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Civ games are fascist
― the people vs peer gynt (goole), Wednesday, August 26, 2009 12:08 PM Bookmark Flag Post Permalink
just saw this post in Mario was a hero to most but he never meant shit to me , made me realize this has actually been on my mind a lot lately. like how much i played this game as a kid, and how much I've, unrealizingly, had to un-learn so many of its tropes. many of which are standard-issue grand-narratives stuff (the teleology of technology, history as the history of wars and of material accumulation, eurocentric take on cultural achievements and 'wonders' etc., actually generally assuming that the narrative of europe is fundamentally the narrative of history even if it gets won by the zulus this time out - the zulus will progress from pottery to bach to stealth bombers).... and some of which may be unique to the experience of playing history as a game like this.
so getting back to fascism: the conceit of the game is that you somehow play the continuous leader of a civilization, forever, directing its actions and standing as the sort of personal body of the nation --- or something - and this doesn't change even though the civilization moves from monarchy to "democracy" - "democracy" proves to be a sham, you still make all the decisions exactly as you did before, but some economic and public-satisfaction calculations shift around. your goal is to crush all other nations and have your people love you, at whatever cost. "civilization," folks!
four years pass...
i was thinking the other day how fanaticism was civ2's version of fascism -- and how if you are playing a democracy and a war starts, the best strategy is to switch to fanaticism during the war.
― wasdnuos (abanana), Sunday, 29 March 2020 10:02 (four years ago) link
I really wanted to get Civ6 but my cruddy old 'HD Ready' TV overscans everything slightly and cuts off the edge of the game and there's no way to switch it off. So instead I got a game called Dawn Of Man where you take a village of prehistoric stone age people up through and into the Iron Age. Not sure what to make of it yet
― doorstep jetski (dog latin), Sunday, 29 March 2020 10:33 (four years ago) link