Is Meikyuu Kingdom a 4X Game?

[yukamichi]

This is a rhetorical question about the extent to which one media paradigm's assemblage of various traits into identifiable patterns is ever going to map comfortably onto a different media paradigm, and how the attempts to do so can potentially reveal unexamined assumptions about less obvious aspects of how we orient ourselves towards that medium in the first place. And also, I'm going to answer the rhetorical question anyway.

I mean, all four Xs do appear in one part of the game's major procedural structures or another. But even a lot of relatively popular ways of playing D&D contain some degree of at least three of the four Xs, and yet I doubt many people would jump to claiming that D&D has much in common with, for example, Masters of Orion.

Which is to say, I suspect that very few people really interact with games on a psychological level directly vis a vis the fictional activities we engage in while playing (this is also a backhanded critique of the supposed "Three Pillars" of D&D play, but that's a whole different rant). The way we view those activities is heavily influenced by the rhetorical interface of the game; for example, the role of "overseer" that we generally play in 4X games, compared to the rhetorical interface of the individual actor common to most RPGs.

But that's what makes the label of "4X" potentially more applicable to Meikyuu Kingdom than it is to other tabletop RPGs where the players/characters explore, exploit, expand, and/or exterminate. The core gimmick of Meikyuu Kingdom is the eponymous Kingdom, a communal character played by all of the players (and to which their individual characters belong), and which provides the necessary "overseer" framework that conceptualises the activities the individual characters take part in as part of the traditional 4X "loop."

Bonus malformed thought: The Overseer Stance!

The "party conceit" has long been a sticking point for a lot of RPG play. It drags characters into a relationship that may be a poor fit for the kind of story they want to be in and players want to tell, and can limit player choices in ways that violate their expectations and are deleterious to the experience of play. Meikyuu Kingdom isn't unique in fostering an "overseer" stance that feels natural, but it's something that many games struggle to achieve without feeling contrived.

Large, old-school, open-table D&D campaigns fostered a communal sense of play through player roles like Caller and Mapper, and through using lethality as a way to maintain ironic distance from the fiction. Combat in Tunnels and Trolls pools all of the characters dice together and rolls them as one. The core conceit of most Traveller games is the way that the characters' are bound to their ship, the maintenance of which is a constant communal concern and driver of the fiction. Many Battletech/Mechwarrior games revolve around managing a military command, often in such detail that it's earned the (mostly affectionate) appelation of "AccountanTech".

These games all feature a little (or occasionally, big) element of "management simulator", a small extra layer conceptualising and contextualising the activities of play that can often reap large dividends in how much value it adds.