This paper was originally written for the 2023 conference of the Canadian Game Studies Association (online). I'm posting it here in my web garden and will continue to edit and update it, so the text below will likely have departed from the CGSA 2023 text before too long.

An Interpretation of Total Annihilation

By David Ogborn

My name is David Ogborn, and I'm pleased to be able to share this paper, "An Interpretation of Total Annihilation" with you all at the Canadian Game Studies Association. I'm an Associate Professor at McMaster University, in the Department of Communication Studies and Media Arts. I've had the pleasure of attending the past two CGSA conferences as a lurker, and am looking forward to coming into closer conversation with, and continuing to learn from, this group. McMaster University is located on the territories of the Mississauga and Haudenosaunee people, a location and enterprise made possible by a number of broken treaties. I'm in a process of learning what my responsibilities are as a White settler in this context, and I'm hopeful that the CGSA can be a place where that learning can happen together with others.

At the centre of this paper is the 1997 real-time strategy (RTS) game Total Annihilation, developed by Cavedog Games, designed by Chris Taylor, and published by Activision. Total Annihilation is a game with which I have a longstanding personal relationship: starting at the very end of the 1990s, not long after the game was released, and extending for the better part of a decade, this game in particular was the basis of many LAN parties with friends. I still call it my "favourite video game of all time", and I've started to include a brief analytical presentation about it in the Game Design course I teach at McMaster. My background is primarily as an electronic musician and artist programmer, and through the latter identity and my teaching activities I'm slowly becoming more involved with game design and studies. Giving a paper about a game is a new step for me, and it made sense to start with something with which I have a lot of play experience. I also think the RTS / 4X genre(s) have manifest, complex, non-innocent relationships to the ongoing project of colonization, and so I hope that the game can serve as an entry point, for me, into thinking more about that. I should mention that this is very much a work in progress: I am sharing with you as far as I have been able to get in this study.

Total Annihilation can be seen as part of a series of games that came out in the 1990s and which established the genre of real-time strategy (RTS). It’s included in Bruce Geryk's "A History of Real-Time Strategy Games" (a piece on gamespot.com likely published in 2001) as part of a "second generation" of such games that also included the now more famous Starcraft (1998, developed & published by Blizzard) as well as the now much more obscure Dark Reign (1997, developed by Auran, published by Activision). Geryk's piece singles out the interface of Total Annihilation as a point of innovation – features like build queues, default builds, and AI stances (behaviours) for units made it "possible to construct elaborate plans that aren't hampered by the old limitations of the RTS interface." The Geryk piece also highlights the absence of much attention to story/narrative in the game; indeed, not much is offered beyond the thin pretext of armies of robots versus armies of clones-that-might-as-well-just-be-robots. The Geryk piece also draws attention to a tendency, at the time, to compare Total Annihilation and Starcraft, and engages in it themselves: "If Total Annihilation set the standard for technical achievement in a real-time strategy game, it took the hands of the old masters at Blizzard to create the artistic equivalent."

It seems that "artistic" is being used here to note the much more elaborate storytelling and cast of characters in Starcraft, while "technical achievement" presumably refers to the abovementioned interface innovations and perhaps also to the arguably fancier graphics of Total Annihilation. In published game studies literature I have reviewed thus far, Starcraft (including Starcraft 2) seems to be the focus of a preponderance of research, with other games from the genre receiving less attention. While I can't help but engage with this work, and it has interesting and valuable things to say, I think I also have to resist a tendency to explain things by way of comparisons and contrasts to the Starcraft franchise; instead, I hope to give attention to the specifics of Total Annihilation (and its progeny) "in their own terms" as much as possible.

So what happens when one plays Total Annihilation? Each player starts with a powerful unit called a commander which can move around and build things. There are two resources, metal and energy, which are collected by building harvesting units (often in specific locations on the map). With these resources, an army of robots/clones can be built with the purpose of destroying all the units of other players. The "fog of war" is an important game mechanic: one can only see enemy units if one's own units could see them; and in some game modes the nature of the terrain is also invisible until uncovered by exploration. There's a hierarchy of things that can be built – the basic units can be built by the commander who can also build factories for producing other moving units, those factories can build all of the level one units of a particular type (robot, tank, air vehicle, sea vehicle), and specific unit built by that factory can build a factory for the more powerful, more expensive level two units.

Total Annihilation as series and FOSS

Total Annihilation was released in 1997, and was followed up by two expansion packs The Core Contingency and Battle Tactics in 1998. Cavedog Entertainment then appears to have used the same engine to drive the fantasy-themed Total Annihilation: Kingdoms and an expansion pack, before the company's bankruptcy in 2000. It would take ten years for a successful commercial followup – 2007's Supreme Commander, a product of Total Annihilation designer Chris Taylor's company Gas Powered Games. Prior to this commercial follow-up however, a free and open source software project directly inspired by Total Annihilation had appeared: the Spring real-time strategy engine. It's unclear to me when exactly Spring began and when it was usable, but in any case, ostensibly aimed at recreating the experience of Total Annihilation within a more completely 3D environment, Spring has supported and spawned numerous and far-ranging variants of the "original", and small communities appear to still be playing some of these games online today. Total Annihilation then has a second free-and-open-source echo in the form of the Forged Alliance Forever community, which maintains, extends, and plays variants of Supreme Commander: Forged Alliance. Spring and Forged Alliance Forever are both substantial free and open source software projects in a space (games) where such projects do not tend to be visible and successful: thus I find myself intrigued to learn more about, and more clearly map, the story of these projects. In both cases, I note the fundamental impurity of their relationship to FOSS. For example, to play Forged Alliance Forever you are expected to buy the commercial Forged Alliance through Steam, and then this fact is used to authorized your access to the community servers and updated client – a relatively complicated and unusual arrangement. I think the use of the word “forever” is particularly interesting – as it raises a challenge both to commercial gaming’s need for planned obsolescence and with the difficulty of preserving games (and software generally).

A final note about the nature of the "content" of these games – in my play experience so far they are all VERY similar – all have a threadbare story that appears to be given no importance by players, similar (well-developed, complicated) user interfaces, and a strong emphasis on "balance" (about which more in a moment). Playing Forged Alliance Forever in 2023 feels a lot like playing Total Annihilation in 1997... so perhaps the object of study here is not a game, nor even a series of games, but an idea or thread about what a certain kind of game could be that has been advanced collaboratively and competitively by both commercial and community actors?

Cavedog Entertainment (1995 – 2000):

Total Annihilation (1997)
expansion: The Core Contingency (1998)
expansion: Battle Tactics (1998)
Total Annihilation: Kingdoms (1999)
expansion: The Iron Plague (2000)

A first free and open source moment:

Spring RTS (2005 (earliest source code commit I could find)? Earlier? Later?)
(and many mods/variants using the Spring engine, up to present day)

Gas Powered Games (1998 – 2013/2018):

Supreme Commander (2007)
Supreme Commander: Forged Alliance (2007)
Supreme Commander 2 (2010)

A second free and open source moment:

Forged Alliance Forever (2011-?, community continuation of Forged Alliance client and servers)

Capitalism, colonialism

In general, the genre of real-time strategy games has any number of connections to capitalism and colonialism, both at the level of narrative and imagery, as well as at the level of procedural rhetoric – the latter may be especially important to recognize for a game like Total Annihilation where narrative is arguably of less importance. The "empty" map over which militarized forces spar is a straightforward enactment of the doctrine of terra nullius – that supposedly empty land is supposedly there for the taking. The frenetic resource harvesting of the game, what we might think of as its "economy", while performing the catastrophic idea of land as simply or mostly a resource, is also ultimately directed only to destroying things, a dynamic which Noble and Ferber (2016) have termed "illth" (as opposed to wealth) in the context of their analysis of Starcraft 2 – arguably their critique applies even more neatly and robustly to Total Annihilation, a game whose very name points to the way there appears to be nothing in it that is not directed at destruction (certainly there is no story). Alexander Galloway (2007) once argued that a game (ostensibly Starcraft) focused on selecting things for swarming agents to target amounts to "a simulation of the informatic space, or the networked modality of ecological or systemic expression," (pg. 90) and that the "balance" favoured in such games is "a distinctly nefarious virtue bent on the subsumption of difference, be it the racial asymmetry of the Zerg swarm or the offline import of race itself." (pg. 102) In the Total Annihilation games, balance appears to be a significant player preoccupation, the goal of basically endless tweaking of the units (both in the commercial and open source worlds), and is also neatly encapsulated by the tendency of Total Annihilation-esque maps to be highly symmetrical across different numbers of players. Galloway says of this relentless and performative leveling of the playing field, "There is a better word for this phenomenon: a market." (pg. 95) Following this logic, Total Annihilation constitutes a kind of market, and a kind of war, even before resources are fought over or things are blown up. No doubt.

And yet, I am reluctant to leave things there, with Total Annihilation and related games figured simply or only as celebrations of, apologists for capitalism and colonialism, and for a number of (inter-related) reasons. While such a reading certainly identifies overall features that should be accounted for, it does not arrive at a close consideration of the details of the game, details that can be such a key part of player experience and engagement, and which arguably serve to position the game within a genre. In an oft-cited paper, Stuart Hall argued that the violence in spaghetti western film and television needed to be read in different registers, according to different codes, and pointed to four basic categories of code that may be in play: dominant/hegemonic, professional, negotiated/corporate, and oppositional (Hall 1973). It would be tempting to linger here and develop ideas around each of Hall’s categories in relation to games more generally, but that is a bit out of scope (perhaps someone has already done this?). In any case, and still going too quickly, I ask: what might an oppositional code be in the context of playing Total Annihilation? According to Hall, an oppositional code is in play when a viewer “detotalizes the message in the preferred code in order to retotalize the message within some alternative framework of reference,” and gives the example of someone “who listens to a debate on the need to limit wages, but who ‘reads’ every mention of ‘the national interest’ as ‘class interest’”. (p. 274) Surely the empty terrain and the various forms of extraction and targeting can be understood by the player as limiting figures of a constraining capitalist and colonial logic.

In this connection, I consider also David Murphy’s points that a “digital game’s capacity to create political meaning... cannot be reduced to a discussion of representation or simulation because dissonance between both components can also be understood as a real relation...“ and that “investigating ludonarrative dissonance... provides a useful starting point for examining the discrepancies emerging from games that reinforce problematic political discourses while simultaneously simulating potential systematic alternatives." (2016, p. 2)  The ludonarrative dissonance in Total Annihilation is extreme: a story is barely provided (by contrast with the detailed NPC character networks of the Starcraft franchise, as elaborated by Blomquist (2016)), and the central element of the plot that is provided about clones vs robots has no mechanical consequences (beyond that there are two differing sets of units that can be built) – the story is entirely irrelevant to the choices made by players and AIs alike, including in each individual episode. In multiplayer play, it is possible and common for competing players to choose the same “side” of the supposed galactic war, depending on their momentary preference. Players find themselves fighting over land to which they have no relation, with a story that doesn’t really add up. This is without doubt some kind of depiction of colonial war, but it is no straightforward celebration of it.

Discourses and Experiences of Artificial Intelligence

Briefly, the third theme that I think can be brought to bear on Total Annihilation (etc) has to do with the multiple and complex roles of autonomous agents (aka artificial intelligence) within the games. The single-player campaigns are played against AI opponents, while multi-player skirmishes may (or may not) include some number of AI opponents. At a lower level, both human and AI players direct units with relatively autonomous behaviours. At various levels, then, the games offer the chance of collective exploration of the possibilities of AI as competitor and collaborator, and even offer us the chance to explore AI-creation – in the free-and-open-source world of Spring RTS or Forged Alliance Forever, the code of autonomous agents is available for inspection, exploration, and variation. In the progression from the original Total Annihilation to today’s expanded eco-system of Total Annihilation-related games, this AI element continues to gain visibility and complexity – for example, in Forged Alliance Forever the player can choose from a large selection of different AI algorithms as opponents (for themselves and for each other).

Conclusion: RTS in the ruins

Donna Haraway’s Staying with the Trouble: Making Kin in the Chthulucene ends with a chapter that offers her telling of the Camille stories, a collectively generated science fiction fable about multiple generations of future humans who inherit our damaged world and from there navigate new paths forward. At an early point in the chapter, Haraway explicitly mentions that the subjects of her story could not indulge in settler colonial fantasies of empty land, that they were compelled to “[ask and respond] to the question of how to live in the ruins that were still inhabited, with ghosts and with the living too... Unlike inhabitants in many other utopian movements, stories, or literatures in the history of the earth, the Children of Compost knew they could not deceive themselves that they could start from scratch."

Haraway’s words make me want to try to imagine what RTS games that respond to this challenge would be like – games where the space of play is somehow teeming “with ghosts and with the living too”. At another level, the Total Annihilation games may be seen as a series of ruins (software ruins, ruins of gameplay practices and ideas about what the games are about) within which games that address this challenge can be attempted.

Bibliography

Gregory Blomquist (2016). "Affective Symmetry: Affect and Networks in Blizzard’s StarCraft II: Legacy of the Void." Loading... 10:16, pp. 175-95. https://journals.sfu.ca/loading/index.php/loading/article/view/183

Alexander R. Galloway (2007). "StarCraft, or, Balance." Grey Room 28. pp. 86-107. www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/abs/10.1162/grey.2007.1.28.8

Bruce Geryk (2001, presumed). "A History of Real-Time Strategy Games: Part 1: 1989-1998." www.gamespot.com, accessed 29 May 2023 via Internet Archive Wayback Machine https://web.archive.org/web/20110525055831/http://www.gamespot.com/gamespot/features/all/real_time/p5_01.html

Hall, Stuart (1973). "Encoding and Decoding in the Television Discourse." In Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies Selected Working Papers, vol. 2. ed. Ann Gray, Jan Campbell, Mark Erickson, Stuart Hanson, and Helen Wood. London: Routledge. Reprinted in Stuart Hall (2019). Essential Essays: Vol. 1. ed. David Morley. pp. 257-76.

Donna J. Haraway (2016). "The Camille Stories." Ch. 8 of Staying with the Trouble: Making Kin in the Chthulucene. Durham and London: Duke University Press. pp. 134-68.

David Murphy (2016). "Hybrid Moments: Using Ludonarrative Dissonance for Political Critique." Loading... 10:15. pp. 1-12. https://journals.sfu.ca/loading/index.php/loading/article/view/147

Josh Noble and Michael Ferber (2016). “Universe of Teleological Illth: A Critique of StarCraft 2.” Loading... 10:15