Two Mechs, Alike in Dignity
I’ll admit right off the bat: The title here is a little misleading. We’re not here to talk about two mechs and their stories, or at least, not only here for such. We’re here to ask ourselves how two people bought the same game, had the same objectives, enjoy many of the same things about the game, played it through for hours upon hours, and somehow came to totally different conclusions about how their game world should look.
Mind you, BATTLETECH is not an RPG, where significant divergence in narratives playstyle is common and often expected. It’s a tactics game: A game that has a story, and a pretty good one, too, but mostly cares about strategy and weapon statistics and fun unscripted moments of triumph and loss.
Turns out, it also is a game that can be about at least two very, very different things, with different portions of its fundamental pitch sinking in for different people.
My friend and I were sitting at our desktops, playing our cooperative, federated game of Stellaris, pushing back a rising tide of fanatic xenophobia and slaving hegemony, when it came up. We got to talking about our respective BATTLETECH campaigns, and I offhandedly mentioned my current cash reserves, which I said were usually something in the neighborhood of 3–5 million. This revelation was greeted with silence. After the pause, and with some confusion, I asked him how much he was sitting on.
40 million, he said.
I was flabbergasted. How could you even get 40 million, let alone float there consistently? Given the way I’d been playing the game, that number was manifestly impossible. So I asked him: How? And answering that question, I discovered the ways in which we’d simply been playing different games.
First, a little background. In BATTLETECH, the player endeavors to pilot their fledgling mercenary company to success, both by taking on whichever jobs seem most rewarding, but also by following a path of Restoration (their term for the faction) after an authoritarian takeover. This sees you balancing your own needs as a company, as a business, with the needs of the nascent military force your employer is creating. You manage debts, maintenance and repair costs, crew salaries and morale, high payoff vs. better salvage, and other factors, all as important as any moment spent piloting your mechs across the galaxy. To me, to make sure I always had the ability do what needed to be done even when people were hurt or mechs shredded, it meant that I did my best to keep a healthy stable of top grade mechs and pilots at all times. Essentially, I kept a private army — a througline in keeping with my frequent role as an elite military black ops group for the insurgent Restoration. This meant that, with the maintenance costs on some 12 odd teched-out mechs and about as many high pilot salaries, I generally floated in the comfortable low millions, occasionally switching from my heavy salvage-focused mission style to a money-focused style when I wanted to buy a new upgrade. It worked for me.
My friend’s style was emphatically different. He didn’t build an army. He didn’t hire a whole swathe of newbie pilots he trained from the ground up. He scrapped and scrimped and saved to the higher tiers of the game, using mostly what he had from the beginning, replacing old mechs with new ones, selling off the chaff, waiting patiently for soldiers to heal and for mechs to be repaired. And then, once he had reached his goal — 4 incredibly upgraded, highest tier mechs, ones he judged to be the most efficient picks he could possibly alight upon — he stopped. And sat, taking lucrative jobs, not needing to care much about salvage for new mechs, with barely anything in maintenance fees eating at his bottom line. He was rich, and he would stay that way, with a small but tight mercenary company that would never want for anything. He wasn’t a penny-pincher, to be clear: This was simply the natural way to play the game for him, and the game did nothing to discourage it.
We talked it out, each espousing the advantages of our particular style of play, confused about how we had managed to create such entirely different ecosystems. Sure, we’d diverged plenty in the past, taking different roads in the Dragon Age or Mass Effect, but those were roleplaying games, designed for divergence and player choice. And we’d taken different routes in other strategy games before, focusing on playing this or that faction or using this or that tactic. But following wholly different goals, while being presented with the same information? That felt new.
After teasing it out a bit further, we got closer to the heart of the matter. Simply put: To him, the mercenary leader simulation, the notion of running the company and seeing it prosper and watching his own fortune rise to a respectable place, was most appealing. What’s the point of being a mercenary, if not to get rich? In contrast, the idea of being a leader in an insurgent cause, of deploying every weapon at my disposal against an enemy who wanted my death and the deaths of my loved ones, appealed to me. First and foremost, I was a member of the Restoration, and it was my job to project power wherever necessary, making clear that we were not to be trifled with. Only secondarily was I a mercenary.
If there’s any point I want to make here, it’s this. The revelation that the two of us had been nearly playing two different games, framed by these same structures, was wonderful, at least to me. And not, necessarily, even wholly in a ‘importance of player agency’ way, as that conversation gets fraught with questions about power fantasies and the potential selfishness inherent there. It was wonderful because it was unexpected. Never in my life would I have expected to learn that my friend, who I ostensibly know well, is a compulsive money hoarder, just as I’m sure he didn’t expect to learn that I am a willing cause-for-hire. In more seriousness: Games have the ability to throw in so many incredible elements of chance, of change, of unpredictability. They have a kind of malleability between them and their audience that other mediums rarely share. Actions, knowing or unknowing, can turn into stories all their own. Celebrating the games that do this well, and highlighting the ways in which stories can become richer as a result, is a small but valuable step towards recognizing how games can set themselves apart.
