Civilization: The Good, The Bad, and The Civilopedia
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- Опубліковано 22 лип 2024
- Hi. I wanted to start off this series of videos with what I consider to be both a foundational and a neglected element of learning history: Historiography.
Comparing certain elements of Civilization 5 and Civilization 6 felt like the best way to explore how Civ changes and falls short across the series when it comes to things like neutrality and presentation.
Let me know if this clicked for you, because it's the first in a series where I'll be talking about academic history and how it functions, stuff colleges teach and maybeeee don't want people to learn for free c:
Next up is EU4 and Great Men Theory.
Uhhhhhhhhhhh I have ZERO idea how the graphic at 12:16ish rotated 90 degrees but okay.
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Civ Children Book article: arstechnica.com/gaming/2017/0...
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00:00 Intro
02:40 Historiography and Narrative
07:38 Historiography and Framing
10:51 Omission
14:19 Conclusion - Ігри
This cuts to the heart of my problem with Civ 6: it's approach to culture is just...fundamentally unfinished. Numerous technologies and tenets are just left off to the side as unconnected one-shot techs, and can be totally bypassed. The way that Civ has set itself up has left some of the most fundamental forces and core events as things that are just kind of there. They don't have an impact, let alone connect to your civilization. It feels like someone said 'ok, it's balanced for this version' and then approved it for launch.
Honestly, as… randomly slapped together as CivBE’s tech web was, the idea of a web felt pretty neat. And when I compare this game’s tech to, say, Civ 3, it’s nice that he AI doesn’t just change governments every time it learns a new one, but it’s also a shame that actual historical progression has basically been thrown out.
@@Rosencreutzzz And I agree! A good part of what makes this feel unfinished is that the outline for historical progression is there. If the devs had just...done things a bit differently, it would be imo. It truly is as you said: they did some research, but weren't comfortable with the conclusions, and so they didn't implement them.
That is because civilization is a 4x game, not a narrative about history. India is not a representation of real india, anymore than the characters in rainbow six siege are real depictions of law enforcement. They are personalized, because identification and communicating mechanics and playstyles are important, not because the parent company wants to make copoganda. When people say "you can't tell reality from fiction" they are literally talking about you people. _its all based on a board game, for christ's sake._ This video is annoying, and I rebuke you all.
@@shoopoop21 but oh my if a game ever dares to unironically imply socialism could actually be better than capitalism you would never hear the end of the critics.
@@houndofculann1793 Tons of city builders from the golden age do this, in regard to central planning. I love them to bits. I love videogames.
Really enjoyed this! It's nice to see scrutiny applied to Civ's portrayal of history in a way that goes far beyond the usual "lol gandhi no nuke irl" memefests you often find on forums.
The Civilopedia entries of Civ 6 were impossible for me to read because of the flippant and snarky tone they adopt that I found personally infuriating. Give me the dry and impersonal list of facts of the Civ 5 Civilopedia over the glib narrative peppered with snarky remarks of the Civ 6 Civilopedia any day of the week.
I know *exactly* what you mean. The weird tone shift from like factoid to just making some weird quip about atomic bombs or whatever. I don't need Jim's best joke from that tuesday as the last line for the entry on fascism, especially when your game otherwise plays softball with concepts like they're neutral in a vacuum.
It's been said that fascism is the application of colonial methods in a European context, funnily enough, regarding Autocracy.
I have over 1400 hours in Civ 5 and I was always complaining that you can't look up tenants of Ideologies after you select them. Turns out you can trough the civilopedia. I learned something new FTW! :D
Yeah before I made this video I wasn't even sure you could check, because I knew the pyramid for them was kinda...wonky.
Tenets
Very good video and it makes some great points. I find myself conflicted because on the one hand I agree with every word you say, but on the other hand if it wasn't for games like Age of Empires 2 and Civ 4 I wouldn't be here today watching history videos. How do we reconcile these games' historical shortcomings with their obvious benefits in engaging the public, kids especially?
The "Jaguar Warriors of Tenochtitlan" line from AoE2 has been in my head since childhood and so I'm pretty sure I'm in a similar situation to you. I think rather than reconciliation, we simply have to do better history. I mean, that's always the case, really. Games really can be amazing entry points for people to learn history. I think one of their strongest appeals in this respect is that they help do the visualization for you, especially of more abstract things like geography, countries, borders, and culture. Civ started it's understanding of history at a children's book level, and it can even continue to maintain that, if it wants, but children's media being "for kids" doesn't mean it deserves less academic scrutiny, it means it deserves more.
Getting rid of truisms and cliches does not get rid of gaming experiences, unless someone demands inaccuracy for the sake of their false perceptions. A kid who grows up knowing the term "dark age" not as "grim brutal feudalism times" but as "an era we don't know enough about" isn't going to have less fun games, if that makes sense.
@@Rosencreutzzz thank you for the thoughtful reply! I'm not super optimistic about how much better mass market games will do, and while I hope my kids learn from historical games, I guess what it comes down to is supplementing that with other material
A nice video, and I like the shorter, more condensed format for this approach of looking at an element in a game. Looking forward to that EU4 vid too!
I remember Civ 3 also included communism, fascism (with an expansion) and "democracy" (codename capitalism) as the three main late game government forms. That wasn't started with Civ V.
I remember that most every country (in my anecdotal experience) would switch to new governments every time they got them and so they would very often end up almost all fascist, as the latest discovered ideology.
@@Rosencreutzzz I think most players recommended fascism as the meta as well, iirc
I think it's a bit situational but I played 3 mostly as a kid. It was almost always suggested fascism or communism in those days though, because space and conquest were the best conquests and production boosts were better than whatever capitalism offered. And also if the AI is all going fash, it's hard to like, keep up with their military bonuses, I guess. It's funny to look back and be unsure if culture victory was even a thing (it was, apparently)
I still play a fair bit of Civ 3. Here democracy is unlocked earlier than the others, with a tech in the middle ages (a combination of the middle age and renaissance eras of later games), and communism and fascism both in the early industrial era. Gameplay-wise communism is better if you're really large or do a lot of fighting, democracy is better if you're at most moderately sized and not engaged in too much war, fascism combines the disadvantages of the other two with little advantage, so I never use it (I deleted a longer paragraph of the in-game effects of these governments, as it's likely not of much interest). Maybe it changed with some later patch, but in my experience the AIs tend to mostly but not exclusively prefer republic to monarchy in the early game, entirely ignore feudalism as an option (tbf that's the worst government in terms of in-game effects), all go for democracy and then keep that for the rest of the game, unless they get into a large enough war, in which case they mostly switch to fascism, but sometimes also to communism. I don't remember what the civilopedia entries look like, as I haven't looked at them in ages. As a funny side note, you can still build stock markets and the Wall Street small wonder under communism.
hey I just found your videos from the viccy vid ✌️. Great stuff, can't wait to watch your channel grow!
Just getting into your content, I can already tell that I'm going to love it. This is the kind of stuff I thought about but didn't realize anybody else thought about.
More than anything, I'd love to be a fly on the wall during a development meeting. I wonder how they do research, whether there's a department, or several departments dedicated to that, what sort of communications they have, what sort of values they have in deciding what to include and what not to include, how self-aware they are of those values... all of it.
Clicked on this playlist when it popped up randomly, and was slightly apprehensive, but I'm very glad I watched this, and looking forward to the rest of the "Doing history" series
I haven't played Civ 5, but seeing how they give Isabella I (Monarch) an instrumental version of Ay Carmela/Viva la Quince Brigada (Republican song), it says a lot.
This really reminds me of how Tropico 4 & 5 portray Ideologies. The Communists in 4 are much more focused on the well being of the populace and get angry if people starve, die by healthcare or lose their home, making them seem much more like Anarchists or Libertarian Socialists. Compare that to 5 where they want the constitution to form a police state that censors the news and later on the internet, this of course being an overcorrection to make them much more Marxist Leninist to reflect how politics were actually in 20th and 21st century Cuba, at least they actually want Workers Coops and Unions leaders? Then theres the Intellectuals of course and they seem to be through and through the Libertarian Socialist faction who fight for workers rights, education and a Free Internet, being renamed the "Globalists" in 5 because the devs at Haenemont Games wanted to do some genuinely funny jokes about the EU and Neoliberalism. Oh and and of course in both games the Right Wing Nationalists are treated as a punch line with political views that are entirely detrimental to your economy and society lol
All in all the games do a much better job at portraying politics than any of the Civ games do imo
Love your vids!!
Games are crucial for some people in organizing their thinking on abstract subjects and approaches to such global process as history and social development. It would be interesting how not only in-game descriptions, but gameplay itself forms a certain mindset. Keep it up, the subject is very interesting. Would you like to look at such games as Millennia and Old World, or even go beyond the strategy genre?
As years-long Civilization fan who has always been absorbed into the strategy of the game, I've always hated the ways it frames "success," particularly how that success is always determined numerically--which reinforces the idea that capitalism is the natural conclusion of any culture that wants to be successful, because capitalism has no function other than to make number go up.
Every time I talk about this my friends start staring into the distance with their mouths slightly open. Thanks for the video!
I would dispute this, because unless you're going for an economic victory, then you don't really need to care about the economics of your nation, as a science victory is possible under any economic system, and for conquest you are performing colonial mercantilism which is inherently opposed to free market capitalism, and while it does pigeonhole you with economics in the pursuit of wealth it is because we have proof that free market capitalism is the best (not most perfect nor most fair) system to attain prosperity.
@@t.wcharles2171 free market capitalism only offers common people prosperity inasmuch as it's necessary to bring wealth to the top. Prosperity was never the point, and never will be.
@@zed739 if you would rather i should call the happy accident of capitalism because in all other systems wealth is concentrated exclusively in the upper class be it a Nobility or a Politburo it is the result of capitalism that today more people are better off than they were in 1900 especially in the old 'third world'
@@t.wcharles2171 I don't think your understanding of wealth distribution under capitalism is very good. Currently it's one of the most lopsided it has ever been with 10% of adults in the world owning 85% of all the wealth. Conversely the bottom 50% of world adult population own only 1% of the wealth.
As a small example home ownership is often much lower in modern capitalist countries than in socialist (+former) ones where it was/is at 85-95% and rents were never much more than 5-10% of monthly income, a very far cry from what most of the "richest" countries today have with the US average for home ownership being around 65% and rents being between 10-45% of monthly income. Especially that upper end there is utterly ridiculous and most often affects people whose income is too small to afford proper living with the rest of what they get.
Yes, capitalism has brought humanity a lot of progress. Yes, socialism has caused a lot of grief and messed up shit. But the same goes exactly inverse, and on top of that with a bit of research one can find that capitalism spends incredible amounts of time and effort into sabotaging socialism (or just merely left rethoric even) while at the same time claiming it's such a bad system that it will fail by itself. I find that rather weird to put it mildly.
The central idea of capitalism is free competition of individuals, which will always result in someone ultimately winning and getting everything unless something limits the competition. The central idea of socialism is distribution of wealth equally to absolutely everyone. Which one of these sounds like it concentrates wealth to an upper class?
@@houndofculann1793 oh the reason for home ownership being so high in eastern european countries is because the newly minted governments flogged them off at lower than market rates these rates were quite literally pennies on the dollar.
Also the wealth distribution is still much better than in many other countries the problem is when competition stagnates that is the point companies stop fearing for their jobs the market slows and prices rise, the companies are no longer incentivised to keep prices low and wages at parity they can let it slip a little and that is where inequality emerges.
Real fascinating.
Civ is really more of a themed board game than anytning highbrow
Games, including boardgames, are not above, or beneath, criticism. Criticism is not something that should be reserved for "highbrow" media, especially when most of the media landscape isn't, and never has been, "highbrow".
@@jovaniibb not to mention the that term "high brow" has its roots in phrenology
Both of these comments simultaneously hold true.
sometimes the devs just don't think about the game as hard as the critics@@LoudWaffle
@@JCdental Yes, completely agreed.
just finding this now. FANTASTIC!!
I disagree with your assertion that the 3 ideologies in Civ 5 BNW are supposed to be: Democracy, Communism and Fascism that were just obscured. I do strictly believe these ideologies are much more akin to Victoria's national values where incidentally you can also find both order and freedom but in an arguably different context. When viewed in this light it makes sense that a so called 'Communist' or 'Freedom' tenant is in the Autocracy tree as the ideas these tenants portray aren't actually mutually exclusive to 1 ideology or another. Since you mentioned Gunboat Diplomacy specifically, lets continue with that. Originally it was indeed the British that used Gunboat Diplomacy against China in the Opium Wars. Technically you can argue that this tactic has been used much earlier but I think this is what the creators of Civ5 BNW envisioned with this tenant. With that said, since that time many countries of varying ideologies all used the concept of Gunboat Diplomacy to achieve their goals.
Which brings us back to your argument of omission which I argue is a gross misreading of the Civ5 ideologies. They simply aren't the classic trio of: Democracy, Communism and Fascism, like in Civ6, instead they encompass ideas from all 3, somewhat, and allow the player to pick and choose which tenants s/he wants. This was done primarily for game play reasons to make all 3 ideologies relevant for whichever victory condition the player is aiming for. However as I showed above with the case of Gunboat Diplomacy, also actually makes sense historically. Whether we like it or not there were many similarities between Democratic, Communist and Fascist governments throughout history. Their differences were actually in very narrow and specific fields, in all others they actually had a lot in common. The Civ5 BNW system reflects this perfectly whereas Civ6 goes full woke and butchers this idea, like it did with so many other things.
Glad i wasn’t the only one who interpreted Civ V’s Ideology mechanics in this way!
His interpretation/understanding of the intent (or vague lack there of), with Civ V’s ideologies had really caught me off guard and was incredibly distressing to hear him interpret the mechanics in the way he did.
Appreciating its nuance and lack of hand holding (Civ 6’s “this tenant was a bad thing” “this tenant doesn’t actually work” ) and that the tenants not matching up or feeling better placed in another Ideology was intentional, as real world countries that fit into these ideologies frequently have counter intuitive tenants or tenants that are clearly mutually exclusive, but are here with us and exist regardless.
Additionally how freeing it is that any of the big 3 victory types are achievable with any ideology. Not forcing the player to pick Autocracy for conquest, Freedom for scientific, etc. is a simplistic but excellent design choice that feels absent with Civ 6’s new version of the mechanics.
Here’s hoping you get a reply, i would be very interested to hear what he has to say about it
Great video, great points. I wish we had longer and more nuanced critique video I should say.
Render unto the algorithm what is the algorithms: Comment!
Rosencreutz : "the devs are bias"
Me playing civilization 5 and every leaders chose "Communism", and leaving me with no free tenets : :'(
Jokes aside, I love your analysis of this game. I can't trust any historical sources which said "the Library of Alexandria being burned by Christian mobs",or even promoting Capitalism and constant growth as the only answer to success and glory. The world needs someone like you more.
Late to the video, but just adding that civ did had a more ironic tongue in cheek approach. In civ 4 you need fascism to build mt rushmore or something like that. It's interesting to see the evolution.
As much as it can be fun to deconstruct the Civlopedia on a historical accuracy basis, I don't think that was the main focus of the devs. With over 1500 hours in the game, I have read only a handful of entries in the entire game. There are hundreds of entries. My main use, and I suspect the vast majority of other players as well, is to get data on gameplay mechanics: like combat strength and tech pre reqs. When the devs explicitly say that their take on historiography is to tell history at a children's book level, it is fair to say that their writing is less than a Wikipedia entry, because it is intended to be such. A much better place to focus attention is the phenomenal soundtrack that permeates every game. Civ VI hits the nail on the head with giving just a small taste of many different civilizations in the form of a very gamified system that is optimized for gameplay every step of the way (except the music, which is optimized for maximum awesome). I do love your content, but this video in particular suffers greatly from a lack of scope: focusing heavily on 2 points in a game that has hundreds or thousands of similar points, depending on frame of reference. The hardest thing for me to accomplish in this context is concisely summarizing all of history, historiography, and relevant comparisons simultaneously, but I do think the longer form content of your Paradox videos fits this genre better. There is no dearth of content in this field, so I recommend not making strong cases or focusing too specifically without disclaimers in such short form videos. A large part of historiography is understanding where a lack of information limits one's ability to make an informed judgement.
Eh. I would say its unlikely many /adults/ read the non gameplay civilopedia, at least for broad concepts rather than the blurb about a specific reader.
However as a child i read through the entirety of the non gameplay civilopedia in civ 2 and 3 more than once. Im sure there are plenty of children doing the same with the modern games.
@@russianbear0027 And there is an argument to be made that a heavily biased narrative tells a better story to a child that isn't able to understand all the concepts, or even words, in a complicated text entry. I'm not arguing for a moral platform here, but I think Civ 6 actively tries to cater to a younger demographic, and changes the way they present information accordingly. Leaders are heavily animated, beautiful art, but leaning more artistic than realistic. The game is predicated on colored districts like childrens' building blocks. I don't expect the level of detail, precision, and grit found in other series or even previous Civ titles. I have only player 4, 5, and 6, but 6 is definitely much more colorful and kid friendly, and 5 was particularly heavy with the ideology stuff that brought the mood to a darker place than I remembered. I think both are good, but I am interested in what the original civlopedias were like in relation to the mood/themes of the games.
Democracy is definitely the most glaring example of the flaws of the civics tree. I feel like most people know it's ancient
Thank you, this has always been one of my biggest disconnects with the games (even though I managed to get over it and logged 900+ hours in Civ 6 lol)
I basically just have to entirely discard the game’s potential function as a “what if” historical sim, which at least seems like something the devs were trying to accomplish.
Describing the Great Depression as a 'hiccup' of Capitalism is such a mind bogglingly bad take. The juxtaposition of the Capitalism and Communism desc's lengths already painted such a bleak picture.
At least civilopedia is more accurate than the nonsense AoE2 had in its manual. Even as a kid I questioned some of the stuff in there. And glad to see they are keeping up the tradition by hiring "historians" that get base their research on wikipedia troll entries.
I found that Civ 6 in general is basically western „development“ with a Heavy european focus, leaving out a lot of specialties from other cultures and continents - I get the idea and I love playing the Game but you have to keep thinking critically
Actual technological and humanitarian progress tends to have a European bias so you can hardly fault the game devs.
Leaving my comment on another video to feed the algorithm gods! 🙏🙏
crus? ven line?
"Capitalism" being a tenet on the "freedom" tree is one of those little ironies that get more glaring by the day
Capitalism is actually best put under the freedom ideology lol😂 what a moronic statement
At at least one point in this video, the presenter acknowledged that civ v/vi etc are just games. They are not history books. I am not quite sure if he was criticising them for lack of academic rigour, or because he disagrees with the historical descriptions they contain, but neither of those things have much applicability to a computer game producer presenting a 4X game to the mass entertainment market. Their development dollar is spent on coding the UI and catchy graphics, not deep historical research.
What is ironic, however, is that (some, at least) teenagers who play a game like civ vi might actually develop an interest in history, geography, politics, etc that will take them far beyond the game - and the often questionable wikipedia page on a subject. They might even read a couple of books, learn some basic SQL coding, and make a mod of some historical country or leader they develop an interest in.
"Scientists do not speak in absolutes" literally everyone 2-4 years ago: THE SCIENCE IS SETTLED
I HECKING LOVE SCIENCE
Science has a consesus though.
Leftists treat government and science the same way, as in, if 51% of the people "agree" than the 49% have to shut up and go along with it. There is such a thing as artificial consensus.
🌹✖️
All states have elements of autocracy and all states have done autocratic things in the past. It is however true that Britain invented liberalism and liberal democracy (with obvious help from the Dutch and others, and the classical Greeks and Romans), and it is true that liberal democracies are the most free states in known history. Britain was also one of the most liberal and humanistic empires in world history. Civ 5 is reductive in how it oversimplifies history, that is true, because it is a computer game, not a 250 volume history of everything, but your claims that it is inaccurate and your attacks on its objectivity are unfair. If you want nuance, go read a library's worth of history like real historians do. You, a UA-camr most likely at peak hubris on the Dunning Kruger curve, are nitpicking like a teenager whose just heard about postmodern critique. The Civilisation series, particularly civ 4 and 5, are perhaps the best introduction to history you can get in the 21st century. And no, lacking sources does not mean you should reject what people say. That is called 'appeal to authority' fallacy'. 'The world is not flat' 'I don't believe you because you can't cite any sources'.
I'm not saying you should believe whatever Civ 5 tells you and close your mind to understanding further, but understanding history requires beginning with cognitive hooks with which to combine other historical knowledge together, and continually questioning, synthesizing and re-evaluating what you know. That's how we build historical knowledge. Civ 5 is as good a place to start as any macrohistory written by an academic, or a publicly edited source like Wikipedia. All with be over-simplified and contain a certain narrative, but Civ 5 is not a source demanding to be included in historiography like Wikipedia or a historical journal is, it's a game trying to explain the basics of history to people who don't know much about the subject so they can have an elementary knowledge from which they can build towards more accurate understanding. Civ 5 is impressively accurate and naunced for a computer game and has no evident political agenda despite wishing to avoid being divisive and cause offense to its customer base, and that actually makes it more appropriate source of learning than, for example, a high school history textbook or a Netflix documentary. You imply that it is less accurate than other sources (you provide no citation for this, so by your own logic we have to discount your claim, as in epistemology the person making the claim has the burden of proof) and that it is trying to present a biased narrative and be considered part of accepted historiography, and as someone who actually has a postgraduate degree in modern history from a prestigious institution, I see no evidence for your claim, other than you may be did a little bit of postmodern critique at school or in your undergrad or watched a few UA-cam videos on it and now you're Karl Marx himself.
Marxism as an economic ideology makes too wide a play by dabbling into religion, etc., and that's why the Civilopedia mentions such. It is Marxism itself that enables such Civilopedia content.
Civ 6 is a farce to me. It ugly , snarky, and such a watered down experience when compared to civ5.
Dude, it's just a game. For many people it's a good aproximation for history. But my guess it's if you want more detalied and serious analyses, go for a book or a set of authors, not a game.
if it's "just a game" why would it have these entries at all
Author's decision to make it more funny. I mean, a lot of the Civilopedia entries are quite funny, even if I dissagree with some of those.@@elitemagikarp4822
Dude, it’s just a video. For many people these kind of analyses are interesting and a great learning tool. But my guess it’s if you want less analytical and informational content, go for a simpler game like football or tetris.
Fair point about the video and I'm not saying that the video it's not interesting at all. But at the same time, I think it's asking a lot for just a game@@LoudWaffle
@@diegoramirez7901 My comment's mostly just ribbing on ya no worries man 😁
I guess if I have to make a genuine point, it's just that I don't even necessarily think that critiques like this are trying to affect such great change in the things they are critiquing - in this case I don't get the impression that Rosencreutz wants Civ to fully dive into an accurate and deeply nuanced simulator of alternate histories; as that would just make it a fundamentally different game from what it's really trying to be.
It is indeed "just a game" rather than an essay or book written by a historian on these topics, but at the same time it can say a lot (perhaps accidentally) about the things we take for granted or assume about history and the flow of civilizations, and that's worth talking about.