A few days ago I found myself with a free evening and decided to make good on a promise I'd made to myself over and over again during the last year: to play the game Civilization!
I'm sure most of you are familiar with the game but if not, here's what it is. You play an immortal tyrant who's task it is to build up a small settler tribe from a handful of members to the most successful* tribe in the world, but basically just survive and thrive. You have absolute power to control the movement of civilian or military units, city production (which is and always has been limited to one project per city) as well as some resource assignment, scientific goals and most recently cultural goals too (again, one at a time per field). There is some limited diplomacy, which has built up as the game series has progressed. Obstacles to your.
Success is measured by points, contributions to which are the metrics of the survival and wellbeing of your subjects, such as health, happiness, population count, military victory, territory, etc. But there are ways to finish the game and win, such as building great projects (like sending a spaceship to Alpha Centauri), or being the only civilization left. Your only obstacles to conquest are civil unrest (most often due to lack of food or health) at home, and war from outside. It's pretty simple really. 😅
The bread and butter of the game is building, moving and operating units (civilian units improve the land, military units provide deterrent and fight if required), building stuff in your cities and trying to navigate the technology tree of science (as well as the cultural tree in later games) with a long term yet reflexive plan.
Sounds boring but it's awesome! The first game I played in the series was Civ 2 and I was hooked fast, I played it endlessly. I loved the slow pace of the game and the detail with which you had to plan and coordinate ever increasing numbers of units and cities, taking into account terrains, other computer players and your own populous.
Years on, a reflection on the state
At the time it didn't seem odd to me that you as player would have full control of the state and the arms of the state, and that you'd be pitted against the other states in aggressive competition. It's a computer game, and one generally has compete control of the environment. I was familiar with other planning and strategy games before this, such as DinoPark Tycoon, SimCity 2000 and Command & Conquer: Red Alert. They're all awesome games where you have almost complete control, sometimes direct bodily control, of other people and their environment, in different aspects and flavors depending on the game.
When I finished playing a few centuries in Civ 5 yesterday, I thought, man this is perverse. I have complete control of this state. In these worlds the state is completely taken for granted. When I move onto new territory it is either unclaimed (and thus uninhabited), inhabited by barbarians (which deserve only death) or by another state, which I can only enter by agreement or take by force. I can send us all to our deaths, challenge others to theirs, and hopefully eventually rule the entire global. It's a nightmare.
Guns don't kill people, kids who've played computer games do (with guns)
There's the old idea that video game violence contributes towards violence in players. This has been challenged roundly, and rightly so, though it continues to be brought up from time to time. This was put well in a Forbes article by Erik Kain:
Every few months or so, somebody comes out with some fear-mongering jibber-jabber about how video games are corrupting our youth, making our young men terrible killing machines. They always ignore the fact that in nations with high rates of video game usage, violent crime is generally exceptionally low; that as video games have become more popular and realistic, violent crime has fallen; that in spite of the horrific shootings we keep seeing, these are never caused by video games, and have their roots in far more complex and difficult to understand phenomena.
What about statism in computer games, does it make people more statist? "Yes" was my first intuition, of course, they seem to legitimise the use of brutal and meticulous force and coercion, especially of your "own" people, to master the environment, all the other people, and the very stuff of nature and the cosmos. It is pure destruction wrapped up in the cosy premise of the eternal state.
But, perhaps not. Who out there among you love these kinds of games and yet is a libertarian, voluntryist or anarchist? Why do you love it? Is it because it is the Yang to your Yin? The guilty pleasure, perhaps exorcising the thing your most against, sadistically showing yourself just how much fun it is to control everything in the world?
And the thing is that although there seems to be no causal link between computer game violence and real world violence, that doesn't mean that playing these games have no effect at all on anything. That would be like saying that a reading a certain book is totally harmless and has no effect on you.
Learning from the nightmare
I found a super interesting player who posted a story on Reddit about their almost 10 year long game of Civilisation II. That is mind blowing dedication! They said:
[...] The results are as follows.
- The world is a hellish nightmare of suffering and devastation.
- There are 3 remaining super nations in the year 3991 A.D, each competing for the scant resources left on the planet after dozens of nuclear wars have rendered vast swaths of the world uninhabitable wastelands.
The only governments left are two theocracies and myself, a communist state. I wanted to stay a democracy, but the Senate would always over-rule me when I wanted to declare war before the Vikings did.
[And due to constant war] cities are not only tiny towns full of starving people, but that you can never improve the city. "So you want a granary so you can eat? Sorry; I have to build another tank instead. Maybe next time."
Is this kind of thing training us to be authoritarian demagogs, using either religion or communism as the cover story, in order to overrule dissenting voices, because we know what's best? Perhaps it's a stark warning of what the future might be like if we keep competing so ruthlessly. Or maybe it's just the game mechanics played out to their absurd conclusion.
Taking it literally
Is Civilization a platform for the ideas of the state?
I've been thinking a lot about the idea of certain kinds of speech being allowed to be spoken somehow legitimizes it, or in other words the idea that if we do not try to stop certain kinds of speech from being said (especially in public or by a public figure) then we are tacitly endorsing it. It's the viewpoint of "no platforming" for example, that this tacit endorsement will lead to recruitment to organisations which promote contrary ideologies.
If you take Civilization (and other empire based Real Time Strategy games really) literally, you might say that it is a platform for promoting statism at least or authoritarianism at most (you can play as an explicit fascist or communist), just like Monopoly could be seen as a game for promoting ruthless capitalism.
Monopoly is purported to have been designed as a critique of capitalism and landlords, which backfired when people just wanted to compete in a fun game. Does it them promote capitalism, challenge it, or something else? Are we all now more or less accepting of capitalism having played it as children, or simply had a richer childhood?
Gaming as artistic expression
I found out about Vincent Ocasla, a "22-year-old architecture student living in the Philippines", in a Vice article where they call him "The Totalitarian Buddhist Who Beat Sim City", obviously tongue in cheek 😜
In his own words:
[The movie Koyaanisqatsi] presented the world in a way I never really looked at before and that captivated me. Moments like these compel me to physically express progressions in my thought, I have just happened to do that through the form of creating these cities in SimCity 3000. I could probably have done something similar--depicting the awesome regimentation and brutality of our society--with a series of paintings on a canvas, or through hideous architectural models. But it wouldn't be the same as doing it in the game, because I wanted to magnify the unbelievably sick ambitions of egotistical political dictators, ruling elites and downright insane architects, urban planners, and social engineers. [emphasis mine]
We see here the direction of expression is through the game, not inspired to a political critique because of it. He goes as far as to say that while the game was the most "magnifying" art form he could have used, painting or IRL architecture would have been similar.
Here's a video of his work, spanning over more than 3 years. It's truly epic, and a well put together film project. The attention to detail is astounding, and the genius of his problem solving.
End of part 1
I'll leave it here for now. In a second part I want to look at how these games might, and important might not, affect us.
But for now, what do you think? Tell me in the comments and I'll reflect on it as I write part 2.
Thanks as always for your interest 😎 👍