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I 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

I 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 ago
even 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 ago
  I 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 ago
Eh, 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 ago
Effectively, 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"
- amlozano 10y ago
  Not quite. In civ 5. If your happiness gets pretty bad you cities will start spawning rebel units. Revolts can happen and entire cities might even switch sides to a different civ with a preferred ideology. Its pretty rare for a human player to have to deal with that though. http://civilization.wikia.com/wiki/Happiness_(Civ5)#Brave_New_World http://civilization.wikia.com/wiki/Happiness_(Civ5)#Brave_Ne...
  - ajuc 10y ago
    Slaves rebeled too from time to time.
  - KON_Air 10y ago
    Civilization 6 is fantastic with it, when you capture a pre-industrial civilization city defended with musketeers or crossbowmen with your modern civilization using tanks and planes, but don't take good care of it immideatly, they can spawn tanks as rebellion forces.
FrankBooth 10y ago
> Slavery, the single-most important economic institution of recent millennia, is entirely absent in the series. Not quite accurate. Civilization 4 has a Slavery civic, which allows you to work your own population to death for faster production.
- waterhouse 10y ago
  This was outside the Sid Meier series, but Civilization: Call to Power had a Slaver unit, a stealth unit which could capture enemy citizens from their city. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Civilization:_Call_to_Power https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Civilization:_Call_to_Power Also, in Civilization 6, from what I've read, the Aztec "Eagle Warrior" unit has an ability to "turn defeated enemy units into Builders". I think the subtext is clearly that the defeated units are enslaved, though it's curious that they don't say so. I do suspect that they don't highlight the subject because players might find it unpleasant.
  - ajuc 10y ago
    > I do suspect that they don't highlight the subject because players might find it unpleasant. Which is hilarious thing to worry about in a game where you can nuke a whole city no problem. Cultural tabu is a funny thing.
- em3rgent0rdr 10y ago
  there are some other subtle references to slavery. Aztec warriors in Civ 6 have a chance when defeating enemies to capture them as workers.
clock_tower 10y ago
"Dark Age" certainly doesn't mean the whole Middle Ages -- Petrarch was (a) an ass and (b) writing in what was still the Middle Ages -- but I think that modern historians try to minimize how much really was lost in late antiquity and the "Viking Age" after Charlemagne. The Fall of Rome and the End of Civilization discusses the first of these periods; A History of Private Life has some interesting discussion of the second, and there was a memorable discussion of the Viking Age in the Archdruid Report blog not long ago. The Archdruid Report's author put it this way, more or less: "a dark age is a time in which the memory of what was lost, is lost." As for slavery, I object to how Civ makes it almost inevitable; at least back in Civ 4, you underperform for the whole game if you don't work your people to death in the Classical period. Disease definitely needs a larger part in the game as well... I'd also argue for food insecurity and Malthusian limits (as in reaching the carrying capacity of an ecosystem -- or surpassing that carrying capacity, damaging the whole thing, and producing great mobs of the starving and desperate who'll eagerly listen to anyone who tells them who to kill to fix their problems) being conspicuous by their absence. Population growth wasn't all upside in the long ages that had neither the Haber process nor Norman Borlaug's hybrids... But then, I've heard that an early version of Civ 1 tried to depict the rise and fall of civilizations, but players hated the fall part, so they just made it rise and rise. The mass market doesn't pay to feel uncomfortable...
- pjc50 10y ago
  Civ hid the Malthusian limits behind the accumulation of food units in the granary. What was stranger was that starving cities for a few turns (as often happened after capturing a large city) tended to improve happiness, as the unhappy citizens died off.
sbmassey 10y ago
The term Dark Age is still legitimately applied to the 1200 BC ish Eastern Mediterranean cultural collapse though, is it not?
ajuc 10y ago
You can argue slavery is going on the whole time in civilization. It's not like your workers or armies can decide to stop working for you on their own.

empath75 10y ago

even 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 ago
I 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 ago

Eh, 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 ago

Effectively, 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"

amlozano 10y ago
Not quite. In civ 5. If your happiness gets pretty bad you cities will start spawning rebel units. Revolts can happen and entire cities might even switch sides to a different civ with a preferred ideology. Its pretty rare for a human player to have to deal with that though. http://civilization.wikia.com/wiki/Happiness_(Civ5)#Brave_New_World http://civilization.wikia.com/wiki/Happiness_(Civ5)#Brave_Ne...
- ajuc 10y ago
  Slaves rebeled too from time to time.
- KON_Air 10y ago
  Civilization 6 is fantastic with it, when you capture a pre-industrial civilization city defended with musketeers or crossbowmen with your modern civilization using tanks and planes, but don't take good care of it immideatly, they can spawn tanks as rebellion forces.

FrankBooth 10y ago

> Slavery, the single-most important economic institution of recent millennia, is entirely absent in the series. Not quite accurate. Civilization 4 has a Slavery civic, which allows you to work your own population to death for faster production.

waterhouse 10y ago
This was outside the Sid Meier series, but Civilization: Call to Power had a Slaver unit, a stealth unit which could capture enemy citizens from their city. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Civilization:_Call_to_Power https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Civilization:_Call_to_Power Also, in Civilization 6, from what I've read, the Aztec "Eagle Warrior" unit has an ability to "turn defeated enemy units into Builders". I think the subtext is clearly that the defeated units are enslaved, though it's curious that they don't say so. I do suspect that they don't highlight the subject because players might find it unpleasant.
- ajuc 10y ago
  > I do suspect that they don't highlight the subject because players might find it unpleasant. Which is hilarious thing to worry about in a game where you can nuke a whole city no problem. Cultural tabu is a funny thing.
em3rgent0rdr 10y ago
there are some other subtle references to slavery. Aztec warriors in Civ 6 have a chance when defeating enemies to capture them as workers.

clock_tower 10y ago

"Dark Age" certainly doesn't mean the whole Middle Ages -- Petrarch was (a) an ass and (b) writing in what was still the Middle Ages -- but I think that modern historians try to minimize how much really was lost in late antiquity and the "Viking Age" after Charlemagne. The Fall of Rome and the End of Civilization discusses the first of these periods; A History of Private Life has some interesting discussion of the second, and there was a memorable discussion of the Viking Age in the Archdruid Report blog not long ago. The Archdruid Report's author put it this way, more or less: "a dark age is a time in which the memory of what was lost, is lost." As for slavery, I object to how Civ makes it almost inevitable; at least back in Civ 4, you underperform for the whole game if you don't work your people to death in the Classical period. Disease definitely needs a larger part in the game as well... I'd also argue for food insecurity and Malthusian limits (as in reaching the carrying capacity of an ecosystem -- or surpassing that carrying capacity, damaging the whole thing, and producing great mobs of the starving and desperate who'll eagerly listen to anyone who tells them who to kill to fix their problems) being conspicuous by their absence. Population growth wasn't all upside in the long ages that had neither the Haber process nor Norman Borlaug's hybrids... But then, I've heard that an early version of Civ 1 tried to depict the rise and fall of civilizations, but players hated the fall part, so they just made it rise and rise. The mass market doesn't pay to feel uncomfortable...

pjc50 10y ago
Civ hid the Malthusian limits behind the accumulation of food units in the granary. What was stranger was that starving cities for a few turns (as often happened after capturing a large city) tended to improve happiness, as the unhappy citizens died off.

sbmassey 10y ago

The term Dark Age is still legitimately applied to the 1200 BC ish Eastern Mediterranean cultural collapse though, is it not?

ajuc 10y ago

You can argue slavery is going on the whole time in civilization. It's not like your workers or armies can decide to stop working for you on their own.