
What Sid Meier’s Video Game Empire Got Right and Wrong About ‘Civilization’ - enkiv2
https://blog.longreads.com/2016/10/26/what-sid-meiers-video-game-empire-got-right-and-wrong-about-civilization/?utm_source=digg&utm_medium=email
======
haberman
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.

~~~
FrankBooth
> 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
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
> 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.

------
vacri
> _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
Yes, 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
> 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
That'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.

------
SwellJoe
It'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
Pssh, the best Civ is still Alpha Centauri. Nerve stapling your populace was
also a bit more extreme than mere slavery.

~~~
SwellJoe
I 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
If 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
Complaints 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
Agreed; 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
>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.

------
hackuser
The 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.”

~~~
boomboomsubban
From 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.

------
syphilis2
It appears the first Civilization forgot New Zealand.

[https://longreadsblog.files.wordpress.com/2016/10/civilizati...](https://longreadsblog.files.wordpress.com/2016/10/civilization-1-map-2.jpg?w=728)

[http://worldmapswithout.nz/](http://worldmapswithout.nz/)

~~~
cperciva
Ireland, 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
Also 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.

------
komali2
"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
Slavery is in Civ 4.

~~~
Neeek
Wait 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
Not 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
Hahaha, I was thinking specifically of the labor civic that you can adopt as a
nation.

------
partycoder
I 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
If you miss games like civ you need to start looking at indie games.

~~~
nickpsecurity
On 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
That can be said for any genre.

~~~
nickpsecurity
Indie isn't really a genre. It's a classification of small players in all
genres. There's only so many AAA titles in each genre coming out from
established groups. I can easily track them plus people probably know people
playing them. The indie and non-indie but budget games are much higher in
number. Harder to track them.

------
sixo
Civ 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
Civ 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
What would you consider a deep one that might still appeal to a large
audience?

~~~
Lockyy
Personally 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
Is 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
Both 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
One 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
This 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
I 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
Thanks for the response! Great points, I totally agree. The article is
definitely worth a read :)

------
fetbaffe
Article 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.

------
jwatte
I have just one thing to say: Stop with the Python! (Turn times are
excruciatingly slow!) Anything else is window dressing.

~~~
Impossible
Python was Civ 4. Civ 5 and 6 seem to both primarily use Lua for scripting.

~~~
Pxtl
That's marginally better, but it's still a million little hashtabe lookups.

~~~
enkiv2
Hashtable lookups are O(1). What are you complaining about? If they did this
in plain C they'd probably end up using binary search trees and then
everything would be slower.

------
malux85
It taught me that I can become very wealthy with a draconian surveillance
infrastructure and spy network :)

------
YeGoblynQueenne
"Civilisation"; just another word for war.

~~~
mc32
I 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.

~~~
wyqydsyq
A 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
The whole concept of war requires civilization. Civilization is human
organization. War is conflict between organized groups of humans.

~~~
nikatwork
Ape troupes fight all the time. Chimps genocide monkeys. Human war is just
scale.

~~~
jessaustin
Ummm... 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
> _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
> cassus belli

Should just be one "s":
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Casus_belli](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Casus_belli)

