenics with various racial groups, best preparing their people to conquer infinite worlds via outlasting and dominating the competition. The game also pushes players towards racial homogeneity. Although players can conquer and ingratiate other races/civilizations into their own, there are often penalties for doing so, as specific and focused strategic depth often bests the variability or adaptation granted by multiple races/civilizations.
Of course, this kind of eugenicist thinking has a long and storied connection to race science and colonialism (Levine, 2010; Conklin, 2013). However, I want to focus on the re-emergence of eugenics in tech culture to show how Age of Wonders 4 encourages racialized play while seeming neutral and natural. To sum up the kind of top-down, utopian thought emerging from the increasingly regressive Silicon Valley, I’ll refer to their use of the acronym TESCREAL [4]. These beliefs privilege the distant future, wherein humanity has learned to grapple with advanced technology and has ascended to planet-conquering superhumans capable of advanced (and supposedly rational) thought. Along the way, the suffering of humans is justified (or encouraged) so long as it leads to a theoretical paradise. It is by this logic that eugenics creeps back into the argument of techno-utopian thinking. Ruha Benjamin (2024) explains how this sort of thinking flattens humanity:
The artificial intelligentsia is trying to engineer a world predicated on the inherent morality (or at least neutrality) of math. […] It is all about expected value calculations and number-crunching. When you include hypothetical future digital people in one’s EV calculations, then the far future wins every time.
The creation of superhumanity in the future is often spoken about in terms of increasing the IQ of individuals (Klancher Merchant, 2024). When combined with figures like Musk and Thiel’s hyperbolic pronatalism rhetoric [5], the resulting expectation is that some kinds of humanity should exert more influence over the genetic pool than others.
The massive control over life in Age of Wonders 4, but it also synchronizes with the egocentrism common in TESCREALism (and White masculinity more broadly). Even as powerful technocrats assert their rationality and benevolence, their goals assume noncompliance or a herd mentality in others. Discussing the ethos of effective altruism, a tenet of TESCREAL, Leighton Woodhouse (2022) writes that the philosophy screens adherents from democratic ideals and anti-racism:
Effective Altruism is ultimately rooted in saviorism. It’s a top-down view of social change, appropriate for those who are accustomed to recreating the world in their own image from the perches of their high-status professions. It encourages high-net-worth individuals to use their wealth to impose their moral convictions upon the world, whether the world likes it or not.
Age of Wonders 4 flattens the complexities of rule in a way that encourages this egocentric, top-down view of society and power. At all times, players have a perfect knowledge of their economy, approval, technology, military, etc. and how those facets of society compare to their foes. Because these facets of society are ingrained in algorithmic systems, they encourage the sort of simplified systemic thought appealing to regressive technocrats. If only we could get the proper inputs (high wealth, IQ, status individuals) into the proper system, we would achieve the proper outputs (space colonization, crime elimination, ethnostates), the logic goes. As I’ve alluded, this bifurcation is as much about race as it is gender. Populist rightwing discourse about race often privileges White men because they are the supposedly capable of delaying satisfaction and comprehending principles of causation -- ideals for which 4X strategy games are known. In discussing the speculative, eugenicist philosophy of intelligence scientist Stanley Porteus, Jordan S. Carroll (2024) writes that Porteus used his intelligence tests, “to rank nonwhite races as inferior and reaffirm settler-colonial control by supposedly demonstrating that many nonwhite populations… were incapable of governing themselves” (p. 42). Porteus’ tests allegedly measured the ability of different racial groups to plan, adapt to new situations, foresee changing circumstances, and learn skills over time. Carroll rightly links this sort of thinking to extractive capitalism, arguing that, in speculative literature, “capitalist accumulation becomes an expression of racially determined providence” (p. 44).
In addition to the eugenicist and egoist flattening afforded by Age of Wonders 4, the game creates clear hierarchies and delimits authority in ways which harken to the most principal desires of rightwing social movements. I do not wish to characterize the ideologically diverse Anglophone rightwing political movement (containing an array of conflicting impulses and roots) in a reductive manner; however, I do think McManus (2023) is correct in attempting to locate a unifying theme in rightwing thought as “fundamentally a response to the moral project of modernity: that society consists of moral equals who should be free to pursue their interests within participatory institutions” (p. 2). To flatten the complicated dynamics of rule and military action, Age of Wonders 4 actualizes distinct sets of visual cues and quantification for the sake of elegant gameplay. Each unit is assigned a type (shock, polearm, battle mage, etc.) in accordance with its role on the battlefield, and this role is visually demarcated by clear and consistent symbols. Moreover, these units are divided into tiers, with higher tiers being stronger and requiring more resources to summon. Age of Wonders 4 examines armies and quantifies their strength -- usually in a range from two-hundred to three-thousand -- so as to give the player a simplified understanding of military might. I am not suggesting that quantifying in games leads to rightwing political thinking. Instead, I argue that the flattening which occurs in a game like Age of Wonders 4 makes pleasurable and coherent a type of worldview which relies on rightwing desires for a clearly delineated hierarchy; a desire which, if exported to the real world, can lead to problematic beliefs about the inherent nature of individuals across cultures and racial groups.
This dynamic holds special weight considering that Age of Wonders 4 privileges the subjective experience of a single player. This privileging along the lines I’ve described re-inscribes a White logic, grounded in a supposed value-neutral, post-racial, “objective” logic leaves the game’s politics unquestioned. By White logic, I draw heavily from Bonilla-Silva and Zuberi: “White logic, then, refers to a context in which White supremacy has defined the techniques and processes of reasoning about social facts. White logic assumes a historical posture that grants eternal objectivity to the views of elite Whites and condemns the views of non-Whites to perpetual subjectivity” (2008, p. 17). This logic is ever present through Age of Wonders 4’s construction of the player as subject and with fantasy race/culture as the thing-to-be-played. Race is all-encompassing and ever-present in Age of Wonders 4, but it is in a way which follows the discursive and epistemic movements of postraciality. The player-subject can freely re-combinate race and culture, playing with generic tropes to signify the various dignity and agency afforded to racial groups. The game transitions from drawing attention to the artificial construction of race to it being a grounded reality, and then it transitions back. All the while, the player’s experience of race is flattened, and such transitions seem natural to the broader context within Age of Wonders 4. The player is granted authority over what counts as race, and this authority is cleverly masked as value-neutral. In this way, the player of Age of Wonders 4 is forever granted eternal objectivity.
New Races, Old Faces
The process evinced by Age of Wonders 4 is one of racializing assemblages -- it is the process, made available to an imagined White male audience, of disciplining racial groups into hierarchical categories and burying that process within discourses of inevitable naturalization. The process of racialization is composed of physiological and social traits being categorized into gestalt wholes, which can then be readily deployed through stereotyping. These wholes are continually, dynamically constructed, and they are always historically and discursively contingent. No common understanding of “race” or of any racial group is innately granted and defined in perpetuity. What fantasy allows is the re-aggregation of these traits -- they can be disassembled and reassembled in infinite combinations. Even to call the fantasy racial archetype an “Other” is contingent in these arrangements. This paradigm, though seemingly questioned by the open-ended procedural rhetoric of Age of Wonders 4, is not overthrown. It is instead sublimated so as to make the process of racial formation more flexible in a post-racial Anglophone context.
In using the term “racializing assemblage” to describe this process, I am naturally in the debt of Weheliye’s Habeas Viscus (2014). In it, Weheliye describes the “idea of racializing assemblages [which] construes race not as a biological or cultural classification but as a set of sociopolitical processes that discipline humanity into full humans, not-quite-humans, and nonhumans” (p. 4). In Age of Wonders 4, this process is the primary selling point -- players map physicalities, mentalities, cultures, ideas, etc. on to the peoples which they control. Each of these categorizations connotes a history, and the inviolable nature of each of their subjects connotes a perpetually successful process of indoctrination into racial stereotyping and warfare. Indeed, this analysis concurs with Weheliye’s assertion that race “be placed front and center in considerations of political violence, albeit not as a biological or cultural classification but as a set of sociopolitical processes of differentiation and hierarchization” (p. 5). Because of the unique phenomenon of race in fantasy games, we can apply this assertion to argue that fantasy games serve as a useful conditioning for the creation of dominant subjects.
Weheliye’s work describes how the de-racialization of biopoitics and bare life prevents us from seeing how humanity and Man come to be conflated in dominant, Western thought. Weheliye explicitly calls the driving force behind this process as Whiteness: “as an object of knowledge whiteness designates not actually existing groupings but a series of hierarchical power structures that apportion and delimit which members of the Homo sapiens species can lay claim to full human status” (p. 19). Indeed, Whiteness coheres power relationships as such by masking the supposedly objective White Man as the natural arbiter of human constructs and relations. Although Age of Wonders 4 allows for the creation and identification with nonhuman, not-quite-human, and totally human actors, there is always a constant: the player. Despite seeming an escape from the brutality of generic tropes for fantasy races, Age of Wonders 4 is much more concerned with the abolition of humanity (in terms of its archetypal depiction) than it is with an abolition of the “human as Man” (Weheliye, 2014, p.23). To put it in Sylvia Wynter’s terms, this sort of fantasy may grant the appearance of having unlocked the creation of new, hybridized, genres of being human, but those genres are contingent upon creation and recognition by Man (McKittrick and Wynter, 2015, pp. 25-27). Although the game allows for the re-combination of traits, the default traits (e.g. “Adaptable”) and description of Humans in Age of Wonders 4 re-institutes a fully White human as the default version of Man: “[Humans are] Humanoid beings who are organized and entrepreneurial, albeit impatient at times.” In this way, the game cannot escape a generic history which equates full humanity with Whiteness. That the game markets itself as a product of incredible freedom appealing to the rational thinker is merely another way that it aligns its ideal experience with a liberal humanist subjective.
In addition to the actual procedure of creating and playing these fantasy races, I want to return to the notion that Age of Wonders 4 operates in a social and cultural environment which already identifies this kind of gameplay as masculine and White. Strategic 4X games, like Age of Wonders 4, implicitly and explicitly encourage the kind of detached, rational thought which is associated with White male subjectivities. 4X games construct a subject capable of ignoring emotion for the purposes of winning. They construct subjects capable of engaging strategic risk and delaying gratification. In the end, alike the hero of quintessential fantasy stories, the player “realises a messianic duty via a journey, one which results in a spiritual transcendence for the hero along with the salvation of the world by the act of healing or re-creating it, thereby fulfilling their destiny” (Palmer-Patel, 2019, p. 1). Games like Age of Wonders 4 lay at the crux of this dynamic -- power is flattened and solidified in the player-character in a powerful way due to the conventions of fantasy, gaming as a medium, and popular conceptions of race and politics.
Conclusion
I have shown how Age of Wonders 4 represents race as a fixed point around which various signifiers of difference can adhere. Pushing past the key ways in which the fantasy genre, gaming medium and racial tropes simplify difference, struggle and power, I’ll move towards how Age of Wonders 4 constructs an ideal player. As alluded to before, this simplification not only trivializes social phenomenon, but it interpellates social subjects which are more amenable to racial hostility and warfare. The interpellation is exacerbated by the continual rhetoric of “freedom” and “agency” which, paradoxically, forecloses radical challenges to racial representation and the fantasy genre. The sorts of freedom and agency afforded by Age of Wonders 4 (the possibility of anything) are easily recognizable and internalized along racial and gendered lines.
Horkheimer and Adorno (2002) describe the means by which cultural and leisure activities reinforce dominant ideology through carefully controlled tropes and narratives: “Not only do hit songs, stars, and soap operas conform to types recurring cyclically as rigid invariants, but the specific content of productions, the seemingly variably element, is itself derived from those types. The details become interchangeable” (p. 98, emphasis added). In fantasy, racial hostility and violence, alongside the reduction of complicated social and cultural factors, remains constant, though the particulars of those racial groups may remain. David Gauntlett plainly calls interpellation as a process occurring “when a person connects with a media text […] and caused us to tacitly accept a particular approach to the world” (2006, p. 27). Although other scholars (most notably Jenkins, 2006) have called into question the image of the consumer as a passive acceptant of dominant ideology, I find it to be a useful lens due to the ways in which contemporary fantasy games elide culpability for political readings. A critical fan review on Steam is titled “No identity, only sandbox” (Snemelc, n.d.), a nod to the game’s wide gameplay which disavows prescriptivist storytelling and generic conventions. At least in the case of fantasy media, emerging from this crisis of authority is a vision of the genre which touts a visual inclusivity but reinforces a simplistic view of race. This view still essentializes racial groups, though it does so as a means to incorporate diversity solely in terms of participation -- without an attention to the forms which that participation takes.
Age of Wonders 4 both allows for the escape from this struggle while drawing attention to the construction of its elements. The game provides more choice in the construction of a systematized society than most other games, and it does so through fantasy racialization. This form allows for incredibly multivalent approaches to constructing and reading fantasy race in the gameworld, and it actively encourages the player to do so. However, it does so in a way which cleverly hides the enduring qualities of race as a social reality. It is not just that fantasy and science fiction have the power to analogize harmful representations of race and ethnicity, but that its representation, justification, rules, lore, etc. about race as an idea is in and of itself harmful and prohibitive to the pursuit of justice. It eliminates essential aesthetic and cultural differences between races but does not eliminate the assumed hostility between them, nor does it eliminate the validity of reductively associating physical signifiers with deeper political meanings. Although there is a potential for transgressive and potentially liberatory interactions within the game, they too are reduced to an indication of an individual’s political or aesthetic sentiments.
Under the logic of neoliberal capitalism, games seek to become more immersive, more escapist, more all-encompassing, more interactive and they do so by promoting notions of player agency and avoiding topics deemed “political.” But political and immersive are not opposites, and it is only the rhetorical shorthand provided by postracial racism that makes them seem so. Race, being one of the key ways in which gamers (oftentimes White men) read politicization in games, see that immersion is thus converse to portraying black-and-brown-skinned individuals or racially progressive themes. The freedom to escape from politics is a freedom disproportionately allotted to privileged groups within a society, as is the ability to demarcate the boundaries of the political. As Ruha Benjamin (2019) reminds us, race often functions as a technology: “this is an invitation to consider racism in relation to other forms of domination as not just an ideology or history, but as a set of technologies that generate patterns of social relations, and these become Black-boxed as natural, inevitable, automatic” (Race 23, emphasis in original).
Endnotes
[1] Here I’m alluding to Attebery’s “fuzzy set” definition (2022) as well as Young’s (2016) work on fantasy as a “genre culture” to reinforce the idea that generic expectations for fantasy are historically and culturally situated.
[2] While my own work is quite indebted to the famous Racecraft of Fields and Fields (2012), it is Age of Wonders 4’s racial shaping and creation mechanic from I derive the title of this article -- an agency laden capability to shape racial meaning in a digital game, closer to Minecraft than witchcraft.
[3] Most notably the influential post-Marxist text Hegemony and Socialist Strategy: Towards a Radical Democratic Politics.
[4] TESCREAL is a neat summation of a bundle of ideologies pervading the techno-oriented right. TESCREAL stands for “transhumanism, Extropianism, singularitarianism, cosmism, Rationalism, Effective Altruism and longtermism” (Torres). Believers hope that adhering to these ideals will allow for humanity to conquer the stars, transcend the failings of humanity, and potentially merge with an “artificial general intelligence” or AGI.
[5] In Musk’s words, “If people don't have more children, civilisation is going to crumble” (Dodds).
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