Should CIV 6 should be rated M

Basically question is:
Wouldn't you prefere more serious approach?

CIV games managed to avoid very sensitive topics (slavery, prostitution, religious wars, etc), instead everything is dipped in the sugar...

Maybe CIV 6 should be M rated, but show the truth behind human history..

I agree it should be rated M to be able to include those things, but they should not be forced. For example, Opium or tabacco could be a resource, but basically the only reason the game gets an M rating should be because it uses those taboo words.

Civ games have almost always left the 'Addictive' Luxury Resources out of the game, except for Alcohol and Chocolate (Wine and Cocoa as Resources). This is especially peculiar in that Coffee and Tea are both major 'Luxury' resources and major Trade Goods ever since their discovery. Opium falls into that same category, with the added historical weight that that substance provoked wars in the early 19th century between Britain and China!

Slavery is an historical fact, with important consequences that, sadly, were left out of Civ VI completely when it had been included in earlier versions of the series.

I'd like to see them all back in the game - along with both the 'positive' and negative consequences in political, diplomatic, economic, and other areas of the game.

Slavery already exists in Civ 5 via stealing workers as do religious wars. "Stop sending missionaries to my cities or else!"

BenitoChavez said:

Slavery already exists in Civ 5 via stealing workers as do religious wars. "Stop sending missionaries to my cities or else!"

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But neither of those show the actual consequences of either slavery or religious conflict.

The 'stolen' Worker magically becomes completely loyal to your civ and is indistinguishable from your own workers. There is no chance of revolt, or of labor becoming so cheap it stifles development of laver-saving industrial methods.

As for a Civ V 'religious' war, the adherents of the other Civ's religion remain, again, totally loyal to you even when you are storming their Holy City, and with a couple of Inquisitors you can obliterate any trace of any foreign religion in your own civilization, or in captured cities.

Like so much in Civ V, they are watered down, insipid ghosts of a shadow of a trace of what they should be.

Slavery already exists in Civ 5 via stealing workers as do religious wars. "Stop sending missionaries to my cities or else!"

Click to expand...

This post made me blind.

CIV 5 is just so full of political correctness than I sometimes dubt if it really should be called Civilization. Maybe it should be called "Fanatsay game for people who belive that history is just Ghandi smilling at you".

How do you compare complex concept present in human history probably since it's inception untill now - to stealing workers?
I mean: you can (still) OWN intelligent human being as a property, and you compare it to stealing terraforming unit.

You compare complex issue of religions coexisting (for good and for bad) to "STOP SENDING MISSIONARIES" in diplo screen? Going further that road, let me present you TRUE history of religion:
"Polynesians found magical hut, hut gave them Faith points, they took pantheon, then some time later - they pick beliefs from beliefs table. Particular belief can be used only once per religion, so there is a special worldwide organization - Religion Control Group - RCG. They are responsible for delivering up to date tables of beliefs to CIVs which gather enought faith points".

"political correctness" is a) a great way to kill a thread and b) not a real thing. It's a buzzword invented to demonise the political or social stances of those you disagree with.

Certainly, I think in terms of the game itself, the notion of slavery is present, but incredibly abstracted. I don't think the poster you quoted is at all disagreeing that slavery, like most other themes in CiV, is incredibly watered-down, so it's a bit disingenuous to infer that.

Every complex real-world issue is diluted in these games; always has been. Ironically one of the best real-world simulators in terms of social dynamics and makeup is probably Dwarf Fortress, for crying out loud

Do people play the Civilisation series for historical accuracy? I think people prefer the historical setting, but accuracy is both hard to achieve in a game format, as well as being rather flexible depending on how you interpret history (both modern, classic and ancient). We can't even remember the history of race in the Western world, or choose not to. I sincerely doubt the wide-ranging playerbase of the Civilisation series (right-leaning, left-leaning, and everyone inbetween) would be able to agree on such a thing.

And when the developers implement something players disagree with? Well, then you get complaints. And accusations of "political correctness"

Wojciech_R said:

CIV games managed to avoid very sensitive topics (slavery, prostitution, religious wars, etc), instead everything is dipped in the sugar...

Click to expand...

Wojciech_R said:

This post made me blind.

CIV 5 is just so full of political correctness than I sometimes dubt if it really should be called Civilization. Maybe it should be called "Fanatsay game for people who belive that history is just Ghandi smilling at you".

Click to expand...

Your original post said they avoided slavery and holy wars. Now you're saying the way they implemented slavery/holy wars isn't historically accurate or in-depth enough. So if that's what you really mean, then say so in the first place. I can only respond to what you write, not what you meant to write.

I personally prefer Civ as entertainment rather than a historical simulator. I'd rather not deal with the moral ramifications of slavery or using nukes because in the end, Civ is just pixels and electrical currents running through circuit boards.

I still don't get why a game like civ would need a M rating if it included resources like tobacco or game concepts like slavery. It's a strategy game. The player is building cities and moving units around on a board. I hardly think that moving a worker unit on a tile with tobacco is going to corrupt young people into smoking or clicking a slavery button on a city screen to rush build a wonder is going to make people run out and buy a slave. It's not Grand Theft Auto where you are graphically killing people. Besides, civ4 had slavery and I don't think it had a M rating. And civ5 had a wine resource and I don't think that was a problem for its rating.

If any game that includes 'Razing cities' and using an Inquisitor Unit to forcibly change an entire city's religion doesn't already have an 'M' Rating - or better yet, an 'RIWC' rating for "Recognized International War Crime", then adding Tobacco to the game isn't likely to change its rating for the worse.

And, I agree, this is a Game and not a Simulation. I've been involved in historical Simulations, and the Fun Quotient is a negative value. BUT Civilization purports to be historically-based, so I'd really like it if they at least made an attempt to get the history they do include right. Civ V does not, on many levels ranging from the Tech Tree to Units to 'Uniques' and in almost every case, it would be a more fun and more interesting game if they had gotten the history right in the first place.

In a game where Gandhi likes to lob nuclear weapons left right and center I doubt adding slavery, holy wars etc. is really going to make it more historically accurate. I'm easy either way, i.e. I'm not going to boycott it if it depicts slavery nor do I think anyone else would (except possibly a few who wouldn't buy it anyway). I deplore the whaling industry but that doesn't stop me trading whales, they are just binary digits in a game. Also I thought M was more about gore and violence anyway.

The question, for me, is whether the game design gives you the real, or at least semi-historical, alternatives when it requires you to make a decision, and Civ V in its basic design made the decision to show no negative sides to your decisions at all. Basically, your every decision is between two (or more) Positives, and you are only deciding which Yellow Brick Road you want to follow, or follow first.

A better game, and this is just my opinion, would be one in which you have to make decisions constantly, and some of those decisions will include negative outcomes, which you will have to compensate for in other ways. Even such nastiness as Addiction (Tobacco, Alcohol, Coffee as Trade Goods or 'Luxury' Goods) and Slavery should be included because they and their consequences were a huge part of history, and a supposedly-historically-based game should include them in some form.

In fact, although I am NOT advocating making Civ VI into a Teaching Tool, by including both the positives and negatives of historical decisions, you can teach a gamer a few lessons...

For example, Slavery at first glance looks like a source of Cheap Labor (Workers) BUT, as historical groups as different as Virginians in 1840 and Spartans in -300 could tell you, a large slave (Helot) labor force also requires a large Security Apparatus to keep them working. Cheapening labor and making it the province of slaves also stifles initiative and innovation among the rest of the population - try to find a technological or philosophical innovation that came out of either Sparta or the American South. The way to show that in the game might be to include a constant % chance of Slave Revolts in your slave-holding cities AND the 'slave' population points in your Civ could not be applied as Specialists of any kind. Cheap Labor with an extra Price.

Along similar lines, I think there should be a lot more conflicts among the various Social and Religious Policies - there are combinations of, for instance, Freedom with Piety, Honor or Tradition policies that should trigger conflict among some of your citizens, yet right now you can 'cherry-pick' any combination of Social Policies in the game and apply nothing but Bonuses from them. This is Sanitized History, or Historical Fantasy if you will...

I would not care if CIV VI was rated M. I also could not imagine a positive gameplay change to mandate such a rating.

I don't think introducing slavery, or addictive goods, or mass murder and genocide (oh wait we already got that) would cause the ratings board to give it an M rating either.

As long as the violence and themes aren't excessively graphic I think ESRB is liberal with their rating system.

On slavery: I think it can be added as a game mechanic without any "controversy". After all, it was in previous versions. If I had to wager a guess, it probably has less to do with any political correctness and more to do with how barebones the original game was. And there wasn't a convenient way to include it later. So on that point, it probably would be better if it were in the base game.

On prostitution: wut? I don't see what this has anything to do with a big picture strategy game with historical flavor. I suppose you could replace a building like the zoo for a brothel, but on the whole it seems like a rather pointless, and forced, inclusion into the game.

On goods like tobacco: such things shouldn't matter, but perhaps it was more of a decision that tobacco, specifically, isn't needed for the general luxury goods mechanic to work, so just kept out for convenience. I wouldn't mind seeing it included, but I also wouldn't mind if it was continued to be left out.

On religious wars: War in this game is just a button to declare war anyway. Why would you need for a war to specifically be labeled as "religious"? Is it any more or less significant than a war about resources, a war about opposing ideologies, or anything else? If there were an additional casus belli system like in Europa Universalis, then yeah, sure, I suppose it would make sense to have a reason for war distinctly labeled, but otherwise I don't see the point.

The ESRB doesn't know anything about the games they rate, at least until someone writes a complaint as with the Hot Coffee scandal.

Looking for shock value isn't the way to present a historical simulation. You can insert slavery and graphic depictions thereof, and tell the player that slavery is a terrible horrible thing, then give the player generous incentives to implement slavery in their civilization, but that would be a ham-fisted insertion.
What Civ games have failed to do is adequately depict the history of labor - it's just naturally assumed that your people are good little workers who want to make their leader great and so on, and production is based on a very unnatural system. You don't hear anything about agricultural workers, miners, construction workers; soldiers have little attachment to the actual population, instead popping out of nowhere when so many hammers have been accumulated; slavery is only understood in Civ4 as a way to kill population for more hammers, which really isn't how slavery worked. Much of this has to be streamlined because the game is trying to be a game, rather than a simulation, but I could see places where the series could do way better.

Lately - particularly with Civ5, which is just a terrible game - the game is streamlining too much and becoming a game of bonuses upon bonuses, rather than interesting decisions with actual tradeoffs. Civ4 had this to a degree and it's been a criticism of the series from the very beginning, but Civ5 is notorious for being a game of bucket-filling, giving the player abundant goodies to make them feel better, just like a lot of games that prey on addictive behavior.