What social construct is Civilization simulating?

[Mojotronica]

Is it simulating nations? Or is each civilization something larger than a nation?

Here's the closest dictionary definition of a civilization --

2. The type of culture and society developed by a particular nation or region or in a particular epoch: Mayan civilization; the civilization of ancient Rome.
http://dictionary.reference.com/search?q=civilization

It's not entirely consistant though -- the Egyptians could be thought to represent a nation, but the Greeks seem to represent a culture more than a nation -- since people of many nations have been thought of as Greek -- the Cretans, the Athenian/Spartans, the Macedonians, the Byzantines, modern Greece..

(Before Conquests was released I always thought of the Greeks as having "culture flipped" the Eastern half of the Roman empire in 395AD, and the resulting Civ was Greek, rather than Roman.)

Admittedly the game isn't great at simulating historical reversals -- winning is all about momentum, and increased corruption is the only consequence of reducing the number of Civs in the game.

According to Sam Huntington's Clash of Civilizations, there are seven or eight major Civs in the world today -- here's his definition:

What do we mean when we talk of a civilization? A civilization is a cultural entity. Villages, regions, ethnic groups, nationalities, religious groups, all have distinct cultures at different levels of cultural heterogeneity. The culture of a village in southern Italy may be different from that of a village in northern Italy, but both will share in a common Italian culture that distinguishes them from German villages. European communities, in turn, will share cultural features that distinguish them from Arab or Chinese communities. Arabs, Chinese and Westerners, however, are not part of any broader cultural entity. They constitute civilizations. A civilization is thus the highest cultural grouping of people and the broadest level of cultural identity people have short of that which distinguishes humans from other species. It is defined both by common objective elements, such as language, history, religion, customs, institutions, and by the subjective self-identification of people. People have levels of identity: a resident of Rome may define himself with varying degrees of intensity as a Roman, an Italian, a Catholic, a Christian, a European, a Westerner. The civilization to which he belongs is the broadest level of identification with which he intensely identifies. People can and do redefine their identities and, as a result, the composition and boundaries of civilizations change.

http://www.alamut.com/subj/economics/misc/clash.html

His list of the major contemporary civilizations:

Western
Confucian
Japanese
Islamic
Hindu
Slavic-Orthodox
Latin American
and possibly African

Each of those major Civs can be divided into sub-categories, important but not independent of the larger Civilization category.

Civilizations obviously blend and overlap, and may include subcivilizations. Western civilization has two major variants, European and North American, and Islam has its Arab, Turkic and Malay subdivisions. Civilizations are nonetheless meaningful entities, and while the lines between them are seldom sharp, they are real. Civilizations are dynamic; they rise and fall; they divide and merge. And, as any student of history knows, civilizations disappear and are buried in the sands of time.

 

[superslug]

Is it simulating nations? Or is each civilization something larger than a nation?

I personally think a civilization is larger than a nation. In regards to the game, I'd say that most of the available slots are/were civilizations at some point, although there's a few thrown in that are just nations.

Admittedly the game isn't great at simulating historical reversals -- winning is all about momentum, and increased corruption is the only consequence of reducing the number of Civs in the game.

Agreed, although there's no way to address this without abandoning the very successful core premise of the game.

 

[warpstorm]

It's a culture, IMHO, not a country.

 

[fazzoletti]

No it must be a country, not a culture. The fact that Germans and Italians (in the RW) might feel somehow related has already been accounted for in Civ3 -->culture groups