Civilization games are chock full of historical information, but it’s mixed in and peppered with fantastic features that make it fun to play – that’s how I recently encountered Harriet Tubman as Han dynasty emperor Niccolò Machiavelli when I played Civilization 7 this month on the cover of PC Gamer . Games are not history teachers, but Firaxis senior historian Dr Andrew Johnson, who is also an associate professor in the Department of Social Anthropology at Stockholm University, hopes that the studio’s passion for history will inspire some of us to pick up the book. That’s the whole reason I do this job.
In the case of Civilization 7, Firaxis has relaxed the criteria for leaders, so Machiavelli can rule historic China, although it’s demanding to say that this is any up-to-date departure from historicity, considering that the series has always been about rewriting the past, often with stupid consequences. For Johnson, the problems that arise when trying to tell a story in a grand strategy game are more academic.
For example, borders in Southeast Asia have a different nature than borders in other parts of the world, Johnson says: “There are overlapping zones of sovereignty. Someone can be both part of the Cambodian state, part of the Thai state, part of the Lao state, pay tribute to all or none. But this doesn’t work in a game where you need direct lines on the map. So there is nothing wrong with it, we can point it out somewhere in the Civilopedia or in the gameplay if someone is interested enough in the Khmer Empire, they can read about it.
For me, Firaxis’ biggest historical problems stem from the fact that Civ is a game you can win, which means it presents history as something you can win. Given that Civ 7’s new three-act structure includes an “Age of Exploration,” which encourages players to build fleets and venture to distant lands – perhaps to conquer and colonize them, perhaps not – he asked Johnson whether he’s not worried about the game portraying a Eurocentric view. Are colonial empires models of “victory” here?
Apologizing to Civ 7’s narrative designer Dr. Rue Taylor, an expert on medieval Europe, Johnson said he particularly wanted to counter the tendency to overemphasize European history.
“When the average history buff starts the game, they’re often saturated with European, sometimes East Asian, history and don’t really look beyond it,” Johnson said. “So the ideas of a passive, traditional, mystical ‘other’ and a dynamic, active Europe is one of the things I really wanted to move away from. That’s why civilizations like the Chola are really interesting to me, because here we have large, poly-religious, multi-ethnic trade routes stretching across the Indian Ocean at the time that Beowulf was written, and Europeans are looking for trolls under the rocks. That’s why I think it’s fascinating to capture the dynamics of the world outside Europe.
“For me, the age of exploration is more or less the age of interconnection. Yes, we have the highest age of European colonization there. But we also have trade in the Indian Ocean. We also have Pax Mongolica, we have this trade in the Steppe. You have caravans in the Sahara, lots of other things going on, and the game is set up so that you don’t have to be a colonizer to win the victory conditions, which have nothing to do with colonization, but on the other hand, going on a journey, exploring and settling new lands is something that non-European powers have achieved.
Returning to Johnson’s motivation for working on Civ 7, the possibility of someone being inspired to explore the past isn’t extraneous to him – he says that’s why he took the job.
“That’s exactly what I’m here for,” he told me. “I just want people to appreciate the world and the strangeness of the world. Because if you appreciate how different the past or other places were, you can also change your everyday life. It opens up up-to-date worlds. This makes up-to-date worlds possible. If you think this is the only way it can be, the only way it should be, then you are locked into a inert existence, and that is monotonous.
Civilization 7 is scheduled for release on February 11 Couple and consoles, and a full description of my game can be read in the latest issue of PC Gamer. The brief version is that I was having fun fighting against Rome and struggling to build a reasonable Great Wall, and I expected Civ 7 to be fun and, as usual with this series, divisive. Whether the large changes to Firaxis’ structure (which I explained in an older preview) turn out to be a complete success or not, I’m glad to see the studio continue to try up-to-date things in a series that’s well over 30 years aged.
