
The Game of Everything, Part 3: Civilization and the Narrative of Progress - doppp
https://www.filfre.net/2018/03/the-game-of-everything-part-3-civilization-and-the-narrative-of-progress/
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truculation
I unashamedly think that progress in many fields has occurred, is a good
thing, and that we should expect more of it!

However we don't get there by _trying_ to change things, per se. (Only people
who think they already have the answers do that.) Rather progress comes from
trying to understand things as they are. Specifically from understanding the
_problems_ better.

For example, if we understood exactly _why_ people eat too much, exactly _why_
the dozen or so excellent fusion projects out there haven't yet succeeded,
exactly _why_ people go to church, then a lot of progress would happen
spontaneously.

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AnimalMuppet
You view people going to church as one of the problems? That seems... rather
narrow-minded.

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truculation
No no I mean the problem of explaining howcome people do go (or don't go).
It's very interesting and the observable consequences of understanding it
better are utterly unpredictable. E.g. it might result in fewer people going,
more people going, or no change in attendance at all.

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AnimalMuppet
Ah. I understand.

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pjc50
Ah, the End Of History, that glorious period 1991-2001.

Just as the map is not the territory, the simulation is not the reality - but
it can be a great toy for exploring the possibilities of interacting systems.

Another factor at play is the "twenty minutes into the future" view of
civilisation, including one or two not currently possible technologies leading
to the interstellar voyage. Up until 2000, there was always this kind of
futurism in popular media, but now we don't have that deadline to look forward
to we're adrift.

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smacktoward
If you're interested in exploring an alternative to the "march of progress"
way of looking at history, the Strauss-Howe generational model
([https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Strauss%E2%80%93Howe_generatio...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Strauss%E2%80%93Howe_generational_theory))
is fun to contemplate.

To (over)simplify, it argues that history is less a straight line than a
pendulum that swings back and forth between institutionalism and
individualism. The swing towards institutionalism yields a well-ordered,
smoothly running society, but at the cost of increasing suppression of
creativity and harder pushes to put people who don't fit the institutional
mold on the margins. Eventually that uniformity gets so heavy-handed that it
starts to feel oppressive, at which point people revolt in the name of
individualism and push the pendulum in the opposite direction. That starts a
trend towards increasing liberality, which goes on until individualism is
maximized but institutions have been weakened to the point where nothing feels
like it works anymore -- at which point people revolt in the name of making
the trains run on time, and start the pendulum swinging back towards
institutionalism again.

It's definitely pop history, and you can pick it apart its specifics pretty
easily if you want to. But its core insight (that history is made up of
"people moving through time," rather than time washing over people) is
valuable, and if you were raised on the March of Progress model thinking about
history as something that happens in cycles can be thought-provoking.

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gowld
Is there reason to believe it's a "pendulum" and not just "variation"? A
pendulum operating in many dimensions with many drivers and overlaying many
periods is just a changing system. Calling it a pendulum is simply leaning on
the fact that any mathematical function can be analyzed harmonically (Fourier
analysis)

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jmcomets
These posts are the most interesting pieces of game development / history I've
read so far. Hats off to the author!

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smacktoward
If you want to support his work, he has a Patreon you can chip into here:
[https://www.patreon.com/DigitalAntiquarian/overview](https://www.patreon.com/DigitalAntiquarian/overview)

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bronson
Unexpectedly, this article contains one of the best descriptions of the Cold
War that I've ever seen:

> A decade earlier, Secretary of State Henry Kissinger had said that the Cold
> War would be “unending”: “We must learn to conduct foreign policy without
> escape and without respite. This condition will not go away.” Which was
> perhaps just as well, given that no one could seem to formulate an endgame
> for it that didn’t leave the world a heap of irradiated ashes.

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npunt
Great article. About 18 years ago at E3 Sid Meier was running a Q&A and I
asked why he hadn’t included regressions (like lost technologies and the like)
into Civilization, even though history is full of examples of them. I believe
the answer was ‘it wouldn’t be fun’.

Given the stories that emerged since around Civilization’s hasty development
(it was a complete oddball project for Microprose and completed on a tight
deadline for Christmas season, and wasn’t anticipated to be much of a
success), my sense is that it would have taken a lot more time to explore
anything other than a simple progress narrative, and likely would have been
infeasible.

Civ also came out shortly after Railroad Tycoon, which did a great job
simulating the progress of rail in the industrial revolution, and its pretty
obvious that the game’s mechanics and gameplay were heavily drawn from RT.
Sort of like in many science papers how authors overstate the implications of
their findings in the conclusion, Civ took the notion of rail progress and
applied it to all of human endeavor throughout history.

