What about nuclear weapons? Religious minorities? Religious tensions? An awful lot of events and systems are in the game that force the player to deal with these things. To get back and try to repeat in a more concise manner, the game deals with - you have questions, civics questions that come up about slavery, about women’s rights, about child labor. You’re trying to reach - in a way the question the game asks, if you could redo this whole thing, how would you do it differently? What would you try to make better? Rather than, it’s a horrible slog and you have to sharpen your axes and chop your neighbor’s head off before he chops yours, it’s more of a - I wanted to put a more positive cast on that. You’re trying to build something from all these cultures. We like to think that maybe we could have a more optimistic future. The game is designed so it can be played that way.īut a little bit of the philosophy, or my philosophy, and I think the philosophy of the studio, and hopefully William, because he got stuck actually doing it - life is not a pitiless struggle where the winner takes all and everyone else gets ground into the dirt. You can play the game that way, and that’s fine. A lot of games really enjoy getting into that, the relentless Darwinian struggle for mastery kind of thing. Typically, if you do a 4X game or a game that has a lot of conquest in it, the tone can easily be very grim. Jeff Spock: It took a fair amount of thought. How did you decide on the tone for Humankind? The tone seems to be a little lighter than I expected.

This is an edited transcript of our interview.

We talked about the humor that comes from building a civilization, the narrative that emerges as you add cultures and advance through the ages, and how a strategy game studio approaches writing. Join gaming leaders live this October 25-26 in San Francisco to examine the next big opportunities within the gaming industry.Īfter playing, I had a bevy of questions for narrative director Jeff Spock and lead designer William Dyce of Amplitude Studios.

Humankind civilizations