I have to preface this post with an apology: Though I will try to make it painless, it will be long, abstract, and short on sexy, specific suggestions. That's because I'm less interested in offering concrete ideas for changes in the game and more interested in explicating a framework that might encourage radical speculations and offerings from others. I've cryptically suggested that the best hope for the
Civilization franchise lies in "burning it to the ground" and starting over; here, I want to explain what I mean by that.
Here, in outline, is what I'll say:
Sid Meier's Civilization (henceforth: SMC) is a simplification of history; that is inevitable, and it is the secret to its success. There are, however, many different ways of simplifying history. SMC has gone, I think, about as far as it can go, and so the franchise would be better served by returning to first principles and constructing a different game based on a different simplified model. It would not "replace" the SMC game we all love, but would exist as a complement to it.
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There are few games that show any flair for simplification. 'Sid Meiers Civilization' is one; Sid was so brutal in his simplification of history that I sometimes wince at the game's inaccuracies. Yet the result of Sid's design parsimony was one of the greatest computer games of all time. A lesser designer would have succumbed to the temptation to pile it on. Chris Crawford, as quoted by dh_epic
True words, and a convenient entry point for my argument. Any theory of complex phenomena will have to simplify what it models. There's an obvious reason this should be. As one Monty Python skit argues, a 1:1 scale model of a boat is not a model, it's a freaking
boat. This holds true for any theory, whether in the hard sciences (as in physics or chemistry) or in the social sciences (like economics or history). Any resulting "inaccuracies"aspects of reality that it does not take account ofare not inaccuracies but lacunae, gaps passed over by the theory because it prefers to explain and describe a specific
part or general
aspect of the complex world.
Now, a game like SMC is not itself a theory of history, but it does
embody such a theory, and so like any theory it has these lacunae. There are, for instance, no "dark ages" in SMC; no recognition that different civilizations pursue and realize different purposes and philosophies; no intuition that a culture's metaphysics, social structure, and arts develop in tandem and influence each other. There's nothing wrong with this, because SMC
is extremely successful at constructing
one intuitive model of the way history works. There is, however, no reason that game designers (including Sid Meier and his team) cannot toss out SMC and its model of history and develop a different game that simulates historical phenomena in a different way. Quantum physics and classical physics complement each other; there is less cause for complaint about letting different historical simulations complement each other.
Hence, my first assertion: We would lose nothing and possibly gain much if the design team left
Civilization IV as the last word in this branch of the franchise and instead set about designing a quite different simulation that embodies a very different theory of history. It wouldn't be like swapping astrology for astronomy (or capitalism for Marxism) but like swapping the Tim Burton
Batman for the Chris Nolan
Batman: different but equally valid interpretations of the underlying materialthough, of course, some people can be counted on to vociferously prefer one vision to the other. (I'm a Burton man, myself.) And just as people can and will play different scenarios and mods depending on what kind of SMC experience they want to have, people could play "original" or "radically new"
Civilization depending on what they were looking for in a particular game.
Now, this has been very vague. Let me give a concrete explication of what I mean when I say that SMC "embodies" a theory of history, and how a different game could embody a different theory.
In SMC, the basic unit is a particular thinga "civilization." Already, by taking civilizations as the basic unit of the game, SMC makes a controversial choice: not all historians recognize "civilizations" as authentic furniture in the world. Moreover, SMC treats civilizations as a particular kind of thing, with a certain kind of structure, direction, and purpose. To put it brutally, an SMC civilization is a machine designed to conquer the world and/or put a man into space. Everything in the gamethe cities you found, the improvements you make, the units you build, the technologies you researchis just a cog in this machine, and the object is to be the first to build the most successful such machine. This is why all the civilizations in a standard game of SMC, be they the Americans, the Egyptians, the Chinese, or the Malinese, are basically interchangeable. They race up the same tech tree, build more or less the same units, and indulge in more or less the same behavior.
Such is easily forgivable, for SMC works not because it is a
true representation of the world and of history, but because it embodies a fairly widespread intuition about the direction and consequences of history. Call it the "Whig", the "Western Enlightenment", or the "Faustian/Promethean" theory of history, if you like; if you're feeling especially facetious, you can even call it the "Gene Roddenberry" theory of history. It's the idea that the history of mankind is the history of its progressive mastery of the physical world, culminating in its escape into the infinity of space. Whether or not you want to dismiss it as a culturally specific theory (a theory that would only occur to an inhabitant of Modern Europe/America), the fact remains that it does a good job of describing the general thrust of the last six thousand years.
Now, I don't know if Sid Meier and his team started with this theory and then tried to build a game that would let the player reenact the historical process it describes. But it doesn't really matter even if they didn't, because the game they created has structural features that can't help but give it this flavor. Those structural features are, more than anything else, the Tech Tree and the Victory Conditions. The Victory Conditions define the sought-after end state (a successful space launch or world dominationwhether defined in terms of conquest, preponderant influence, or culture). The Tech Tree is the path along which the player picks up the elements that will let him build the machine that will carry him to the end state, and it defines and orders these elements in a hierarchy of usefulness: you move along it so that you can get the ever-more-powerful items that will help you compete for the prize. In terms of goals and structures, there is little difference between SMC and Milton Bradley's
Game of Life.
Now, once you see this, you can see why some of the features that people suggest adding to the game
cannot appear. A "dark age" would be a frustration and not an organic part of an ever-upward civilizational path. Geography is denigrated because it is man's ability to leverage his assets, and not the nature of the assets themselves, that matters to his progress. Culture is useful only to the extent that it extends the player's base or allows him to more efficiently exploit it. AI civilizations that pursued different visions of the "good life" would be poor competitors. And so on.
Equally, however, you can free yourself to see alternate ways of describing history and hence see alternate ways of setting up a "Civilization"-style game.
This is why I said in an earlier post that the best "big" changes would be ones that tore out the "essential" features of SMC. The essential feature is not that it is tile-based or turn-based or possesses a tech tree. The essential feature is that it is based on and therefore limited by this particular theory of history. True, getting rid of that theory and substituting another would imply making deep changes to the internal structure and organization of the game. But that is a sequel to the main change.
So here is the "framework" I alluded to above: Return to history, in all its complexity, with an innocent eye, and apply to its multifarious phenomena a (simplifying) new theory of how it works. Then suggest ways that theory might be realized in a game.
Again, this is vague. So here is an example (not a proposal) of one way you might do it.
In the first half of the twentieth century, Arnold Toynbee offered up a theory of history that (as in SMC) took civilizations as the central unit, and argued that they operate according to a single set of internal dynamics. They are, however, unique unto themselves, and always mortal. The history of a civilization is always the history of its appearance, growth, breakdown, stasis, and decay. That process, in a nutshell, works like this:
A civilization is a community the responds to a crisis by developing a set of customs, traditions, and institutions to handle the challenge. Human creativity (or perversity; sometimes it comes to the same thing) being what it is, these reactions not only solve the challenge but outstrip it. In doing more than just solving a particular problem, these solutions create new problems, which occasion new evolutions in the civilization. This process of challenge, solution, and new challenge eventually ends when the civilization encounters a challenge that it cannot surmount. At this point the civilization ceases to be creative and becomes deeply conservative and rigid, doing its best simply to survive in the sub-optimal physical or social environment it has created. The best it can hope to do is survive as a kind of fossil; usually it succumbs to internal collapse, often accompanied by external invasion. That collapse dissolves the unified field of customs and institutions, creating a fresh field upon which survivors and invaders will create a new civilization, albeit one that takes over or adapts fragmentary remains of the preceding civilization.
The best concrete example of this is Greece-Rome. That civilization arose in the Aegean following the collapse of the Minoan civilization; its peculiar challenge was the environmental one of surviving in the environmentally hostile Greek peninsulas. The Greeks met the challenge by creating economically specialized city-states. This solved the problem of material subsistenceby concentrating on cash-crop farming and manufacturing they were able to generate the surpluses they needed to pay for food importsbut it led to a paradox: the city-states were politically separated but economically interdependent. The Greek ideal of belonging to a particular polis clashed with the economic reality that all the cities were part of a single material combine; worse, it was a combine that was deeply embedded in the non-Greek world. They were unable to resolve this tension peaceably, and realized a "solution" only when, exhausted by fratricidal war, they were unified first by Macedon and then by the Hellenized Romans. The city-state ideal continued, however, as realized in the erection of Greek colonies throughout the empire, in Alexandria, Caesarea, Antioch, etc., but it was all held in place by an external imperial structure and not by any organic internal development. Greek culture continued, but it was a static repetition of long-established forms. In the East, Hellenic culture was dissolved by the resurgent Syriac culture and replaced by an oriental-Christian hybrid (Byzantinism); in the West, Imperial authority was overthrown by invaders. The remnant population there, after an interregnum of several centuries, gradually gave birth to a Western civilization in much the way Greece itself had arisen out of the ruins of Minoa.
Similar stories, according to Toynbee, can be told about most everyone: Egypt, Babylon, India, China, Mesoamerica, Peru; even the Eskimos and the Polynesians fit the pattern, he claimed.
The salient points of this theory are three:
First, the underlying pattern is not one of birth, growth, stasis, and decay but of challenge and response. Faced with a challenge, communities evolve complex social behaviors, which themselves often create new problems. The pattern of challenge, response, challenge, and response continues until responses fail. (Toynbee allowed that it is theoretically possible for a civilization to continually best all challenges, but he was not optimistic.)
Second, civilizations differentiate themselves according to both the nature of the challenges they face and the differing creative ways that they meet them. The Greeks and the western barbarians both faced the problem of surviving in a post-imperial vacuum. The Greeks retained their parochial inheritance by carving out city-states. The barbarians, however, lost their tribal affiliations in a nebulously unified "Christendom" that was itself an adaptation of the imperial ideal; "Rome" as a state had failed, but as a spiritual home it survived in the form of the Church. Ties of kinship were replaced (or at least attenuated) by feudal relations that were reified by ecclesiastical authority.
Third, because different civilizations meet different challenges with different tools, they develop different conceptual toolkits, which in turn open and close different channels for future evolution. Not every technical improvement can be realized by every civilization; or, more carefully, not every technical improvement is as easily adapted by every civilization.
In summary: Civilizations are complex social adaptations to particular challenges. They evolve and develop in response to sequences of such challenges. The process ends either when there are no further challenges (which is at best a rare limiting case) or when challenges prove insurmountable. At this point they lapse not into a dark age but into a crepuscular twilight of conservatism and stasis.
No, it's not a very cheerful theory, but it has the merit of describing a world that looks very much like our own. Could it be realized in a fun and compelling game?
That's not the purpose of this post. I'll just offer a few observations about how you'd have to approach the problem.
Radical change in the theory of the game would necessarily imply radical changes in its structure. In "Arnold Toynbee's
Civilization," for instance, you would have to get rid of the "victory conditions," as civilizations never actually win. Instead, you'd probably have as a game goal the idea of putting off the moment you
lose as far as possible. The player might win big blocks of points for making certain kinds of improvements or discoveries, but this would be balanced against a steady and accumulating loss of those points. The game might end when those points dribbled down to zero, and the final score would be a function of how many turns the player lasted. If this sounds perverse, remember that "Tetris"another very popular computer gameis also one that no one has ever "won."
You would also probably have to get rid of the idea of Research. It's always been a faintly risible concept anyway, but a game like I've just described would have at its core the idea that new skills are won by performing certain actions: discoveries result from experiment, not abstract "research." It would, in a way, have to work like the promotions that military units now get in Civ IV, but applied to all units and probably also to cities. E.g.: If you want a new kind of ship that can cross the ocean, you would have to move one of your primitive boats a certain number of spaces; before you win the ability to build temples, you'd have to (somehow) generate a priest. The interface would work like a toolbox: to unlock these tools, you would have to do certain things. The relations between these tools could be made quite complex. You might have to unlock certain early tools in a certain order in order to unlock later ones. You might lose certain skills if you don't exercise them. And so on.
I mention getting rid of victory conditions and research not because I
want to see them go, but as examples of how fundamentally some of the changes would have to be. Nothing would be sacrosanct: units, specialists, even cities might have to be radically rethought. It would not be like making a "mod" of the current game. There's nothing wrong with hanging on to certain elements if it seems like they would have a necessary place in the radical redesign. Cities, in one form or another, would almost inevitably have to remain. But, to repeat what I said above, you'd have to return to real-world history with an innocent eye but armed with your new theory of how it works, and begin designing the new game more or less from scratch.
If you've read this all the way to the end, you have my sympathies and my gratitude.
