Synergy Invites Us To Question Our Assumptions About City Building Games

From RPGs to action games, every genre carries its share of baggage.

The exploration, expansion, exploitation, and extermination necessary to progress in Civilization and other 4X games define success in rigidly specific form. To win the game, a player’s civilization must prove itself superior to the competition. Rivals must be crushed militarily and outstripped scientifically. Their competing religions must be consigned to history, and the player must develop a hegemonic global culture that envelops the traditions and practices of competitors. A thriving civilization does not coexist with its peers; it dominates them and reigns as suzerain (definition: a superior feudal lord to whom fealty is due).

Similarly, it’s exceedingly difficult to construct a First Person Shooter that is not a power fantasy. Many excellent FPS titles like Spec Ops: The Line explore this idea and ask what is so enticing about the catharsis of simulated bullet-spraying mayhem.

None of this is to say that players should feel ashamed for tossing out a frag grenade in Call of Duty or bringing the galaxy to heel during a grueling Stellaris campaign. Games are art, and they deserve to be engaged with critically. It’s important we dissect their themes both explicit and implicit, to better understand them and what draws us towards them. To do less is a disservice to the medium.

This brings us to Synergy, a simulation game with an ecological focus and a lot to say about its genre and the typical conventions of other city builders.

Synergy and Other City Builders

So, let’s dissect simulation games. What presuppositions do they bring to the table?

From SimCity to Cities: Skylines, any game about urban development necessitates constant unrestrained growth. Cities, both virtual and physical, are a microcosm of the capitalist system that gives rise to them. In simulation games, cities must expand ceaselessly. Starting with an uninhabited patch of land, the player will materialise row upon row of residential complexes, industrial hubs, and office buildings. This expansion is the purpose of the game and is self-justifying; you are expanding now, so that you may continue to facilitate more rapid and efficient expansion in the future.

Synergy questions this assumption. It dubs itself an “Ecosystem City Builder”. Rather than a blank canvas of earth, waiting to be occupied by buildings, in Synergy players construct their city in a pre-existing ecosystem of plants, trees, and rock formations. While the player will develop a city during gameplay, they must learn to inhabit and coexist within the ecosystem, rather than tearing it down as the price of progress. Failing to sustainably expand your city, by taking from the world around you without giving back, results in key resources dwindling and eventually drying up.

A successful city in Synergy cultivates the land it is built upon, rather than simply extracting from it.  

The ecosystems in Synergy are often, at least initially, harsh and unforgiving. The game’s world, while not completely arid, is dry and prone to heatwaves, droughts, and scorching summers. Securing enough water to keep your community nourished is a credible challenge, especially because water is necessary to operate forges and to brew medicine. The key is to develop infrastructure to ensure that water can be preserved during the hot months. Water can also be sent through canals, pumps, and other irrigation structures to make the land greener and more arable. A successful city in Synergy cultivates the land it is built upon, rather than simply extracting from it.  

Synergy does not feature any form of currency. Structures are constructed by expending the resources necessary to build them rather than by paying for them. Similarly, while your city will develop a complex economy, it’s one based upon the exchange of goods for other goods, rather than upon financial transactions. Tree bark can be processed into planks of lumber, which can be used to construct a plant nursery to grow vegetables, some of which can be composted to grow trees, whose bark can be taken to start the cycle over again.

Since there is no currency, Synergy doesn’t use the player’s capacity to make money as a metric to determine their success. Instead, players are scored based on the “prosperity” of their city. This is calculated by evaluating the happiness of their citizens, and sharp penalties are applied to this score if adequate housing and healthcare aren’t provided. In this way, Synergy’s mechanics center on providing a positive quality of life. This encourages players to act with empathy and to construct a flourishing city, rather than a hyper-efficient revenue-generating engine.

Conclusion

Synergy is not the first simulation game that encourages players to question the foundations of the genre. The protagonist of Factorio crash-lands on an alien world and gradually decimates its ecology to set up a factory. The assembly lines of this factory eventually construct a rocket that enables Factorio’s protagonist to escape both the planet and the consequences of their actions. Factorio simultaneously revels in the satisfaction of building a planet-spanning production line, while condemning the pollution and environmental devastation this inherently causes. Synergy sets itself apart by offering an alternative vision, a simulation game where the player’s actions heal the world, rather than harming it.

Synergy's mechanics reward players for developing sustainably and punish the squandering of resources and rampant unchecked growth. The game’s scoring system incentivises constructing a society that prioritises the needs of its populace, rather than the acquisition of profit.

The title “Synergy” is apt. This is a game about building a community that exists symbiotically with the world around it, rather than one parasitically set apart from nature. Synergy presents an alternative framework for city-building games based on compassion both for others and for the world itself. The lessons here are just as applicable to future societies as they are to future city builders.