Essay 1: What Does Civilization Tell Us about Civilization III?

Radical Society, Jul 2003

why we like video games even though they bore us

The first Civilization, created by Sid Meier for Micro-Prose in the early 1990s, now carries the kind of nostalgia that people my age usually associate with Transformer cartoons and, when playing it, the level of commitment usually associated with organized religion. By now, Civilization has acquired enough viewers (or devotees)-it is hard to say which term is more accurate for this genre (whose current vocabulary would describe me as someone who "plays" a civilization)-to be generally recognized as the greatest strategy game of all time. Why has Civilization been so successful? Is it actually fun? I would suggest that contrary to the typical claims used to propagandize great art-the idea that we've sustained the canon because of how it instructs and delights-Civi lization has been an extremely popular work specifically because it is not fun at all.

Fun is a difficult piece of critical terminology for a game like Civilization III. This is a game about history that is fittingly slow and process-based. Consequently, like The Sims, where you manage a life, and unlike first person shooters like Quake, where (I guess) you simulate life, Civilization III is slow and open-ended: it simulates the broad expanse of lives rather than life, of history rather than the individual. Thus, strategy games-the equivalent of board games for Generation X-are often fun in the way that data entry is fun. Sim City, Civilization, Mailers of Orion-all of these games, these operas of micromanagement-are successful attempts at turning boredom

1 into a recreational activity. They suck you in with a sensation that's less like excitement or real enjoyment than a negotiation: you play and wait to see how your citizens and enemies will respond to your latest move (i.e., your latest mood); this aesthetic of checking and then rechecking is a little like checking your e-mail every thirty seconds and finding some new response always waiting for you. This is not so much a work of art as an addiction to stimulus. And when it's all over, you come away, after hours of gameplay, having conquered Japan and invented atomic warfare, and suddenly realize that you are more or less the same as when you started. You have been-not really stimulated, but merely absorbed-like someone watching TV. You have not learned anything.

This would be one way of looking at it. I would like instead to offer a positive conception of boredom-"positive" in two senses: first, I would like to design a use of the word without any normative or derogatory implications, a boredom that we enjoy; secondly, I mean "positive" as opposed to negative, the way that a painter sees the white canvas as negative space or a scientist sees coldness as having no independent existence since coldness is defined not as a thing in itself but as the absence of heat. Ibrahim Kaiin, for example, has argued that Islam advocates a positive conception of peace-that is, not only does the Islamic conception of peace refer to the absence of warfare but also to the desire to see peace not as the absence of violence but as an active state. So far as they use "boredom" as an aesthetic term, artists and audiences typically refer to the absence of entertainment:

In both the Freudian and the Marxist traditions ... "boredom" is taken not so much as an objective property of things and works but rather as a response to the blockage of

1 temporary energies (whether those be grasped in terms of desire or of praxis). . . .Even taken in the narrower realm of cultural reception, boredom with a particular kind of work or style or content can always be used productively as a precious symptom of our own existential, ideological, and cultural limits, an index of what has to be refused in the way of other people's cultural practices and their threat to our own rationalizations about the nature and value of art. Meanwhile, it is no great secret that in some of the most significant works of high modernism, what is boring can often be very interesting indeed, and vice versa: a combination which the reading of any hundred sentences by Raymond Roussel, say, will at once dramatize. We must therefore initially try to strip the concept of the boring (and its experience) of any axiological overtones and bracket the whole question of aesthetic value. It is a paradox one can get used to: if a boring text can also be good (or interesting, as we now put it), exciting texts, which incorporate diversion, distraction, temporal cornmodification, can also perhaps sometimes be "bad" (or "degraded" to use Frankfurt School language). (Jameson 71-72)

That Jameson notices boredom is one of the more idiosyncratically interesting moments in the early parts of Postmodernism or The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism. Jameson, however, still explores the boring in a fundamentally negative way; he gives, for example, the example of a piece of video art where the audience is forced to stare at an expressionless face for twenty-one minutes. The initial feelings of boredom give rise to less innocent feelings of kitsch: