The game that we have been playing and learning from as a class the past couple of weeks is a game called Tropico 6. Tropico 6 is described as a construction, management, and political simulation game. I would describe this game as a hybrid between civilization 6 and the sims games. The game is a bit goofier, like the Sims games, but you are still building and expanding your city. There are four eras that you work through, those four eras being the
colonial era, the world wars era, the cold war era, and the modern era. The game was released on March 29th, 2019, by publisher Kalypso Media, and developed by Limbic Entertainment. The overall goal of the game is to progress through the four different eras and make as much money as possible by expanding your city and building new buildings. One feature that was added to Tropico 6 was the ability to expand onto other different islands which the game calls archipelagos. This was my first time playing the game and this game was for sure much easier to pick up and get the gist of how to play the game. Because I have played the Sims games in the past, the game felt more familiar, and I was able to have a little more fun with the game right from the start unlike Civ 6 and Empire: Total War. Beginning the game, I created my ridiculous-looking character and completed the tutorial, as I had no clue how to play the game. The tutorial was very informative and was helpful to put together the framework of how the game functions and showing you the things that can be done within the game. One feature of the game that I found interesting was that as “El Presidente” you can order your henchman to assassinate other NPCs within your town.
I tried to use this feature on a random person walking around my island and the game would not let me do it because the person that I was trying to assassinate was a minor. It made me laugh because I was glad to see that the game developers implemented some sort of moral code on who you can and cannot assassinate. This game is not a good representation of how things went down in history. However, it still has its moments where gameplay and other aspects of the game did seem to be reasonably historically accurate. The game is very cartoony and is more focused on the fun element than it being a historically accurate game. In the article that we read for class is “Is Sid Meyers Civilization History” and in this article, the author says “If we accept that history is a narrative-making pursuit, then play with historical videogames is a diegetic activity. Indeed, the simple markers that we would expect to see within any history,
regardless of form, are all present in the historical video game. Firstly, at its most basic, ‘historical narrative is always built on blocks of verifiable data’ (Rosenstone 2006, 161)”. According to this viewpoint, Tropico does not have a lot of verifiable data, so therefore it is not a historical videogame. Some examples of the game being historically accurate is when you enter the Cold War era of the game. When you enter this era there are a plethora of historically accurate issues that begin to happen. Some of the things that start to happen are that tensions between the United States and the Soviet Union begin to rise over the spread of communism. Also, uranium becomes an available resource to export or use in the Tropico infrastructure. Another example of tropic being historically accurate is that when you get to the modern age, everything starts to become very expensive which is similar to the real world and how the dollar has become decreasingly valuable. One way that I can relate this game to my major that I am studying, which is finance, is that you must be very careful with your money. Imports and exports are one of the better ways to make money in this game and if you recklessly construct buildings and use all your money, then you have to lower wages to make more money for the government and then the people become less and less happy with how you are running the island. Overall, I had more fun playing this game than I had in other city managing games most likely due to the fact that the game is more meant to entertain than to be a history game. I learned a lot from this game and I will continue to improve my island.