Is civ a sandbox game?

[GrayingGamer]

Setting it up to do different interesting things is the game you play.

I think you're 'playing' with this 'thing,' but I stand by my assertion that it's not actually a game.

Anyway it doesn’t really seem so black and white: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sandbox_game, with especially https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Non-game on the border between games and play/toys.

Anyone can disagree, but at the same time it’s pretty reasonable for someone else to think there can be games without objectives.

Certainly - this has definitely become an academic discussion.
I have tried to be very clear about the claims I am making and the definitions I'm using. My claim that games have goals/objectives/win-conditions is the standard definition, it's not just my own hair-brained idea. Others have been fine to disagree with me (this is part of the fun), but they should do the same.
If there can be games without objectives, I just think that anyone making that claim should be equally clear about:
1. What exactly is a game
2. How is it distinguished from a toy and just general play

That second wikipedia article about edge cases is notable because they're actually calling them 'non-games' because they don't have objectives, which just supports my claim. Some of the examples they bring up would be better classified as 'software toys' (and reading it again, that's exactly what Will Wright asserted); they were probably called games for simplicity sake or marketing, but they aren't really games by any normal definition.

 

[user746383]

Sure, I’m not particularly interested in a semi-formal debate about it, just thought the people who felt games without objectives were still games had an interesting perspective and that their “claims” didn’t need to be shot down. Your point of view is really interesting to read about too, though I personally don’t think there’s anything at all wrong with the simple definition of game that marketing teams and many other people use.

 

[Lazy sweeper]

Civilization never was a sandbox game like Sims or SimCity. Civilization always had defined conditions for winning and losing. It's not even a historical simulator like EU - for Civilization games balance and gameplay was always more important than historical accuracy. Civilization is historically-themed strategic game.

The main indicator of sandbox game is having player-invented goals. Civilization always was bad at this - most of the things were done for winning, but to small extend it always had those goals and Civ7 is not an exception. For example, I've seen several posts like "look at my long wall". That's exactly the thing people do in sandboxes.

I like to think about it in other terms.
Take an Agatha Christie's book. It's short. Complex. Subtle. By the end of it you might be given a clue to what happened and then the story ends.
That's comparable to nightmare difficulty in a game like Doom II. That's a truly sandbox experience.

A videogame "sandbox" doesn't need to mean to be able to build your own world literally like the Sims but it's more like the level of difficulty. The simplification effect, the
globalization of all the genres into some more "casual" experience, with high level of instantgratification, thus removing all kind of barriers or learning curves.

In that sense Civilization is a sandbox experience in that it takes you into an automated world, where there are no real challenges outside yourself and what you want
to accomplish. The modern Civ game, like all majority of modern games, follows the same trend. And in doing so has removed the nightmarish aspect
of having to understand all the nuances of an Agatha Christie story.

So yes, it is a sandboxed experience in this hypothesis.
A dystopian sandboxy world devoid of any challenge, empty.
And in that sense it is very like the Sims.

Winning and losing is comparable to understand who the real assassin is in an Agatha Christie's book before the end of the book reveals it to you, and just have someone who already read
the book just tell you the end, but doesn't care for why the end it's only part of the story. The book never ends at the end of it. Only a superficial reader will get is akin to winning or losing.
The other reader, will stay in that world for hours on end thinking about it, then read it again...

So now we come back playing the highly customizable Civ 3 and 4, with extremely hard difficulties, but that we can understand, and relate, while the rest can enjoy reading Mickey Mouse.

 

[Smellincoffee]

I wouldn't think of any of the civs as a sandbox game, principally because so much of my gaming has been simulators like Rollercoaster Tycoon, SimCity, and The Sims. I wouldn't say these games are easy -- the original Sims 1 involved constant motive work, and Impressions' Games city-builders had supply management systems that were complex and challenging. The difference in a sandbox game, though, is that when what you've been working or building gets disrupted, there's no "Game Over", fade to play, restart from checkpoint. Instead, the player keeps working in the box, trying to find a way to rebuild in another way that won't fail. In Civ, though, while you are building something, there are enemy AIs who are directly trying to make you lose. It's more of a win/lose zero sum game than the creative building and problem-solving of a sandbox.

 

[Oberinspektor Derrick]

I think part of what made Civ popular was the ability to accommodate the min/maxer and the sandbox player. With Civ 7, they definitely alienated the sandbox player.

They alienated both.
In civ 6 there are still a multitude of ways to play that are competitive for good win times, but I'm not forced down any of those roads and can still discover new ways to play to this day.
And in the case that some "milestones" are options that are arguably better than others (work ethic religion in the unmodded base game), that's nothing a quick mod can't fix as its just tweaking numbers.
Civ 7 on the other hand is designed like a trash game from the very start and at its very core, and there's only so much lipstick that you can stick on that pig.