Essay 2: What Does Civilization III Tell Us about Civilization?

Radical Society, Jul 2003

why civilization III-a game about history and science-is really a Christian video game

What exactly does someone playing this game of civilization learn about history? Civilization has always sold itself as a game of history. While the original Civilization was a more complicated, computerized version of Risk, the newest update of the game-Civilization III-has many players talking about historical accuracy and even claiming that it's helped them more completely understand history. Here is a game for the military fetishists and the gun club historians: Civilization III is a game where some of the truly interesting parts come not from winning it but from trying out new pieces of weaponry or science-trying out history, really-the way a teenage girl might try out different prom dresses. Militarily, you can create Japanese samurai, French musketeers, bomber jets, nuclear missiles, galleons, invisible submarines, pirate ships (these can attack enemy ships without revealing their own nationality), archers, catapults. Infrastructurally, you can build police stations, the Hanging Gardens of Babylon, temples, the United Nations, Shakespeare's theater, coliseums, universities, and Sun Tzu's Art of War. As all these varieties of things attest to, this is a game that is enthusiastically materialist: because Civilization is a computer game every element of the game must contribute to some kind of point score, some indication of whether or not you are winning or losing the game. Because of this-and because this is a game made by Americans in the American era-Civilization has a Medusan view of history: it turns everything in its

2 gaze into an object. Every atom of history necessarily acquires some note of utility: the Heroic Epic creates more leaders for your military campaigns and Police Stations decrease "war weariness" (which makes people unhappy, which reduces your productivity). Even "Culture" is measured in points rather than ideas. There is nothing really different between Civilization's French and Japanese cultures, for example, except for the number of Culture points. The idea of culture is the most provocative change that separates Civilization III from the earlier two Civilizations. The game marks it as the dotted border of your empire, so when you build temples and cathedrals, the size of your country literally increases. Culture is so significant that if your border falls over a foreign city, the city may defect, recognizing your culture to be "superior" to that of its defective and suddenly barbarian motherland. So, in Civilization, culture is so neutral as to be invisible-it has no qualitative shape, only quantitative shape; one merely accumulates it, the way one would money. The same is true about technology, economies, government, and (for the most part) military-all are abstracted, to the point that there are no incredibly significant differences between one culture and another. Whether you decide to be French or Babylonian allows only a few subtle differences-the way the ghosts in Pacman are different or the way that Mario is different from Luigi in Super Mario Bros.-by which I mean "not very different at all." The main difference is material: where your people happen to be born on the map.

This open-ended interpretation of history-geography as narrative, rather than narrative as narrative-seems remarkably similar to the approach recent historians have taken toward one of the most necessarily contentious questions in history: why did some civilizations advance-militarily, scientifi

2 cally "culturally"-further than others? The question belongs (along with debates about the canon and affirmative action) in the sweaty-palms category of sociopolitical conversation: it is something difficult to talk about because underneath the evidence and the arguments lies the inevitable consequence of saying that one people, one race, one culture-the noun is irrelevant-is "better" than another. A century ago, the answer was obvious because the question was not even assumed. The historians that gave us "the white man's burden" were eager to talk about Christianity and of primitive civilizations. Our era may be remembered in its attempt to reverse this ironically unscientific applauding of Western scientism. Recent historical works have often emphasized not the cultural differences between one civilization and another, but the geographical ones. They give us an anti-essentialist view of history, one where cultures rose and fell not because of anything inherent but because of contingent factors: England had coal and China did not (R. Bin Wong); the terrain and coast line of Europe allowed small states to compete unlike the despot-friendly open terrain of China (Jared Diamond); East Asia experienced an ecological crisis that forced it to conserve resources right when Europe began the Age of Exploration (Kenneth Pomeranz); the world was at economic and scientific parity but geographic accident allowed Europe to leap ahead thanks to New World gold (Walter Blaut). Civilization is thus a less contentious thing than we'd thought: it's climate change, land mass, trees and minerals. The meaning's only supplemental.