"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

"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...