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What Sid Meier’s Video Game Empire Got Right and Wrong About ‘Civilization’
- malux85 10y agoIt taught me that I can become very wealthy with a draconian surveillance infrastructure and spy network :)
- YeGoblynQueenne 10y ago"Civilisation"; just another word for war.
- mc32 10y agoI know you're being glib, but no, it's the opposite. Without it we'd still be in continuous war and likely a bit backward, comparatively. Not that we have forsaken war, but we more or less need it to keep the barbarians at bay and spread your vision of not-war.
- johnfjacobi 10y agoWell, that's not entirely fair. Sure, civilization has largely made mankind more peaceful, but Progress is still driven by violence. There was even a link on here recently about how the relationship between war and civilization. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12798058 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12798058
- wyqydsyq 10y agoA state of natural chaos, sure, but not war. War is a product of human society, prior to civilization we only had the state of nature which while just as brutal as a war would be quite different...
- Throwaway23412 10y agoThe whole concept of war requires civilization. Civilization is human organization. War is conflict between organized groups of humans.
- nikatwork 10y agoApe troupes fight all the time. Chimps genocide monkeys. Human war is just scale.
- jessaustin 10y agoUmmm... monkeys and chimps are not in the same family, let alone the same species. One might as well say that humans "genocide" chickens. Tribes of neolithic humans occasionally attacked and killed each other, but it was about something real, like the survival of their families. Civilization has given us kings and armaments manufacturers, who have us kill and die over bullshit like "God" and "freedom".
- nikatwork 10y ago> about something real vs die over bullshit While the military-industrial complex is a thing, most armed conflict can be abstracted as resource exploitation or contention expressed as territorialism. Religion and ideology is just a convenient cassus belli. As the Lesser Bonapartes podcast puts it, "The in-group always has a problem with... those people."
- schoen 10y ago> cassus belli Should just be one "s": https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Casus_belli https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Casus_belli
- jessaustin 10y ago...most armed conflict can be abstracted as resource exploitation... This might be true, but invariably it is massive excessive exploitation by the ruling class, rather than e.g. "we'd like to hunt in that creek bottom so we can eat some meat."
- mattnumbe 10y agoI feel at a constant state of almost war from the first time I meet any civilization in the game. I both fear and look forward to the war actually starting.
- syphilis2 10y agoIt appears the first Civilization forgot New Zealand. https://longreadsblog.files.wordpress.com/2016/10/civilization-1-map-2.jpg?w=728 https://longreadsblog.files.wordpress.com/2016/10/civilizati... http://worldmapswithout.nz/ http://worldmapswithout.nz/
- jharger 10y agoYou assume New Zealand wants to be seen.
- cperciva 10y agoIreland, Sri Lanka, and Hispaniola, too. And the Canadian Arctic Archipelago became completely non-archipelagic. Considering the resolution they were dealing with, I'd say they did a pretty decent job with that map.
- rtkwe 10y agoAlso projecting from a sphere to a plane at the same time as they're dealing with the rough resolution. If I had to guess NZ was dropped to make the Pacific ocean feel more appropriately vast.
- BirdieNZ 10y agoDoes New Zealand actually exist? https://www.facebook.com/DoesNewZealandExist/ https://www.facebook.com/DoesNewZealandExist/
- rangibaby 10y agoCiv2's world map has New Zealand. And Hawaii, for that matter. Playing the world map is pretty boring anyway, the AI civs are fairly clueless on it when compared to how they play on randomly generated worlds.
- deleted 10y ago[deleted]
- jwatte 10y agoI have just one thing to say: Stop with the Python! (Turn times are excruciatingly slow!) Anything else is window dressing.
- Impossible 10y agoPython was Civ 4. Civ 5 and 6 seem to both primarily use Lua for scripting.
- vacri 10y ago> On the other hand, a game like Europa Universalis, which boasts many more variables than Civilization, has remained even more niche because it is too realistic. It is too constrained by history (or at least history as imagined by the game’s designers) and the innumerable details needed to render such an exhaustive vision of the past. EUIV is more niche than Civilization because it's got a steeper learning curve, not because it's too constrained by history. The article also makes the odd claim of Civ being so mutable, because most games of Civ run very similarly to each other, whereas you can actually do quite different gameplays in EUIV. Civ was a revolutionary game, but the last couple of refreshes have been pretty ho-hum. I'm clearly in the minority, though - Civ was one of the most-played games in terms of live user count on Steam.
- emp_zealoth 10y agoYes, the changes were more or less cosmetic. Funny thing is that latest, more pronounced changes came from Endless Legend (multi tile cities are the most visible to me) I wish they would get off their asses in the AI department. It is pretty lacking and playing with humans is obviously a massive drag (difference of skill levels, sheer amount of time for a single game) I play on prince and usually steamroll everything. When I try king the AI cheats so hard at the start it's just a massive turnoff for me...
- ryandrake 10y ago> I play on prince and usually steamroll everything. When I try king the AI cheats so hard at the start it's just a massive turnoff for me... A lot of games do that cop-out for level difficulty, though. Higher difficulty doesn't make the AI smarter or more cunning, it just lets them break the rules progressively more or gives them a score multiplier. More like a handicap system then "levels of difficulty". It's probably easier to program.
- schoen 10y agoThat's a pretty useful analogy; it made me think of a chess game where the author isn't sure of how to write a strong AI, so the higher difficulty still has you play against a relatively weak AI but you have to give up some of your pawns or pieces.
- hackuser 10y agoThe article has some very interesting background on Meier's thinking about and research of history that affected the game design, and experts' analyses of the game Regarding the author's own analysis, he writes, > Meier has no formal training as a historian But what expertise does the author have? All the article says is, > Kanishk Tharoor is the author of Swimmer Among the Stars, a forthcoming collection of short fiction from Farrar, Straus and Giroux. He is the presenter of the BBC radio series “Museum of Lost Objects.”
- partycoder 10y agoBut I think he had the right problem solving approach, and that led him to make the right questions and get the information he needed. That was the key.
- boomboomsubban 10y agoFrom his website > He studied at Yale, where he graduated magna cum laude and phi beta kappa with BAs in History and Literature, and at Columbia, where he was a FLAS fellow in Persian and South Asian studies.
- partycoder 10y agoI think Civ is a survivor from an era in which there was still more exploration around game genres. Meaning that now the industry has converged towards what risk aversion through sticking to what is known to be commercially viable. I think there was no precedent to make a game like Civ. You could mention board games, or simulation games like Simcity, but Civ is vastly different, gives you a lot of knobs to play with and that makes very, very risky. I admire Sid for his courage and being able to pull it off to the extent of the franchise it is today. I play Civ daily.
- bitJericho 10y agoIf you miss games like civ you need to start looking at indie games.
- partycoder 10y agoI've played some indie games. I think generally speaking they are creative, e.g: superhot, braid, etc... But I would enjoy seeing something that radically departs from known genres, or incurs into more abstract stuff.
- Houshalter 10y agoDwarf fortress and Minecraft were both indie games that sort of created new genres.
- nickpsecurity 10y agoOn contrary, I wanted to do that but there's tons of indie games. There's both a filtering and financial problem to exploring them enough to catch everything. Some minimal exploration might still get most of the great ones using careful attention to reviews for the filtering part. I'm not sure what the resulting cost is. Just remember when claiming that both the sheer number of indie games and the fact that many gamers can only afford a few games a year.
- bitJericho 10y ago
- komali2 10y ago"What can be fairly read into the game? Civilization players have noted certain telling omissions in its historical arc. Slavery, the single-most important economic institution of recent millennia, is entirely absent in the series. " If I remember correctly, in Civ 5 you could pop slavery to rush early wonders. Am I remembering wrong? Or maybe that was Civ 4.
- ZanyProgrammer 10y agoSlavery is in Civ 4.
- Neeek 10y agoWait 5 onward doesn't have slavery? The last civ I played was 4 and that bit from the article has been quoted twice now in the comments, had me very confused.
- takingflac 10y agoNot sure what the ability to capture enemy builders/settlers and use them to build your roads should be considered. This has been in every single main civ game as far as I know.
- Neeek 10y agoHahaha, I was thinking specifically of the labor civic that you can adopt as a nation.
- empath75 10y agoThere were slaves in civ 4.
- SwellJoe 10y agoIt was kind of a vague notion of slavery; you could use population to hurry production. But, there are many things that cause population loss, and so it looked kinda like any other mechanism that lost population. Then again, one could say that every element of civ is just some number in memory being assigned meaning.
- haberman 10y agoI love Civilization and am enjoying this article. However one thing jumped out at me: > What can be fairly read into the game? Civilization players have noted certain telling omissions in its historical arc. Slavery, the single-most important economic institution of recent millennia, is entirely absent in the series. There are no Dark Ages and no Black Deaths. "Dark Ages" is a somewhat dated way to refer to the Middle Ages. From the Wikipedia article (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dark_Ages_(historiography) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dark_Ages_(historiography)): "[Many] modern scholars who study the era tend to avoid the term ["Dark Ages"] altogether for its negative connotations, finding it misleading and inaccurate for any part of the Middle Ages" Just thought it was interesting that someone stepping forward to correct the record appears to have some historical blind spots of their own.
- empath75 10y agoeven if there aren't hard coded dark ages on the game, you can absolutely get into a bad state where you stop really progressing for centuries at a time, because of war, or running out of resources, or barbarians, etc.
- Bartweiss 10y agoI still remember a moment when, as Rome, I realized that the barbarians at my gate were stopping me from progressing in culture and science. That was oddly poignant.
- Trombone12 10y agoEh, the fact that historians have revised downwards how nasty the early middle ages were as they've learnt more about it does not mean the label "dark ages" has lost its utility. For one it does somewhat convey the decline in trade and population in a way "early middle ages" does not, which is useful when exemplifying periods of decay in history for a popular audience.
- douche 10y agoEffectively, everybody in a Civ game is a slave. All of your units do exactly what you tell them to do, all the time. All of your workers in your cities work exactly where you tell them to, and build exactly what you want. It's a Soviet central planner's wet dream. Colonization also had some mechanics that were sort of a wink-wink, nudge-nudge towards slavery. There was a convict class of settlers, and there were also "converted" natives that you could acquire. If you had missionaries in their settlements, once in a while some religious converts would come over freely. Or you could attack their settlements, which generated lots of "converts"
- sixo 10y agoCiv seems to basically survive on its ability to capture the imagination, but doesn't offer much in terms of strategic depth, competitive multiplayer, or verisimilitude. It feels like it's open to a disruption by a more adventurous indie offering, same as Cities: Skylines did to Simcity.
- Pxtl 10y agoCiv is really a turn-based grand-strategy combined with rpg-esque Skinner-box elements. I enjoy it when I play, but I don't pretend it's deep. Games like that are all about "yay, I unlocked a new goodie!" and "numbers must go up so I can make more numbers go up" more than deep planning.
- nickpsecurity 10y agoWhat would you consider a deep one that might still appeal to a large audience?
- Lockyy 10y agoPersonally I would recommend Crusader Kings 2 as a good intro to the deeper grand strategies. It's more limited in scope regarding time frame however there's far more detail and politics involved.
- Tomte 10y agoIs it easier to get into than Europa Universalis IV? In EUiV I have started the tutorial several times, and everytime I get stuck moving some armies or so, because it oesn't seem to work the way the tutorial showed just seconds before.
- fnovd 10y agoBoth games are made by the same company and have a similar feel. EUIV has a high learning curve but is very fun once you get a hang of it. There are play-throughs you can watch on YouTube or Twitch, which I'd argue are more informative than the tutorial.
- georgeecollins 10y agoOne thing bugs me about this article. There is no acknowledgement of the "Civilization" board game that MicroProse licensed for the game. They are very different designs, but I suspect the board game influenced the early tech tree and the challenge of civil disorder from over population. Civilization is a great game, maybe the best computer strategy game of all time. But I think it's namesake deserves a mention.
- rosstex 10y agoThis article spends time attempting to portray the 'wrong' about Civilization, but it still comes off as more interesting background about the game's creators than remorse about Western views. Then the last paragraph ends on a very low note, way too low to be supported by the rest. Still an enjoyable read, but damn it didn't need to come crashing down!
- enkiv2 10y agoI definitely feel like the author was trying to write a very different article. An article about the way that Meier's western-centric view of history caused the system he implemented to have interesting systematic biases that limit the set of behaviors that can be simulated in interesting and unexpected ways, Zizek-style, would have been interesting. But this isn't that article; mentioning the lack of dark ages and the enlightenment grand-narrative view of progress as a game mechanic doesn't deliver, since it's crit 101 stuff that anybody would immediately notice. The author should have probably recognized that the article wasn't the one she intended to write, & eliminated the points that didn't add to its organic form, rather than trying to force it into the intended form. But, its flaws don't detract enough to justify not posting it or reading it.
- rosstex 10y agoThanks for the response! Great points, I totally agree. The article is definitely worth a read :)
- SwellJoe 10y agoIt's probably folly to expect games, even very rich history-based games like Civilization, to be accurate on every detail, even big details, like slavery. Everything gets boiled down to a number (+2 culture, 15% combat strength in friendly territory, etc.), anyway, so it's kind of arbitrary which real world elements find their way in as one of those numbers. Slavery has been in Civs in the past, where it could be used to trade population and happiness for hammers (rushed production). That said, I miss some of the mechanics in earlier Civ games. Civ IV, with all expansions, is still my favorite of the Civs (though I haven't played Civ VI, yet, and won't until the Linux version arrives), partly because it was so complex. On the whole, Civ games are far more educational than the average video game, even "educational" games. If you dig into the Civilopedia and look past the numbers in memory (e.g. Stonehenge is +5 faith, and pyramids are free workers and faster tile improvement, but also have real world history). But, I don't expect Civ games to be "realistic"; I mean, I wouldn't suggest that pyramids were used to store grain because I saw that pyramids in Civ II/III and FreeCiv provided a granary in every city (effectively providing food storage in every city). Though I guess if a presidential candidate can make that mistake, it's not so unreasonable to think people are considering Civ games a reliable source of historic information.
- animal531 10y agoPssh, the best Civ is still Alpha Centauri. Nerve stapling your populace was also a bit more extreme than mere slavery.
- SwellJoe 10y agoI was hoping Beyond Earth would be the new Alpha Centauri, but most reviewers have been lukewarm, at best, about it, so I still haven't bought it. I figure I'll wait until it's available really cheap on a Steam sale, and then give it a try. It'll probably tide me over until the Linux port of Civ VI arrives.
- takingflac 10y agoIf you played Alpha Centauri and liked any aspect in it then I wouldn't get Beyond Earth that aspect has probably been cut from Beyond Earth (I have played both)
- redthrowaway 10y agoComplaints about Civ's omission of the dark side of history ring hollow to me. Civ is, at its heart, a deeply aspirational and optimistic game. Watching the Baba Yetu intro from Civ IV[1] gives me the same sense of wonder and pride in humanity that Chris Hadfield's rendition of Space Oddity[2] does. Dwelling on the darkness in our history would be so discordant for a game like Civ. [1]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IJiHDmyhE1A https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IJiHDmyhE1A [2]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KaOC9danxNo https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KaOC9danxNo
- timo614 10y agoAgreed; the point of the game is to make you feel like a God. Sid Meier gave a talk at the GDC: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MtzCLd93SyU https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MtzCLd93SyU In it he explained how Civilization tested random negative events that could shape your world. He mentioned how this had a negative effect on the player experience and many times people would just grab a past save to avoid them IIRC.
- redthrowaway 10y ago>Agreed; the point of the game is to make you feel like a God. I would actually disagree. There are plenty of power fantasies, most notably the spectacle fighter genre, which seek to make you feel powerful. Civ isn't about that. Civ makes you feel purposeful. You nurture and grow your civilization, not for personal aggrandizement but for a feeling of progress and accomplishment. Your goal is not to be the most powerful ruler, but to have the greatest civilization. Human achievement and ambition is the theme of the game.
- glandium 10y agoThe game whose purpose is to make you feel like a God is Populous.
- tdb7893 10y agoI agree. I tell people about some of the things I've had to do in Crusader Kings 2 and they are horrified. Civilization 6 is a history themed 4x strategy game, not some hyper realistic history simulator.
- fetbaffe 10y agoArticle implies that capitalism & communism are of the same domain (ideologies), no they are not. Capitalism is an economic system, communism is a political system. Apples and oranges.