REF: Civ links

Civilization has been designed and redesigned, beginning with the original Meier and Shelley efforts, to quite clearly conform to an aesthetics of play rather than to construct a realistic model of human history.  And, over the succeeding years, the games have retained the trappings of a historical simulation only in the most superficial and nominative sense

(Myers: forthcoming)

A couple more:

Caviness, Rochelle. “History in Review: Civilization III.” 2002. 14 Jan 2004.

Chick, Tom. “The Teaching Game: All I Really Need to Know I Learned in Civilization.” Jan 2002. CGOnline.com. 18 Jan 2004.

Chick, Tom. “The Fathers of Civilization: An Interview with Sid Meier and Bruce Shelley.” Aug 2001. CGOnline.com. 18 Jan 2004.

Henthorne, Tom. Cyber-Utopias: The Politics and Ideology of Computer Games. Studies in Popular Culture, 25.3 (Apr 2003). 20 Jan 2004. 

Poblocki, Kacper. "Becoming-State. The Bio-Cultural Imperialism of Sid Meier's Civilization." Focaal -- European Journal of Anthropology 39 (2002): 163-177.

I dunno, some of these articles are a bit depressing really. Civ, which is a management game, gets used as an educational tool a lot. Several of these articles rip this apart, mainly claiming that the learning tree contains politicised assumption (like the use of nuclear power as an automatic pollutant), and that it is Western centred - playing the other races often puts you at a disadvantage, and victory has to be achieved through Western standards of sucess.

Well, duh. I'm sorry, but this is at root a game. I'm running up against this problem a lot at the moment - games are ciritcised for having agendas, or alternatively, for not having enough scope. Some games are trying hard to crawl out from under these issues, but for others (I don't include Civ here, btw), the depth of historicisation and accuracy is run by an agenda. for example, historical FPS games are about, at root, killing people. So they tend to be quite militarisitic! Providing a narrative advocating pacsifism would break the game dynamic. Similarly, management games are about projected progression of a world. They thus have to make learning tree choices. These are politically informed by the programmers, and have run into a lot of criticism.

It seems to me, and this may be horribly liberal, that any game will have an underlying agenda - like any other text in fact. We may not agree with this agenda - in fact the agenda may be wrong; historically, socially, culturally, politically. But this level of accusation seems ot me extreme - another version of saying 'games don't do history well because they are games and therefore worthless'. Games contain a version of history that is as politicised as any other text. However, because they are games, they also make gameplay descisions about what is to be omitted or included. This can be criticised because it is more obvious than for example, a historical fiction about the Tudor period that doesn't feature the Walsingham family. When looking at it in this light (the multitude of Tudor fictions that don't have the Walsinghams), the argument seems to me to become extremist.

The second thing that frustrates me is that these games are criticised for following the course of history. Why yes indeed, the West has been a vicious coloniser that wiped out barbarians whenever they found them (as in the early stages of Civ), and we have used nuclear power, which, when not properly maintained, becomes a polutant. So why the outrage when these aspects are used in the game? I understand that excluding some things and including others is very problematic, but personally my issue is with the idea that the SETI programme gives every city a 50% research bonus. Because lets face it, a programme that looks for aliens and exists largely as a screensaver (and a very memory heavy screensaver at that), coupled with an outmoded space programme that's sat on its 1950s haunches for the last few decades, has really increased the sum of knowledge in the world. I guess my point is that politicisation can be gathered from virtually every aspect of the game, and that the process of negative history is given a hard rap when postive effects are just as dubious. Why the seed drill and never the horse drawn plough? Why does communism always make my people happier? And so on. Aspects of history are used in specific ways to make the game run. Very often, they advance gameplay with a rough approximation of what they were supposed to do in real life (the cure for Cancer in the game is a uniformly Good Thing - no problems with a riseng aged population etc...) and so on. Critics always seem to harp at the bad and never really consider that the 'good' in the game has just as much of a historical/game impact.

Comments

[Pete]

"The game is based on Microprose's famous Sid Meier's Civilization and has many basic ideas in common with it. Actually, this project has arised from the wish to correct annoying design mistakes and AI weaknesses of Civ II."

http://c-evo.org/

Freeware re-working of Civ II

[Esther]

Interesting freeware, Pete. This the third or forth of these I've seen so far. One of the points made by either Myers or Diane Carr is that when the game is tweaked, it is game play, not dubious historicity that is changed however - so pollution is removed because it is an annoying aspect of gameplay, but nuclear power and barbarians still stay in; both authors use these examples specifically when discussing the politiicsation of the text versus its role as 'game'. In some ways this is more interesting - game as artifact to be manipulated, thus not history at all; than the claim that history can be bunk in the game.=. I'd be interested to see if this is the case here -