What an astounding reply, thank you.

It's a little strange though as you seem to have contradicted your original assertion that Civ is not Western-centric. I believe you have in fact supplemented more arguments against that point. But I guess that's not the most interesting thing on the table.

A lot of what you're saying here is what I was attempting to allude to, such as the role of the "savage" in progressivist linear history, and the stupidity of "white guilt", and wondering about how an anti-Civilization perspective would view the implicit lessons of the game of the same name.

Elsewhere, I still come up again against the fatalistic idea of "why bother", now in the richer context of Civilization era length cycles of life, death and rebirth you spoke about. While I agree that utopia is by definition a mirage, aiming for better is not a waste of time.

So back to the game Civ, you say that "it's impossible to promote an universal standard for measuring progress and virtues" but that's exactly what the game tries to do. As I said before, I'm mainly wondering how this is picked up by players, if at all.

It's good that you also challenge this. I really didn't get this from your Civ-as-management-training post and I'm glad you've been commenting on these. I'd really like to see more from you from the more philosophical perspective on games, I intend to dive in there a bit more too.

I'll watch that video, thanks for the recommendation.