You awaken on a hexagonal tile. It is the year 4,000 B.C. You can see just a few tiles beyond yours: to the north a desert; to the south a shoreline; to the east, alarmingly, an angry-looking volcano. The tiles beyond are shrouded in shadow. Over the next 6,000 years you will explore tile by tile until you have uncovered the whole globe, expanding your empire, waging war and making peace with your neighbors, inventing hydroelectric dams and space shuttles and nuclear arms.
This is the basic structure of every installment in the turn-based strategy game series Sid Meier’s Civilization since its debut in 1991 (although in the earliest games, the tiles were square). For each iteration, the designers follow a rough formula: One-third of the game’s rules and mechanics are the same as in previous games, one-third are altered, and one-third are new.
Sid Meier’s Civilization VII, which was released on Tuesday for PCs, Macs and consoles, had the designers struggling to contain the new to just one-third. “Right out of the gate we had some big, bold ideas,” said Ed Beach, creative director at Firaxis Games.
One big change is that the new game is split into three distinct “ages” — antiquity, exploration and modern — that have their own dynamics and mechanics. The leader characters are also now fully decoupled from their historically accurate homelands; in Civilization VII, you can make Benjamin Franklin lead Meiji Japan, or put Charlemagne in charge of the Shawnee.
Previous games in the franchise mostly pit heads of state against each other. Civilization VII broadens that choice to leaders with much wider skills.
“No one explores better than Ibn Battuta,” said Dennis Shirk, the executive producer at Firaxis. “No one does diplomacy better than Machiavelli. No one can set up a government better than Confucius.”
It was important not to change too much, Shirk said, emphasizing that the core game loop always needs to feel like Civilization. The balance between novelty and consistency is important, agreed Nikhil Murthy, an independent game developer who has played the game for as long as he can remember.
“Many players have played the previous version into the ground,” Murthy said. He estimates that his father, who plays no video games other than Civilization, has devoted 3,000 to 4,000 hours to each version.
Playing Civilization is a form of meditation for Murthy — “something to do with your hands while you think” — who said it can be fun to play as a dominant empire. Sometimes, though, Civilization unnerves Murthy. In one version, a slavery option stopped him short. In others, it was the way the game pitted civilizations against “barbarians.”
“That’s a dichotomy that, historically, I know which side I’d be on,” said Murthy, who is Indian.
One day, while Murthy was reading the novel “Ulysses,” he came upon a passage where an Irish nationalist mocks British civilization as “syphilisation.” That very Joycean pun inspired him to create an elaborate parody-tribute game that he released last year: Nikhil Murthy’s Syphilisation, in which a group of Indian students try to collaborate on a group project about Gandhi and Churchill in a world made of hexagonal tiles.
The Civilization games have attracted considerable academic and philosophical attention because of their popularity and their attempts to tackle all of human history.
Murthy cited a favorite passage about Civilization from the book “Gamer Theory” by McKenzie Wark, a New School professor of culture and media: “Whoever wins is America, in that the logic of the game itself is America.” You can play as whomever you like, Murthy said, but the victorious nation always resembles the United States immediately after the Cold War, a moment when pundits spoke of the “end of history.” It is no coincidence that the first Civilization game came out the same year the Soviet Union fell.
Some new features in Civilization VII seem designed to address those types of academic complaints. Barbarians have been reframed as “independent powers,” and their actions are more nuanced. The game’s historical veneer is much more lovingly detailed than in previous installments. There is a palpable and sincere appreciation of the art, music and architectural styles of cultures and societies wherever they originate. If you play as the Chola Empire, you get access to ships specific to South India with names in Tamil.
When researching the original Civilization, Sid Meier consulted the children’s section of his local library; Civilization VII has two Ph.D. historians on its design team, and they consulted with other experts to incorporate accurate details of each of the game’s dozens of nation-states and historical figures.
But Murthy said that no matter how many changes are made to character selection and rule sets, the Civilization series maintains a deeply colonialist worldview at its core.
“It’s winner take all,” he said. “It’s growth for the sake of growth. And it’s history from above, not below. All three of these pillars have remained entirely intact throughout the series.”
Those stubborn ideas are right there in the name of the game genre that Civilization originated: 4X, which is an abbreviation for explore, expand, exploit, exterminate. One of the points of Syphilisation, Murthy said, was to demonstrate that a cooperative approach to a 4X game (and, by extension, real-world geopolitics) is entirely possible, if only the developers were willing to try it. When he plays Civilization, though, he feels a certain obligation to play it as designed.
“I want the Giant Death Robot,” he said, referring to a technology that becomes available near the end of Civilization V and VI. “And if I’ve unlocked the Giant Death Robot, I want to use the Giant Death Robot.”
Civilization VII is an empire-expanding simulator that arrives as President Trump is threatening to annex Canada, Greenland, the Panama Canal and Gaza. Some players feel aligned with the game’s worldview and real-life parallels; others experience dissonance between what they believe about the world and how the game guides them; still others view Civilization as a math problem that just happens to have a historical surface.
A game this complex can be enjoyed in many ways. The philosopher Bernard Suits put gamers in four categories: players, triflers, cheats and spoilsports. “The one that interests me is trifling, where you don’t really care about winning,” Wark, the New School professor, said in an interview. “You’re just interested in exploring the rule set. So your civilization inevitably gets defeated, but you find little affordances as you go along.”
Beach and Shirk, the lead developers at Firaxis, said that Civilization VI was the first game in the series for which they got detailed metrics about player patterns. They were shocked to learn that under 40 percent of Civilization players ever finish a single game.
For many Civilization players, it seems, winning isn’t everything. But maybe winning at Civilization would mean more, Murthy argues, if there were more ways to win — such as an option to work with your neighbors to make a better society for all.
“It doesn’t need to eliminate the rest of the win conditions,” he said. “They could add a cooperative win condition at very little game design cost. And the payoff is still tremendous.”
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