Dawn of Discovery: The mechanics of diversity

“Why do we need diversity in our games?”

In an ideal world, I wouldn’t have to answer that question. It should be self-evident why making our games more inclusive raises their quality. It should be apparent how the involvement of marginalized peoples broadens our horizons and creates newer, more interesting narratives. However, we do not live in an ideal world.

Dawn of Discovery, or Anno 1404 as it’s known outside America – that is one of the best answers I can provide to that question.  It’s a game that doesn’t just use diversity as an overarching theme. It translates diversity into gameplay mechanics.

The core idea of any city building game is simple – construct a settlement and grow it into a metropolis. The Anno franchise is no different in that respect. Dawn of Discovery’s own take on the classic formula involves the addition of a cross-cultural balancing act. To succeed in game, players must create, expand, and balance the needs of both a Christian and a Muslim city simultaneously.

 Initially, the player is put in charge of a Christian, European island settlement and tasked with meeting their people’s needs. Meeting these needs early game is a fairly simple process – merely requiring the player to build the correct structures. As the game progresses and the townspeople become more affluent however, their wants and needs become more extravagant. Further progression requires players to ally with their Muslim, Middle-Eastern neighbors and create a second major city. This second settlement isn’t merely a colonialist resource pit to be exploited for the benefit of the player’s initial European settlement – it is a completely distinct, independent entity which requires just as much player investment to function. More important than the depth of the Middle-Eastern city, however, is its distinctness.

Creating resource supply chains is a staple of many city building games and Dawn of Discovery is no different. The distinctness of the Middle Eastern city, based on real life cultural and religious differences from European civilizations, adds an interesting layer of complexity to DoD’s take on supply chains. A great example of this complexity in action is the primary thirst meter of your cities’ inhabitants. In your initial European settlement this meter is lowered by distributing alcohol amongs your citizens. It would have been a simple to have your Middle Eastern citizens behave similarly. However, as many might know, alcohol is a taboo in the Islamic world – having your obviously Muslim townspeople openly engaging in drunken revelry like their Christian counterparts would have been rather historically inaccurate. An easy solution to this problem might have been simply renaming the various alcohols to something more universally acceptable like water. Related Designs Software (currently known as Blue Bytes Mainz), however, took a different approach. Alcohol remained as the primary thirst quencher in the European settlements. However, the thirst meter of the player’s Middle Eastern citizens could only be lowered using milk.

Because of how interconnected supply chains are in an Anno title, mutually exclusive primary resources like alcohol and milk make for interesting logistics puzzles. The level of interdependency between the two different cities required for both to progress also compound the puzzle and enable players to make some truly interesting choices for the sake of progression.

This is just one of the many interesting mechanics that make Dawn of Discovery stand out amidst other city builders. Most of these mechanics wouldn’t exist in game if it weren’t for diversity. At a time when most major titles were content with simply portraying Muslims as terrorists to be shot or bigots to be scorned, Dawn of Discovery approached its subject matter with respectful understanding and in doing so facilitated the creation of unique mechanics.

It is very likely that I am overselling the degree of interdependency between the two cultures in game. It is equally as likely that some of the mechanics I am fawning over have unfortunate colonialist implications. Regardless, the game at least appears to handle Islam thoughtfully and that too in 2009. It’s been almost a decade since and I have yet to play a game that does something similar.