Unhappiness is a dreaded condition in the Civilization game series. Unhappy citizens stop working, stop researching scientific pursuits and, worst of all, start rioting.
In the new Sid Meier’s Civilization VII, which introduces three historical ages and a mounting series of crises during the transitions between them, my ancient Babylonian empire was running smoothly and expanding with ease. Then, suddenly, things struggled to feel cohesive. The game declared that my empire had fractured “as once-loyal settlements seek their own path forward.”
The unhappiness in my cities and towns grew so severe that several outlying settlements began trashing their districts and looking to outside civilizations for support. While I worked at putting out fires started by rioters, my neighbor Napoleon swooped in and quickly conquered one of my towns. This started a territorial war that only deepened the unhappiness of my population. Soon, half my towns were in revolt.
While following your chosen civilization’s path in Civilization VII, from the rough-hewed settlements of the past to the glistening megalopolises of the future, you move through ages that transform not just your technologies, government and civic policies, but also the broader identity of your civilization itself.
With its precipitous rises and falls, Civilization VII, which will be released on Tuesday for PCs, Macs and consoles, is a departure for the series. Although past iterations have had revolts, diplomatic incidents and civic upset, they tend to feel less closely connected to the ways that historical forces can boil over into crisis and conflict.
The violent and chaotic cuts here accurately reflect a world history where many things can happen all at once and often with surprising swiftness. History doesn’t always move forward in the routine, turn-based lock step of the 4X genre (explore, expand, exploit, exterminate) that Civilization popularized. More often, root causes like financial instability, cultural changes and oppressive hierarchies stay below the surface until emerging in a cacophony of war, revolution and natural-disaster-fueled chaos.
It feels appropriate to be playing this game at this point in America’s history. The coronavirus pandemic was an event of immense disruption. The whole planet came to a standstill; many industries floundered and either transformed completely or disappeared. At the same time, we had a leader in President Trump who could compound the feelings of disorientation. We are a divided and unhappy nation, and it’s difficult to know where to go from here.
It’s in states of disorientation that societies can see change that appears to happen overnight. What seemed impossible during periods of greater stability can now be pushed through.
Naomi Klein posits this in “The Shock Doctrine,” a 2007 political history in which she points to a series of major political shifts in the latter half of the 20th century as examples of moments when societies faced crises and changed dramatically: the end of apartheid in South Africa. The Pinochet dictatorship in Chile. The war in Iraq under George W. Bush.
Those who pick up Civilization VII will be buffeted by these sorts of crisis scenarios, as well as by increasingly violent environmental catastrophes like flooding rivers and erupting volcanoes. It’s easy to see why dramatic political change can result.
It took a hurricane in New Orleans for real estate conglomerates to condemn many of the housing units once occupied by poor residents and for the city to try a radical approach to its education system like privatizing it with charter schools. It took a tsunami in Sri Lanka after a cease-fire in its civil war for its tourism industry to kick out the fishing villagers who once lived on its ravaged beaches. The end of the Soviet Union brought precipitous economic collapse, which along with pressure from Western banks led to a corrupt bifurcated society ruled by oligarchs.
Civilization VII evokes the dynamics of these historical moments through its gameplay, by always having crises accompany change. The identity of your starting civilization — Aksum, Egypt, Khmer, Maya, Rome, etc. — cannot shift from one age to the next without disruption, without an often overwhelming amount of chaos that threatens to bring everything crashing down.
Each transition disrupts the smooth, automatic function of a civilization. The people want more from your leadership; you can no longer ride out your deficits, borrowing against tomorrow. Tomorrow has arrived.
In the game’s first age, antiquity, you establish cities and towns and map out the geography of your starting continent. Once you have a nascent empire — spreading out a bit, meeting a few other civilizations, and discovering the oceanic borders of your land mass — the game moves into the exploration age, which introduces seafaring, colonization and religious proselytizing. The final age is the modern one, with the world now mostly settled and divided up, its borders more sharply defined and ossified.
In my play-through as the Babylonian empire, surviving into the exploration age automatically quelled the uprisings. I adopted a cohesive new identity, of the Abbasid empire, and proceeded to spread my civilization’s Islamic beliefs far and wide, with an endless army of missionaries. I managed to ride out the threatening rise of the mercantile class and the bourgeoisie, wrap up the exploration age, and make it a few turns into the modern age, only to have war declared on me by several civilizations at once.
During Civilization VII’s catastrophic transitions, it’s easy to lose hope, to drift unsure into a dissociated doomerism. I lost one town to riots, another to invasion, and the production in my capital is stalled.
It’s hard not to resign myself to powerlessness in the face of severe catastrophes that seem to appear out of nowhere. But persevering in the face of disaster usually means making it out to the other side, eventually. Remember that the potential for change can work both ways. The civilization that makes it out of a crisis often won’t look anything like the one that went in.
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