Civilisation and its discontents

One more turn…

For the release of the fifth version of the PC game Civilization, the makers ran an ad featuring a spoof ‘Civanon’ support group. The ad traded on the game’s infamous ‘one more turn’ irresistibility, and was entirely too close to the knuckle.

Civilization is what is known as a ‘4X’ game: eXplore, eXpand, eXploit, eXterminate. Indeed, it and its creator, legendary games developer Sid Meier, founded the genre. It is a game of fictional history: you begin as a wandering tribe of Neolithic hunter gatherers and end up - if you survive - as a modern nation state with space stations and a climate crisis.

The word ‘civilization’ derives ultimately from the Latin for city, and the game is perhaps inevitably about urban development. You spread out across the world, founding cities that become hubs for culture and innovation, allowing you to research new technologies, found new religions and recruit armies with which to do all your exploiting, expanding, exploring and exterminating.

It’s 1936 and Germany just became Fascist. Something tells me I might be needing my big battleship on the left there.

This might all sound rather procedural, but there’s a reason why the novelist Iain M. Banks said that he had to delete Civilization from his hard drive before he could complete his sci-fi novel Excession. Even with all of intergalactic space to play around in, the allure of the game was too great. Since its inception the central mystery of Civilization has remained the same: how something so tedious can be so goddamn addictive.

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After all, in one sense it’s just an extraordinarily elaborate interface for managing a spreadsheet. Data - how much wheat this farm grows, how strong that legion is, how many scientists work at this university - is fed into a load of algorithms that spit out their results in little animations of dying infantrymen and roiling smokestacks. Other games offer you the opportunity to be a deadly assassin, a spelunking archaeologist or a small moustachioed plumber, but only Civilization offers the experience of being a mid-level civil servant fossicking about with trade regulations and data entry. But with no actual reward beyond being slightly older when you’ve finished.

It’s in this minutiae, though, that we find part of the explanation for its addictiveness. More traditional console games offer escapism, but Civilisation is more like a craft in its call to absorbed attention, its ever-present to-do list. It is this absorption, combined with the autonomic tick-tock of turn-based play, that makes it so difficult to walk away from. You move your little citizens around the strange new map, uncovering the world, and then you end your turn and discover how your actions affect other civilisations. New landscapes open up before you, new possibilities for trade, for discovery, for extermination. One more turn, then. 

Addictions feel shameful because they represent the triumph of our bio-chemistry over our consciousness, as well as a waste of health or wealth. The only thing Civilization wastes is your time, but it is spectacularly good at that. And like bad TV, it is an especially shameful waste of time because it is so boring, little more than a collection of abstruse rules and intricate box-ticking.

It is descended from war games, massive training exercises beloved of armies from the Prussians onwards: big maps, lots of little figurines, endless fiddly rules that substitute for the chaos and unpredictability of actual life. Civilization is obviously intended to be a model of our own history, but in order to make a playable game, like a wargame it must simplify and codify the matter of history into a set of comprehensible strategies. 

The first version of Civilization came out in 1991, the year before Francis Fukuyama’s The End of History and the Last Man (1992), and it shares the fundamental post-Cold War assumption that civilisation is a winnable activity: that human society has a destination, and that there is a right way to reach it. (You can win Civilization by sponsoring the colonisation of Mars, which explains a few things about Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos.)

It’s an old fashioned view of history, but then it’s an old fashioned kind of game. Thirty years ago computers were nowhere near as capable of the creepy verisimilitude that they are today - you had to rely on the game box art to know that that jagged little clump of pixels you were jerking around the screen was supposed to be a horde of steppe barbarians; important events happened in captions and history was nothing but a cluster of text boxes. Meier has always been a designer more interested in ‘finding the fun’ in the mechanics of a game than in the visuals. Its compulsion is conceptual, not graphic. It does not create the immersive, richly rendered experience of a Legend of Zelda; visually it’s much closer to Candy Crush. 

But that is part of its power. Where Zelda pulls you into an intricately realised world, Civilization is all about creating a world of your own. Its simplifications open up space for imaginative engagement; when Iain M. Banks deleted Civilization it was because he was about to start writing a novel directly inspired by it. In Excession, his characters stumble across some highly developed technology that they call an ‘Outside Context Problem’, a discovery so beyond their current understanding that it threatens to destabilise their whole world view, their civilisation:

“[Civilisation is] part of where the idea of Outside Context Problems came from, you’re getting along really well and then this great battleship comes steaming in and you think, well my wooden sailing ships are never going to be able to deal with that.”

Even uninstalled, you can still feel it there in the back of his mind, underneath the game ‘Despot’ in his novel Complicity or the empire-defining game ‘Azad’ in his sci-fi novel The Player of Games.

In the 1970s one American, Dave Arneson, developed a set of wargame rules so complex that players played not an army, or a division, but the roles of individuals in a small German town under Napoleonic occupation. Then another wargamer, and fan of fantasy books, Gary Gygax, got hold of those rules and adapted them, naming his new game after the attributes that distinguished it from the obsessively accurate depiction of historical warfare: Dungeons & Dragons.

Where traditional war games try and abstract history through simplified rules, role-playing games like Dungeons and Dragons try and imagine the real lives within those abstracted worlds - less interested in the exact place of infantry squares on the field at Waterloo, more invested in standing in a ball room in Brussels, listening the distant guns, wondering what tomorrow held for history, Europe, yourself. The rules become a lens through which we might glimpse the reality they so poorly model, rather than restrictions they are prompts to the imagination.

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The game’s simplification of the mechanisms of history also reveals our own approach to historiography; how we frame and approach the stories we tell ourselves about our own culture, and other people’s. When you’re playing Civilization you’re offered the merest scraps of evidence to inform your decision-making: some economic data, some buried treasures, news of a distant battle. From these imperfect fragments we must construct a version of the truth for ourselves. Beyond the facts, all we have is imagination, empathy and insight. And this, ultimately, is what makes me play, again and again: the opportunity to enter a different mindset, to see the past not as a long story of cause and effect but as an eternal present in which the future is always doubtful. 

Look at him out there, this little explorer, lost beyond the borders of civilization: just him and his faithful hound, out in the wilds. Out where the languages are foreign and the customs strange, where they have not heard of Harald Hardrada and his Norsemen, where they do not know the Allfather, the slap of sea on a longship’s hull and the singing in the mead hall. To the north, the Ottoman city of Ankara straggles down to the riverside in the shadow of a distant volcano; to the south, the ziggurats of Uruk rise from the rice paddies to tower over the trees. Beyond them: the unknown. A rocky pass through a mountain range, into steaming, screaming jungle and then… what? What wonders, what dangers, what new civilisations?

UNIT NEEDS ORDERS.

Well, always time for one more turn, right?

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For more dungeon delving and game playing: