Volkerwanderung

This German word describes the historical period from about 200 AD through 600 AD when different peoples ("volk") wandered ("wanderung") all over Europe, fighting and conquering. What strikes me about this period is the blending of peoples and cultures. France, for example, was Celtic with Roman cultural elements, and then it was overrun by Germanic peoples; the France of today still harbors many Celtic elements. England, on the other hand, was less deeply Celtic when the Romans arrived, and the Germanic invasions eliminated a great many Celts; this, along with the later Norman invasion, led to a population with strong Germanic elements colored by rare Celtic elements.

In this game, the player would represent a higher-level abstraction than we see in most games: a culture, as represented by its language. The player might represent Celtic culture, in which case his goal is to maximize the use of Celtic language throughout Europe. Merely conquering other peoples is not enough; a player must also outbreed them. The verbs of the game establish the culture's proclivities toward various cultural elements: the warrior tradition, respect for authority versus respect for the individual, the rule of law, exaltation of agricultural productivity, admiration for art and learning, and so forth. The player can freely increment or decrement these values, but there are limits on the rate of change a culture can absorb.

Each volk in the game is composed of some mix of the three fundamental cultures: Celtic, Germanic, and Roman. Each of the three players gets to control each volk in proportion to the fraction of that volk that he owns. Thus, if the Lombards are 50% Germanic, 30% Roman, and 20% Celtic, then the Celtic player's commands have 20% weight, and the Germanic player's commands have 50% weight. The actual policies that a volk applies are the weighted average of the commands given by the individual players.

A volk grows in population in proportion to its agricultural output. But a volk can influence other volk by several means. It can attack another volk, in which case the victorious volk absorbs the losing volk. When this happens, the population proportions change in a manner that reflects the actual populations of the two volk and their cultural distributions, with a weighting factor in favor of the victorious volk.

This game would have strong historical value, but it would also be fascinating as a game because the player's identity is so diffuse. To a greater or lesser extent, each player's identity exists in each of the actors (the volk).