Category: Civilization

For my final hour of gameplay with Civilization, I continued my previous play through begun in my 5th gameplay session (so all the settings were the same as stated in the previous blog). I started the game at 1 AD, and was mainly trying to see if I could just get to the end of the game during this play through regardless of winning.

I did well at first, getting the Largest civilization in 140 AD, the Wealthiest in 680 AD, the Most Powerful in 1300 AD, and then the 2nd Largest in 1635 AD. It was around here that things started to go downhill as in previous sessions. In Paris (my original city), I had built the Great Library, Hanging Gardens, and Magellan’s Expedition – not that I really understood what I was accomplishing in doing so. I still had plenty of money, continued peace with the Egyptians, and didn’t even have any issues with revolts (probably due to my lack of desire to change the government).

So where were the issues? Barbarians almost constantly landed on our shores, I still hadn’t found any other civilizations, and most of all I felt stagnated even as I entered later stages of the game. Frankly, I was bored and getting frustrated again, especially as I noticed that the later I went into the game the slower time seemed to pass. I knew the game would end at 2500 AD, but I found myself quitting somewhere just past 2000 AD. I didn’t think I was in a position to win, and I was no longer motivated to reach the goal I had set for myself. So once the hour was up I chose to let the game go.

So what were my issues with Civilization? I think overall my biggest problem is the lack of intuitive controls (at least for someone possessing no prior experience with civ games). It made the game feel more like work than play; essentially, it lost the “fun” factor for me.

As stated by Johan Huizinga, “the fun of playing…resists all analysis, all logical interpretation” (Huizinga 98). That, I think, is the strangest thing about play and also the reason there are so many different kinds of games. What is fun to one person might feel very similar to work for another, as Civilization felt for me. A lot of people really love this game clearly, or else it wouldn’t be such a successful franchise. It simply doesn’t appeal to me personally, at least in the form of the original Civilization.

And if a game is missing the fun factor for you, then why play it? To learn, I suppose. I don’t regret spending the time to try and understand this game, and it certainly gives me a greater appreciation for the more modern games I tend to enjoy. So in the end, it was worth putting the time in and reflecting on what kinds of games I personally want to spend time playing for the fun of them.

For this attempt at Civilization, I decided to span a play through of the game over two play sessions rather than just one. I figured I could try and reach the end of the game in some capacity (my research indicates that at 2500 AD the game is over and whichever civilization has the most points wins).

I played for one hour, on the Chieftain difficulty level, with my old favorites the French. I decided to edit the game world in an attempt to make it easier to come into contact with other civilizations (the only default parameter I changed was making the land masses large instead of medium).

I started out this play through with a similar strategy to my fourth one, doing my best to expand as quickly as possible and have the best military units available to me across my cities. I did well initially, getting Happiest Civilization in 1700 BC and Most Advanced Civilization in 1040 BC. I also found and made peace with the Egyptians in 880 BC. While I was still on an island sort of land mass, it was significantly larger than the others I played on and as far as I could tell the Egyptians only occupied the upper corner. I played through until I reached 1 AD and I didn’t come into contact with any other civilizations, although I was a bit befuddled by the Egyptians’ actions as the moved settlers and soldiers around in my territory. I also made use of caravans more than I had before and established trade routes with my Egyptian neighbors.

I enjoyed this hour of gameplay significantly more than the last few hours I played through. I had a goal in mind of reaching the end of the game and while that isn’t necessarily “winning” by the standards of the game having my own goal gave me some level of motivation that I did not previously possess. Still, I wouldn’t say that I enjoy Civilization as much as I enjoy other games, even those of the same type. I see where others might enjoy it, and even where it could be useful from a strategizing standpoint, but I don’t find it all that interesting myself.

I have considered why I might not like it in comparison to other strategy centered games I have tried, and I feel it might be due simply to the overall limitations of the game. The graphics in the main screen(s) are boring to me, and although I enjoy seeing the cities grow in the animations this growth is not reflected in the cities on the main map. I do understand these are just the limits of graphics at the time, but I couldn’t help but want to try one of the more recent games with detailed graphics.

The lack of intuitive controls also bothers me, and I suppose it’s because they made the game feel more like work rather than play. But I’ll save such observations for my final play through blog.

At the point of starting my fourth play through of Civilization, I found myself without any urge to play whatsoever. After dedicating three hours to the game and still not quite being able to grasp fully the rules, the mechanics, or how to “win” I no longer felt motivated to play through the same scenario over again. But play I did, attempting a somewhat different strategy than before:

I picked the same basic scenario with Chieftain difficulty, the French civilization, and 4 players rather than 3 in the hopes that I might encounter other civilizations more easily (which did not end up being the case). I played on my lap top at home for roughly an hour. I started the game with a focus on building more cities sooner and expanding as much as possible to figure out the limits of the land mass around me. Again, I did not get very far due to being stuck on an island, but I settled as much of it as I could early on.

I also built up my military units much more than in previous play throughs. As time passed, I was also careful to get rid of old/weak units and replace them with stronger ones. I still hesitated to switch my government to any other system though, as I still did not understand how to keep citizens happy under the other forms of government available.

Throughout the play through I was awarded Happiest Civilization in 1600 BC and 600 BC, the Most Powerful Civilization in 420 BC, and the Largest Civilization in 420 AD. I ended the game in 450 BC with 7 cities and no contact with the other civilizations beyond the occasional barbarian attacks.

This play through was – in essence – frustrating for me. I took a different approach to how I played, but I still found myself replaying a scenario so similar to my other attempts that it was just frustrating. This is mostly due to the fact that the rules for winning are not made clear within the game (yes, I did look up strategy guides but the complexity of the strategies required a much more in depth understanding of the goings-on within the game than I possessed after a mere 3 hours). The frustration felt by not having a solid end-goal to work towards outweighed any enjoyment gained from successfully building up my cities or getting recognized as having the “Happiest civilization” in the game world – these essentially lose their meaning because they seem to lack a point in relation to my understanding of the game.

Bernard Suits claims to “play a game is to engage in an activity directed toward bringing about a specific state of affairs, using only the means permitted by specific rules (Suits, 156). He doesn’t address the importance of these rules being clearly understood by the player, or what the effect is of the player not understanding either the rules (here equating rules with mechanics and their basic functions or impacts) or the actual goal of the game. I understand one means of winning is to militarily defeat the other players, but if I’m stuck on an island and I don’t even know how to reach the other players how can I accomplish this?

Essentially I feel Civilization not making the mechanics and rules of the game explicit works against its’ very essence as a game – only players who enjoy the kind of frustration brought about by fumbling in the dark or attempting to understand the algorithms in place behind the game will have fun. I like strategy games I have played in the past, but this one is almost simultaneously too obscure and too basic at the same time for me.

Game played: Civilization

Time played: 7:00-8:00 PM (Thursday 1/19/2017)

Location: At home on my MacBook Pro

For this second play through, I again chose the easiest difficulty setting (Chieftain), with the country of France, and three other “players”. While my settings were the same, I allowed myself to watch the beginnings of a gameplay video on Youtube to grasp (at the very least) the basics of starting the game. The player I watched emphasized exploring early on, and settling new cities quickly (while maintaining enough of an army to guard those cities). My basic formula was create city, create militia unit, create settlers, settle new city, repeat.

With this slightly better grasp of the game, I was able to make more visible progress than in my first attempt. I found I was stuck on an island, which did limit my expansion and interaction with other nations – it took me until 1802 AD to find the Romans. Still, I managed to create around seven or eight cities on my little island and got to the point in technology where I could start building ships to navigate across the ocean. I did lose a few of the first ones though, as they were not able to sail off the coast (a fact not made clear by the game upon their creation).

Once I had actual ships I was able to explore further out. I also had a revolution for monarchy. This ended up leading to almost constant civil disorder in one city or another, a roadblock that frustrated me endlessly as I could not figure out why it was happening or how to fix it. If I had another revolution it would remedy the issue for a turn or two, then the disorder would return. My general “strategy” (if you could call it that) was to build what the game advisors prompted whenever a city was able to start on something new; since I tended to stick with these instructions, I couldn’t figure out why my citizens were so unhappy.

I also could not figure out how to initiate diplomacy (i.e., I didn’t know you could put caravans and diplomats on ships). The Romans had to come to me offering a treaty; I had no clue how to approach them. The game also prompted me to implement taxes as my cities grew to large to fund themselves as they had throughout the game, another aspect of the gameplay that I could not for the life of me sort out how to implement.

After an hour of gameplay I saved an exited the game (without ending it).

Once again, the prevailing emotion during this gameplay was frustration. I had more fun initially since I had a grasp of the basic early game mechanics, but this understanding did not carry me into the late game. Still, I had more fun during this play through than my initial attempt, as I was able to watch my little cities grow every time I added something to them. While it was disconcerting that the city remained on one tile, I understand that was just a limitation of the technology at the time. I have played other similar games where you create and grow a civilization, and I always like the physical representation of farms, buildings, citizens, etc. as it gave me more of an idea of what I was creating. I’ve seen screenshots that show later versions of Civilization games with this kind of detail, though.

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?