Civilization II

The purpose of this series is to reflect on things embedded in my past that directly influence my thinking. Most are so much a part of my life that I scarcely see them.

I’m a gamer and a Gen-X’er, so I spent a lot of my adolescence playing video games. I’m not deluded enough to consider this a time of booming productivity, but it wasn’t all simple recreation.

Growing up, I never really cared about history. It didn’t interest me. Most of my history education took place in fundamentalist Christian schools. I was getting a ridiculous Texas-style history and science education before it was funny.

This experience signaled to me that history doesn’t matter. It’s amazing how crucial matters can be casually dismissed when you’re marking time until an ageless, omnipotent carpenter kick-starts Armageddon.

Pardon my digression

I don’t know exactly when my love of history developed, but Civilization II played a large role. I didn’t play the first game (I didn’t have a PC back then), but by the time the second game came out, I had a 486.

All I can really remember about that period was that I played two games: Civ II and Master of Orion II. Both are time sinks. Both are 4X games. but where they differed was in style and gameplay. Civ II made me wonder about history and technology because it was less fictionally based than its sci-fi counterpart.

My formal education failed to kindle curiosity about history, but this game succeeded. Fast forward to 2007: Civ IV is released. Now I’m a history and counterfactual addict – I’d watched Connections and Cosmos. By this point, I’m starting to cultivate a big-picture view of things. And I’m hooked yet again.

Opening Theme from Civilization 4

How I got that way

• All technology is related
  You can’t have what came after without first having what came before. The elaborate tech-tree drove this point home.
• Culture is a force
  Those expanding and contracting cultural borders caused me to understand the role of institutions in local and global power.
• Political borders change
  A human life is short, but entities like nations have a substantially longer lifespan. Look at a map. Now imagine you could speed time up and watch the shifting borders. We lose sight of this because we’re nailed to a short time-frame.
• Religion is social technology
  Religion confers benefits, happiness, and cohesion among political entities.
• It didn’t have to turn out this way
  No matter how rock-solid the past may appear, it didn’t have to be that way. It might have been some other way – some different configurations that would have led to a very different now.

Then there’s the accidental learning that took place when I read the Civlopedia. That in-game reference would inform me of the game’s mechanics. But every so often, I’d read about this history of the tech in question and then learn how far back pottery technology goes.

Keeping it in perspective

Civilization 5 will be released this year.

Washington DC wasn’t settled by George Washington in 4,000 BC. And no, a tribe didn’t decide to research horseback riding for 100 years and then – boom – manifest a team of horsemen. Obviously, it doesn’t work that way.

These are concessions to fun that keep the game interesting enough to learn those lessons later. An educated eye might find the game crude. and my lay-observations would seem quaint.

But for a kid who didn’t know or care about history, it wedged a foot in the door and created the space to care about humanity. Every cool subject I’ve learned about since can be directly traced to this experience. That’s one awesome tech-tree.