[Journal Club] The Hierarchical Structure behind the Diversity of Age of Wonders 4

Paradox’s Age of Wonders 4 (hereafter AoW4) — released in 2023, yet posting strong sales with every DLC — is well known to Korean gamers as a game that folds together the virtues of the Civilization series and Heroes of Might and Magic.

The system that counts as AoW4’s greatest trait and virtue is the ability to customize a people within the game. Beyond the races of the standard fantasy worldbook — elves, dwarves, orcs, goblins — it fields varied folk carrying cultures and traits of their own: the frog-formed Toadkin, the goat-like Goatkin, the Syrons resembling the Na’vi of the film Avatar. It grants, further, the freedom to customize their cultures (Barbarian, Feudal, Primal, Reaver, Industrious, Dark, and so on) and even their racial traits. These features are credited with maximizing immersion in the world and adding depth to strategy and tactics.

The freedom to recompose a people yields one further property: it lets the game slip past critical discourse on how racial violence is represented. The mechanics of the 4X genre (eXplore, eXpand, eXploit, eXterminate) generally presuppose quantifying populations and peoples into manageable resource units, and so can draw the criticism of reproducing a one-sided, authoritarian concept of race. As one may feel, playing the Civilization series, that faint unease — “it rests on history and particular heroes, so it isn’t exactly to be refuted, and yet casting Korea as the technology people and Japan as the war people is somehow…” — representations of race and racial traits cannot escape the criticism of being built atop an essentialist, hierarchical concept of race.

AoW4, though, is relatively free of such criticism: first, because directly linking race in reality to the concept of a fantasy people is a logical leap; and second, because even if some racial stereotype does surface in play, that is the gamer’s violence showing itself within a free system — not the game’s fault. If anything, a system that separates a people’s appearance from its traits, each freely customizable, might overturn stereotypes long repeated in fantasy worlds — might even sprout doubt toward the discriminatory perspective that ties race to racial character in reality.

But Mark Hines of the University of Kentucky raises a flag against this perception — because he views representation in games not simply as text, but in connection with play. And his discussion, while moving past the classical critique of racism, makes one ponder how the specificity of games might touch their political implications. In this Journal Club, let us look at how the seemingly progressive race system of a fantasy game connects to real-world racism.

Floating Signifiers and a Reinforced Racial Order

As noted above, AoW4 is a subtle challenge to fantasy media’s essentialist ways of depicting race. The game induces players to consider the interplay of racial aesthetics, culture, technology, and morality within fantasy — showing that racism in the game is not something hierarchized essentialistically for the player to inherit, but something the player produces along with an array of cultural factors.

Yet Hines criticizes AoW4 for constructing a subtle and harmful racial worldview even as it evades essentialist racial depiction. The concept he deploys is Stuart Hall’s “floating signifier”: a word or symbol that holds no single fixed meaning, filled with different meanings from era to era and context to context.

To this Hines adds the insight of Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe: the floating signifier does not stop at semantic fluidity, but is a field of political contest in which different groups vie for command of that very fluidity. AoW4 appears to let players compose the meaning of a people freely — but beneath, he points out, something fixed still remains.

How, then, does AoW4 construct a harmful racial worldview? As C. Thi Nguyen has argued, games hold great power because they can flatten the complexity and ambiguity of reality. Questions as tangled as “what counts as success in my life” or “how should I treat other people” the game systematizes and quantifies, producing goals clear and consistent.

But look at AoW4’s goals, and a reductive racial worldview centered on the white male shows through. The empire as a whole may comprise several peoples, for instance — but each individual city must be composed of one people alone. The very picture of different peoples living together in a single city does not exist in the game. Moreover, the player who holds the most members of a given people can transform that entire people at a stroke by magic — even those of its members who belong to the enemy’s side.

This quietly implants the perception that a people is bound as one body regardless of political belonging. The hero system is similar. The player may bring in heroes from other civilizations and use them on their own side, but a hero’s inborn magical capacity remains that of the original people. Rather than dissolving into a new culture, the capacity follows the hero about, as if it were a law of the cosmos fixed from the beginning. Such a setting ends by nailing race down as “what one is simply born as.”

The 4X Genre Meets White Male Subjectivity

What matters, though, is not simply that the game figuratively rehearses the logic of white nationalism. The game’s simplification lets the white-male-centered gamer split their real-world experience from the game world, treating racial and gendered discrimination as if it “did not exist” — and internalize, across the boundary of reality and game, a transcendent racial law. The spatial setting of countless parallel worlds, for instance, turns battle with other peoples into a universal law — “different beings always discover difference and take it as warrant for violence” — while the cyclical time of repeated play makes the game’s principles of rule and war look like “common sense,” like “eternal truth.”

Go a step further, and the game — in letting players remake a people’s traits at will — meets Silicon Valley’s TESCREAL discourse (techno-utopian eugenic thought) head on. The player reforms their subjects by magic in whatever direction they wish, and the design makes pressing forward with a single people strategically superior to an empire of mixed peoples. In Hines’s phrase, this amounts in effect to playing at eugenics: the elitist logic — if there is a social problem, why not technically improve the population, systematize it numerically, and reorder the world? — rehearsed in the guise of an enjoyable game system.

One may suspect the criticism excessive, since every game is, after all, made of player action; but precisely in making the authority given to the player — the deciding subject at the meta level — feel value-neutral, the game paradoxically displays the effect of internalizing a principle of “eternal objectivity.”

Does the criticism, then, apply only to gamers who are white men? It does not. The heart of Hines’s critique lies in the sociopolitical process itself that disciplines humans into “fully human / half human / non-human.” AoW4’s real allure lies in this racializing process of designing a people by freely combining body, mind, culture, and ideology — and it is the player who confers the hierarchy.

At a glance, AoW4 seems to overturn the fixed ideas of race. In fact it has only packaged the process of race-formation more flexibly and elegantly, to suit a post-racial mood, while keeping intact the underlying frame that hierarchizes and others around the player. And so the player — whatever their actual race — is endowed with the values of the white man: he who judges coolly, shoulders strategic risk, and endures for the greater gain.

The Game That Rehearses the Hierarchical Structure

What Hines wants to say through the paper comes down, in the end, to one thing. In AoW4, a people’s appearance and culture may be shaken and recombined without limit — but the premise that “difference becomes the grounds of antagonism” never shakes at all. The people may seem to drift free like a floating signifier, but beneath sits a single fixed axis to which every meaning adheres.

The interesting point here is that Hines does not treat the problem as a defect of AoW4 as an individual game. What he really aims at is the 4X genre — and, further, the properties of the medium of games itself. The capacity to reduce complex social judgment to clear numbers and hierarchies; the structure that hands the player, gripping perfect information, the authority to redesign the world. These properties, Hines says, fit the right-wing worldview uncannily well — the very form of the game is built to make that worldview feel peculiarly comfortable, peculiarly fun. What is more, the game’s promise that one can be anything and make anything makes it hard even to bring out fundamental questions about the hierarchies of reality. The sense that “it’s only a game” is precisely the device that sets the player at the greatest distance from political judgment.

The discussion leaves a provocative question about the nature of games. To overstate it: “however progressive the values a game’s content tries to hold, if the game’s mechanisms reproduce conservative values, does the game not in effect harbor an alt-right property?”

Push the logic to its end, and not only 4X games but strategy simulation at large, automation sims, deck-building games, build-optimization RPGs — even idle games — can be read as mechanisms reproducing the neoliberal values of systematization and efficiency (city simulations that reduce citizens to indices of happiness and tax revenue, say, or factory-automation games that handle population as an input–output function).

At this point, though, Hines’s argument is not fully tied off. He draws his own line — quantification in games, he says, does not in itself lead to right-wing thought — yet the essay as a whole treats that very quantification and hierarchization as evidence of a right-wing worldview. How the distance between the two is to be closed is a question the paper leaves unanswered. So too with the line dividing racism from “post-racial racism”: Hines defines the latter as a posture that acknowledges difference while leaving the antagonism between differences as something natural — but where the narrative conventions peculiar to the fantasy genre end (conflict between peoples is, after all, also a device that keeps a story running) and where the infiltration of a political worldview begins remains ambiguous. That ambiguity is likely why the paper reads less as a complete argument than as one provocative question.

Even so, the question itself is worth chewing over. Is the combination we meet again and again in games — “free design” joined to “inevitable antagonism” — really the product of chance alone? Or is the medium of games built, from the start, to favor that combination? Rather than delivering a finished answer, Hines’s paper makes us doubt, once more, where the fun of the games we enjoy comes from.

References

Hines, M. (2026). Racecraft à la carte: Fantasy assemblages in Age of Wonders 4. Game Studies, 26(2). https://gamestudies.org/2602/articles/hines