Sid Meier's Civilization
GameBy MPS Labs · Released Sep 30, 1991
Documents about Sid Meier's Civilization
Whitepaper16 pages
On Being Stuck in Sid Meier's Civilization: The Promise of Freedom in Historical Games
Sid Meier's Civilization promises players the freedom to rewrite world history through counterfactual "what-if" play, yet this promise is argued here to erode as the game advances.
- The report argues that Sid Meier's Civilization promises freedom to rewrite history through counterfactual play but progressively erodes that freedom as the game advances, leaving late-game play feeling stuck and unrewarding.
- It proposes three freedoms as an evaluative framework for historical games: the freedom to move, to disobey, and to create, drawing on David Graeber and David Wengrow's The Dawn of Everything.
- Civilization constrains player agency through mechanics such as cultural borders, algorithmically hardened diplomacy, locked government structures, and punishing government reversions.
DiGRAJun 2023
Report10 pages
Wargaming and Computer Games: Fun with the Future
Patrick Crogan's essay traces the history of wargaming to argue that modern computer games carry forward a distinctive relationship to the future, one rooted in the Enlightenment project of rational prediction and control.
- Patrick Crogan argues that modern computer games extend a relationship to the future rooted in the Enlightenment project of rational prediction and control, with the core activity being modelling and simulation.
- Narrative and cultural 'texture' are treated as marginal in games because the central pleasure lies in modelling complex systems, a claim that positions the essay within the ludological tradition while challenging its positivist tendencies.
- Wargaming is traced from Helwig's 1780 squared-board game through Reisswitz's 1824 Kriegsspiel, which impressed the Prussian military and was adopted into officer training, and on through postwar American military and research simulation.
DiGRAJan 2003
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