All rise and no fall: how Civilization reinforces a dangerous myth

And I don't think the thesis put forward by the Civilization franchise is necessarily wrong, however dreary. As with anything, it depends on the level at which you engage with it, and how much good faith you apply and which things you choose to emphasize or not emphasize. Economic strength and accumulation of resources and sheer population do have a lot to do with who dominates. But maybe it takes other stuff, too. Maybe playing a game doesn't mean you're ignoring it, and "correcting" the thesis of the game doesn't mean we're due for an overthrow of a grand cultural dogma.

Civ is not a perfect reflection of history, society, or civilization, let alone an idealistic society or civilization. And in truth, that's what makes it fun. Pinning the fate of our "IRL" civilization on a game because it perpetuates the myth of perpetual growth is a bit ridiculous. The perils of capitalism are not going to be defeated by changing the mechanics of a Sid Meyers game.

If we want to talk about the harm video games bring about, let's talk about loot crates and microtransactions in F2P games.

I remember listening to a talk from Sid Meier and at some point he explains how they tried to implement a rise-and-fall system in the original Civ. It didn't go very well. Playtesters hated it.

When the first fall came, people just quit and start again, thinking that they did something wrong. When they were told it was intended and they had to fall to rise again, they just didn't like it at all.

I can see a niche for a hardcore strategy game where rise and fall is part of the game loop, but given the current estate of affairs it would be just that, a niche game.

He makes the same point that the original Civilization was designed around the assumption of a relentless march of growth and progress that will ultimately benefit all mankind. This is encoded in the game's winning conditions: "You win a game of Civilization in either of two ways: by eliminating all rival civilizations or by surviving until the colonization of space begins."

"Bruce Shelley, who authored the manual, is thus explicitly discouraging the player from approaching Civilization as a zero-sum game: you win simply 'by being in existence when colonists reach Alpha Centauri.' This doesn’t mean that all or most players played under that assumption — a topic I’ll return to momentarily — but it’s nevertheless kind of an amazing statement to find in a game like this one, implying as it does that civilization writ large truly is a global, cooperative project. There’s an idealism lurking within Civilization, this game that plays not just with economics and war but with the grandest achievements of humanity, that’s missing in the likes of Master of Orion. It’s notable that, while the history of gaming is littered with hundreds of galaxy-spanning 4X space operas, vanishingly few games beyond Civilization‘s own sequels have attempted to replicate its model of grand strategy."

[1] https://www.filfre.net/2018/03/the-game-of-everything-part-2...

What I found fascinating is after playing for a bit you can start to see these cascades start early and try to stop them and still fail. All you can do is try to efficiently route resources as you watch your entire city fall into decline.

Also collapse of a state does not mean that civilization is gone completely. Maybe exploring collapse may be fun too. (At least it would teach an agility that could come quite handy for an individual). However building such a game would be really hard, as it would go against the patterns of historical discourse, there is probably less data to build on.

On the other hand we had a lot of instances during the past century when the established order of things did come to a crashing halt...

And the way the rise and fall mechanism is implemented in practice is simply by ending the game. Once you've won (or lost) you are back to the stone age on a different map.

Civ 4 had global warming, and it annoyed people enough they hacked the game to get rid of it: https://forums.civfanatics.com/threads/global-warming.145922...

People already complain the games are too complex. If you add a bunch of knobs for various forms of pollution and exploration, you'd just get thousands of requests to turn it all off.

I usually play at Prince or lower because my civilization does much falling at higher levels.

It's all biology. Empires grow and decline and die like animals. The leave offpsring.

There is perpetual growth but it happens in a cycle. No empire "wins", it breaks down and the pieces then grow and compete.

"That means that sooner or later, in every Civ game, you’ll reach a point where the challenge is gone but there’s still a long grind before you reach the point at which you have enough capital cities, culture points, rocket launches or religious conversions to win the game."

It solved it with tubeworlds. You were allowed, in Civ II to build, say, 24 x 160 worlds, and that made all the difference. Games were exciting all the way through as you raced to deal with the Civilizations next to you and fight toward the ends. No matter what, when you came up against your last one or two computer opponents, they were advanced civilizations that weren't boring to fight even though you were already close to a win. Very sadly, this was dropped from subsequent games, in which you could only generate rather square maps. I have absolutely no idea why. A great loss. I don't play Civ now.

There's many ways in which the game shakes things up in the late game. One aspect of it is squalor, a metric that rises as your cities grow and advance in technology. High squalor increases unrest. There is very little you can do to reduce it- it will just keep rising over time, as your population grows. And even with careful management the cities at the edges of your empire (where the population tends to have cultural differences to the center) are always at high risk of a revolt, that kicks your army out of the city and replaces it with a rebel force. A hack around that is to artificially cause the city to revolt in an opportune time (when you have a good army to take on the rebels), take it back and slaughter the population, bringing it back down to a manageable size. Still, large cities will always eventually get to a point where they just suck for everyone involved.

The other thing that shakes the late game up is the Mongol invasion. Actually- two of them. First you get the regular Mongols that are the hardest thing that's hit you until then, by a wide margin. Don't worry- they don't want your cities; they just want to pillage them, raze them and move on to the next. Once you 've dealt with them and a few decades have passed, the Temurids come on, who are like your worst nightmare married to its own worst nightmare, but trailing elephants with cannons strapped on their backs. You know you're in trouble because their banner is black and red. That spells "evil" even in a real history-based gaming world.

Then of course there's more stuff that happens in the late game- somebody discovers a New World and a whole new map is added to the game. Things like that. It's very hard with the game to end with total domination. If nothing else, I've abandoned most games because I got bored of the constant strife, that got a little too repetitive after a long enough time, to be honest.

The point is- there was no constant march of progress in this game. You really got the feeling that the world hated your guts, as things went on and the more you played, the more it hated you. Such fun :)

_________________

[1] I played this game primarily as a 4x game, for the city management and the map expansion - I know that's not how it's meant to be played and that the focus was on the realistic battles, but MTWII had probably the best balanced campaign map than any Total War game and playing it this way was way more satisfying than many 4x games I've tried, including various Civs that didn't even come close, to be honest.

That said, it would be pretty neat if it were possible to make a fun game that did all that. The hazard is that didactic games often aren't fun. Don't make games that aren't fun.

However absurd the reasons are, I can at least understand the assertion that climate change is a "controversial" topic, so if your goal is to even cater to the lunatics, fine.

But that overfishing can damage the environment shouldn't be controversial - or is it?

Culture victory for United States of America!

To be somewhat less facetious, does the game have any mechanisms for environmental issues? Do you have to handle pollution, loss of species, depletion of stocks through overfishing or overhunting, etc?