Video games are one of today's quintessential media and cultural forms, but they also have a surprising and many-sided relation with the past (Morgan 2016). This certainly holds true for Sid Meier's Civilization (MicroProse & Firaxis Games 1991–2016), which is a series of turn-based, strategy video games in which you lead a historic civilization "from the Stone Age to the Information Age" (Civilization ca. 2016). Sid Meier's Civilization VI, the newest iteration of the series developed by Firaxis and released on October 21, 2016, allows players to step into the shoes of idealized political figures such as Gilgamesh, Montezuma, Teddy Roosevelt, and Gandhi. Via these and other leaders, you aim to achieve supremacy over all other civilizations. This is done through founding cities, creating infrastructure, building armies, conducting diplomacy, spreading culture and religion, and choosing "technologies" and "civics"—philosophical or ideological breakthroughs—for your civilization to focus on.FdA – Publicaties niet-programma gebondenDigital Archaeolog

Ariese, C.E.

Mol, A.A.A.

Politopoulos, A.

Video games are one of today's quintessential media and cultural forms, but they also have a surprising and many-sided relation with the past (Morgan 2016). This certainly holds true for Sid Meier's Civilization (MicroProse & Firaxis Games 1991–2016), which is a series of turn-based, strategy video games in which you lead a historic civilization "from the Stone Age to the Information Age" (Civilization ca. 2016). Sid Meier's Civilization VI, the newest iteration of the series developed by Firaxis and released on October 21, 2016, allows players to step into the shoes of idealized political figures such as Gilgamesh, Montezuma, Teddy Roosevelt, and Gandhi. Via these and other leaders, you aim to achieve supremacy over all other civilizations. This is done through founding cities, creating infrastructure, building armies, conducting diplomacy, spreading culture and religion, and choosing "technologies" and "civics"—philosophical or ideological breakthroughs—for your civilization to focus on.</p

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“From the Stone Age to the Information Age”: History and Heritage in Sid Meier’s Civilization VI

Leiden University Scholary Publications

DIGITALREVIEWS“From the Stone Age to theInformation Age”History and Heritage in Sid Meier’s Civilization VIAngus A.A. Mol, Aris Politopoulos, and Csilla E. Ariese-VandemeulebrouckeVideo games are one of today’s quintessential mediaand cultural forms, but they also have a surprisingandmany-sided relation with the past (Morgan 2016).This certainly holds true for SidMeier’s Civilization(MicroProse & Firaxis Games 1991–2016), which is aseries of turn-based, strategy video games in whichyou lead a historic civilization “from the Stone Ageto the Information Age” (Civilization ca. 2016). SidMeier’s Civilization VI, the newest iteration of theseries developed by Firaxis and released onOcto-ber 21, 2016, allows players to step into the shoes ofidealized political figures such as Gilgamesh, Mon-tezuma, Teddy Roosevelt, and Gandhi. Via these andother leaders, you aim to achieve supremacy overall other civilizations. This is done through found-ing cities, creating infrastructure, building armies,conducting diplomacy, spreading culture and reli-gion, and choosing “technologies” and “civics”—philosophical or ideological breakthroughs—foryour civilization to focus on. In this way, SidMeier’sCivilization series, often simply referred to asCiv,allows players to engage with past and present tech-nological advances, social systems, and built heritagein a playful history that is closely analogous to butalways slightly different from our own (Figure 1). Inthis review, we provide a brief overview of the seriesand some of the new features present inCiv VI. Wealso questionCiv’s treatment of world history andheritage and place the series in a broader perspectiveas a cultural and ideological artifact, entangled withchanging perceptions and politics of the past.CIV ’S HISTORY AND HERITAGEAs you are reading this review, between 50,000 to 90,000 peopleare busy building their empires, one turn at a time, in Civ V orCiv VI (SteamSpy 2017a; SteamSpy 2017b). Since its debut, theCiv series has sold more than 37 million copies worldwide and,together, players have played over one billion hours across allversions (Takahashi 2016). Its roots lie with developer and pub-lisher MicroProse in Maryland, USA, where in 1991 Sid Meier andBruce Shelley launched what would become one of the most rec-ognizable and critically acclaimed franchises in the video gameindustry. Civ I became so popular that it gave rise to a wholegenre of strategy video games known as 4X. In 4X games, play-ers control an empire, state, or other large political unit throughgameplay that is based on an iteration of “eXploration,” “eXpan-sion,” “eXploitation,” and “eXtermination.”These elements are present in all subsequent Civ games, withevery entry in the series making its own tweaks to this basicformula. As a result, Civ rewards long-term planning and fea-tures evolution-like, phased gameplay. The moment-to-momentmechanics that allow for this careful strategizing are facilitated bya turn-based system in which the player will manage resourcesand make political decisions. In one turn, a player may be con-fronted with diplomatic talks with Napoleon, give building ordersfor the construction of the Pyramids, choose whether to researchmathematics or iron working, and send her scouts to exploreuncharted territory.Every game in the series features a “Civilopedia” that providesinformative entries on all aspects of the game. These not onlyprovide descriptions of in-game effects, but also provide informa-tion about the actual history underlying every building, wonder,unit, leader, technology, and more. Still, for people new to theseries, starting up a first game of Civ can present somewhat of anoverwhelming experience—which is mitigated to some extent inAdvances in Archaeological Practice 5(2), 2017, pp. 214–219Copyright 2017 © Society for American ArchaeologyDOI:10.1017/aap.2017.9214DIGITALREVIEWSFIGURE 1. Screenshot from Civilization VI. Ariese-Vandemeulebroucke playing as Harald Hardrada of Norway, upon achieving acultural victory. Around the capital Nidaros, a number of wonders can be seen, such as the Great Lighthouse, the Colossus,Alhambra, the Terracotta Army, the Hanging Gardens, and the Hermitage.Civ VI by an extensive tutorial that pits the Sumerians against theEgyptians.For those who are already acquainted with Civ, this newestiteration builds on the core of the series with some innovativefeatures. In contrast to previous games, in which urban build-ing was restrained to a player’s city centers, Civ VI shifts thefocus to the ecology of the wider landscape. Players need tozone plots adjacent to cities by developing them as commer-cial, residential, cultural, industrial, and other types of districts,which receive strategic bonuses from being built close to spe-cific types of environments and other districts. Civ VI has alsotaken a leaf from quest-driven games with its introduction of“Eureka moments” that give the game a new strategic ele-ment, the completion of which will speed up the discovery ofnew technologies and civics. For example, the first meetingwith another civilization will give the player a boost to the dis-covery of the “Writing” technology, which unlocks the optionto build libraries and campuses. The diplomacy of computer-controlled leaders of other civilizations, known for largely pre-dictable behavior interspersed with irrational decisions, has longbeen a thorn in the side of players (Figure 2). Civ VI now moreclearly flags the quirks of other leaders, but their actions towardyou and other opponents controlled by the computer can stillfeel erratic.Civ has always had a colorful and clear graphic design, but Civ VIsports a particularly polished look. Tweaking graphical settingswill make it perform on slightly older PCs, as well. Top marks goto sound design with an impressive game score that takes iconiccompositions from one of the game’s civilizations and evolvesthem from single instrument to full orchestra as the player con-tinues through the ages. With generally favorable reviews andtwo million units sold in the first two weeks after its release, thegame is already a critical and commercial success (Plunkett 2016;SteamSpy 2017c; Zucchi 2016). In short, over the next few years,millions of veterans and newcomers will experience our world’sheritage and history viewed through the lens of Civ VI’s develop-ers and designers.POLITICS OF THE VIRTUAL PASTAs an exercise in interactive history-telling, Civ VI and its fore-bears have a complex relationship with the past. A regular gameof Civ VI starts at the “dawn of civilization” at 4000 B.C., withthe founding of a capital city for every player and computer-controlled opponent. Likewise, the game always ends in similarways, with one of four types of “victory”: military, religious, cul-tural, or technological domination. The technology tree startswith “Pottery,” “Animal Husbandry,” and “Mining” and throughrelatively tightly prescribed pathways leads to “Robotics,”“Nuclear Fusion,” and “Nanotechnology.” The civics tree startswith “Code of Laws” and has “Globalization” and “Social Media”as its epitome—one can only hope the designers were having aMay 2017 Advances in Archaeological Practice A Journal of the Society for American Archaeology 215DIGITALREVIEWSFIGURE 2. Gandhi declares war in Civilization I. Gandhi is one of the most pacifist leaders in the game, but thanks to a bug in theoriginal game he is also one of the most likely to use nuclear weapons. This behavior was retained as an in-joke in later games,leading to a plethora of online memes about Gandhi’s penchant for creating nuclear holocausts.laugh when they envisioned tweeting and Facebooking to be thenew pinnacle of civilization.When it comes to this cookie-cutter approach to societal andcultural change, it has to be noted that Sid Meier, the series’creative father, is regarded by his peers as one of the most bril-liant game developers (Crossley 2009). The first Civ game Meiercreated was based on what he remembered from his family’s sub-scription to American Heritage and what historical atlases andbooks he could scrounge from local libraries. Yet it is perhapsa lack of interest in the finer intricacies of the past that droveand continues to drive the design of Civ. Indeed, Meier meantand means for Civ to be an “apolitical game,” or, as he statedin a recent interview: “one of our fundamental goals was not toproject our own philosophy or politics onto things. Playing outsomebody else’s political philosophy is not fun for the player”(Tharoor 2016).The idea of “apolitical fun” has big implications for Civ’s game-play and the type of interactive experiences it presents its playerswith. The result of Meier’s mollycoddling is that it undercuts thepotential for an honest engagement with the past that is, in prin-ciple, present in a game like Civ. For example, wars are wagedbetween units that look more like small miniatures than actualcombatants, fought with only battle cries and some clatter ofarms. City sizes, indicated with single or double digits, drop afew points to indicate the massive loss of life after a successfulsiege. Slavery, one of actual world history’s darkest pages, as wellas a practice that has had great societal, cultural, demographic,and economic impacts, did not appear in the series until Civiliza-tion IV. Civilization V did away with it, as well as with the series’long-standing feature of global warming and pollution causedby ecologically destructive behavior. Civilization VI continues thisclean—we would argue too clean—view of historical societiesand cultures.In 1991, the idea of an apolitical yet interactive version of his-tory at the “end of history” must have sounded less ridiculous(Fukuyama 1992). The result of this is a series of games that isperhaps more palatable for a large audience with a range ofsensibilities, but at the cost of projecting a false reality. More-over, we argue that a more political stance does not necessarilyhinder enjoyment of a game. As the popularity of such titles asNever Alone (Upper One Games 2014), Prison Architect (Intro-version Software 2015), This War of Mine (11 Bit Studios 2015),and Undertale (Toby Fox 2015) shows, players are quite capableof dealing with even highly politically or philosophically chargedinteractive media. Instead, the lack of a clearly defined politics ofthe virtual past has opened Civ up to the risk of replicating dom-inant narratives of what it means to create or have “civilization.”Simply put, the enterprise of making a game about civilization isinherently a political philosophical undertaking.THE WONDERS OF CIVILIZATIONAn in-depth look at the “building blocks” of civilization in Civ—the technologies, buildings, and civics—makes it immediatelyclear that these games have largely perpetuated a traditional nar-rative of what it means to have civilization. Nowhere is this moreapparent than in Civ’s “wonders,” a collection of unique build-ings and projects that are closely analogous to the concept ofWorld Heritage. An overview of the wonders in Civ’s main games(Figure 3) shows a core group that have appeared in (nearly) allversions. These core wonders are the video game equivalent ofan old-fashioned world history atlas, like the one Meier used toconsult for the first Civ. Starting with ancient, Orientalist wonderslike the Hanging Gardens and the Pyramids, we continue ourtraditionalist interactive world heritage tour through ClassicalGreece, via Renaissance and Industrial Europe, and end it with“marvels” of the modern era like the Pentagon and the Man-hattan Project. An additional breakdown of the actual locationand main cultural identity of wonders across Civ I through Civ Vmakes it clear that there is an overwhelming focus on Westernand Orientalist heritages (Figure 4a).Advances in Archaeological Practice A Journal of the Society for American Archaeology May 2017216DIGITALREVIEWSFIGURE 3. A two-mode network showing how wonders are distributed over all six main Civilization games. At the center, thecore of wonders present in most or all of these games.There is some reason for optimism, however. In the list of won-ders in Civ VI, we see several new wonders as well as more varietyin their actual world locations (Figure 4b). Interestingly, many ofthese are referred to in the original language of the culture theyare associated with. For instance, the Templo Mayor, or GreatTemple of Tenochtitlan, has been added to the game under itsNahuatl name: Huey Teocalli. We suggest that this change indirection is the result of new attention to indigenous languagesand heritages, a movement that has a long(er) history in politicsand academia, but which now seems to have made its mark on amainstream game like Civ. The introduction of a more diverse setof world heritages, as well as the new naming convention, seemsto suggest that the game’s design is not as impervious to chang-ing cultural sensibilities as its intellectual father might suggest.From the perspective of the archaeological and heritage disci-plines, this may well be the true innovation of Civ VI, even moreso than the inclusion of “archaeologists” as units and “muse-ums” as buildings. Beyond being merely a sign of the times, theinclusion of heritage in a game as popular as Civ has an impactoutside the game. As proof, the date of the prerelease reveal ofthe Aztec culture and the date of the release of the game itselfshow an upsurge in popularity of Google searches on “Huey Teo-calli” and other new wonders (Figure 5). These are certainly stepsin the right direction, but for the upcoming expansions of Civ VIor an eventual Civ VII, we would like to see a more avant gardeand multi-vocal engagement with history as event and processand an even wider inclusion of our world’s cultural, natural, andintangible heritage.May 2017 Advances in Archaeological Practice A Journal of the Society for American Archaeology 217DIGITALREVIEWSFIGURE 4. Pie chart with a breakdown of the nations from which the actual versions of the wonders in (a) Civilization I throughCivilization V and (b) Civilization VI can be found.FIGURE 5. Graph showing the increase in number of searches in Google for the term “Huey Teocalli.” A peak is visible in themiddle (announcement of the inclusion of the Aztecs in Civilization VI) and on the right (release of Civilization VI; data fromGoogle Trends).CONCLUSIONWhen a player in Civ VI discovers the “Cultural Heritage” civic,she is greeted with the words of Marcus Garvey: “a peoplewithout the knowledge of their past history, origin and cultureis like a tree without roots.” In a very real sense, 25 years ofCiv have helped millions of people gain knowledge of humanhistory, origins, and culture through a playful and interac-tive engagement with the past. However, even if Civ VI hassome new sensibilities when it comes to the representation ofthe past as well as a much expanded Civilopedia, this gameis not a good replacement for World History and Heritage101.It is, however, a medium and artifact that merits more atten-tion by the archaeological and heritage disciplines. Thereare many routes of approach here; writing reviews in schol-arly journals is just one of them. For instance, those who areexperienced with the core game of Civ could try the mods andscenarios that allow you to experience specific periods in thepast or even aim to build your own scenarios and mods. Inaddition, you could try to go beyond the tight confines of itsdesign and experiment with new approaches to play, such aspacifism.For those who have never played Civ, there is no better timethan the present to pick up this game. If you do, the authorsAdvances in Archaeological Practice A Journal of the Society for American Archaeology May 2017218DIGITALREVIEWSof this review are not liable for nights spent building empires untilthe early morning and any missed deadlines that may ensue.REFERENCES CITEDCivilization ca.2016 About Civilization VI. Electronic document, https://civilization.com/,accessed January 15, 2017.Crossley, Rob2009 Miyamoto tops Game Developers’ Hero list. Electronic document,http://web.archive.org/web/20090618103412/http://www.developmag.com/news/32186/Miyamoto-wins-Game-Developers-Hero-award,accessed January 17, 2017.Fukuyama, Francis1992 The End of History and the Last Man. Penguin Adult, London.Morgan, Colleen (guest editor)2016 Video Games and Archaeology: Part One [Special section]. SAAArchaeological Record 16(5):9–37.Plunkett, Luke2016 Civilization VI: The Kotaku Review. Electronic document,http://kotaku.com/civilization-vi-the-kotaku-review-1788213327, accessedJanuary 12, 2017.SteamSpy2017a Sid Meier’s Civilization V: Peak Daily Concurrent Players. Electronicdocument, https://steamspy.com/app/8930, accessed January 17, 2017.2017b Sid Meier’s Civilization VI: Peak Daily Concurrent Players.Electronic document, https://steamspy.com/app/289070, accessedJanuary 17, 2017.2017c Sid Meier’s Civilization VI: Owners. Electronic document,https://steamspy.com/app/289070, accessed January 17, 2017.Takahashi, Dean2016 Civilization: 25 years, 33M copies sold, 1 billion hours played, and 66versions. Electronic document, http://venturebeat.com/2016/02/18/civilization-25-years-66-versions-33m-copies-sold-1-billion-hours-played/, accessed January 17, 2017.Tharoor, Kanishk2016 Playing with History: What Sid Meier’s Video Game Empire Got Rightand Wrong about ‘Civilization’. Electronic document, https://longreads.com/2016/10/26/what-sid-meiers-video-game-empire-got-right-and-wrong-about-civilization/, accessed January 12, 2017.Zucchi, Sam2016 Civilization VI Is More Game than Drama. Electronic document,https://killscreen.com/articles/civilization-vi-game-drama/, accessedJanuary 14, 2017.LUDOGRAPHYNever Alone.2014 . PC. Upper One Games. E-line Media: Phoenix, Seattle & Anchorage.Prison Architect.2015 . PC. Introversion Software. Introversion Software: Walton-on-Thames.Sid Meier’s Civilization.1991 . PC. MicroProse. MicroProse: Hunt Valley.Sid Meier’s Civilization II.1996 . PC. MicroProse. MicroProse: Hunt Valley.Sid Meier’s Civilization III.2001 . PC. Firaxis Games. Infogrames: Lyon.Sid Meier’s Civilization IV.2005 . PC. Firaxis Games. 2K Games: Novato.Sid Meier’s Civilization V.2010 . PC. Firaxis Games. 2K Games: Novato.Sid Meier’s Civilization VI.2016 . PC. Firaxis Games. 2K Games: Novato.This War of Mine.2014 . PC. 11 Bit Studios. 11 Bit Studios: Warsaw.Undertale.2015 . PC. Toby Fox. Toby Fox.AUTHORS INFORMATIONAngus A.A. Mol VALUE Project, Leiderdorp, Dr. de Bruijnestraat 20,2351PD, Netherlands (info@valueproject.nl)Aris Politopoulos and Csilla E. Ariese-Vandemeulebroucke Faculty ofArchaeology, Leiden University, Einsteinweg 2, 2333CC, NetherlandsMay 2017 Advances in Archaeological Practice A Journal of the Society for American Archaeology 219

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“From the Stone Age to the Information Age”: History and Heritage in Sid Meier’s Civilization VI

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