Playing Games with Technology: Fictions of Science in the Civilization Series

This article investigates the ways in which the history of technology has been modeled in “4X strategy” games, especially in a series called Civilization (which comprises six games and expansions introduced from 1991 to 2016). Although there have been various studies interrogating the ideological biases in strategy games’ modeling of civilization and society, to date there has only been partial exploration of the ideological biases within their models of technological and scientific development involving “technology trees.” Moving from discrete analysis of individual instances of technology trees within strategy games, the aim of this article is to demonstrate not only the fundamental issues behind the notion of these trees in all of the Civilization games, but also to demonstrate ways in which they can reveal particular historicized perceptions of technologies over the period they were developed. This investigation furthermore reveals that many players of the games may bring assumptions embedded in their sense of the history of technology, and that these present a particular problem for those who might uncritically accept the games’ underlying axioms

‘That which is real is irreplaceable’: Lies, Damned Lies, and (Dis-)Simulations in Westworld

This chapter examines the ways in which Westworld functions as a set of loops on a textual and metatextual level. The series, following in the wake of a number of pre-existing representations of Artificial Intelligence, not least of which is the original film and Jonathan Nolan’s Person of Interest, relies upon and re-inflects a number of pre-existing tropes within such representations. These include challenges to human exceptionalism, the nature of consciousness, the problem of agency, and freedom versus control. This chapter explores the extent to which the “AI narrative” of Westworld itself functions as an ideological mask, and asks whether the questions its asks contain the one we should be asking: can we ever truly “escape” the systems its overt narrative elides

Post-National Futures in National Contexts: Reading ‘British’ Fictions of Artificial Intelligence

This chapter explores how the vaunted ‘British Boom’ of science fiction of the late 1990s relates to more regional visions of the future from authors within a post-devolutionary United Kingdom. Despite situating British science fiction in contrast to science fiction productions from the US or Europe, the ‘British Boom’ elided the role of such regional visions, and this piece examines whether regionality has any place in a genre more generally known for its ‘far future,’ post-national settings. Addressing representations of Artificial Intelligence in three works by Neal Asher, Iain M. Banks, and Alastair Reynolds, it considers the role of science fiction’s ‘visions’ in such geographical and political contexts, and more broadly queries the role of location-based identity politics within new British and Anglophone science fiction

Artificial Reading (Mk II)

This essay re-reads Roxanne Lapidus’s translation of Pierre Lévy’s “La Lecture artificielle” in the context of recent developments in the field of literary criticism, particularly in relation to the emergence of computer-based interpretative practices and text-creation programs, examining the ways in which such activities can be considered to be “artificial.