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Nutrition It's well known that "hidden hunger," a significant long-term shortfall in nutrition, doesn't kill, but results in the reduction of the overall level of energy at which an individual operates. It's safe to assume that in societies where hidden hunger is rampant, the initiative and ambition necessary for technological innovation would be severely reduced. A particularly vicious form of the hidden hunger is infant protein deficiency syndrome (IPDS). Significantly low protein levels in the first 18-24 months of a child's life will result in permanently crippled mental development. In order to decide whether a new idea has the potential to work, an innovator needs to be able to evaluate the impact of a given change while holding all other things constant. Individuals who suffered brain damage in their earlier years due to insufficient nutrition are simply unable to reason in this way. Most will agree that food is an integral component in all God Games. Unfortunately, the role it plays is a limited one. Creating a stable food source is often one of the first steps a player must undertake before they progress. After this, however, nutrition level has almost no effect on the game as a whole and even less on technological innovation. Lets take a look at how Activision's Civilization: Call to Power approaches nutrition and technological change. As one of the industry's most recognizable franchises (and easily one of the more intricate titles of the genre), it's unfortunate that it doesn't take a more complex approach to nutrition and technological innovation. While political structure and path dependency (something we'll talk about later) are important, capital is the primary influence on technological change; players buy advances with gold. Food production doesn't influence technological change beyond the amount of population a given civilization can support. Perhaps a more realistic scenario would take a more involved approach to the effects of nutrition on technological innovation. A civilization in an earlier stage of development (aka Neolithic) would need to produce a surplus (either by farming or hunting & gathering) of food before a group of full-time technological specialists would be able to develop. More complex civilizations would need to be able to maintain a certain level of food production so that their population wouldn't fall prey to malnutrition, and therefore be unable to produce technological innovations. If food production fell below a certain level and malnutrition set in, the player wouldn't be able to encourage technological innovation. In order to maintain a stable level of nutrition, the player would need to encourage the development of an infrastructure (accessible markets, social safety nets, etc) that would facilitate the rapid and efficient distribution of food.
It's difficult to determine the level of food necessary to support a given population. I'm not going to bore you with the many complex mathematical formulas anthropologists have developed to model caloric intake among modern and prehistoric populations. Whatever levels a designer chooses for their game is going to be mostly arbitrary. Just remember that a well-designed title needs to reflect the changing nutritional needs as a civilization increases in complexity. Life Expectancy People who live very short lives have little time or incentive to generate new knowledge. In earlier times, the act of technological innovation depended on a process of trial-and-error that was not only time consuming, but often quite dangerous. Why would any short-lived individual concerned with far more life sustaining pastimes (filling their belly, etc) ever engage in the activities necessary for the generation of new knowledge?
When looked at thoroughly, however, life expectancy is probably one of the lesser variables involved in technological innovation. Historically speaking, technological progress has always marched on in the face of extremely low life expectancy. 14th Century Europe, for example, saw many technological innovations in a time when thousands of people we're dying every day from the infamous (and terribly nasty) black plague. While many God Games do indeed consider population health, very rarely do they ever take life expectancy into account when dealing with technological change. In games such as Impressions Games' City Builder series or Blue Byte's Settlers series in which an individual actually counts for something (opposed to other titles that treat the population as a relatively homogenous blob), life expectancy isn't really a factor in anything. Sure, people can get eaten by stray wolves, skewered by rampaging enemy armies, or fall prey to disease. Most of the time, however, given good conditions, individuals are virtually immortal. Populations mostly only increase and decrease significantly due to immigrations and emigration. People aren't born, nor do they die of natural causes. Technological innovation isn't at all linked to the life expectancy of the population. I think that many of the titles out there are on the right track in the way they deal with health. The largest problem, however, lies in the whole immortality factor. The peons within a civilization really need to be given a finite lifetime. Increase in life expectancy through time would depend on key variables such as the creation of stable and predictable food sources, the establishment of basic sanitary facilities, medical research, and the infrastructure, both social and physical, necessary to maintain population health (infant vaccination, widespread medical facilities, birth control, socialized medicine, etc.). Consequently, as life expectancy increased, people would have more free time to engage in technological innovation and provide the player with more opportunity to encourage advances. The effect of increasing life expectancy on technological creativity would essentially be cumulative. The higher the life expectancy of the population, the more technological innovations would be available to player. ________________________________________________________ |
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