This episode starts like it always starts: A publisher announces a new game. The new game is apparently different to the previous game, and that’s a complete dealbreaker. How could they?? In this case the game is Civilization 7, and the change in question were, well, I’ll get there.
Just for fun, I decided to spend some time in the salt mine that are the comment sections for this announcement. There are some hilarious capital-G Gamer moments on full display, and I could spend an entire blogpost ridiculing all of them. But just to give a little taste of them:
Wow… I never would have imagined the narrator to be a woman. And a female Pharaoh! Who would have guessed. Ooo… I can’t wait for the trans non binary queen!!
— @theendishere7, who has never seen the Wikipedia Category:Female pharaohs
But the most common whinge here isn’t how women ruin gaming, or how Firaxis lost the plot in daring to simulate climate change, no, it was that, rather than leading the United States of America from 4000 BC to 2050 AD, you instead evolve it from an ancient civilization to a modern one.
And to be fair, there are concrete reasons to be concerned about this change: Humankind (2021), a game heavily inspired by Civilization, attempted this previously, and that game was somewhat lackluster in its execution. And given that “game with civilization change is meh” is the only data point, it’s easy to extrapolate from there that Civilization 7 is going to be meh as well.
Luckily for us, the board games Small World (2009), Vinci (1999) and History of the World (1991) also all had such a feature, each of which won several game of the year awards. So the concept itself probably can be executed well, it’s just that Humankind couldn’t.
Yet, the backlash to this change is suspiciously disproportionate. This isn’t just people being skeptical about a gameplay change. This goes deeper, with some stunning language:
The changing mechanic is disgusting. It tries to imprint on us that all people are interchangeable.
— @Aemond2024
Yep, this is about nationalism.
The nationalist ideology
Even though nationalism is a fairly recent addition to the list of things humans get very attached to and excited about, only really becoming a thing throughout the 19th century, it probably is the most popular belief system at the moment.
Up until now, Civilization 1-6 consisted of you leading a civilization – current nations like Germany, France or Russia, or ancient civilizations like ancient Rome, Aztecs or Maya. Each civilization has some perks unique to it: For example, China is the only civilization which can build the Great Wall as its tile improvement, and is the only one to have the Crouching Tiger unit. Unless conquered, each civilization is eternal.
This gameplay is inherently compatible with nationalism. In nationalism, a large source of pride is the achievements of others of the same nationality, whether it’s someone good at sports in the Olympics, or something someone did in the old times.
- This is true for Chinese nationalism which points at itself and proudly announces it’s been there since practically the stone age,
- This was true for German nationalism which points at the Holy Roman Empire and by continuation the Roman empire and proudly announced that naturally it was to rule all of Europe,
- This is true for US nationalism, too, which proudly points at its founding date and how it built itself into a nation on virgin lands without any external help.
These nationalist beliefs are just that though – beliefs.
- China has not existed since the stone age, it split and recombined and split again, incorporating various but always different bits of east and south east asia into itself over time, and has a devilishly difficult and splintered history. Notably, the current “China” is not actually the Republic of China that was there during the first and second world war – instead, it’s a new thing, while the Republic of China itself is better known as Taiwan these days, but still maintains a claim over the entire region and its thousands of years of history.
- Seeing Germany as a successor of the Roman empire can be rejected just the same by pointing at Arminius/Hermann, who defeated the Romans in the Varus disaster. Seeing it at a successor of the Teutons can be dismissed just the same as Hermann was a Cherusci, with an army of Cherusci, Marsi and Bructeri. Trying to seeing it as the nation that formed out of Germanic tribes also doesn’t work as the tribes of the Goths a) came from Sweden and b) ended up in Spain and Italy during the fall of Rome. Even trying to draw up the HRE as the “first Reich”, it glosses over the fact that it encompasses 6 other whole nations (Netherlands, Belgium, Switzerland, Austria, Czechia, Slovenia) in addition to large parts of France, Italy and Poland, so despite it being sorta ruled by an emperor, it hardly qualifies as a united people.
- The US of course didn’t manifest its destiny on virgin lands, but on lands on which people already lived, Indians. It also didn’t do so without help; France had an important role during the whole independence thing, and various Europeans, Africans and Asians chose, or have been chosen, to go to the US. If anything, the US shows that the idea of a nation being a united and sovereign ethnicity doesn’t really hold as the US is pretty much all ethnicities together.
In Civilization 7 meanwhile, you play as 3 somewhat connected, but different civilizations through out the ages: the ancient era, age of exploration and modern age. This completely rips apart this idea of nations as a practically eternal thing – easy to understand and drastic to see. The idea of a people being not a constant, but rather changing over time is just incompatible with nationalism. But it also is true.
Take the kingdom of Majapahit under the rule of Tribhuwannottunggadewi Jayawishnuwardhani (or just Gitarja if you don’t have that much time). In Civilization 6, it is practically a nation from 4000 BC to 2050 AD, like the all the other ones. And while in the back of our head we know this isn’t quite how history played out, from a nationalist background this feels like an acceptable simplification to make.
Let’s now take a look how Civilization 7 might structure this instead: In the 3-era model, Majapahit just barely makes the cut for the ancient era. Once we hit the age of exploration, we’re offered the choice to become Chinese or… Dutch? That’s like on the other side of the world! And for the modern era, it’s a choice between Germany, Britain, Japan and Indonesia! Surely, none of that makes any sense?
As it turns out, all of it does:
- The Majapahit (13th-16th century) followed the Srivijaya (7th-11th century, also a somewhat different sphere of influence). Details don’t really remain as they likely wrote on leaves.
- The area had and still has strong ties to China for trading.
- The Dutch colonized the place from the 17th century, except for the bit that the British got.
- Papua New Guinea (once partially ruled by the Majapahit) was split into a Dutch, British and German bit in the late 19th century.
- Japan conquered the entire island chain during the second world war.
- The former Dutch colony across the many islands today is… various countries, but mostly Indonesia.
Any choice here is, in an alternate history sense, reasonable in the simplified model we’re operating under. And it’s not like it’d be a massively strong detriment to Civilization as a series if the choice was unreasonable: Civilization is not a game series which cares particularly about historical accuracy. After all, in Civilization 6, the following scenario is possible:
A Buddhist France declares war against a Custom Religion United States of America because both spawned on Antarctica (which consists of mountains and plains mostly, with a bit of desert) in the year 200 AD, and are only separated by the city-states of Jerusalem (allied with France with 4 envoys) and Auckland (allied with the United States with 3 envoys). By the time the war ends in 950 AD, Auckland is captured by France and subsequently lost as a Free City due to low loyalty, but Jerusalem and Bordeaux get converted to Custom Religion. The Catholic Phoenicians swoop in and conquer the Free City of Auckland with its vampires, and to maintain loyalty complete the Move Capital project in Auckland.
If you’ve never played Civilization 6 before, the above paragraph is insane. If you have, you might have done something similar before without batting an eye, and if you’ve played with friends, you probably wouldn’t be surprised if the next step of France and the US would be an alliance and a joint declaration of war against Phoenicia to rid the world of that dirty opportunist.
And it’s finally with this backdrop that the decision to switch civilization mid-game is hardly outrageous at all. If anything, it adds realism if you go with the maximum realism option provided (which might even be a Roman Empire -> Holy Roman Empire -> Germany path!), and gives player choice if you find your empire developing in a vastly different direction compared to reality. And on the way it just casually happens to challenge nationalism, without even drawing much attention to that.
Leo Wattenberg 