Sid Meier's Civilization V
Game
2 documents in the library are about Sid Meier's Civilization V, from writers such as DiGRA and Eludamos: Journal for Computer Game Culture. Each has a summary and key insights with the page they come from.
Connections
Each row is a game or company named alongside Sid Meier's Civilization V, each column a document, oldest first. A mark means that document names it. Select a row to see those documents.
Documents about Sid Meier's Civilization V
Lifting the Fog of War: Militarism, Colonialism and Encyclopedic Pleasures in Digital Play
This paper examines the design concept of fog of war (FOW), the limiting of visible information in strategy and exploration games, and argues that its meaning has shifted from a representation of military risk and uncertainty to a source of exploratory pleasure in entertainment gaming.
- The paper argues that the 'fog of war' mechanic has shifted meaning from representing military risk and uncertainty to a source of exploratory pleasure, with the obscured map reframed as 'unfinished business' inviting players to uncover the game world.
- Its central thesis is that 'lifting the fog' in contemporary games enacts a colonial fantasy in which unexplored terrain is cast as terra incognita, a space of untapped potential to be mapped and possessed, obscuring the violence of colonial cartography.
- The authors contend that fog-as-fun parallels the goal of military simulation: eliminating friction and uncertainty to create a 'closed world' that can be fully known and controlled.
"Was Barbarossa Not German?!": Nation, History, and Identity in Civilization Players' Online Discussions
Trattner's 2025 study examines how players of the Civilization series conceive of nation, history, and identity in discussions on a German-language forum, the Civilization Webring Forum, drawing on roughly 59 threads from 2001 to 2023.
- The study analyzes roughly 59 threads from 2001 to 2023 on the German-language Civilization Webring Forum, using qualitative content analysis to examine how players conceive of nation, history, and identity.
- Its central argument is that prior scholarship assumed players passively absorb Civilization's primordialist, essentialist, and nationalist ideologies, whereas players' own discourse, shaped by their national identities, actively interprets and tests those ideas.
- Players use the terms "nation" and "civilization" interchangeably, and they define a "real" nation by historical continuity and cultural cohesiveness, which leads them to disqualify the United States as a civilization.