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Empire Perspectives of Sid Meier's Civilization and other Historical-World Strategy Games

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 This was posted over in Three Moves Ahead forum in the The Brave New World thread and I wanted to see it discussed, but I'd rather do it in a new thread:
 

 

 

Since this is such a highlight and everyone is so positive about it, let me bring you all down, if I can. Let's start by telling you, I always had trouble with video games using historical settings on a world scale. It is my fault. I cannot abstract the idea of playing a video game from the intention to 'use' history and historical facts (names, places, cultural landmarks, technology)

I started the "Brave New World" and my Morrocan ruler (one ruler to rule them all, as always - never mind tribal culture - but that's fine) from the Saadi clan just discovered the Kilimanjaro, a few tiles away (never mind the biggest desert on Earth in between, I guess). My first "General" is called "Rommel"(!) - most certainly beloved by the Morrocans. Next, my neighbors - a native American tribe (Shoshone, on the soil of AFRICA!) said hello.

Take a moment to let this sink in. Explain it to a four year old you know.

I am not so dumb, to doubt, that the Civilization games - and especially this latest incarnation - have a lot of great 'systems', game mechanics and offer great gameplay. What you all seem to enjoy (and I envy you for it), is the complexity of how the systems are more refined and allow for more complex gameplay than ever before. If anything, the idea to turn reality into game mechanics is fascinating and thrilling to game designers and developers, for sure.

My problem with this (and these kind of games) is: everything in the world is reduced to one unified ideology: follow the game rules (mechanics).

 

This games' mechanics are propagating a unified view of the world and the people in it. Everyone and everything under "one" game mechanics (which means "one set of rules"). Diversity, complexity, heritage and history, are just different colors on the same set of units. "History" as lipstick.


"Social policies" do not "naturally" progress into "Ideology" It is a field of controversy and world views, It is a topos for political and theoretical debate, based on highly complicated rules of who is saying what to whom. Neither Hegel's nor Sid Meier's "Weltgeist" is the "End of History" all-in-one ideology. But while Fukuyama tried to tell Hegel's story to a wider audience, at least, Sid Meier can say "Hey, it's just a game." Suddenly YOUR ideologies and YOUR believes discussing the 'real' world are colored (or limited) by thoughts, that are informed by game design decisions. Mixing 'real' world history debate with ideas based on 'compelling' game design, turns everything into ahistorical relativism? Relativism is the death of history.

Again - all my fault. Because I cannot divide the real from this virtual terra nouva, when every "terra" is a "terra nullius". This game truly is a "Brave New World" as it turns real history and the origins of real culture into (meaningless) toys. History as a 'science', as a source, is always fragile, always under threat, always 'up for grabs', for debate. The fear of mixing my thoughts about toys with the real world, makes me not enjoy any of these games.

 

And seeing "culture as a weapon" is certainly ONE way to see the world. Not mine.

I've always suspected that this view was out there, but Alex's comment is the first I've actually seen. So I looked around to find more examples of this area of criticism, because I think it's an interesting perspective. Here is a paper that attempts to describe the way that "Western Civilization's" paradigm is expressed in the mechanics and themes of Sid Meier's Civilization series  (Dude, when eesald-ram starts talking about the "cyborg technobody console cowboy", I'm like "What the fuck is happening in this essay?" I love it. Good stuff.)

 

Personally, I think that the perspective in the game is that of imperialism, but not of a particular region. This belief probably stems from the premise that imperialism has inherent methods. 

I love me some Civilization V and I recommend playing it it and look forward to more. I experience no shame in playing it. To me, it is beautiful, pleasurable and valuable. But I still enjoy considering these post-structuralist criticisms. Hopefully this post will lead to Howard Zinn, Jared Diamond, Noam Chomsky and a bunch of brilliant historians from different cultures to create something that can compete with Civilization 6. But til then, anyone want to talk about it?
 

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There was a fairly huge conversation about how simulation games choose to represent reality in this Sim City thread which might be a good place to start. Civilization is pretty much that write large in precisely the way you talk about, although I don't think anyone ever needs to be ashamed for enjoying a piece of entertainment as long as they understand the problematic elements of it. If we had to reject all entertainment with problematic elements we'd be out of movies, books, and games to enjoy.

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Ian Bogost is of the opinion that Civilization is basically the book Guns, Germs and Steel proceduralized into a video game. It's one prism through which you can look at world history. Whenever you make a simulation, you have to choose what to simulate and to what extent. And how -- other people will have different ideas about how the systems you are simulating actually work, whether they are systems and whether they can be simulated.

 

The criticism in the first post is unfair. Civilization only models culture as power because that is what it is about. And don't tell me you can look at the world today and say culture cannot be used as a weapon.

 

When you play a game like Civilization, you can think about what the game is doing, which parts you agree with and which parts you don't. I've been playing Civilization games since I was a kid and I never just copied the systems to my head, which is what Covic seems to be fearing like some UK tabloid writer. Even as a kid, there were many aspects of the game I didn't agree with. There are obvious ones that very few people agree with, such as a phalanx occasionally taking out a tank. But it's very useful when you want to think about history in terms of how resources or geographical position relative to bigger powers can affect a nation. You can also play a small culture and lead that to greatness, which is a fun storyline for a play session. Everyone knows that isn't how world history turned out.

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Isn't the purpose of Civ to present players with a fun sandbox in which to play and tinker with history and diverse gameplay elements with a historical skew to them? If you look at it as a proper piece of either historical documentation or a thesis on how culture spreads, it obviously falls apart with extreme severity. I do think, and hope, and know, that there are games that take that truer historical/scientific route, but Civ isn't it. Civ is goofy. You can start out as prehistoric Napoleon and assimilate Beijing. Don't take this seriously. It's pretty "dumb" entertainment (from an academic standpoint), but made with smart elements for a more discerning crowd.

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Isn't the purpose of Civ to present players with a fun sandbox in which to play and tinker with history and diverse gameplay elements with a historical skew to them? If you look at it as a proper piece of either historical documentation or a thesis on how culture spreads, it obviously falls apart with extreme severity. I do think, and hope, and know, that there are games that take that truer historical/scientific route, but civ isn't it. Civ is goofy. You can start out as prehistoric Napoleon and assimilate the Beijing. Don't take this seriously. It's pretty "dumb" entertainment (from an academic standpoint), but made with smart elements for a more discerning crowd.

 

I think the idea of the initial post, odd rhetorical flourishes aside, is that the goofy sandbox of the Civilization games is actually pushing a particular lens of world history really hard. You only play as expansionist empires, expansion is resource-driven, "progress" is positive as well as a given, and someone wins history by being the biggest/best something. It's almost certainly unintentional, of course, but that doesn't make it less problematic.

 

Stuff like this is what makes me glad that games like Neocolonialism are being made.

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Ian Bogost is of the opinion that Civilization is basically the book Guns, Germs and Steel proceduralized into a video game. It's one prism through which you can look at world history. Whenever you make a simulation, you have to choose what to simulate and to what extent. And how -- other people will have different ideas about how the systems you are simulating actually work, whether they are systems and whether they can be simulated.

I guess the question becomes, "Is Guns, Germs and Steel a post-racial attempt to establish the inevitability of Imperial success?"

 

 

When you play a game like Civilization, you can think about what the game is doing, which parts you agree with and which parts you don't. I've been playing Civilization games since I was a kid and I never just copied the systems to my head, which is what Covic seems to be fearing like some UK tabloid writer. Even as a kid, there were many aspects of the game I didn't agree with. There are obvious ones that very few people agree with, such as a phalanx occasionally taking out a tank. But it's very useful when you want to think about history in terms of how resources or geographical position relative to bigger powers can affect a nation. You can also play a small culture and lead that to greatness, which is a fun storyline for a play session. Everyone knows that isn't how world history turned out.

Seems like Rodi has a similar view:

 

Isn't the purpose of Civ to present players with a fun sandbox in which to play and tinker with history and diverse gameplay elements with a historical skew to them? If you look at it as a proper piece of either historical documentation or a thesis on how culture spreads, it obviously falls apart with extreme severity. I do think, and hope, and know, that there are games that take that truer historical/scientific route, but Civ isn't it. Civ is goofy. You can start out as prehistoric Napoleon and assimilate Beijing. Don't take this seriously. It's pretty "dumb" entertainment (from an academic standpoint), but made with smart elements for a more discerning crowd.

 

I think that the complaint may be that the use of actual historical symbols in Civilization's procedural rhetoric has the effect of making an argument (though it seems not a very convincing one for some of us). That argument being that Imperialism is inevitable and it's just a matter of which race and culture gets there first. This argument could be seen as an attempt to reduce the accountability of the imperialists; kinda like calling foreign cultures "sore-losers".As the Poblocki essay (linked in my previous post) puts it, "That means that every Civilization, also the Iroquois, has an equal opportunity to become the United States of America, but only those who are skilled and clever enough do succeed."

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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I think he has a good point, although it's not a clear analysis. I think it's important to realize that these games are made by the western entertainment industry and thus have many limitations. They aren't made by historians or social scientists. It would be interesting to note, however, how the Civilization series has been evolving from a binary Cold War perspective to a more multiculturalist view of the world. Just compare the victory conditions in Civ 2: space race and conquest to the newer ones: diplomacy and culture.

 

Simulations are abstractions of reality, they can never encompass all of it. And the scope of Civ can only exist within the historical conditions of the developers.

 

One classic example of this is the game Sword of the Samurai (1989), in which Sid Meier took part. You play as a samurai dynasty and your goal is to climb the social ladder and go from lowly samurai to emperor of Japan. This goal of social ascension says nothing about the Sengoku period, but it says a lot about the American Dream.

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I do think Civilization has some interesting things to say, born purely out of its simulations. As much as the game favors an imperialist viewpoint, it doesn't stop us from generating compelling narratives based on the outcomes. A great example of this is the 10 year civ 2 game that surfaced last year:

 

http://www.reddit.com/r/gaming/comments/uxpil/ive_been_playing_the_same_game_of_civilization_ii/

 

-The ice caps have melted over 20 times (somehow) due primarily to the many nuclear wars. As a result, every inch of land in the world that isn't a mountain is inundated swamp land, useless to farming. Most of which is irradiated anyway.

-As a result, big cities are a thing of the distant past. Roughly 90% of the worlds population (at it's peak 2000 years ago) has died either from nuclear annihilation or famine caused by the global warming that has left absolutely zero arable land to farm. Engineers (late game worker units) are always busy continuously building roads so that new armies can reach the front lines. Roads that are destroyed the very next turn when the enemy goes. So there isn't any time to clear swamps or clean up the nuclear fallout.

-Only 3 super massive nations are left. The Celts (me), The Vikings, And the Americans. Between the three of us, we have conquered all the other nations that have ever existed and assimilated them into our respective empires.

-You've heard of the 100 year war? Try the 1700 year war. The three remaining nations have been locked in an eternal death struggle for almost 2000 years. Peace seems to be impossible. Every time a cease fire is signed, the Vikings will surprise attack me or the Americans the very next turn, often with nuclear weapons. Even when the U.N forces a peace treaty. So I can only assume that peace will come only when they're wiped out. It is this that perpetuates the war ad infinitum. Have any of you old Civ II players out there ever had this problem in the post-late game?

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Does Civ favor imperialist societies or does it model how civilizations as we know them have behaved? You have a choice to expand within your uncontested borders and pursue alternative means, no?

 

I can see how one might level a critique that it is inherently problematic that the goal is to be the dominant global society, but alternately, doesn't the Utopia Project, and Space Race give you victory conditions that isn't through military conquest, or cultural imperialism? 

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I've never played any of the CIv games, but I've always had similar issues to the quote in the OP whenever I hear people talking about it on Idle Thumbs or elsewhere. I have played the Total War series, which exhibits a lot of the same problems it seems, namely viewing history as a linear set of progressions, each better than the last. That's a narrow and dangerous view of history, but one that is so easy to model in a video game that it's tough to imagine anyway to design around it.

 

While I recognize that most people don't take their perception of history wholesale from video games, it's also important to note that for many people, Civ games and their ilk are the most exposure to historical narratives they get, aside from possibly Hollywood movies. I think it's at least possible that many people's perception of history is coloured by CIv games, especially since that historical narrative is the dominant one presented elsewhere in our culture. For that reason, it's entirely valid to question how these games present history and human society.

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I think if you start talking about 'success' and 'failure' with respect to human societies, imperialism is more or less the inevitable conclusion. To be successful, after all, a society has to be existent, and so a society that makes other societies *not exist* becomes tautologically the only potentially successful one. Civilisation's non-military victory conditions attempt to disguise this point, but ultimately I think are only applying labels on some underlying mechanic. A culture victory is simply a military victory with the weapon renamed. A space race win might as well be a giant nuke you blow up everyone else with.

 

If you want to go away from imperialism in god games you need to look at games where success and failure is *not* decided on the level of an individual society, and especially not as a zero sum game. Fate of the World is one such game, or even something like XCOM. Or Crusader Kings 2, where the notion of trying to 'succeed' is less clear.

 

To be clear, I don't think being imperialistic is neccessarily a bad thing about a game. What we see is that imperialism arises in games, because the player (and the AI) are trying to *win the game*. The difference in real life is that there is no game we are trying to win, that ideally, rulers are just trying to get their subjects through life in a pleasant way.

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Does Civ favor imperialist societies or does it model how civilizations as we know them have behaved? You have a choice to expand within your uncontested borders and pursue alternative means, no?

 

I can see how one might level a critique that it is inherently problematic that the goal is to be the dominant global society, but alternately, doesn't the Utopia Project, and Space Race give you victory conditions that isn't through military conquest, or cultural imperialism? 

 

Civ 5 is the first Civilization game where you can make a go of it having 4-5 really big awesome cities rather than spreading all over the globe. It is possible to get one of several victories this way (UN victory, Research victory, cultural victory.) If anything, the AI pushes imperialism as you typically have to defend your borders constantly if you run your country in this style.

 

Edit: Wiped out all that other stuff, as it was pretty much rambling.

 

Edit2: Is that original post basically saying we should never ever make history games?

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Is that original post basically saying we should never ever make history games?

 

I think so. He's saying that history happened as it happened and that removing or changing the context is the death of history.

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My problem with this (and these kind of games) is: everything in the world is reduced to one unified ideology: follow the game rules (mechanics).

 

That's kind of the definition of a game right? Regardless of context, any game you try to make is going to have set game rules, at least until we get an AI smart enough to make stuff up on the fly Table Top RPG style.

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I've never played any of the CIv games, but I've always had similar issues to the quote in the OP whenever I hear people talking about it on Idle Thumbs or elsewhere. I have played the Total War series, which exhibits a lot of the same problems it seems, namely viewing history as a linear set of progressions, each better than the last. That's a narrow and dangerous view of history, but one that is so easy to model in a video game that it's tough to imagine anyway to design around it.

I think this really gets closer to the suggestion that the game mechanics are exclusionary. The history of technological upgrades seems to be irrelevant in the game. Maybe not though, because the build of your cities can both be reactive and speculative based on how the player views the needs of their civilization. For instance, though I may have unlocked the first four founding technologies by the time I'm considering radio (just like every other civ), I may have unlocked them in a specific order because I was dealing with an unhappy populace and a threat on my western border. And my civilization's particular history of technological upgrades had an influence on the my success in a war a century later (thereby shaping my borders and diplomic relations). So even though later technological upgrades seem to make the older ones obsolete, the choices for upgrades I'm making now are based on world conditions influenced by what I upgraded first.

Still, there are opportunities for the game mechanics to make the idiosyncratic historical contexts of each civilization more prominent. Like I said, national borders and diplomatic relationships (and also religion, trade-routes and city-placement) have a reasoning influenced by your civilization's history, but I think that there are more ways to reflect it.

Feature Request:

How cool would it be if each civilization had procedurally generated music tracks based on its history? For example, a civilization that was founded in the marshlands or near rivers may have reed instrumentation. As its borders expand to other climate zones and as it begins to trade with other civilizations, the instrumentation could widen, but reeds should always have prominence. Musical scales could be the results of your civilizations particular needs in mathematics. The musical scales for sea-faring civilizations could be somewhat geometric whereas the musical scales for a civilization that has a comparative prioritization on trade or currency might be reflective of accumulation and equation. This way, even though complex technologies are adopted in order to remain competitive, the path and unique history of the civilization could still be reflected.

Personally, I would prefer an even more simulation-dependent way to represent technology than choosing from a somewhat arbitrary upgrade-tree. Instead of choosing what to research, I'd like technologies to be discovered by what my sims prioritize and what resources and methods are available based on our national history and the player's interpretation and amendment of law. But you know, that's not going to be in Civ 6, I'll probably hav to wait til 7 ;)

I wonder if this kind of subtility would reduce the criticisms we are discussing in this thread. Or if history is just too sacred for some.

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Personally, I would prefer an even more simulation-dependent way to represent technology than choosing from a somewhat arbitrary upgrade-tree. Instead of choosing what to research, I'd like technologies to be discovered by what my sims prioritize and what resources and methods are available based on our national history and the player's interpretation and amendment of law. But you know, that's not going to be in Civ 6, I'll probably hav to wait til 7 ;)

 

Honestly, though that would be cool, the intent that you express with those proposed systems was already anticipated, at least in part, by how technology research worked in Sid Meier's Alpha Centauri. You'd designate any number of four "values" (explore, discover, build, and conquer) as a priority, with the ability to change them at any time, and the game would work through the tech tree invisibly based on how those values were distributed. Once you got a sense of the tech tree (or if you turned "blind research" off in the game options), the sense of organic discovery was a lot less pronounced, but it still undercut the overwhelming march of "progress" that other Civilization games had and have in spades.

 

Actually, I think a lot of what made Alpha Centauri work was its setting on a different world in the near future. By playing, you were writing a new history, which meant that a lot of the faux pas of "historical" 4x games were avoided. Not to mention "progress" in Alpha Centauri was nightmarish and unstoppable in a way that the main Civilization series never had the courage to make it.

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I like what you're thinking about technolgies. To start maybe have each country's techs vary like loot in Borderlands. Maybe civilization is under constant attack so they need to be able to build warriors fast, while another civilization is nomadic and needs warriors that have longer moves.

 

Of course, at some point you're basically creating the ship builder from GalCiv in ancient times (Fallen Enchantress actually already does this.)

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I keep seeing people refer to Civilization as a historical simulation. That is grossly inaccurate. The game is an abstraction of world history, not a simulation of it. A lot of critiques of the game seem to stem from this conflation.

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Edit2: Is that original post basically saying we should never ever make history games?

 

I don't know about the original poster, but I'm definitely saying that games about the entire breadth of human history are, at the very least, overly ambitious. As in most things, specificity and focus will result in a more faithful recreation of history. I think a game that focuses on, say, a hundred year period has a better chance to accurately model historical forces than one that is taking on millenia.

 

That's not to say that I think the Civ games are bad or shouldn't exist. Like I said, I haven't played them and have always meant to check them out (I actuall own Civs 4 and 5 and am just too intimidated to start them up). But I think saying that their rendition of history is a misleading one is a perfectly valid criticism.

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I don't know about the original poster, but I'm definitely saying that games about the entire breadth of human history are, at the very least, overly ambitious. As in most things, specificity and focus will result in a more faithful recreation of history. I think a game that focuses on, say, a hundred year period has a better chance to accurately model historical forces than one that is taking on millenia.

That's not to say that I think the Civ games are bad or shouldn't exist. Like I said, I haven't played them and have always meant to check them out (I actuall own Civs 4 and 5 and am just too intimidated to start them up). But I think saying that their rendition of history is a misleading one is a perfectly valid criticism.

I'm not sure Civ has ever tried to give an accurate rendition of history, and so criticizing it for that seems a bit specious.

I'm disappointed that oranges aren't apples, but that doesn't mean there is something inherently wrong with oranges.

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That's not to say that I think the Civ games are bad or shouldn't exist. Like I said, I haven't played them and have always meant to check them out (I actuall own Civs 4 and 5 and am just too intimidated to start them up). But I think saying that their rendition of history is a misleading one is a perfectly valid criticism.

I strongly recommend loading up civilization 5. The game has advisors that tell you everything you need to know in order to have a good time for your first try. There will be systems that you don't quite understand, but the basic gameplay of just picking a place to settle, using workers to upgrade your territories, scouts to explore, and choosing something to build every 10 turns or so is very pleasurable. It starts out super slow (which is good if you are new) as you build more units and cities, that's when it can get overwhelming. If you get bogged down with decisions or just overwhelmed and depressed because of your geopolitical situation, just save your game and start over. You'll be surprised how muh you learned about how to play from just trying it once. It can be a very zen-like game.

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I'm not sure Civ has ever tried to give an accurate rendition of history, and so criticizing it for that seems a bit specious.

I'm disappointed that oranges aren't apples, but that doesn't mean there is something inherently wrong with oranges.

 

A game that calls itself "Civilization" is making a claim. Of course it's not pretending to be about the actual events of history, but it does seem to be pretending to accurately model historical forces, like how civilizations start, grow, and end. Any number of stories that come out of these games shows that at least some people have the takeaway that "this is how civilizations work."

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A game that calls itself "Civilization" is making a claim. Of course it's not pretending to be about the actual events of history, but it does seem to be pretending to accurately model historical forces, like how civilizations start, grow, and end. Any number of stories that come out of these games shows that at least some people have the takeaway that "this is how civilizations work."

 

No, it actually isn't pretending to accurately model anything. The origins of the game can be traced back to an old board game. There is zero modeling going on. It is not like a Paradox game where you input parameters, and see what happens. What Civilization does is include various aspects history in a worker management game. It is no more a simulation of world history than Agricola is a simulation of medieval subsistence farming. Sid Meier has said that when fun and reality are in conflict, always let fun win. Whether or not you agree with that game design philosophy, it is very much the guiding principle for the Civilization series. Some people may take away, "this is how civilizations work", but I don't blame artists for their fans' poor reading of what a piece is about.

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Well, if it's not intended to model history, then why make it a historical game at all? Whenever you pick a historical theme for a game, you invite the criticism that your game does not do justice to that historical theme. That's a valid criticism, in my view. It's great that Sid Meir likes fun, but history is a fraught subject for many people and may not be that great a topic to be made into a game. I understand that point of view. I feel the same way about many war games (not that I cast any judgment on those who do enjoy those games).

 

Ultimately, I think it's OK to be grossed out or bothered when a heavy subject gets turned into an object of fun; it's not like Alex Covic is saying that no one can enjoy Civilization, just that he doesn't enjoy Civilization. 

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I think you guys are missing a key factor about the series, it's Sid Meir's Civilization, it's Sid Meir's model of civilization not the worlds.

 

Therefore we have  reason to believe the following....

 

Sid Meier only acknowledges that the world speaks one language. He does not know which one, so he included 26 different versions of the game. But we all speak one.

Sid Meier believes that each civilization is governed by one immortal leader since the beginning of time.

Sid Meier understands that the world will stop progressing at some point in time, the world keeps going going, it just won't matter because the winner was already chosen.

Sid Meier believes each civilization is being ranked by a point system.

In 1996, Sid Meier didn't believe civilizations had religion.

 

and so forth.

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