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Codex Interview RPG Codex Interview: Daniel Bill on DEMIURGOS: Path of the Leviathan

JarlFrank

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Tags: DEMIURGOS: Path of the Leviathan

Demiurgos: Path of the Leviathan is an interesting indie RPG currently on Kickstarter, and because the main man behind that Project, Daniel Bill, works at the same university I do, I decided to interview him. And boy, was that interview fruitful - one and a half hours of questions about his game, as well as some general discussion about RPGs and game design, which ended up providing almost 14k words of text to be made into a Codex article.

I interviewed him in German and tanslated everything to English, so if anything seems unclear to you, feel free to blame me. I'll make sure to ignore your complaints as best as I can.

The game's combat encounters sound very varied and promising, and most of the resident posters are likely to agree with his opinion on a certain Bioware title:

And every encounter is hand-placed then, right?

Yes. We’re working on one encounter right now, we didn’t manage to include it in the preview video yet, there are some boss encounters too. Like tanks from the WW1 era driving through a street, and you have to flee from the tank while you’re also shooting at enemies. When the tank gets too close, it destroys your cover. We do want that every combat – there’s one in the preview video, with the hostage situation – has something the player has to pay attention to, and maybe sometimes it’s a better approach to solve the encounter without firing your weapon, like in the hostage situation where you could endanger the hostages. And just as the hostages are released, you shoot your enemies anyway… the player can do that if he wants. We want to make every combat encounter a little special. Hand-made.

So you’re also placing some unorthodox elements into your encounters, like those tanks that can destroy your cover, in order to make encounters more varied and exciting.

And also more cinematic and action-packed. It looks pretty cool, too, when you zoom out your camera and wonder – will that tank arrive at my position in the next turn? We also have a cool fight – it’s not completely finished yet – where there’s a submarine that submerges and rises up again occasionally, and you have to fire at the submarine from afar. And you can shoot at the periscope the crew uses to look at the battlefield, and when it’s destroyed the submarine has to come to the surface which makes it easier to attack. We also have an encounter on a train! Maybe we’ll manage to finish that one before the end of the campaign and show it off. You’re on a train and have to go forward while fighting some enemies, and when you’re all the way at the front you enter the driver’s cabin.

So systemically, your combat system is going to be simple and easy to understand, but what makes the combat interesting is the variation of encounters. That means you’ll probably have few encounters, and encounters with special elements to them, so you’re probably not going to include any filler combat either, are you?

What’s filler combat?

Filler combat is… did you play Dragon Age?

Yes.

That was chock full with filler combat.

Dragon Age… [starts rambling] I don’t get what people… I played only Inquisition, and it’s… I don’t understand how one can even compare that to other games, that’s not even an RPG for me.​

To read more about the gameplay systems and philosophical themes of Demiurgos, and of course more of Daniel Bill's opinions on RPGs both old and new, go read the full article!

Read the full article: RPG Codex Interview: Daniel Bill on DEMIURGOS: Path of the Leviathan
 

Grampy_Bone

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"Politics, Philosophy, Morality and the Pursuit of Power" Ooh do I smell pretentious, superficial, hipster moralizing? I LOVE pretentious, superficial, hipster moralizing!

(that may have been sarcasm)

Is "Demiurge" going to be the new "Nephalim," i.e. some obscure mythological concept dredged out and plugged into game after game with little real care or skill, because it sounds mysterious and cool?
 

aratuk

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Not to betray my anglophone ignorance, but is "Daniel Bill" an unusual name for a German? Are there plenty of other Germans named "Jonathan Bob" and "Albert Fred"?

Asking as an American with a German name.

Edit: I see that it's not an uncommon surname, particularly in Austria. I still hope there are Germans running around named "Jonathan Bob," though.
 
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Daniel Bill

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Thank you so much JarlFrank for doing all of this!
Your translation really is superb!

"Politics, Philosophy, Morality and the Pursuit of Power" Ooh do I smell pretentious, superficial, hipster moralizing? I LOVE pretentious, superficial, hipster moralizing!

(that may have been sarcasm)
The reason I did the interview was to show that I am not an agenda driven hipster, but someone who is interested in social and political science as well as in history and philosophy - and wants to make a game about all of this.
If this is your definition of hipster - ok.

Is "Demiurge" going to be the new "Nephalim," i.e. some obscure mythological concept dredged out and plugged into game after game with little real care or skill, because it sounds mysterious and cool?
I talked about this multiple times and you can find an explanation in the campaign description. But I must admit that without reading these texts beforehand, things could still be unclear.
I quote from our website/campaign:
"In Platos philosophical teachings the Demiurge plays a central role. Aristotle`s teacher emphasizes the priority of mind over matter in his epistemology (theory of cognition).
Our sensory experience is portrayed by Plato as trace of the actual matter; consisting of ideas - the only true elements in cosmos.
This cosmos is conceived by Plato as a timeless entity, which would be unorganized movement of matter in chaos simply following necessity, if not for the Demiurge.
Within this chaos, Platos creative deity steps in by arranging the matter and assigning it with the basic ideas of shape, number and measure.All other ideas are furthermore brought into this world by the Demiurge, who by doing so creates our reality which originates solely from his thoughts."

Regarding this explanation, the name Demiurgos fits into our game - I would say perfectly. It refers primarily to the idea of absolute truth, referring to the age of ideologies. Secondarily it refers to the player - following the "Path of the Leviathan" - trying to impose his way of thinking on the world.

Sorry to disappoint you, but "Daniel Bill" is a pseudonym.
It's my mothers surname!

I'm sorry?
 

Murk

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Daniel Bill the term 'agenda' and its various uses is a meme here (and a button).

It was coined when there were nefarious forces seeking to manipulate the brofist market and their treasonous ways were brought to light. The brofist agenda still lurks, never you doubt, for the price of a fair and free brofist market is eternal sperging vigilance.

edit: repeat wording
 
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Daniel Bill

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Daniel Bill the term 'agenda' and its various uses is a meme here (and a button).

It was brought to light when there were nefarious forces seeking to manipulate the brofist market and their treasonous ways were brought to light. The brofist agenda still lurks, never you doubt, for the price of a fair and free brofist market is eternal sperging vigilance.
Oh, thanks for clearing that up!

It was brought to light when there were nefarious forces seeking to manipulate the brofist market and their treasonous ways were brought to light. The brofist agenda still lurks, never you doubt, for the price of a fair and free brofist market is eternal sperging vigilance.
Well... if you say so!
 

huskarls

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Hand placing encounters is really important, I can always tell when they just take a map and copy paste some mobs with no direction for the combat. POE's big problem is they have some idea guys make six dialogue choices, record a series of lore based dialogue before and during the quest, then on the actual area they just spam whatever despite all the effort every where else. Compare that to blackguards where it's almost like a puzzle game with the combat.

Also dragon age 1 has six years of development and is much more polished
 

Kyl Von Kull

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You had me at Nietzsche... backed!

I wish this period got more attention in mass media (or niche media). There's a ton of great content in Herodotus and Thucydides.
 

VentilatorOfDoom

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I backed the Socialist tier but only because there was no National Socialist tier (wtf?) and so Socialist was the closest. Still, I don't care about appearing in the credits unless there is a Nationial Socialist section.
 

Kyl Von Kull

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I backed the Socialist tier but only because there was no National Socialist tier (wtf?) and so Socialist was the closest. Still, I don't care about appearing in the credits unless there is a Nationial Socialist section.

Since this is being made in Deutschland, I'm pretty sure Daniel Bill could get in trouble for doing that. I don't know if national socialism in its entirety is illegal, or if it's just the NSDAP, but their government is kind of touchy about people doing anything that could potentially be conceived as pro fascist. For understandable reasons.

As an aside, why does the only decent RPG site on the web seem to tilt so hard right (albeit with plenty of obvious exceptions)? Reminds me of that Norman Spinrad book about Hitler as a hack science fiction author, The Iron Dream.
 

Grauken

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Dude said:
That’s the one question I really thought about in advance, and I can’t give you a top five – but I can mention five who had a big influence on me, and whose theories also influenced the game. Plato – well, if you can refer to Plato’s work as social science. Social science is a field of the 20th century, but for me a lot of philosophers are actually social scientists. If I had to name five, I’d pick Plato, Max Weber of course, Foucault, in a certain way Carl Gustav Jung and – as paradoxical as it may sound – Sigmund Freud, too, and, uhm… who was the fifth one I thought about?
Well... it will be a shitty pretentious game then and I don't need to follow this up. Thank you for clearing that up!
 
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aratuk

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I backed the Socialist tier but only because there was no National Socialist tier (wtf?) and so Socialist was the closest. Still, I don't care about appearing in the credits unless there is a Nationial Socialist section.

Since this is being made in Deutschland, I'm pretty sure Daniel Bill could get in trouble for doing that. I don't know if national socialism in its entirety is illegal, or if it's just the NSDAP, but their government is kind of touchy about people doing anything that could potentially be conceived as pro fascist. For understandable reasons.

As an aside, why does the only decent RPG site on the web seem to tilt so hard right (albeit with plenty of obvious exceptions)? Reminds me of that Norman Spinrad book about Hitler as a hack science fiction author, The Iron Dream.

It could be as simple a correlation as the willingness of people to unforgivingly point out and attack what they don't like. "No, I don't respect your opinion, or you. Fuck you."

Maybe sometimes it requires intolerance to maintain high standards.

RPG criticism by a bunch of wannabe thugs.

:discohitler:
 
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Daniel Bill

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You had me at Nietzsche... backed!
Great!

There's a ton of great content in Herodotus and Thucydides.
I started marking all the pages where stories are told which we could use in the game. It ended up beeing enough to do several games about it...

I backed the Socialist tier but only because there was no National Socialist tier (wtf?) and so Socialist was the closest. Still, I don't care about appearing in the credits unless there is a Nationial Socialist section.
Thanks for your support! I think national socialism is - as you said - kind of socialism. Moreover you'll find all the national socialistic principles you propably support, like "Volk", "Reich", "Blut & Boden", "Meine Ehre heißt Treue", "Führerstaat", Social Darwinism and many more, in the game!
If it really means something to you and since your profile picture is awesome - we could divide the socialists into "internationalist socialists" and "Völkische Sozialisten" (don't know atm how to translate "völkisch". Comes from Volk - the people).

They do always seem to get the best outfits.
Thats absolutely true imo.

Well... it will be a shitty pretentious game then and I don't need to follow this up. Thank you for clearing that up!
You disagree that Platons Politeia is a work of social science? No passive aggression. I really am interested what your arguments would be!
I could understand it regarding CG Jung and Freud, but wouldnt you also agree, that psychology and the understanding of a humans behaviour is part of explaining how society works?

If this is your goal then I think it's important that the factions and ideologies in the game don't map too neatly onto contemporary politics, even if, as you point out, there are close parallels. The politicization of classics (see Publius Decius Mus and his Flight 93 essay) has really poisoned that discipline in the public eye. Basically, keep it subtle.
Thanks for your feedback. This certainly will be one of our largest challenges regarding the games development, but it really was our intention to keep it subtle.

Surprised that this didn't get further elaborated upon in the interview. Having read the campaign page a couple times, I'm still unclear about what this Benjamin is on about.
I can totally understand that. I needed several months and I am still unsure if I understand it in total.
Basically it is about contradicting the supposedly christian influenced way of percieving the idea of history in most of the western historical works. Benjamin thought that the european-american understanding of history was heavily influenced by the eschatological view of time in the middleages - seeing history as something that started at X and ends at Y - starts with the genesis and ends with the apocalypse. So as a "bad" historian you would say: first comes the stone age, later there are simple civilizations, then there were the Persians, later the greec city states, after that Alexanders archetypical empire, followed by the Roman Empire and so on. Benjamin stated that our way of percieving history like this would make us blind for the real historicity, that lies in the single historical event.
For example a community member asked how Frida Kahlo could be explained to appear in the game:
I think the Mexicanidad movement (like "authenticité" in Zaire) was basically a semi-indigenous response to having been colonized by a foreign race and an effort to reassert a native cultural identity
my response was:
What you have to take is: "a semi-indigenous response to having been colonized by a foreign race and an effort to reassert a native cultural identity" - this is kind of the component of historicity.
Greeks were one of the first european colonizers and the persians did similar things!
This way you have the core of history, something you can use scientifically - without claiming that every historical event has to be seen sepereated from others - what is true for history (not historicity) and why it couldnt be seen as a at least theoretically measurable science, without Benjamins work. In my opinion at least.

Very sorry for all the english mistakes I propably did, but I think you all can undertstand that explaining it in english could be even hard for a native speaker.
 

Reapa

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I backed the Socialist tier but only because there was no National Socialist tier (wtf?) and so Socialist was the closest. Still, I don't care about appearing in the credits unless there is a Nationial Socialist section.

Since this is being made in Deutschland, I'm pretty sure Daniel Bill could get in trouble for doing that. I don't know if national socialism in its entirety is illegal, or if it's just the NSDAP, but their government is kind of touchy about people doing anything that could potentially be conceived as pro fascist. For understandable reasons.

As an aside, why does the only decent RPG site on the web seem to tilt so hard right (albeit with plenty of obvious exceptions)? Reminds me of that Norman Spinrad book about Hitler as a hack science fiction author, The Iron Dream.

It could be as simple a correlation as the willingness of people to unforgivingly point out and attack what they don't like. "No, I don't respect your opinion, or you. Fuck you."

Maybe sometimes it requires intolerance to maintain high standards.

RPG criticism by a bunch of thugs.

:discohitler:
there is indeed no honor in sugarcoating shit.
 

Reapa

Doom Preacher
Joined
Jul 10, 2009
Messages
2,340
Location
Germany
You had me at Nietzsche... backed!
Great!

There's a ton of great content in Herodotus and Thucydides.
I started marking all the pages where stories are told which we could use in the game. It ended up beeing enough to do several games about it...

I backed the Socialist tier but only because there was no National Socialist tier (wtf?) and so Socialist was the closest. Still, I don't care about appearing in the credits unless there is a Nationial Socialist section.
Thanks for your support! I think national socialism is - as you said - kind of socialism. Moreover you'll find all the national socialistic principles you propably support, like "Volk", "Reich", "Blut & Boden", "Meine Ehre heißt Treue", "Führerstaat", Social Darwinism and many more, in the game!
If it really means something to you and since your profile picture is awesome - we could divide the socialists into "internationalist socialists" and "Völkische Sozialisten" (don't know atm how to translate "völkisch". Comes from Volk - the people).

They do always seem to get the best outfits.
Thats absolutely true imo.

Well... it will be a shitty pretentious game then and I don't need to follow this up. Thank you for clearing that up!
You disagree that Platons Politeia is a work of social science? No passive aggression. I really am interested what your arguments would be!
I could understand it regarding CG Jung and Freud, but wouldnt you also agree, that psychology and the understanding of a humans behaviour is part of explaining how society works?

If this is your goal then I think it's important that the factions and ideologies in the game don't map too neatly onto contemporary politics, even if, as you point out, there are close parallels. The politicization of classics (see Publius Decius Mus and his Flight 93 essay) has really poisoned that discipline in the public eye. Basically, keep it subtle.
Thanks for your feedback. This certainly will be one of our largest challenges regarding the games development, but it really was our intention to keep it subtle.

Surprised that this didn't get further elaborated upon in the interview. Having read the campaign page a couple times, I'm still unclear about what this Benjamin is on about.
I can totally understand that. I needed several months and I am still unsure if I understand it in total.
Basically it is about contradicting the supposedly christian influenced way of percieving the idea of history in most of the western historical works. Benjamin thought that the european-american understanding of history was heavily influenced by the eschatological view of time in the middleages - seeing history as something that started at X and ends at Y - starts with the genesis and ends with the apocalypse. So as a "bad" historian you would say: first comes the stone age, later there are simple civilizations, then there were the Persians, later the greec city states, after that Alexanders archetypical empire, followed by the Roman Empire and so on. Benjamin stated that our way of percieving history like this would make us blind for the real historicity, that lies in the single historical event.
For example a community member asked how Frida Kahlo could be explained to appear in the game:
I think the Mexicanidad movement (like "authenticité" in Zaire) was basically a semi-indigenous response to having been colonized by a foreign race and an effort to reassert a native cultural identity
my response was:
What you have to take is: "a semi-indigenous response to having been colonized by a foreign race and an effort to reassert a native cultural identity" - this is kind of the component of historicity.
Greeks were one of the first european colonizers and the persians did similar things!
This way you have the core of history, something you can use scientifically - without claiming that every historical event has to be seen sepereated from others - what is true for history (not historicity) and why it couldnt be seen as a at least theoretically measurable science, without Benjamins work. In my opinion at least.

Very sorry for all the english mistakes I propably did, but I think you all can undertstand that explaining it in english could be even hard for a native speaker.
i have read the interview and saw a few seconds of your pitch video and feel i need to remind you a game is more than just philosophy and art. with that in mind, rethink your UI. and don't give me that "it's just a placeholder" crap. when making a pitch video every fucking thing must be perfect.
and get a fucking signature and a shave. you are representing a company whether you like it or not. advertising and image is especially at this point your top priority even in this schweinestall.
 

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