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This
Developer’s Life: Guns Germs and Steel (and some Civilization)
Dear Reader:
Over the next few weeks
we’ve got PAX and Austin GDC, so we’ll get back to the usual gossip and parties
shortly, but this week I wanted to do something I never do, actually talk about
a game. Civ 4 is such old news at this
point that I think it’s fairly safe to say whatever I want about it.
Normally “what I want to
say” about any given game involves a lot of cursing and snide remarks (usually
the first thing I try and do whenever picking up a new title is rage-quit) but
I actually have some rather cheery things to say about Civ 4 (actually I’m
fairly even tempered unless someone f’ks with the great masters [Dante’s
Inferno, I’m coming for you]). What
interests me today about Civ 4 are not its merits as a game, at least not
strictly, but rather what it has to teach.
Happy Anecdote Time:
I’ve had a lot of plane
flights of late and when I’m flying I like to read something light, so I chose Guns, Germs and Steel (as it is a
substantially lighter read than the other book I had on my desk, Genocide, Torture and Intolerance which
is itself only a slightly less grim jaunt than my most dreaded book Veganism: The Well Balanced Meal). Throughout the book the author attempts to give
an overarching “theory of history” to explain why some cultures ended up with
the eponymous Guns, Steel and Germs and others did not. In order to give such an overarching look at
the problem the book spends most of its time dealing with the dawn of
civilization.
Now, as serendipity would
have it, being on planes means using my laptop, and my faithful HP Pavilion
dv5-1000us Entertainment Notebook PC (yes…that’s really it’s full title) with
it’s wonderful on board graphics card and super powerful Centrino processor can
run, well, Civ 4, and that’s about it.
*****Quick Side Note*****
If you build a laptop you
should ethically and responsibly name your laptops, for example, simply because
you put a DVD player in your laptop does not necessarily make it entertaining,
in fact, it probably barely qualifies it for much more of a title than “Not Necessarily
an Insanely Boring Office Machine”. I
feel like Alienware is allowed to call their products “Entertainment Notebooks”,
I’m not sure I feel the same about my Solitaire compatible machine.
*****Side Note End******
Back to the business at
hand: Civ 4. Play Civ 4 and reading
through Guns, Germs and Steel I
started seeing remarkable parallels. Of
course many things were lacking (you can’t give your foreign trading partners Dysentery
or even that Clap in Civ 4, and there’s no replanting wheat…)but overall it made
for a remarkable analogy. In fact,
thinking back to many of the things I had read about the ways things as large
and obtuse as civilizations worked, I found many of them fit nicely into the
game. Now, I was pretty sure I was just
crazy, so dismissed this as the same type of wild imaginings that a film buff
has when the read far too much into a film…but then…
After my weeks of travel
I, for once in my life, I not only tried but actually succeeded in making time
to see my family. I was having dinner at
my brother’s house and chatting with one of my high school age nieces. She was began telling me all about what she
had been studying in school, including her history course. Of course my jet lag addled brain made a
connection “Here is a chance for an experiment!” it thought (completely independent
of me). So I purchased the complete Civ
pack for her on Steam and waited a few weeks.
After a few weeks I found
time to sup with them again and this time our conversation turned to the
game. My niece had begun drawing the
same parallels I did. This to me was remarkable
because it meant that there was extrinsic value to the game. It might not be a teaching tool, but it
certainly aided cogitation. It forced
both of us to consider and reconsider things we had learnt. It hammered home lessons that otherwise might
have been lost to the ages (or at least rapidly forgotten). And all of this from a game that I considered
(at least when I purchased it) purely recreational.
Further Musings
I believe what makes Civ
remarkable in this manner is that general truths come out of the interplay of
the rulesets rather than a well defined set of ideas being hammered into the
user by specific challenges. Consider
how different this is from the standard educational games that focus on
teaching a particular set of knowledge.
Now the question is merely, “Why does this happen?”
I believe this occurs
because the designers were simply trying to model very high level human
behavior in a way that’s fun. At its
core, Civilization is about humanity. It’s
about what we find important and how we adapt to differing circumstances and
environments. These general principles
put into game form let us test and experiment, they let us play with different
permutations and try to achieve different results, and in the end all of our
testing leads us back to these principles and what naturally falls out of them
thus enhancing and reinforcing whatever else we may have learnt on the subject.
Is Civ perfect? No, of course not, it’s limited in scope (I
mean it merely deals with
civilizations, come on…) and it has some authorial bias, but is it miles above
most games that try and teach a
specific subject (and thus include by necessity a much greater degree of bias)?
I believe so. I also believe that there’s something to be
learnt here for designers. I haven’t
hammered it out yet but maybe it’s that, while human behavior can’t be modeled through
solely numerical/logic systems, the interplay of human behavior (at least at
the highest level) can be, and doing so makes for some very compelling, very
approachable gameplay.
No, that’s not it at all.
It’s much simpler than that. If any of you guys agree with my
suppositions, please comment this up or email me with your thoughts about the
lesson for game designers that’s just sitting there, waiting to be unlocked.
Gotta Run:
Well, I’m out of words
again (that hasn’t happened in a while), but a friend asked me to include the
fact that all of our Civ games were played on Monarch or higher, so if any of
you are trying to reproduce this effect, I don’t actually know if the
principles laid out here hold true for the lower difficulties (though I suspect
they do).
Ok, now I’m out. Email me at jportnow@gmail.com or bug me on twitter:
JamesPortnow.
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Quigley's proposed model won't satisfy everyone... but it does, I think, have the saving grace of being brilliantly suited to game design. I had a game design doc started probably five minutes after I finished TEoC the first time (which has been a while now); the morphological process Quigley describes translates very nicely to the "clash of civilizations" -- much better, I think, than Diamond's.
As a side note to that, Quigley would, I think, point out that the civilizations in Civilization aren't actually "civilizations" at all: at best, most of them are cultures, many of which are parts of the same civilization. It would be very interesting (hence the game I started designing) to see what would happen under gameplay rules that treated the major powers using Quigley's definition of "civilization" -- the representation of internal forces, especially "core" and "periphery," could give such a game considerably more simulationist power.
Not that everyone likes simulations as much as I do, of course. :) But it's fun to think about.
I remember my cousin bought Civilization I for me just before the seventh grade, and all throughout Western Civ I kept seeing how what we were learning related to my last playthrough of the game. It did a great job of allowing my history courses to resonate with me, even though my only real connection with those time periods was through the game.
But I like your idea of tying the game into a broader educational context, and agree that most current "edutainment" that I've seen is appallingly didactic and constraining both in content and solutions. I think it has to do with a philosophy that charts a conceptual path from one specific problem to one specific solution. What a game like Civ does is opens up the solution range by instituting an emergent simulation rather than a systematic, linear flow chart. (Though it certainly utilizes flow charts!)
I think this philosophical approach involves the abandonment of binary modes of thought where there are "right" and "wrong" choices, and embraces the more organic continuum of choices made with incomplete knowledge. In other words: it's not a matter of rote memorization of facts, but a presentation of a dynamic situations with multiple goals, belying any one "correct" method for success. This is the soil that creative decision-making grows in, encouraging experimentation and exploration above list-reciting.
I think the reason this method is more engaging is that it simply mirrors life better than a legalistic set of rules does. There is no ONE WAY to live a life that will guarantee success or failure. No script to follow. However, that is all in the ethereal realm of philosophy and coming back down to the ground of educating a person on something more systematic like math or geology would present a lot of problems for one attempting to keep wide open goals and multiple valid methodologies in the mix. Maybe that's why I love philosophy and hate math.
@ Bart Thanks for the book recommendation. I bought it and can't wait to check it out.