The Game of Everything, Part 3: Civilization and the Narrative of Progress
filfre.net
filfre.net
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.
There are endless opportunities to do so in software (ie, in the 1990-2000s in enterprise software all you had to do was take x data heavy process and add a CRM/ERP/CMS/etc style system). Same with "web 2.0" web apps for clunky desktop software, mobile apps for desktop web apps, "sharing economy", IOT, and recently with deep learning/ML.
Likewise in the industrial revolution, you could find any process involving lots of manual labour and add mechanize it with engines or electricity and plenty of metal/steel.
>trying to understand things as they are
Some might regard the following as overly charitable to the latter, but I think you could map those two strategies to political progressivism and conservatism (left and right), respectively. The ideal is probably a bit of both: without the 'trying to change' you don't have new ideas; without the 'trying to understand' you lose the lessons of the past.
To my recollection Civilization hasn't addressed left vs. right politics except in a surface "here's how the simulation parameters change" kind of way, but I sense that there might be an interesting game mechanic there as far as what happens when your culture veers too far in either direction.
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.
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.
> 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.
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.