PROGRAM THE WORLD

One of my favorite things about playing CIV VI (yes, still) is the underlying mechanism of “fuck around and find out.”

“Isn’t that just life?” you ask, immediately skeptical of today’s post?

Yes, obviously! But hear me out.

Every single choice you make in CIV VI has a butterfly effect later, shoving you into (often geographical) corners (without fresh water) you can’t possibly build or fight your way out of. Depending on your difficulty setting, your embryonic little village might be slaughtered almost immediately, long before resembling any sort of actual civilization, or much later, never having witnessed the glory of the Modern Era, much less the Information Era.

Let’s talk about the Information Era.

Even after (actual) thousands of hours playing this game, I am constantly at the mercy of seemingly innocuous decisions I made hundreds of turns ago, and now, on the cusp of a paradigm shift in scientific application, my people are starving/thirsty/under attack/without religion/the arts.

With every choice to pursue animal husbandry at the temporary expense of pottery, or a code of laws before craftsmanship, I am programming the world. At least in CIV VI, I do this intentionally, having memorized the tech and civics trees a long, long time ago.

I am creating my own destiny! Well, my people’s destiny — even if I don’t know what the end game will be yet, or the journey I’ll take to get there. In CIV VI, my only clear measurable outcome is to stay alive.

In real life, there’s still lots of poverty and famine on the map but way less than there used to be. Religion ebbs and flows depending on where you live, while modern-day fundamentalists spent the 2000’s fucking just blowing up many of our oldest world wonders. The tech tree is happening live, and moving faster, while the civics tree is kind of going backwards.

We are beholden to a world increasingly and inescapably programmed for us.

But is it?

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