I've been playing Sid Meier's Civilization for decades
and so have many other people.
It sold well over 30 million copies.
It's one of the most popular examples of what game critic Alan Emrich dubbed a 4X game;
explore, expand, exploit, exterminate.
And players have been using it to conquer the world for twenty-five years.
But I don't think it ever directly addresses the core assumption in its tagline.
What is a civilization?
Most people tend to rest on the notion that civilization is the most advanced stage of human development,
that just as we evolved from ape to human, so society evolves.
In fact, that's how the early Civilization games began,
by putting the dawn of human society in the context of cosmic history and evolution.
The game tells the narrative of a rise from simplicity to complexity,
from savagery to barbarism to civilization.
But what makes a civilization different from a barbarian?
Now, most schools in the United States, when answering this question,
teach some variant of a checklist first compiled by 20th century Australian archaeologist V. Gordon Childe.
But even they're a bit vague.
How large should the urban centers be?
What makes architecture monumental?
Of course, the split between civilized and barbarian has always been arbitrary,
though in the game Civilization, it's always been clear.
Civilizations can win.
Barbarians must be wiped out.
In later games, they were nameless nuisances that existed to help you build up an early military.
But the barbarian tribes used to have names, often names from antiquity,
and some of them names of people who still use them as identifiers.
I mean, Bantu, Polynesian?
Are these people barbarians?
But barbarians aren't the only ones excluded from playing the game.
Civiliation V added an interesting middle ground; the city-state.
Single cities that can be bought, swayed, or conquered.
But like the barbarians, they can't win.
Unless they can.
Sweden, Denmark, Poland, Indonesia, and Brazil were all represented by city-states in the base game,
but later expansions made them playable.
But, if you wanted to play as the Philippines, Congo, Kenya, Tibet, Israel; too bad.
They're simply periphery peoples,
given power and influence only as protectorates and satellites of the civilized.
But, I'm delaying the question.
Who are the civilized?
These fourteen civilizations, or civs, as nicknamed by the fans,
have been in nearly every iteration of the series in some form or another.
Four from the ancient Mediterranean, four modern European nations,
three from Asia, one from Africa, one Native American, and one former European colony.
In the first games, these differences were essentially cosmetic.
Each civ played identically and the only difference was in the AI personalities of non-human players,
from the calm and reasonable Lincoln to the insane war criminal...Ghandi.
But, that's all the difference they needed;
same mechanics, different visuals, equal in the eyes of the game.
But in Civilization III, the civs became more unique.
They got unique bonuses, unique units,
all matched to perceived features thought emblematic of that civilization;
Russian cossacks, Japanese samurai, and such.
And with each game since, Firaxis has added unique buildings, improvements,
making every civ's play style match a particular perception about that people's history.
Let's focus on one civ.
Germany; always a fascinating case study in the history of nationalism.
In Civ I, they were led by Frederick the Great.
In Civ II, you had a choice between Frederick Barbarossa or Maria Theresa.
Frederick was Prussian, Maria was Austrian,
and Barbarossa did hold the title of King of Germany,
but he also held the title of King of Italy, King of Burgundy,
and of course, Holy Roman Emperor.
None of these people lived during a time when a state called 'Germany' existed.
In Civilization III, that changed, when Germany's leader was Otto von Bismarck,
the founder of the modern German state.
The game gave them the bonuses of Militaristic and Scientific,
and granted them the unique unit of the panzer, a stronger version of the tank.
In Civilization IV, you had the choice of Frederick or Bismarck,
the return of the panzer, and the unique building of the assembly plant.
So in both III and IV, we get a sense that the Germany we're playing as is the modern German state,
the one founded by Bismarck, defeated at Versailles, and then fell to fascism.
An unbroken line from the Hall of Mirrors to Hitler.
In Civilization V, that line stretched back farther,
with a unique ability which ties the Germany that you play as
to the one that defeated the Roman Empire at the Battle of Teutoburg Forest,
and a unique building which linked the Germany of Bismarck
to the Germany that participated in the Hanseatic League.
In each of these, a portrait is drawn over thousands of years,
looking from the present backwards, begetting an inverted family tree,
from Angela to Adolf to Alte Fritz to Aachen to Arminius.
Remarkably different societies, though all differences forgotten
and remembered as a single idea called "Germany".
And yet, Civilization IV made the Holy Roman Empire its own civ,
just to get Charlemagne into the game.
That line isn't always drawn so long.
In Civs III and V, you could play as Romans, Greeks, and also the Byzantines,
yet the Byzantines never called themselves Byzantines;
they were Romans, heirs of the Eastern Roman Empire,
and they generally spoke Greek and had Greek customs.
And yet, Greece, Rome, and Byzantium are separate civs,
remembered uniquely, their mutual ties forgotten.
Even stranger is how the series handled India.
The people of the Indian subcontinent speak thirty languages, worship nearly every god,
have spent the last 5,000 years of recorded history uniting and dividing land
through the rise and fall of empires in a history as varied and complex as the entirety of western Europe.
But in Civilization, they've always been led by an English-educated Gujarati man
who has never held official office, a man credited for fathering the idea of a unified India,
an entity that's only existed for sixty-nine years out of a 5,000 year history.
Differences forgotten and remembered, the struggle to unify remembered and forgotten.
All profound changes in consciousness by their very nature
bring with them characteristic amnesias.
Out of such oblivions, in specific historical circumstances, spring narratives.
Benedict Anderson became one of this era's most influential historians
with his widely read book on nationalism, Imagined Communities.
In it, he argued that the modern nation was a social construct
that could only manifest through important breakthroughs in information technology.
In short, we can only live in a civilization if we see it as one.
Anderson believed that in the medieval era,
the origins of national consciousness began linguistically.
After all, "barbarian" was originally a Greek word for anyone who didn't speak Greek.
But over time, that linguistic community became the language of the state,
where a bilingual few understood the prestige language,
the language of scholars and scripture, that of truth,
whether that language was Church Latin, Classical Arabic, or examination Chinese.
But with the invention of the printing press, a popular legitimacy was given to vernacular languages.
In Europe, with the rise of newspapers and the spread of print media,
the populace became less concerned with the language of intellectuals and foreign-born dynasts
and more with the languages spoken by their neighbors.
And it wasn't until these beliefs were in place
that we could see official enforcement of nationalism in the 19th century,
with state-backed national identities,
such as the Russification policies under Catherine the Great
or the Anglicization throughout Victoria's empire.
Nevermind that both Catherine and Victoria came from German families.
And because of colonization, those models began to be applied to the conquered.
It's how a multilingual, multiethnic nation like India can call itself Indian,
or how an equally diverse colonial nation like Indonesia could call itself Indonesian.
Anderson thought that nation-building was possible thanks to three key mechanisms;
the census, the map, and the museum.
Through the census, in colonial countries and colonized alike,
people were asked to declare their own identities in official documents,
reinforcing awareness of their place in a community,
even more aware if they were forced to check that demeaning box labeled 'other'.
Through the map, specifically accurate, western-style maps,
people could see the land they lived on.
The age of colonization brought the first color-coded maps,
where borders gave a physical manifestation to the nation.
No longer an abstract symbol, the nation was literally grounded.
And through the museum, through the restoration of ancient sites and the accumulation of artifacts,
people could construct the narrative of their past from their vantage point in the present.
Ed Beach is the lead designer of Civilization VI,
and previously developed the last expansion to Civilization V,
and I get the feeling that Ed Beach is familiar with Anderson's writing,
since in his revamped version of the cultural victory,
archaeology, museums, and tourism are key mechanics.
He seems to understand that our tribes aren't something that we are, but something that we do.
But Anderson's view of history doesn't fit well with Civilization,
because its mechanics won't allow it.
Just as it was in the game's oldest predecessor, chess.
For centuries, chess has been used to teach princes the art of warfare,
the value of strategy and tactics; humanity seen as pieces on a board.
A piece can upgrade if it gets to the end,
but it can never switch sides, nor declare itself a third player.
What's more, there's no way to achieve peace in chess.
Every opposing piece is a threat and every game has to end with a winner and a loser.
It's a popular model of history and a simplistic one.
Also, Civilization, like chess, is being used to teach history.
But is it so different from the more common models we use?
Don't we already keep score?
We already quantify our lives with studies like the World Happiness Report and the Global Development Index.
Our politicians talk about winning and falling behind,
as if there's a grand game we're capable of losing.
Even professional historians do this from time to time.
We see history as the great game of explore, expand, exploit, exterminate.
And there's the problem.
Defining who is a civilization means defining who can win.
You can win as the Romans, but never as modern Italy.
You could win as the Zulu, never as South Africa.
You could win as the Aztecs, but never Mexico.
Certain iterations of humanity are given privilege over a broad, undefined other, much like in our reality.
But the good news is that the Civilization series began to ask itself this very question,
expanding the definition of civilization.
In later games, you could play as a city-state.
In Civilization VI, the precolonial nation of Congo is available in the base game,
and so is the rising superpower of Brazil.
Even the Huns, marginalized for millenia as mere barbarians, became playable in Civ V.
Still, there's no mechanic in the game to create a nation.
There's no process by which one civ can become another.
They're only pieces on a board; the colors never change.
The idea of American or Chinese or Roman metamorphosing over millenia into the same thing.
But, with tanks instead of spearmen.
Civilization and games like it are only models of history,
because we aren't pieces, but people.
Daily, we reaffirm the meaning of our civilization as we redefine it and recognize it in others.
Maybe civilization is just the honor of being seen as a player.
Maybe that's the only way to win,
by realizing that we all deserve to play.
[music]