The game that we have been playing and learning from as a class for the past few weeks is called Civilization VI. The game is a turn-based strategy game that is for the most part historically accurate. The Overall goal of the game is to achieve 1 of the 7 victory conditions that are possible. Those victory conditions are military domination, technological superiority, or cultural influence, over the other human and computer-controlled opponents. This was my first time playing the game and I had lots of difficulty with learning how to play because of how many options there are and the amount that there is to do and complete in Civilization VI. I have been playing video games for the majority of my life and this was by far the hardest experience that I had with trying to learn and pick up how to play this game. Being thrown into a strategy game that I was unfamiliar with was difficult, I would make moves that I had no idea what I would be doing and those moves would have consequences (good and bad) that I was completely unaware of how they were affecting my gameplay experience. I would try to make allies with other nation-states to establish trade and other perks of having allies in the hopes to become a superpower in the game but would continuously get raided by barbarians and other enemies that would walk all over me. In my first playthrough, I had declared war on another nation-state very early in the game and once again I would get trampled by the computer that I declared war on. I believe that this game is a good historical representation in the right circumstances. For example, it wouldn’t be historically accurate if Genghis Kahn and Teddy Roosevelt were facing off in the Civ 6 world, they both come from very different points in time. Civilization VI is incredibly complex with how many things can happen based off a player’s decisions. The potential playthroughs are pretty much endless, no two playthroughs are exactly the same to each other. One of the texts that we read and discussed for class is called “Is Sid Meier’s Civilization history”. Although it was a tough read, it provided a lot of different viewpoints and opinions on if Civilization 6 is a good depiction of how things have seemed to play out over the course of early history and even into modern history. He has a bunch of different articles and opinions from sources all over the internet that each have their own unique main points and objectives. One point the author makes in the article that I found interesting is “In Civilization, we find that though it ‘might play fast and loose with historical detail it nevertheless remains almost overwhelmed by historical references to peoples, leaders, events and cultural achievements’ (Atkins 2005). The aesthetics of the videogame often
contain a vast amount of data and, accordingly, have a comparable (though different) information load to history in literary form. Further information about these replicated historical objects is easily included due to the multiple possible semiotic modes through which the videogame can operate. Often this means that particular objects or practices are explained through supporting documents that are accessed context specifically intra-ludically or extraneously through a menu system. Either way, what is important to note is the effort to include secondary sources. Sometimes games may even include (copies of) the primary sources themselves, most commonly in the form of pictures, photographs, documents, videos and, as aforementioned, the virtual replicas of the environment”. What he says is that the game has a lot of accurate historical information and even primary sources from historical events which it doesn’t get a lot more accurate in terms of being historically accurate than that. One way that I can relate this back to the major that I am enrolled in is that throughout the game you need to be producing and spending resources like gold, food, and other things. This relates back to me being a finance major because you need to know how to budget the resources that you have and have a steady inflow of those resources or else you will not have any resources which makes it nearly impossible to defend yourself from attackers, make allies, and expand your civilization with the ultimate goal of achieving 1 of those 7 victory conditions. I have very much enjoyed working with and learning from Civilization VI. It is a game that I will continue to play and fiddle with until I fully understand how to play and beat the game in one of the possible ways.