Tagmemic Analysis of Civilization

Note: I haven't played this game, so my knowledge is limited; you'll be able to do better.

Full set of nine questions

1. What is it in and of itself (What are its features? What features differentiate it from similar things?)

This is a strategy game, in which the player has control of many people and resources, and can sculpt a civilization based on choices from a menu of options. In general, the more complex the society, the more powerful it is. It is similar to chess in that it involves strategy, the attempt to beat/dominate, requires allocation of resources (and understanding their capability), but differs from chess in that you don't build a custom set of assets, and chess is more abstract. Related to God game genre (I'm not sure i grasp the difference. Differs from God games (example, Will Wright's Sim games) in terms of competition/militarism?) Might also be interesting to compare and contrast to Risk and/or a more "pure" fighting game? The game, along with Sims variants, have been used in school more than most other games, despite the fact they were not designed to be educational?

2. How is it changing over time? (How much can it change without becoming something else? What is its position in a temporal sequence?)

Author acknowledges board strategy games as model. A variant game, Colonization, was criticized by some for ignoring slavery, and this has been added to Civ IV, which also includes religion, but some would say so generically so as to be trivialized. The game also has some obvious biases (why call Russians the Josef Stalins? It'd be like calling Americans Benedict Arnolds?). Not sure of the trajectory here, but seems to be more complex in terms of culture and less about military? As game engine gets more complex, there could be more diplomacy?

This sparks my own questions:

The endurance of the game is remarkable by industry standards. I wonder what accounts for this?  How can I use that in designing  a game?

Do players discover this game at a particular age/phase of gaming? If so, what sort of games lead to and away from it? Or does a particular kind of person find and stick with it?



3. How is it part of a larger system (either physical or abstract)? (How do its sub-components interact?)

Physical: the game has to run on existing hardware. How has evolution of hardware (and possibly software?) affected its functionality?  (for example, talking being harder to model/quantify than fighting)?  What about imput device? Can we extrapolate to how hardware and software changes could give a new game new capabilities?

Non-Physical: How is it part of a cultural system?  How does the game reflect cultural biases? 

"The historian and anthropologist Matthew Kapell has published an essay critical of the Civilization series. It suggests that the game uses unique American myths of progress and the frontier in culturally elitist fashion. (“Civilization and its Discontents: American Monomythic Structure as Historical Simulacrum.” Popular Culture Review Vol. XIII, No. 2 (Summer): 129-136.)"

If gamers are a sub-culture, how does the game relect that?

Economic system: does the high cost of creating games dictate the designers do thinhs in certain ways?

How might it relate to educational system?
Several educators (Squire, Gee and possibly Jenkins) see educational value.

Is the game a plausible model of how the world works? Can it be used to teach? Or does it distort/ oversimplfy too much? it's rumored that our current president was an avid Risk player (but briefly, so was i ;)

Sub-components: what are the different kinds of resources/actions, and how are they valued? How do they interact? What cultural assumptions does this support or ignore?

Results: after answering these questions (and in the process, generating my own questions) I'm a lot clearer on the educational potential of commercial games. i understand some of their limitations (biases), and I can get more insight into the appeal of the game, in case I want to try to create a non-commercial educational version. By understanding more about co-evolution of hardware and games, I might be able to make some educated guesses about how my game could be better than current ones. In the Star Trek series, we see simulations used as tests http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kobayashi_Maru; could we use games for that (without the no-win part)? Do games become less fun when brought into school context? can that be minimized? My paper would explore these ideas and questions.

A related topic that could be really interesting is political biases in this (genre of?) game.