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Politics and the State In all honesty, it's really quite difficult to determine if there is a certain political structure conducive to technological innovation. Some have argued that a strong centralized government would be secure enough to withstand riots and political pressure from coalitions representing those who stand to lose the most from technological change. On the other hand, a weak government that succumbs to demands to legislate technological change would be unable to enforce such laws, and therefore leave the process of technological innovation to market forces. Politics also matters because the ruling elite, be they emperors, presidents, regents, councils, parliaments, high priests, or grand poobahs, set a national agenda of priorities. If these agendas divert too many resources, particularly talent and creativity, into non-productive and destructive pastimes, innovation on a national scale will be unavoidably damaged. An excellent example of this kind of situation was the string of monumentally destructive wars fought in the most advanced parts of Europe, mainly southern Germany, the Netherlands, and Bohemia, between 1550 and 1650. The result was the total destruction of the participant countries' infrastructure and their ability to initiate and support any kind of technological innovation. The bottom line is that the state plays an unquestionable role in the process of technological change. The general consensus among those who study such things is that if one wishes to fully realize the potential of modern technology one cannot do it with the state, but one cannot do it without either. Generally speaking, the effects of politics on technological innovation are usually included in God Games. Some, like those that act within an actual historical framework rely on it less than those that span huge amounts of time and rely on the player for the motivations for social change. In the case of the Civilization series, different political systems have different effects on science and production. The problem with this is that political systems don't directly affect technological development, but instead the institutions that encourage, develop, and focus innovation. A better alternative would be to make politics a secondary influence on innovation. Political structure would instead directly affect the types of institutions that could be developed by the player. In turn, it would be these institutions that would directly affect innovation. Throughout this article we've discussed specific institutions (universities, patent offices, hospitals, etc) and processes that potentially increase the pace of technological innovation. Each of these would need to be looked at in terms of compatibility with every single possible political system available to the player. For example, due to state ideology, patent offices would be difficult to develop under communism. Because of this, players might have to wait far longer after they had built a patent office before it actually affected the technological innovation within the society. Another alternative would be that the development of a patent office would be altogether impossible. Players would need to use subtler methods to change their political system (something which is beyond the scope of this article) before they would even be offered the opportunity to develop a patent office. War I'm pretty sure that no one will disagree if I say that military activity is one of the most important components, if not the most important one, in God Games. The vast majority of players' free time is either spent gearing up to be attacked or preparing to attack someone else. Despite the fact that most games purport that victory can be achieved through non-military means, the opposite is almost always the case. I don't mean that players can't achieve a final victory through diplomatic, scientific, or economic means, quite the contrary. The problem lies in the fact that players, during the course of gameplay, are almost always confronted with an AI whose sheer hostility often surpasses that which would exist in the real world, and are therefore forced to engage in military conflict.
There is no doubt that military activity often generates new technological innovations. As a species, we're quite adept at coming up with new and nasty ways to kill each other. War also has a habit of destroying the infrastructure necessary for the support of technological innovation and production. A question rarely ever considered, however, is to what degree does military technology benefit civilian endeavors. Well, historically speaking, it seems very little. While military needs served as a focusing device for technological innovation, weapons more often borrowed from civilian technology than acted as inspiration themselves. The wonderfully complex war machines of the Romans (the catapults and the ballistas) didn't lead to any clear advances in civilian technology. In spite of its technologically revolutionary nature at the time it was introduced, gunmaking didn't lead to any significant civilian applications other than a new means of hunting. The machine tool industry, which is often cited as deriving from the mass production of firearms, owed more to clocks and instruments than to guns. ________________________________________________________ |
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