It’s the leaders, after all, that really count for Civilization players. Among fans, Beach explains, discussion of most hated opponents and most favoured allies always comes back to the individuals in charge. “The fact that Gilgamesh turned into Gilgabro in our fan community because everyone loved having him as their ally, and that the memes and cartoon art were always about the leaders? It became very clear that the identity of the other competing players is always the leader.”
Also, memes as statistical data points for evidence based decisions?!?
The existence of memes as an indicator of community consensus (of something positive or negative) has been a long-studied thing. Why do things become memes? Because they resonate.
I think that Gorbles is right, that memes
can stand as an "indicator of community consensus." It is not, as OurBall says,
statistical evidence. And moreover (as I have argued before), the designers
misinterpreted what this bit of evidence means. In the game Civilization, the player's
activity is building a
civilization: founding cities, building "buildings" in those cities, developing resources within one's territory, enhancing that civilization's capacity for making technological progress, developing its social and governmental systems, developing its religion, building its military etc. Doing so involves managing complex and interrelated sub-systems, and the result of doing so is the feeling that your civilization is getting territorially larger and also more complex in terms of its economy, social systems, etc. That is the
business that the game gives the player to do. It may not be how you "identify," but it's your intense focus.
In interacting with the other civilizations, it is true, players tend to talk about their leaders. That is for several reasons. The most important reason is that civilizations are complex entities, and so we need a kind of shorthand for synthesizing all that is going on in the rival civilizations. It can be a fun game challenge for me to hook up a road between two of my cities* (prioritize workers doing that over some other activity they might be engaged in, coordinate that with all of the other activities I am doing to build my civ, enjoy the increased $ for doing so, enjoy being able to move my troops more quickly). But when I deal with a rival civ, I don't want to be thinking about
its road system (and all of the other sub-systems that make it up as a civilization); that would be mind-boggling. I want one focused representation of that civilization. In rhetorical terms, this is the figure of thought called synecdoche: the part standing for the whole.**
And of course I pick a human being as the thing that is going to provide the "face" of that civilization. Our minds favor human beings as the representations of agency (and the rival civs have the agency of being able to declare war on you, being able to trade with you, etc.) We are irrepressibly anthropocentric. We see a human face in the crater-shadows on the moon's surface. Most memes (the "why not both?" girl, Captain America "I understood that reference," the thousand-yard stare soldier) do feature a human face. What that reveals is something about how our minds work
generally, rather than any particularly useful information about the Civ franchise.
So my basic position is like what Krikkit1 spells out:
I think the issue is
the Other player are identified best by their Leader
My identification is best with the Civ.
The designers' misinterpretation of player habits of speech lies in two things 1) assigning more meaning to the fact that players describe the rival civs in terms of their leaders (as I said, this is natural for us to do and not indicative of any special significance), and 2) not remembering that the central business that the game gives players is developing a
civilization. There are some games, like an RPG that more centrally focus on developing a person (the stats of your avatar). But civ does not. (I mean, Civ 7 tried to provide this in the leaders' development trees, but fundamentally, as a franchise, Civ does not.)
So player memes are a potentially useful data-point. But as always, the trick lies in how one
interprets data. They made a crucial and costly mistake in their interpretation of that data.
(By the way, I will happily acknowledge that this is easier to observe
after the fact than it was for them when they were making game design decisions.)
The mistake regarding the end-game is different, and probably trickier. I'll probably devote a separate post to that.
*Civ V is, as always, my reference point
**the game uses synecdoche in other places, by the way. Buildings, for example. My city of 36 million has
a public school? No, it has a public-school
system. Do I, as a player, want to individually build every school building in that system? No, of course not. My civilization gains a benefit (in science/turn) for me devoting production to that particular thing, a public-school system. But it images it to me in something concrete and tangible: a public school.
