Civilization Gameplay Blog 1

Game played: Civilization

Time: 7:00-8:00 PM (Wednesday 1/18/2017)

Location: At home, on my MacBook Pro

For my first play through, I chose the Chieftain difficulty setting (easiest), to be the country of France, and to have 3 other “players” in the game. I decided not to look at any guides before this initial play through in order to have a realistic perspective on how intuitive the gameplay was and see if I could figure it out on my own. To my chagrin, this was very difficult. I understood the concept of building a city (I believe I managed to get enough settlers to build 3), but made very little progress otherwise. The Romans found me rather early on, and I welcomed peace with them. This interaction was repeated multiple times throughout the game, which seemed odd. I managed to create a small militia, as well. I primarily used these units to explore, but I was also curious about the orders you could give them. Unfortunately, I gave two units under my command the order to “fortify” and could not figure out how to unlock them.

Such was the pattern through my initial play through. I survived a long time by essentially doing nothing. I believe I was in the year 1000 AD when I finally figured out how to unlock the militia units, then in the year 2000 AD I decided to end my peace with the Romans just for something to do since nothing else was really helping. So they wrecked me, ending my many years of “enlightened” leadership. But hey, I got a pretty cool castle out of the deal – apparently my people liked me even though I kept them in the Stone Age.

I found the lack of a tutorial or any basic instruction in this game particularly frustrating. Early on, they even give you a quiz based on symbols that represent certain advancements you can make in the game. If you fail, your people revolt. I’m not really sure how they expected players to know what the symbols were so early on, considering they only pop up when you actually make the advancement that you represent. Overall, the lack of instruction stagnated my gameplay to the extent that it did not really even feel like I was playing at all. There weren’t even any indications of what you could click on to make something happen, or an explanation of what you were capable of doing or controlling. As someone who is relatively good at figuring things out, my inability to even grasp the basics after an hour of gameplay was infinitely frustrating. Building out the castle was cute, though.

This first play through really made me reflect on some of the readings on the nature of gameplay. Specifically, I thought of Huizinga’s essential elements of play outlined in his essay. One of these elements (that we also discussed the first day of class) is some sort of system of rules that define the play. Civilization clearly has a system of rules, but when the rules of a game are not made clear to the player it certainly takes the “fun” out of the play. After all, how can you be expected to succeed at a game if you’re not even aware of the parameters under which you’re playing?