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

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Well, beyond the idea of "winning" history, which is a pretty Western idea in and of itself, there's the concept of expansion as profitable and positive, of cultural assimilation as necessary and positive, of scientific progress as inevitable and positive, of religion as an empty opiate, of national character as unitary and manifest, and so on. This is the narrative of the European powers from the Age of Exploration onward, projected onto peoples and cultures that never had these values or behaviors, yet success in the game depends on embodying them and excelling in them. It's revisionist in an innocent but unfortunate way.

 

Don't get me wrong, I love all the Civilization games and have played the crap out of them. I'm just under no illusions that I'm playing what boils down to a nineteenth-century Western imperialist's wet dream about history, which can feel pretty gross when I'm playing as a "loser" like Mali or Khmer. Why can't I win by having the happiest people or keeping with tradition or something? Why is it always power?

 

I would argue that "Winning" is a typical game thing. There are certainly examples of games that don't have a win condition (Sim City was mentioned earlier, Crusader Kings doesn't have a real win condition either) but most of those games have either a high score to hit, or the goal is simply not to die (which I guess is a different variant of high score where score equates to time.) I (and apparently Chris as well) often have the most fun in Civ games where I don't try for the win conditions, so maybe it's a white european thing to feel the need to create win conditions as a delevoper and then strive for them as a player? Either way, I don't think that its a historical inaccuracy that Civ has them.

 

Edit: Removed a bit that was re-hashing the same ground.

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For me, the basic perspective of Civilization is the troubling part. The player acts as a sort of uber-dictator, charting the course of a nation state, always in competition with other nation states for wealth, prestige, territory, and resources. It makes nations the primary unit rather than cultures or societies or individuals. Culture, religion, and government are all essentially window-dressing. People don't matter, only the nation-state matters. That is a very particular view of history, which is sometimes called "realism", and which has a pretty ugly history in the real world. 

 

Interesting. Crusader Kings has the opposite slant, where it's all about the person/family and not really (unless you make it a personal goal) about the kingdoms at all. People seem to find that distasteful as well.

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...Maybe it's a white european thing to feel the need to create win conditions as a delevoper and then strive for them as a player? Either way, I don't think that its a historical inaccuracy that Civ has them.

 

Not an inaccuracy, just an unfortunate and problematic coincidence that, in a game about civilizations by white Europeans, you win by being the best civilization by white European standards. That's all I'm really saying, at least.

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Not an inaccuracy, just an unfortunate and problematic coincidence that, in a game about civilizations by white Europeans, you win by being the best civilization by white European standards. That's all I'm really saying, at least.

Civilizations that gained that types of power are the ones that are most consequential on the world stage, though. It doesn't mean they're the "best" in some absolute moral framework, but are the ones that drive world events, and the global scale is the scale on which Civilization takes place. China is not a European power, and yet it is enormously powerful on the world stage largely for economic reasons.

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Civilizations that gained that types of power are the ones that are most consequential on the world stage, though. It doesn't mean they're the "best" in some absolute moral framework, but are the ones that drive world events, and the global scale is the scale on which Civilization takes place. China is not a European power, and yet it is enormously powerful on the world stage largely for economic reasons.

 

But China westernized in the early twentieth century. It adopted European political and economic systems, European styles of dress and entertainment, and European military organization. It is as complicit as the European powers proper in the Western imperialist narrative, though it did so itself mostly to avoid annihilation during the Scramble for China in the mid-nineteenth century.

 

And I don't know that I agree with you about consequence, Chris. The Greek city-state of Athens, which at its absolute height ruled over just the coasts of the Aegean Sea, laid much of the basis for all of Western science and culture, despite being a mote in the eye of such massive empires as Persia, Macedon, and Rome. The massive empire of the Habsburgs was hapless against a revolt of peasants and burghers in the Netherlands, which grew in their own right into a world power with time. World War I was started over the kingdom of Serbia, with the so-called Great Powers merely reacting. It's a pernicious idea that big and powerful societies call all the shots and always get their say.

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Civilizations that gained that types of power are the ones that are most consequential on the world stage, though. It doesn't mean they're the "best" in some absolute moral framework, but are the ones that drive world events, and the global scale is the scale on which Civilization takes place. China is not a European power, and yet it is enormously powerful on the world stage largely for economic reasons.

 

This kind of ties into my criticism of Civilization as being essentially "realist". World history is not really made up of great powers vying for dominance on the world stage. That is only one way of looking at history, and not always a very accurate way of looking at history in my view. In my view, two of the biggest world events in the past 20 years were the Great Recession and the War on Terror. Neither of these events were primarily driven by world powers acting out of self-interest. 

 

What I think I'm trying to say is that history doesn't reduce to the interactions of nation states. Civilization makes history exclusively about nation-states vying for various kinds of power. That is a normative statement (perhaps unintentional) about history and civilization. 

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This kind of ties into my criticism of Civilization as being essentially "realist". World history is not really made up of great powers vying for dominance on the world stage. That is only one way of looking at history, and not always a very accurate way of looking at history in my view. In my view, two of the biggest world events in the past 20 years were the Great Recession and the War on Terror. Neither of these events were primarily driven by world powers acting out of self-interest. 

 

What I think I'm trying to say is that history doesn't reduce to the interactions of nation states. Civilization makes history exclusively about nation-states vying for various kinds of power. That is a normative statement (perhaps unintentional) about history and civilization.

I think it's only a statement about what Civilization attempts to (very abstractly) portray. I don't think Civilization is making any claim that it represents the totality of history.

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I think it's only a statement about what Civilization attempts to (very abstractly) portray. I don't think Civilization is making any claim that it represents the totality of history.

 

Does it really even need to make that statement explicit for criticism of it to apply, though? I mean, the game is called Civilization and its tagline is "build an empire to stand the test of time." That seems pretty authoritative, whatever the point-by-point intentions of the developers are.

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 think it's only a statement about what Civilization attempts to (very abstractly) portray. I don't think Civilization is making any claim that it represents the totality of history.

 

I think in a way it is, It's saying that History effectively consist of superpowers contenting with each other and effectively ends when one superpower "wins", i think someone mentioned Fukuyama earlier and i don't think its co-incidence that The End of History came from the same early 90's cultural environment as Civ.

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Does it really even need to make that statement explicit for criticism of it to apply, though? I mean, the game is called Civilization and its tagline is "build an empire to stand the test of time." That seems pretty authoritative, whatever the point-by-point intentions of the developers are.

I'm not talking about the developers' intentions; I'm just saying that, as a work, Civilization to me appears to only concern itself with one particular facet of modeling power, and that to me seems sufficient given how complex that subject matter already is. Similarly, in chess, you control explicitly-named units (with visual components that are roughly representational and not totally abstract) which include things like bishops, and yet the way this religious figure exerts his power is ultimately no different to the way ostensibly-military units like the rook does. We understand that chess only models certain facets of conflict.

Of course, Civilization attempts to be more literally representative of our world than chess is in many ways, but it is also significantly MORE abstract than many other games that are actually direct competitors to it. To me, the extreme abstraction that Civ uses to facilitate its systems is the key to its scope. Meanwhile, a Paradox game aims for, comparably speaking, much more directly representational versions of nearly everything it attempts to portray.

I have the same attitude to action games and the like. A game like The Last of Us or The Walking Dead, because they go to such great pains to represent individual human interaction in a high-fidelity way, to me is much more accountable to the human-scale truths of those interactions than is, say, something like Rogue Legacy, which purports to be about family lineage and genetics but is framed in such a highly-abstracted way that we have an intuitive understanding of its attempt to capture certain sensations and evocations of various themes (and hopefully also some level of truth) without attempting to literally recreate them.

Obviously there is nothing universal about this way of approaching game subject matter; but it is a framework I find useful.

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I'm not talking about the developers' intentions; I'm just saying that, as a work, Civilization to me appears to only concern itself with one particular facet of modeling power, and that to me seems sufficient given how complex that subject matter already is. 

 

I don't think anyone is saying that Civilization has to incorporate every aspect of human history to be a good game. Obviously every game has to be selective about what it wants to be about. But at the same time, Civilization has chosen to be exclusively about a particularly approach to history, and that approach to history is practically and morally suspect, at least in my opinion.

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I don't think anyone is saying that Civilization has to incorporate every aspect of human history to be a good game. Obviously every game has to be selective about what it wants to be about. But at the same time, Civilization has chosen to be exclusively about a particularly approach to history, and that approach to history is practically and morally suspect, at least in my opinion.

Fair enough.

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Of course, Civilization attempts to be more literally representative of our world than chess is in many ways, but it is also significantly MORE abstract than many other games that are actually direct competitors to it. To me, the extreme abstraction that Civ uses to facilitate its systems is the key to its scope. Meanwhile, a Paradox game aims for, comparably speaking, much more directly representational versions of nearly everything it attempts to portray.

 

And I'm saying that the extent and manner to which Civilization abstracts certain aspects of history (but not all aspects, I think) is a little problematic in its selection and simplification, such as culture spread and how captured cities are converted over time. It's like abstracting a disaster-relief event in a game into simply dollars billed from your treasury, without even noting the lives, time, and effort that such would entail. It's a perfectly valid design choice, no one's arguing against it ever being made, but it makes for a very partial (both in terms of "incomplete" and "biased") view of history with which I'm not completely comfortable.

 

 

EDIT: Oh poop, I'm redundant. Never mind! You make the point much better than me, Dasein.

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I'll pick Spec Ops out of that list as it's the only one that I've really put a lot of time into. In Spec Ops you can get shot hundreds of times through-out the game and survive. That is not acurate. It's also a poor comment to make about a game that is obviously not trying to model realistic combat (even if it's trying to model other points of its theme well.) It's ok at that the Spec Ops folks chose to make the actual combat gamey and unrealistic, which is why it seems to me it's ok that Civilization doesn't attempt to model history accurately.

The point isn't about whether Civ is or isn't modeling history accurately, the point is what kind of story Civilization is telling about the world by systematizing various real world events and processes in the context of the game simulation. Spec Ops is unrealistic, but the point of Spec Ops is to tell a story about violent video games where you shoot hundreds of people, which makes it absolutely integral to the argument Spec Ops is making that you shoot hundreds of people. Civilization is, ostensibly, telling a story about civilizations, how they interact and rise and fall, and so on. When the game models things in one way or another it says things about how it thinks the world operates because "how the world operates" is the subject of the Civ games, whereas "what it means to spend hours playing a game where you shoot people in the face" is the subject of Spec Ops. And in choosing to represent only certain parts of how the world operates, people are saying Civ is making some unfortunate arguments about reality.

In some ways this thread is the same point that Cameron Kunzelman just made about Castle Doctrine - how a game chooses to model reality encodes certain arguments that we need to think about and, potentially, criticize.

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It still sounds to me that you're making the same arguments about Civ as game censorship folks are making about violent games in a realistic setting such as CoD or Spec Ops. That doesn't make it an invalid arguement, but it seems to me to be impossible to make a game that gives you want you want, while still being actually fun to play and at least somewhat marketable. Perhaps me pulling out Spec Ops as a particular example out of that list was a bad idea, as I didn't think it was a terribly good game.

 

So, to take this discussion on another tack, how would you improve it? I guess make it more Sim City like, where it's a nation building game with no real goal? Abstract it completely from reality, so it's a game about the Naciremas with space muskets on the moon?

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So, to take this discussion on another tack, how would you improve it? I guess make it more Sim City like, where it's a nation building game with no real goal? Abstract it completely from reality, so it's a game about the Naciremas with space muskets on the moon?

 

Those are both good suggestions. Sid Meier's Alpha Centauri was the best of the series, really. Plus, like I said on the other page, if you don't want to go that far, you could at least have win conditions that aren't just about accruing different kinds of power (money, culture, science, territory). The diplomacy victory introduced in Civilization III was a good start, as is the way the culture victory can be achieved with fewer cities in Civilization V. But there's still not a victory that requires you to stay small and focus inward like the military victory requires you to get huge and focus outward.

 

Also, it may be a pretty pointless distinction, but it's really not censorship to say, "Your cool, fun game also happens to be about some pretty shitty things." No one's saying it shouldn't be made, it's just a critique of the game as it is made.

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There are five win conditions in default Civ 5 (not sure if any were added in expansions)

 

Cultural - Make your way though several of the social policy trees then build the Utopia Project

Diplomatic - Build the UN and win the ensuing vote

Domination - Kill everyone

Science - Research your way to the top of the tree, then build a space ship and make it to Alpha Centari

Time - Have the highest score at the end, tallied from the following factors from least important to most important (according to the manual, which may also be out of date)

 

•The number of tiles in your borders (least important factor)
•The number of cities in your empire
•Your population
•The number of techs you possess
•The number of “future techs” you possess
•The number of Wonders you have constructed (most important factor)

 

I'm seriously all for adding more victory conditions, but I'm not sure where to start. Happiest civilization like Chris mentioned would be interesting, though happiness pays off in other ways through giving you Golden Ages.

 

Additionally, as I'm looking at this list, I just realized how unbalanced the victory conditions are toward industrial societies. Three of them directly require building an expensive structure, score favors many expensive structures, and of course you have to build lots of units for a domination victory.

 

Edit: Correction, diplomatic victory does not require you to construct the UN, just that someone does.

 

Edit2: I've had a devil of a time getting the cutural victory with a lot of cities as the price of policies goes up so much per additional city. I'd say that victory type requires you to stay small and focused. Additionally, it's much easier to keep hapiness up if you're small and focused, making it easier to get golden ages, in turn making it easier to get money, in turn making it easier to bribe city states for the diplomatic victory. Not as required to be small and focused as the cultural victory, but still a valid play style.

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It seems like what is most problematic about Civ is that its nature as a strategy game necessitates the reduction of peoples, cultures, societies, and idealogies into finite and concrete 'gameplay elements', when their real-world counterparts are infinitely complex both in their actual nature and in the way they are percieved across distance and time.

 

This is going off topic a little bit, but the conversation seems to be leaning in this direction: I've always wanted to see a game about the development of societies with no 'win conditions' or score at all; a game that focuses on fostering the emergence of narrative and interesting scenarios, and which isn't designed to be min/maxed or power-gamed. When I play Civ, like many of you, I have much more fun trying to imagine the culture and arts that would develop in my society, the lives of the people, and what life would be like in my various cities, and how they would view/move through the landscape. (As a side note, I've always wished there was a way to name rivers, lakes, mountains etc.) I would kill to play a game that caters to our preferences rather than those of the average strategy gamer.

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It still sounds to me that you're making the same arguments about Civ as game censorship folks are making about violent games in a realistic setting such as CoD or Spec Ops. That doesn't make it an invalid arguement, but it seems to me to be impossible to make a game that gives you want you want, while still being actually fun to play and at least somewhat marketable. Perhaps me pulling out Spec Ops as a particular example out of that list was a bad idea, as I didn't think it was a terribly good game.

If my arguments are ever used to tell someone that they can't make a game a certain way, do me a favor and please ignore them. My view is that games with more perspectives need to be made. No individual, group, or policy will ever be able to determine which perspectives are permissible. Tolerant, intolerant, whatever, bring me more games with more perspectives. But then let me criticize them.

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I'm seriously all for adding more victory conditions, but I'm not sure where to start. Happiest civilization like Chris mentioned would be interesting, though happiness pays off in other ways through giving you Golden Ages.

I think that one way to give prominence to a wider breadth of cultural values would be to provide content that is neither necessary for a victory condition, nor completely ignored for one. I mentioned the procedural music example earlier in the thread, but idiosyncratic development could be provided for architecture, literature, folklore, mannerisms. I can easily imagine myself focusing more on exploring and influencing my civilization's procedurally generated folklore than going for a Science-Victory. But maybe some odd mutation in that folklore, leads to inspiration for a new technology.

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Now, I feel ashamed, that such an excellent discussion started after quoting my poor ramblings at 3AM (I live in Europe). Also: apologies. English was the 5th, of a couple more languages, I failed to learn properly to this day. My wordsmithing lacks polish in each one. AND my brain is old, dazed & confused.

 

This discussion here, in this thread, is going into different directions. All very interesting in themselves. What I myself was going after, others here articulated way more eloquently (TychoCelchuu, for example, on page 4). Also, what feelthedarkness (on page 2) called "decontextualization" [of history].

 

History is fragile. There is no "one" truth. I am of the school of thought that "we" are continuously re-inventing and re-telling history. Many of it is based on relics, physical evidence, scientific research, scientific conclusions, based on the current methodologies, state-of-art science, etc, etc ... but also based on prior narrative (academic papers, documents, scholary notebooks, lectures, speeches, religion and religious practices, oral history, mythology). I don't need to remind you, WHO is writing the history, that future generations are reading. They all lie. No source is trustworthy. All is in flux. How "we" see 1492, 1789, 1933, 2000 or today is different, than in past decades and centuries. Also, simultaneously different, depending on where you come from, your teachers, which university you went to, which country you live in, which culture you are raised in. Everything can and will be criticized by power players. People, individuals, institutions, have certain "interests" and are actively trying to establish "their" view as the "true", the dominant one. History - real world history - is fragile.

 

And there, along comes Civ.

 

If the Civ games would be called "Alpha Centauri 2, 3, 4...", and all units and names and countries would come out of the SciFi/Fantasy realms, I would not bother anyone with anything.

 

I am not saying Sid Meier's Civilization is his (the man) or the studios attempt to accuartely mirror our world.

 

It's a game. I get that.

 

But they intentionally set this game in historical context! For whatever reasons. And even unintentionally, this game, the design, the mechanics, implicitly are making a statement about "history", about "the world" and the worlds "mechanics", etc, etc.

 

Now, you can be a veteran video game player, well educated, well raised, well versed in the mechanics of the real world and your brain is of the kind that is analytical and sharp. You are also an adult.

 

During the 8-bit era, many design decision of the artistic kind were based on stereotypes. I would argue, not because the game developers were more racist then others around them, but because, it was very difficult to make something recognizable with so little pixels. Certain stereotypes were used to evoke certain characteristics. African American, females ... you name it. You know the games I am talking about. These were not the proudest days of video game history. Using familiar tropes and themes makes it easier to connect the player to the game (mechanics) and the game world. But we are beyond those early days.

 

How about a version of you, or rather not you, who is 12 years old, and plays CIV 5. The 12 year old does NOT "know" who "General Rommel" really was. Of course, the Rommel in the game is not the "real" General, nor is it trying to be. It is most likely a (not-so) randomly generated NPC name, which some game dev must have thought is funny. Context either makes it funny ... or not. Depending on who you are, where you grew up. I recall hearing some developer talking about the "real" Shoshone and some interaction with the native American tribe in context with a representation of them in the game. The developers DO see some responsibility of what they are doing, it seems. Or they are forced to not ignore it. So, this kid plays Civ, conquers all of Africa and a month later - depending on where you live, of course - might hear about Erwin Rommel in school. Your video game character has suddenly a second life. I cannot imagine how the fake history game world is informing the real history "knowledge" of children and what will "stick" and what not. To say the least, as trivial as this all may sound to some, it sounds at least "problematic", if not troubling to others? Maybe not a single name of a single character, but how about the underlying "philosophy" (the mechanics) of the game. The representation of cultures, technology, philosophies. While it still IS a game, "it" (rather the developers) cannot hide behind that argument of the reductionism that is at work here? idSofware, teaching me how to shoot in a FPS, doesn't make me a better soldier (at least, I don't think so). Telling me something about "Civilization" (even the bland Intro video of Civ 5 - it is offensively annoying to my ears, if not yours), is making statements in this (real) world. It's not making me a bad person, but it informs my real world views, one way or another (just listen to some remarks I think Troy Goodfellow was making jokingly(?!) in the podcast). Even if it is "just a video game"?

 

At the same time, I can play CoH2, Rising Storm, Wargame European Escalation or Gary Grigsby's War in the East, not having to think about any of this. These are adult games for adults. They are not trying to make statements about workings of the world beyond their (limited) scenarios?

 

Again, I seem to have failed, to express what I mean. You go on ...

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Additionally, as I'm looking at this list, I just realized how unbalanced the victory conditions are toward industrial societies. Three of them directly require building an expensive structure, score favors many expensive structures, and of course you have to build lots of units for a domination victory.

 

Like I said, the issues with Civ are emergent out of three simple axioms:

 

1. The game is about winning.

2. Only one player (or an alliance of players) can win.

3. A player winning ends the game.

 

If there's a win condition that doesn't require industrialisation (for example, happiest country), then the game would abruptly end in 2000BC when someone halfway across the world builds a church or something. In the real history of the world, what happened was that people running the countries had their own individual objectives, and for many of them, their objectives were already achieved in their lifetime. You want a sandbox of history, but Civ isn't a sandbox, it's a 4X strategy game clothed in history.

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Now, I feel ashamed, that such an excellent discussion started after quoting my poor ramblings at 3AM (I live in Europe). Also: apologies. English was the 5th, of a couple more languages, I failed to learn properly to this day. My wordsmithing lacks polish in each one. AND my brain is old, dazed & confused.

 

This discussion here, in this thread, is going into different directions. All very interesting in themselves. What I myself was going after, others here articulated way more eloquently (TychoCelchuu, for example, on page 4). Also, what feelthedarkness (on page 2) called "decontextualization" [of history].

 

History is fragile. There is no "one" truth. I am of the school of thought that "we" are continuously re-inventing and re-telling history. Many of it is based on relics, physical evidence, scientific research, scientific conclusions, based on the current methodologies, state-of-art science, etc, etc ... but also based on prior narrative (academic papers, documents, scholary notebooks, lectures, speeches, religion and religious practices, oral history, mythology). I don't need to remind you, WHO is writing the history, that future generations are reading. They all lie. No source is trustworthy. All is in flux. How "we" see 1492, 1789, 1933, 2000 or today is different, than in past decades and centuries. Also, simultaneously different, depending on where you come from, your teachers, which university you went to, which country you live in, which culture you are raised in. Everything can and will be criticized by power players. People, individuals, institutions, have certain "interests" and are actively trying to establish "their" view as the "true", the dominant one. History - real world history - is fragile.

 

And there, along comes Civ.

 

If the Civ games would be called "Alpha Centauri 2, 3, 4...", and all units and names and countries would come out of the SciFi/Fantasy realms, I would not bother anyone with anything.

 

I am not saying Sid Meier's Civilization is his (the man) or the studios attempt to accuartely mirror our world.

 

It's a game. I get that.

 

But they intentionally set this game in historical context! For whatever reasons. And even unintentionally, this game, the design, the mechanics, implicitly are making a statement about "history", about "the world" and the worlds "mechanics", etc, etc.

 

Now, you can be a veteran video game player, well educated, well raised, well versed in the mechanics of the real world and your brain is of the kind that is analytical and sharp. You are also an adult.

 

During the 8-bit era, many design decision of the artistic kind were based on stereotypes. I would argue, not because the game developers were more racist then others around them, but because, it was very difficult to make something recognizable with so little pixels. Certain stereotypes were used to evoke certain characteristics. African American, females ... you name it. You know the games I am talking about. These were not the proudest days of video game history. Using familiar tropes and themes makes it easier to connect the player to the game (mechanics) and the game world. But we are beyond those early days.

 

How about a version of you, or rather not you, who is 12 years old, and plays CIV 5. The 12 year old does NOT "know" who "General Rommel" really was. Of course, the Rommel in the game is not the "real" General, nor is it trying to be. It is most likely a (not-so) randomly generated NPC name, which some game dev must have thought is funny. Context either makes it funny ... or not. Depending on who you are, where you grew up. I recall hearing some developer talking about the "real" Shoshone and some interaction with the native American tribe in context with a representation of them in the game. The developers DO see some responsibility of what they are doing, it seems. Or they are forced to not ignore it. So, this kid plays Civ, conquers all of Africa and a month later - depending on where you live, of course - might hear about Erwin Rommel in school. Your video game character has suddenly a second life. I cannot imagine how the fake history game world is informing the real history "knowledge" of children and what will "stick" and what not. To say the least, as trivial as this all may sound to some, it sounds at least "problematic", if not troubling to others? Maybe not a single name of a single character, but how about the underlying "philosophy" (the mechanics) of the game. The representation of cultures, technology, philosophies. While it still IS a game, "it" (rather the developers) cannot hide behind that argument of the reductionism that is at work here? idSofware, teaching me how to shoot in a FPS, doesn't make me a better soldier (at least, I don't think so). Telling me something about "Civilization" (even the bland Intro video of Civ 5 - it is offensively annoying to my ears, if not yours), is making statements in this (real) world. It's not making me a bad person, but it informs my real world views, one way or another (just listen to some remarks I think Troy Goodfellow was making jokingly(?!) in the podcast). Even if it is "just a video game"?

 

At the same time, I can play CoH2, Rising Storm, Wargame European Escalation or Gary Grigsby's War in the East, not having to think about any of this. These are adult games for adults. They are not trying to make statements about workings of the world beyond their (limited) scenarios?

 

Again, I seem to have failed, to express what I mean. You go on ...

If there is no 'truth', who is to say that your interpretation of history is any more valid than Sid's? What makes you more trustworthy than anybody else?

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The point isn't about whether Civ is or isn't modeling history accurately, the point is what kind of story Civilization is telling about the world by systematizing various real world events and processes in the context of the game simulation. Spec Ops is unrealistic, but the point of Spec Ops is to tell a story about violent video games where you shoot hundreds of people, which makes it absolutely integral to the argument Spec Ops is making that you shoot hundreds of people. Civilization is, ostensibly, telling a story about civilizations, how they interact and rise and fall, and so on. When the game models things in one way or another it says things about how it thinks the world operates because "how the world operates" is the subject of the Civ games, whereas "what it means to spend hours playing a game where you shoot people in the face" is the subject of Spec Ops. And in choosing to represent only certain parts of how the world operates, people are saying Civ is making some unfortunate arguments about reality.

In some ways this thread is the same point that Cameron Kunzelman just made about Castle Doctrine - how a game chooses to model reality encodes certain arguments that we need to think about and, potentially, criticize.

 

If we're going to reference Cameron Kunzelman, then I would follow up with Leigh Alexander's response to him - that creating an ecosystem with certain ideas, concepts, etc. is not necessarily an endorsement of those ideas. Put another way, most game design does not count as a normative statement. I think we all are aware of this, which is why it is so laughable when politicians, or the media refer to video games as "murder simulators" that are turning American children into future psychopaths.

 

To be sure, Civilization's top-down model of history is absurd, and not at all how the world works. Nation's aren't ruled by immortal leaders, technological innovations aren't decided upon in advance, and the flow of time is not turn based. There has always been a lot of fudging, and tongue-in-cheek approaches to the Civilization series (recall the FMVs for advisers in Civilization 2). A game with historical flavor is no substitute for reading primary sources, and critical histories; nor was it ever meant to be.

 

It's all well and good to criticize the game of having a Western bias, but lets at least display a little bit of self-reflexive criticism if we're going to pursue this. When we start demanding more rigor, serious consideration of the flow of power, a less top-down approach, consideration of other agencies than the state and its self-appointed leaders, the perspective of subaltern communities, the de-centering of a European perspective, are we not implicitly endorsing history as a scientific practice, in other words, historical practice through the lens of the West?

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Creating an ecosystem in which ideas function isn't an endorsement of the ideas, yes, but it can be. The question is how the game treats that ecosystem. Does it reward you for buying into the ideas? Does the structure in which the ideas occur suggest that buying into the ideas is the way to get ahead and that resisting the assumptions built into the structure is to conflict with reality rather than to simply have a different opinion? Does it allow you ways to reshape the icky presumptions inherent in the ideas it presents so as to create a more legitimate experience? Does it constantly foster a sense of unease and ickiness to make it clear that something is off (Hotline Miami and Spec Ops do this very well). And so on and so forth. I don't think Civilization does any of these things.

I think it's a red herring to point out the absurd parts of Civilization as if those exempt it from making any sort of argument through the way it systematizes stuff. It's a video game - it has to simplify things. Yes, in real life civilizations are not ruled by immortal avatars of their people. Does this mean Civilization has nothing to do with the real world? Obviously not. They didn't make the immortal avatars into snake people or sentient gas clouds. They chose historical people, to lead historical civilizations, in a world named after ours where things function as abstractions of what has actually happened in our world.

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