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How Do You Design Culture?
Society has taken many forms throughout millennia of human existence. Cultural norms that are established come from iteration, consensus, and communication. It defines our traditions, our customs, and values. Culture can influence our forms of technologies, our modes of communication, our artistic expression. Our cultures are defined by our religious beliefs, our philosophical stances, our political ideologies and so much more.
Could you design culture by hand? How would you go about building it? And if you could, how would you then task a computer with designing unique cultures for you to explore all within the confines of a video game?
Today we explore the inner workings of Ultima Ratio Regum: a roguelike that has been the personal quest of one individual for almost 10 years. To build a game that can procedurally generate the most culturally detailed worlds possible. Comprised of societies with their own political and religious ideologies, their own dialects and material expressions. All in a vast open world for players to explore and interact with.
In late 2020 we sat down with the games creator, Dr Mark Johnson, as he reached a significant milestone with the release of version 0.8 of Ultima Ratio Regum. We discuss the complexities of the game he has designed, how someone with no knowledge of game development sought to create this unique experience and the highs and lows of dedicating ten years of his life, towards achieving his goals.
What is URR?
Ultima Ratio Regum is a roguelike that aspires to do something rather distinctive, to procedurally generate game worlds that are not just bespoke to that playthrough, but the backstory behind it, be it the notable figures, conflicts and their religious, political and other cultural practices are the backbone of the experience. Players are tasked with solving a mystery: a conspiracy hidden throughout history that requires players to find clues throughout the game worlds by visiting different cultures and exploring them, either by chatting with people in the cities or by exploring their religious altars or scouring the sarcophagi of their royal and military histories.
The game is an open-world comprised of a map of 250×250 tiles, each of these tiles itself breaks into 200×200 tile spaces to move around in. Resulting in a game world comprised of over 2.5 million tiles that is procedurally generated one time for each new playthrough of the game. Each world map is comprised of multiple nations, each nation is comprised of settlements. You can enter a city and see the districts built within it. Each district is separated into specific building types, you can then zoom in further and go into buildings, read books in libraries, admire pottery, visit the graves of the dead and talk with the locals to learn more about the world. And that’s just one city, with the game on average generating 18 cities per world map, each with its own civilisations, religions, cultural artefacts, and dialects.
But while the scale is already quite breathtaking, the most impressive facet of Ultima Ratio Regum is how procedural content generation is used to build each of these civilisations in smart interconnected ways. This approach, referred to as ‘qualitative procedural generation’ is built to support the idea that objects – even in video games – should not be created in isolation, but are instead related to one another.
“Fundamental to URR’s world-building processes and the creation of meaning within them, is the idea of “chains of meaning”. Nothing (or at least, very little) is intended to appear in the world that is only related to itself, or only related to one other element.”
[Mark Johnson, Procedural Generation in Games Design, Chapter 27]
What does this mean? Well, if you consider the flora and fauna systems that generate plants and wildlife in the open world, if a particular animal or plant is generated within a region, it can influence the possibility that others might appear alongside them. Conversely, it can also prevent specific species from appearing in that region, given that would contradict the biomes that are being generated.
This then goes one step further, if you visit the local town nearby, a healer may refer to a plant in that region as a remedy for specific ailments. It could influence their religion, with their beliefs or symbolism making reference to the topgraphy of the region. It could even influence language, as their dialects use bespoke phrases that not only refer to the world around them but are bespoke to that culture. It’s a game that is as grandiose as it is intimate, and it all stems from a procedural generation system with layers upon layers of complexity.
While Mark has spoken about the game on many occasions, be it at academic conferences, roguelike events, in textbooks and conference publications, there is also the very human element of trying to build a game of such scale and complexity and the challenges that present. URR started development late in the summer of 2011, the same year that Johnson started his Ph.D. at the University of York in the UK. However, unlike many of the other enthusiastic games academics cum developers, Johnson’s background isn’t in computer science, but rather, sociology. Johnson graduated with a Ph.D. in Science and Technology Studies in 2015 and has subsequently built a career as a games researcher, with a notable interest in the challenges and complexities faced by the ever-growing cultures and economies that surround esports and livestreaming. At the time of writing, Mark is a lecturer in digital cultures at the University of Sydney, in Australia.
And so here we are almost 10 years after the game began development and Ultima Ratio Regum v0.8 was released back in December of 2020, with some minor bug fix updates since. This update was a huge undertaking, with the game now including non-player characters in settlements, procedural face generation that gives variation based on cultural beliefs as well as genetic variations. A conversation system complete with bespoke dialects and mannerisms. Procedural clothing where the outfits of citizens will also fluctuate depending on their culture or religious affiliations. And much much more. It’s a hell of a patch, but it’s one that has taken much of the past 5 years to build. And so a couple of weeks beforehand, I sat down with Mark to talk not just about this patch, but the early beginnings of the game, its inner workings and all of the challenges – be they technical or personal – he has overcome along the way.
Early Beginnings
Mark Johnson: “I mean I would love to claim that I had this kind of massive procedural cathedral planned from day one but that would not be true. I believe what happened was I came across this tutorial for how to make a roguelike in Python and for some reason I thought ‘yeah, that sounds like fun’. And that was basically the entire thought process. I just thought ‘yeah sure why not?’. I had never programmed anything before this but I had modded a lot of games and so I had some sense of what I was doing on some level. I quickly kind of really enjoyed the sensation of being able to change things very easily and to quickly spin off into something very very different from the tutorial. I think at first I programmed in a system for having monsters judge how scared they are based on how many hostile monsters are near them, and that created this really intriguing kind of equilibrium where creatures would have kind of standoffs and would kind of approach and then back off and these sorts of things. That took me let’s say two hours to make and yet it created a kind of dynamic system which I’d never really seen in a roguelike. And so I think that kind of thing: that quite quickly and quite early I thought it’s actually not that hard to kind of create new stuff or to try new things.
And then I suppose after that there was about a six-month period where I guess I was making something extremely ‘Dwarf Fortress’-esque and quite soon I realised well a) we don’t need another Dwarf Fortress because we already have one and b) I realized that the roguelike world has a lot of sort of clone projects and I didn’t feel like the roguelike world needed another clone project. So then I sort of started to think about whether i could do something weird and different and that coincided with me beginning to get a little bit better with python and beginning to explore this kind of procedural graphics idea with ASCII art. And the first time I showed off some kind of PCG ASCII graphics the internet really liked it a lot. And that made me think ‘okay this is the thing my game will be’ because no one’s really done this. This is something which I find very rewarding to make and this is something other people seem to like and so that seemed to be a really good pairing to kind of build the game around. And then over time, the PCG graphics expanded into kind of other sorts of PCG stuff which most roguelikes don’t do like speech or religions and this type of stuff.”
And so from the very beginning, this notion of complex worlds with bespoke aesthetics and cultural artefacts began to take shape, but one of the things that has always stood out about URR is that Mark has always said in talks and publications that the game was intended as a 10-year project. But it’s not often you hear a game be described as such, or for someone to commit to such a prolonged development cycle. Saying to yourself in advance this is a 10-year game and you’re intent on making good on that ambition, sounds awfully pragmatic.
Mark Johnson: “I felt that was a realistic scope and, to be honest, if I hadn’t had some serious health issues it probably would have been actually. Because even with a lot of what I think we euphemistically called ‘challenges’. Even with a lot of challenges I’ve still got 80% of what I wanted done within the 10-year period.
But yeah I wasn’t really interested in making something smaller because, like I said, I’ve always been kind of attracted to the big, grand, mad piece of art I guess. Though once I discovered this kind of procedural graphics stuff and then to less extent the other kind of culture PCG stuff I felt like I really wanted to take that as far as I could take it basically. And I felt that wasn’t something which would be like a one-year dev cycle and then you release a game which has a few PCG swords or something. If I wanted to do it I had to really go for it and really PCG every graphic in the game, and how everyone talks and how everyone looks, and all this type of stuff.
I’ve often been criticized by online people who are less generously inclined as kind of always extending what the game should be. But the genuine truth is after about two years in the ambition didn’t really change much. From there it was just a matter of getting it done. But I think in hindsight the ‘how long is a piece of string’ issue definitely was there at the back of my head. Especially when you have like a really compelling, but pointless PCG system which you could work on. Or something really uncompelling but something really crucial. I definitely found it hard to choose option two when those choices arose.”
How Does URR Work?
Now from everything described thus far, Ultima Ratio Regum sounds horribly complex, but once you dig into the details, you discover that a lot of it is fundamentally quite simple and – perhaps even contrary to the creator’s own beliefs, the subject of some effective design decisions. As Johnson himself admits, he’s not a professional programmer. But while his technical skills have grown, the background knowledge required to build these culture simulators was much more fleshed out and established.
