Nikhil Murthy’s Syphilisation

Nikhil Murthy’s Syphilisation is a post-colonial 4X game where you play a student doing a group report on Gandhi, Churchill and the Raj. It eXplores space left uncharted by the genre and so proposes alternatives to established systems.

## About This Game
Syphilisation is a post-colonial parody of the 4X genre. In it, I take the
established tropes of 4X games and attempt to show post-colonial alternatives
to each of them. Most notably, Syphilisation frames human struggle as a common
striving for a better world rather than a furious competition between
ourselves. There’s a lot of space left uneXplored in the 4X space and
Syphilisation aims to show some of what more is possible.

In Syphilisation, you play as a student doing a group report on Gandhi,
Churchill and colonization as a whole. In doing so, you will research actual
facts about the events of the time, including the Dandi March, Appeasement and
the history of Ahimsa. You also learn about the students doing the report and
their stories. Also, as anyone who has had to do a group report knows, the
politics of nations are just the politics of student groups writ large.

This is a game where you can try empathy though. If you wish to play
opportunistically, this game is not going to stop you, but will let you try an
alternative if you prefer. More than one player can win and you’re able to
help others as much as you can hinder.

It’s also a game that tries to show something of history from below. The
citizens of your empire have many requests of their own and will often just
handle them by themselves rather than wait for you to get around to them. They
will research new technologies, complete buildings and units and simply deal
with their issues by themselves. You can make yourself more popular by getting
there first, but Syphilisation understands that leaders need the people and
not the other way around.

Everything in this game, from campaigns to technology to settling all try to
present a system that is not underpinned by imperialism and so present
something novel in this 4X space. This is a game of ideas and I hope you like
them.

Nikhil Murthy’s Syphilisation