Serf City

When you first play the breakout medieval city–building simulator Manor Lords, you are assigned an ox as a starting resource, along with five or so peasant families. It’s the ox that’s really important because to build anything you need him to drag the lumber, guided by the “people” on screen. Three of my feudal tenants are named Barbara, Herman, and Ott. My ox, who is comparatively large and looming, is called Bartholmes. (You can see each character’s procedurally generated name when you click on them.) If you lose your ox early in the game, you’re screwed.

This is why I find myself returning to Albrecht Dürer’s unbuilt Monument to the Vanquished Peasants, published in the Nuremberg master’s book of proportion studies in 1525. I’ve seen it a million times as an art historian, but never before as the overprotective custodian of this little group. I’m looking at the plinth more closely now, with its livestock—including an ox that looks like the one dragging logs on my screen—positioned in a submissive cluster. I’m willing the Lutheran princes to get your hands off Bartholmes, you bastards!

Never mind the daring, but failed, revolt of German peasantry in the sixteenth century. Never mind Thomas Müntzer and his rallying cry of omnia sunt communia (all things held in common). The game is called Manor Lords, emphasis on Lords, and you are one, ruling over a nascent village as a benevolent sovereign. It is unclear, by the way, whether Dürer sided with some of his princely patrons (the manor lords who never commissioned his theoretical monument to crushing the peasant rebellion) or with the thwarted rebels (some one hundred thousand of whom were slaughtered.) Above the subdued cattle, Dürer places baskets of bread and eggs, and above these he arranges various accoutrements of serfdom—a milk jug, a pitcher, a sheaf of wheat bound with shovels, rakes, and scythes—into a slender column. At the top of the monument is a man who looks a lot like Ott, stabbed in the back with a broadsword, which is variously interpreted as either sympathetic or grotesque. On my forested screen, Ott is busy chopping down a tree, unaware of the crushing weight of ten generations of Structuralist history dooming him to farmer tenancy in my virtual realm. Ott doesn’t know what Friedrich Engels will do with Müntzer—but anyway, Ott is technically a named entry in a resource balancing–spreadsheet, and the spreadsheet has calculated that my subjects are displeased because they don’t have housing, which—fair, everyone, fair—I’m getting to it ASAP.

Ott will get to live in something called a burgage plot, which is one of the key mechanics of Manor Lords, and, more importantly, a key mechanic of the shift from feudalism to a mercantile-craftsman bourgeoisie. A burgage plot contains, in addition to housing, a small amount of privately held land that its tenant can use as a garden, an orchard, and eventually, a specialist workshop like a bakery, tailor, or brewery. Managing these land holdings is a key game mechanic. The two-volume copy of Fernand Braudel’s economic history of the medieval Mediterranean on the shelf directly behind my laptop is of limited utility here, not only because the game is set in late fourteenth century Franconia (the same region that would produce Dürer about a century later) but because the longue durée timescale advanced by Braudel and his Annales school colleagues doesn’t apply to the short, toilsome lives playing out on my screen. Maybe Barbara, Ott, and Herman collectively imagine the living room outside the game (my living room) as a kind of purgatory awaiting them should I mismanage their labors and they all perish as sinners as a result. I work hard to make their burgage plots attractively positioned, with access to the market and the church—and, of course, the tavern, which is surprisingly hard to keep stocked with ale.

Braudel doesn’t really cover the ale-management problem, but he does cover the way in which land divisions like this hew to the natural landscape—something Manor Lords makes possible for the first time in a mainstream title. City-building games often use ninety-degree grids as their foundation, but this isn’t really how cities, or particularly medieval villages that weren’t derived from preexisting Roman army camps, work. My roads, to Ott’s long, thin burgage—and to Barbara’s, and to Herman’s—follow the curvature of hills. Also historically accurate are the way the houses go up and their stone foundations, large thatch roofs, and tiny keyhole windows. You can hear your peasants chatter among themselves as they go about raising buildings, telling one another to be careful with beams and doorframes and uttering gently nagging reproofs. There is a tenderness here rarely found in the distanced, third person gameplay of building simulators that unfold on an urban scale, as untold hours of my millennial youth devoted to Sim City can attest. If that franchise arguably inspired legions of thirtysomething urban planners, there’s a strong chance Manor Lords will make at least one good historian of the medieval peasantry. In the archives, history from below can feel dry and removed; the beauty of Manor Lords is that it allows us to imagine the humanity behind monthly tallies of grain or field line maps.

Giving people good lives, urban studies tells us, means making systems that ultimately serve them. Recently, I tested this principle in practice for about an hour and a half playing Manor Lords. The problem was my sawpit. A sawpit makes logs into planks, which are used for floorboards and other building materials. I had logs. The sawpit had employees. (Really, serfs, since I wasn’t paying them, but either way, there were guys—my guys—there to saw logs.) About ninety minutes and a lot of Googling about sawpits later, I realized that in order to use a giant whipsaw to process a giant log into manageable planks, I’d need my heroic, overworked ox to drag said logs into position. Bartholmes, however, was already busy dragging logs so that Barbara, Ott, Herman, and their neighbors could survive the upcoming winter. In the end, I had to trade tremendous communal resources (money, labor, time, commodities) to acquire a second ox, which sounds boring, but was an incredibly touching and dramatic moment for all involved, I assure you. The ox was assigned to the sawpit. Barbara, Ott, and Herman got their church, which presumably saved them from an afterlife in my living room and delivered them to virtual Jesus instead.

Manor Lords makes visceral a fact about building in the Middle Ages that we know intellectually but struggle to truly fathom: It was tedious, and it took a really long time. No village springs up overnight. The game intentionally has a slow run speed, which enhances the sensibility and attunement of the player to the time put into every building, crop, and bread loaf: You can walk around in first-person mode in the seasonal cycle, and watch your peasants as they haul each precious material component to each site. Hours of long gameplay stand in for something like ten years of historical time. Given the average lifespan of my tenant (a feature finalized in life but not as of yet in Manor Lords) this really hammers home that, for these founding villagers, their village is barely a village at all, that neither they nor even their grandchildren are likely to see it become a small, bustling city. Abbot Suger, planning Saint-Denis and the early forms of the French gothic, did know to think in terms of centuries and generations, but I’ve seen a Brooklyn supertall go up in a summer. Manor Lords reminds me that the time axis of my life is compressed, that we’re all on triple-arrow fast-forward.

Manor Lords is still in beta testing, technically. A lot of games are being released this way now, so that finishing touches can be added in response to player feedback. The game itself has a Suger-like architect behind it: Greg Styczeń, a relatively unknown Polish developer, built the entire thing with the help of just a few freelance programmers. This is incredibly unusual for a game of this depth, scale, and public acclaim that reached millions of downloads on Steam; even this early version allows for multiple towns across county lines and several in-game generations of building, technology, and supply chain management. Styczeń hangs around in the Manor Lords Reddit forum (he, like the peasant characters he created, is almost universally known in the gaming world by a mononym), compulsively attending to small imbalances (underpowered archers, flour making too much bread per unit) at seemingly every hour of the day. His monomaniacal devotion feels like monastic ora et labora. I admire it. It suits the game he made.

If you’ve played Manor Lords, you will have noticed this whole time that I’ve been leaving something out: the combat mode. The game is loosely based on feuding regional warlords in the Middle Ages, who did invade and seize each other’s land with small involuntary draft regiments of their own citizens (or with mercenaries). The mechanism to do this in Manor Lords is far more personal than in, say, Anno 1800, a well-known civilization and city-building simulator comparable in impact if not in budget. (That title was released by a well-known company with a giant development team.) When someone dies in Manor Lords, the game tells you their name. Their family mourns in the churchyard or, worse, at the corpse pit, if you, the urban planner, haven’t gotten it together to build a church in time. If this were a game review, I’d have to do my due diligence and play Manor Lords in combat mode and watch Barbara, Herman, Ott, or, yes, even Bartholmes—they can kill your oxen too—perish on the battlefield. It’s a testament to the game that I can’t bring myself to do it. I know where Herman lives, what he wears, and what route he takes to the woodcutter’s shop to work; I know his burgage plot has an orchard in the back of it, tended by his three other relatives. It takes five years for orchards in burgage plots to come into full fertility: What if Herman misses the long-awaited arrival of his apples?

I could say my love for my serf characters represents a commitment to the humanity of history in the Annales tradition, or I could just admit that I want everybody in my snow-globe village to live an ideal life all the time. I’m that kind of player of city building games. I care about getting the ox to the sawpit in order to get the planks to the church because the randomly named spreadsheet characters are happier if it gets built. But enlightened despotism is still despotism, and part of me wishes that Barbara and Herman and Ott could Müntzer me out of existence. Better yet, that I could just give it all to them, the little city I’ve built with their sweat and tears. This is, of course, impossible within the feudal hierarchy of the later Middle Ages, and within the game specs. So right now, I’m converting burgage gardens to ale breweries and cobblers, I’m setting tithes and taxes to zero, and I’m very carefully keeping track of crop rotation and the fertility of emmer versus flax. I’m hoping that in the church there’s a record of this, a ledger of grain production that some theoretical student twenty-six generations from Ott can read backward and tell their story. Or maybe I’m hoping that I’m that student, right here right now. Manor Lords is a city-builder in which you are an overlord prince and your peasants literally do not have the capacity to disobey you. But Manor Lords is also whoever plays it. In my version of Dürer’s monument, there is no sword in the back of the peasant at its crest, and there is certainly no goddamn rope binding my ox.