The Panopticon Wonder Discussion Thread

[chicorbeef]

Pizza is not a corporation.

Pizza Hut is.

Anyway, if we wanted to implement a "normal" culture victory, without other implications, we could just use Erik's idea of a time capsule/cultural archive.

I think the Utopia idea is left over from the Vanilla name.

 

[CrazyG]

Pizza Hut is.

Some corporations sell art, books, and music. I suppose those don't count either, because a corporation does it?

 

[wobuffet]

One distinction I worry the discussion has elided:
Personally, I support the 3 different Ideology-flavored CV capstone projects idea if and only if splitting them up has some gameplay value (compared to just having one project). For example,

• Each capstone has some unique bonus effect while being built. For example, the Freedom one gives +Happiness, the Order one +Gold, the Autocracy one +Combat Strength.
• Alternative possibility: each capstone has some malus while being built (so you really want to build it as soon as possible) – for example, some malus to Tourism to make it a challenging last hurdle.
• Project may start being built before Influential with everybody, but the CV win doesn't occur until Influential with everybody. While project is being built, +50% Tourism with the same Ideology.

 

[pineappledan]

One distinction I worry the discussion has elided:
Personally, I support the 3 different Ideology-flavored CV capstone projects idea if and only if splitting them up has some gameplay value (compared to just having one project). For example,

• Each capstone has some unique bonus effect while being built. For example, the Freedom one gives +Happiness, the Order one +Gold, the Autocracy one +Combat Strength.
• Alternative possibility: each capstone has some malus while being built (so you really want to build it as soon as possible) – for example, some malus to Tourism to make it a challenging last hurdle.
• Project may start being built before Influential with everybody, but the CV win doesn't occur until Influential with everybody. While project is being built, +50% Tourism with the same Ideology.

I care not for such matters. The game will be over in 6-12 turns by that point. no effect could possibly be worth the code it takes to write it. Whatever G decides w.r.t. this, I'm sure it will be fine. even nothing at all will be totally fine

 

[Legen]

What else would it mean?
Every other victory accounts for how your civilization prevents the rest from taking you down. Everything about a CV is based on influencing other civs and getting better deals in all things they don't have control over.
Ignore the culture assimilation part. Say that it's purely showing how much more refined your people are and the leaders of the world can't possibly claim to be similar regardless of any advances, weaponry, political savvy, or even similar policies and ideals. How does that work?
How does it make your civilization the unquestionable power? Have you achieved the ultimate policies that no amount of force or external politics can outmaneuver? Is that not a form of totalitarianism? There has to be something to address the rest of the world, otherwise I don't see how it claims victory as the only worthwhile civilization in existence.

Cultural victory could mean a lot of things, and be a mix of them as well.

One possibility is that your culture is influential enough in each nation that foreign leaders cannot openly oppose you without undermining their legitimacy to their own people. Some governments do establish their legitimacy around promoting themselves as an opponent of a perceived hostile/immoral nation; if your culture can influence enough of the population such that they do not dehumanize you, then that government (hopefully) lost a lot of its ability to oppose you. This is a more humanistic version of what a CV could be.

Another possibility is that foreign people prefer to adopt your culture, enough that a meaningful amount of them would try to live in your nation, be through mass immigration or by flipping their territories to your side. The immigration part alludes to older visions of civilizations having the power to draw "barabric" people to the civilized cities, the latter has more to do with how the rebel cities from unhappiness flip sides in Civ5. Not sure what to think of it, and probably far from realism.

A third way would be that your civilization's culture has been widely recognized as so far advanced, every other civilization is barbaric by comparison. I think the wonder idea tries to capture that, intentional or not. By this version, winning a CV means everyone else is forever seen in history as barbarians, with their cultural achievments overshadowed by yours.

 

[tu_79]

people in the US who identify as conservative and those who identify as liberal

I don't want to clutter so don't open the box if you are not interested.

Spoiler Conservative - liberal discussion :

Words have different meaning in different places. In the USA they use conservative as a synonim to Republican Party, but it is misleading.
Conservatives, in the XIX century, wanted to preserve Monarchy and Aristocratic privileges while Progressists, called Liberals at the moment, wanted to free the people from the arbitrary oppresion of land-owners. That meant to give power to burguers (people that lived in cities, not food), since in the absent of privileges, burguers had the money. And that was right for the moment. Burguers developed into entrepreneurs and the Industrial Revolution began.
A century passed, land-owners were on declive and bussiness people were ruling. Labor conditions were awful, unions grew strong and so the desire to change the situation came from working people. Bussinessmen were then the conservatives. They are still the Liberals, they don't want the State to mess with their bussiness, but if they were progressists in their beginnings, they are no more.

So when you talk about conservatives, you might be mixing the ethos of the word, the desire that things don't change, with the liberal ideology, since liberals are the conservatives nowadays. Being conservative or progressist has a psychological background, I agree. But ideologies are a product of the culture.

In addition, politicians use words in their own interest, confounding people. I'm quite confussed myself with USA parties. Are Republicans not democratics? Do Democrats hate Republic? Technically, a Republic is always democratic, since it is the people who decides who rules. Constitutional Monarchies can be democratic to a lesser degree. I hardly remember which one is the leftist, if any of them actually is.
Here in Spain we have a proof of misleading party names. PSOE is a socialist party in its name. But back in the 80s, the soon to be prime minister Felipe Gozalez, forced a change in the Party Statutes for the party to abandon marxism. This is what Tony Blair called the Third Way, turning a former socialist party into a moderated capitalist party. People that follow this party are called socialists, but they are socialist no more in the ethimological sense.

This discussion is only a proof that noone actually knows how in RL a cultural victory could look like.
The other types have been somehow present in history or are very easy to imagine because we had a taste of it.
Domination - yeah, someone was trying to conquer the world like forever
Science - space race was a good example, it was a proof that somebody was no. 1 in science / tech.
Diplo - there’s UN, all we need is a world-wide election for a leader, just a scale-up from regions, countries.
And culture - we see the process, we give it various names, but noone knows where it would lead or how it could end. Thus an arbitrary condition or extrapolation is used. We cannot measure culture or its influence like GDP or alike in RL, but in a game we have yields for that.

You are into something. Maybe we can't agree on anything because we don't know what a cultural victory looks like. But we know what being influenced is. Our young people here drink Coca-Cola, eat pizza and only seem to enjoy american blockbusters. Even worse, children at schools are starting to talk among themselves in English. It's logical. English is current lingua franca, at least in the western world. Hell, I'm writing in English in this forum, if I didn't I could not participate here.

All cultures have good things to share. Pizza, chinese food and manga are not american, but I believe they were introduced in my country by american movies. Even pizza, that was common in the neighbouring Italy, was pretty unknown here before the american movies. Maybe it was known for people that could afford to travel to Italy, but not for the common people, and certainly it was not in everyone's menu. Why we didn't copy pizza from the italians, but copied pizza from the americans?

I think that, in the end, we want to imitate those that are faring better than us. We copy with the hopes of being like the leaders, like the rich and the famous. We copy the culture of powerful nations thinking we can be powerful too someday.

If we see influenced status as this: the desire to copy anything that comes from the influential culture, then maybe we could advance a little. This does not imply that the influential civ cannot take good parts of other cultures or evolutionate. I think this is what we usually call 'Globalization'.

 

[verybiased]

"Time capsule"/ "Cultural archive" wonder.

(I am with those in this thread who don't see CV as monoculture and pure homogenization) How about the UNESCO or its World Heritage Centre?
P.S: because a significant difference between cultural and technological victory is how things we built at the dawn of our civilization get more important and there is as much focus on building new things that push our tourism output as having old things that get tourism because now people are staying in hotels to visit the Hanging Gardens. Tech victory is a victory looking forwards into the unknown, could cultural victory be one looking back at what we've achieved?

 

[Tantro]

How about the UNESCO or its World Heritage Center?

In regards to what a 'cultural victory' might look like.

Currently, UNESCO has the reach of a T-Rex. They've been unwilling to do anything against the continuous destruction of cultural heritage in Iraq and Syria as long as it receives financial support from top world stage players. Thousands upon thousands of artifacts are being dug up by looters due to the turmoil in the middle east. Ancient grounds look like someone took a gigantic shotgun and fired upon the ground with full spread. Invaluable stratigraphic data or archaeological context are being destroyed in the looting while antiquities are shipped and sold on the black marked in the west and wealthy players in Asia. This has been going on at least since the first gulf war. Beyond writing angry letters, condemning the looting, UNESCO has done f**k all to help with the problem. UNESCO is far from the portrayed image of a global institution that protects so called 'world heritage' all over the globe. It might have been close to its ideal in the 90's but due to a number of developing countries becoming active on the political world stage outside of the western political sphere UNESCO has been unable to keep up.

In addition, the use of 'world heritage' is a heavily politicized term, implying western superiority. Some British and archaeologists from the US love to dream up continuity between contemporary western civilization and ancient Mesopotamia, the 'cradle of civilization', while conveniently forgetting all about more recent Arabic and muslim pasts.

 

[verybiased]

UNESCO has the reach of a T-Rex

Gives a whole new meaning to "intangible cultural heritage". You make a good point, I was thinking more of the idea behind it but I can see how linking it to a real world institution might bring up associations that don't fit with a "victory".

 

[Omen of Peace]

What else would it mean?
Every other victory accounts for how your civilization prevents the rest from taking you down. Everything about a CV is based on influencing other civs and getting better deals in all things they don't have control over.
Ignore the culture assimilation part. Say that it's purely showing how much more refined your people are and the leaders of the world can't possibly claim to be similar regardless of any advances, weaponry, political savvy, or even similar policies and ideals. How does that work?
How does it make your civilization the unquestionable power? Have you achieved the ultimate policies that no amount of force or external politics can outmaneuver? Is that not a form of totalitarianism? There has to be something to address the rest of the world, otherwise I don't see how it claims victory as the only worthwhile civilization in existence.

My stance is: the player should be free to decide what it means. Hence why I suggest picking something generic and not forcing something upon players.
For some it may be peaceful soft power, for others panopticon-like mental coercion, ...

I look at game mechanics, and I see that CV is first-past-the-post much like SV[1]: you can be Influential with everybody yet have one or more other Civ be Influential upon you as well, and a few turns away from victory. So indeed, I don't see CV as unquestionable power. You just reached the status of "worlwide influential culture" first.

[1] in SV, another civ can launch a rocket 1 or 2 turns after you, so your power is not unquestionable either. You were first, however, and in a game that's all that matters. I don't think it says you're "the only worthwhile civilization" either.

Overall, I feel that you (and others as well) are projecting your notions unto the game.

 

[Infixo]

@tu_79 What you are describing is the process that is happening. But what is end result? One culture? Others dead? Assimilated? Division like ideology or religion? Polarization? That is what we don’t know.
But my entire point is that I don’t see how building a wonder fits into any of these scenarios.
Imho devs came up with a nice solution in Civ6 quantifying that process into tourists and setting a goal to make your empire the most visited one in the world (I simplify a bit, but that’s the idea). Edit. And it’s political, ideology, religion, etc. free.

 

[tu_79]

@tu_79 What you are describing is the process that is happening. But what is end result? One culture? Others dead? Assimilated? Division like ideology or religion? Polarization? That is what we don’t know.
But my entire point is that I don’t see how building a wonder fits into any of these scenarios.
Imho devs came up with a nice solution in Civ6 quantifying that process into tourists and setting a goal to make your empire the most visited one in the world (I simplify a bit, but that’s the idea). Edit. And it’s political, ideology, religion, etc. free.

I guess cultural victory could be unlocked simply by something that simply happens like enacting a world ideology, without further action required, and it will be prevented to happen sudden and unexpectedly. No building, no wonder. AI could be teached to overreact to number of influenced civs after UN is founded. Diplomatic civs may block world ideology if another civ has already influenced everyone and switch to other victory conditions.

 

[ashendashin]

My stance is: the player should be free to decide what it means. Hence why I suggest picking something generic and not forcing something upon players.
For some it may be peaceful soft power, for others panopticon-like mental coercion, ...

I look at game mechanics, and I see that CV is first-past-the-post much like SV[1]: you can be Influential with everybody yet have one or more other Civ be Influential upon you as well, and a few turns away from victory. So indeed, I don't see CV as unquestionable power. You just reached the status of "worlwide influential culture" first.

[1] in SV, another civ can launch a rocket 1 or 2 turns after you, so your power is not unquestionable either. You were first, however, and in a game that's all that matters. I don't think it says you're "the only worthwhile civilization" either.

Overall, I feel that you (and others as well) are projecting your notions unto the game.

I don't care if you think I'm some cynical bastard that can't think of anything besides the worst outcome. All I've advocated is a victory that makes sense and stands equal to the rest in how it erodes all claims to power.
Your point for SV makes sense with the Beyond Earth setting, but the whole point of it is to colonize a new world, so to me that's a victory that's separate from the rest.

Having everyone know of you does not stand equal to domination or being chosen as the world leader. Not being able to stand against you does not prevent others from moving on without you and working to undermine that block ASAP. Making the rest of the world seem barbaric in comparison and having the people flock to you is just...idealism to the extreme(also questionable as to how you can possibly motivate billions of people to develop such a mindset, hence the panopticon discussion), and I've already stated that ideologies make a mess of my argument so I voted in the polls for new wonders.

 

[Workerspam]

Cultural victory could mean a lot of things, and be a mix of them as well.

One possibility is that your culture is influential enough in each nation that foreign leaders cannot openly oppose you without undermining their legitimacy to their own people. Some governments do establish their legitimacy around promoting themselves as an opponent of a perceived hostile/immoral nation; if your culture can influence enough of the population such that they do not dehumanize you, then that government (hopefully) lost a lot of its ability to oppose you. This is a more humanistic version of what a CV could be.

For game purposes this is what I imagine a cultural victory in Civilization consists of. The bonus is you can flavor it anyway you choose:

• Your culture is so beloved and admired by another civilization that any attempts by their leadership to distance their civilization away are met with internal resistance (the benevolent view)
• Your culture has so thoroughly infiltrated another civilization that any attempts by their leadership to distance their civilization away are met with internal sabotage and course correction (closer to the panopticom view)

I like the Cultural Time Capsule as the finishing wonder. Your culture is the one the world recognizes as representative of human civilization and worthy of immortalizing.

 

[pineappledan]

Pizza, chinese food and manga are not american, but I believe they were introduced in my country by american movies.

Except Chinese food IS American/Canadian, paradoxically. Most of the things we think of as 'Chinese food' were invented by East Asian immigrants living in North America, trying to appeal to those white boys' sweeter palates.

There's a lot of things like that. Chicken tikka masala, for instance, is believed to have been invented in Scotland, and is a national dish of the UK.

 

[civplayer33]

I posted a couple of pages back how CV doesn't make much sense in the real world and that it simply exists to provide incentive for players to pursue culture and tourism as well as add another path to victory. The possibility of a civ being influenced by many other civs simultaneously is another good example of the lacking realism of this mechanism; how would a civilization benefit from influencing another in a way that makes it dominant over that civ if that civ is also influenced by 6 other civs? If dominance is not required then how can a civilization "win" (which necessarily means that the others lose) if everyone can be a "winner"? Either this game has a winner or it does not and if it does have a winner then the others are losers, so it doesn't make much sense to regard CV as some cushy feel-good "they listen to our music and like it" thing and in either case the existing mechanics are not that realistic; as I stated before as well, I would actually prefer culture and tourism to not lead to victory directly at all but instead simply to have a greater effect on the rest of the game so that the attainment of the other victory conditions (which IMO are more "real") becomes easier. Unfortunately I doubt @Gazebo would want to implement such a radical and no doubt extensive and arduous change this late in the mod development, however.
Therefore I think the focus should be on optimizing the fun and balance of CVs and not its realism, which is why I originally stated that I don't care much about the wonder names (and then got sidetracked somewhat...sorry).

Somewhat unrelated side discussion with @tu_79:

Spoiler :

I agree that politicians labeling themselves "conservative" or "liberal" is not really helpful, especially since the changes in policies they pursued over time do not match the changes in their labels; this is how one gets a situation where Angela Merkel, who calls herself conservative, is pursuing policies like mass immigration, which is clearly not a right wing position, and in fact more than 75% of the German population is in favor of immediately stopping mass immigration and has been for more than a year, so the great majority of the population is actually a lot more right wing than the supposed "center-right" party of A. Merkel, which reflects how Merkel is really much more left of the center than she pretends to be; this is not just about immigration, either, Merkel also instituted gay marriage, eroded Germany's sovereignty economically and militarily now as well and so on.

My original point was that I don't want "border dissolution" as the Freedom (a.k.a. Western) specific CV wonder. The reasoning I put forward was supposed to highlight that such a position has nothing to do with Western philosophical foundations but is simply a political sentiment, which can be found in other cultures as well (i.e. it is not even specific to the West). I elaborated that such sentiment is the result of personality characteristics that can actually be measured with great validity (especially Big 5 Personality Scale) and is replicable across cultures as well. When I was talking about conservatives and liberals I did not intend to make statements specific to the US only but specific to human nature; the reason why I used those terms instead of "right wing"/"left wing", for example, is because the US has a rather large and very accessible (for scientists) population and a rather nice bipartisan split, which makes it easy to study. When measuring Big 5 Personality Scale metrics one can actually predict with some reliability which party the person will vote for, though there are, of course, other factors at play as well. So you can just substitute "right wing"/"left wing" if you like since regarding the science I'm talking about they are what people will (usually) mean in the US when they talk about conservatives or liberals.
The fact that there is such a strong psychological and, since personality is partially biologically determined, biological basis for political opinion means that there is a certain bounding effect in the political landscape that does not change significantly over time spans of centuries (because evolution doesn't act that quickly and potential selective pressures are somewhat broad in this context); this means that there is a self-correcting mechanism at work, that can be observed right now with Trump's election and the rise of the New Right in Europe; part of this can be explained by the action of the Behavioral Immune System which is active more strongly in people who lean more to the right (they are also more sensitive to disgust) and partly by the violation of so many borders in the current time (e.g. the border around sexuality, around gender, around religion, around culture, around nations and so on) which evokes a visceral reaction in many people who are already predisposed to be more sensitive to the violation of borders.
This is why your statement that ideologies are a product of culture is only partly true; they are, in my opinion, first and foremost parasites on the religious substructure of our society, given power by the moral vacuum in the 19th century after the "death of God" as proclaimed by Nietzsche in "Thus Spoke Zarathustra" and defined by the personalities of the people at the extreme ends of their respective distributions (largely Conscientiousness and Openness to Experience) and only secondarily are they influenced by culture. You can see that in the differences between national socialism and marxism: the first is predicated on the idea that there are extremely important, distinctly defined categories concerning people (nation, race, but also the individual...this is like drawing borders around these things psychologically) while the latter is predicated on the idea that those categories do not exist (no borders) and every human being is equal so that any difference in life outcome must be due to oppression (with some chance sprinkled in). Culture then defines the more detailed parameters, like who the oppressor and the oppressed is, for example.

I hope I explained a bit more clearly why I'm not talking about political definitions here but about biological and psychological differences between people, which are present across cultures and are therefore clearly not part of any specific culture. The "border dissolution" idea is clearly not some idea foundational or even specific to the West but instead the product of people who are at the extreme ends of the personality distributions.

 

[CppMaster]

If dominance is not required then how can a civilization "win" (which necessarily means that the others lose) if everyone can be a "winner"? Either this game has a winner or it does not and if it does have a winner then the others are losers, so it doesn't make much sense to regard CV as some cushy feel-good "they listen to our music and like it" thing and in either case the existing mechanics are not that realistic;

You win, because you are the first one to be influential with all other civs, even when other can be close to that too. It's the same as you win by Science Victory, but an opponent is just a turn or two to launch his last part. You are the winner even if others are very close, like a race.

 

[civplayer33]

You win, because you are the first one to be influential with all other civs, even when other can be close to that too. It's the same as you win by Science Victory, but an opponent is just a turn or two to launch his last part. You are the winner even if others are very close, like a race.

I agree that one can draw the parallel to SV because SV is rather arbitrary (one could easily add another era and another big project like a Wormhole to another Galaxy or whatever) just like CV is arbitrary.

The reason I don't have a problem with SV, though, is that it makes a lot more sense (it is basically a technological milestone that lies at the end of the content that the creators have made); CV on the other hand does not make sense at all...if you go on with the game what would be the next target for culture? Eventually, at least in theory, all civs can be Influencial with each other and then what?

You can't have it both ways; either create a race that, if it is to be realistic, would allow further progress with a practically infinite set of further milestones and declare the first one past the post the winner or create a measure of dominance so that one civ can establish its superiority over others, which requires that the others are inferior as long as the first is superior...otherwise you get this weird situation where everyone wins eventually (which is fine, but not realistic). Which was my point in the first place, namely that CV isn't usefully comparable to the real world.

 

[CppMaster]

CV on the other hand does not make sense at all...if you go on with the game what would be the next target for culture? Eventually, at least in theory, all civs can be Influencial with each other and then what?

You can't have it both ways; either create a race that, if it is to be realistic, would allow further progress with a practically infinite set of further milestones and declare the first one past the post the winner or create a measure of dominance so that one civ can establish its superiority over others, which requires that the others are inferior as long as the first is superior...otherwise you get this weird situation where everyone wins eventually (which is fine, but not realistic). Which was my point in the first place, namely that CV isn't usefully comparable to the real world.

Why would that be the case even in theory? To be influential you have to produce more tourism than opponent have produced culture. If opponent produces more culture than you produce tourism then you won't catch up if you don't do something about it. This is contrary to building a spaceship, because every civ would eventually do it (if is not wiped out).
Also if you have influenced all civs then you have no more civs to influence left, so no further milestones either.

 

[civplayer33]

Why would that be the case even in theory? To be influential you have to produce more tourism than opponent have produced culture. If opponent produces more culture than you produce tourism then you won't catch up if you don't do something about it. This is contrary to building a spaceship, because every civ would eventually do it (if is not wiped out).
Also if you have influenced all civs then you have no more civs to influence left, so no further milestones either.

You misunderstood my post. I was agreeing to the common arbitrary nature between CV and SV and then contrasting their differences. That last paragraph you quoted talked about SV (race with milestones) and Diplo as well as Dom.Vic. (both use a measure of dominance) and then pointed out that CV is both at the same time, which doesn't make sense in reality; it can make sense in the game as a mechanic, of course, but then you could also institute a mechanic counting the number of times a civ has dropped a sack of rice as a measure of rice production and the first past 5 million times wins (China would be overpowered here, clearly ); then have the countries each consume rice and there you go, eventually every civ can produce a rice surplus that keeps stacking up...things like this cannot be found in the real world because they don't make sense, which is why CV doesn't make sense in the real world. Diplo. Vic. is like an election (so quite realistic), Dom. Vic. is like Germany winning WWII (so theoretically realistic, though thankfully it didn't happen) and SV is a race with milestones just like all the technological races going on in the world.