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Narrative Representation and Ludic Rhetoric
of Imperialism in Civilization 5
Masterarbeitim Fach English and American Literatures, Cultures, and Media
der Philosophischen Fakultät
der Christian-Albrechts-Universität zu Kiel
vorgelegt von
Malte Wendt
Erstgutachter: Prof. Dr. Christian Huck
Zweitgutachter: Tristan Emmanuel Kugland
Kiel im März 2018
Table of contents
1 Introduction 1
2 Hypothesis 4
3 Methodology 5
3.1 Inclusions and exclusions 5
3.2 Structure 7
4 Relevant postcolonial concepts 10
5 Overview and categorization of Civilization 5 18
5.1 Premise and paths to victory 19
5.2 Basics on rules, mechanics, and interface 20
5.3 Categorization 23
6 Narratology: surface design 24
6.1 Paratexts and priming 25
6.1.1 Announcement trailer 25
6.1.2 Developer interview 26
6.1.3 Review and marketing 29
6.2 Civilizations and leaders 30
6.3 Universal terminology and visualizations 33
6.4 Natural, National, and World Wonders 36
6.5 Universal history and progress 39
6.6 User interface 40
7 Ludology: procedural rhetoric 43
7.1 Defining ludological terminology 43
7.2 Progress and the player element: the emperor's new toys 44
7.3 Unity and territory: the worth of a nation 48
7.4 Religion, Policies, and Ideology: one nation under God 51
7.5 Exploration and barbarians: into the heart of darkness 56
7.6 Resources, expansion, and exploitation: for gold, God, and glory 58
7.7 Collective memory and culture: look on my works 62
7.8 Cultural Victory and non-violent relations: the ballot 66
7.9 Domination Victory and war: the bullet 71
7.10 The Ex Nihilo Paradox: build like an Egyptian 73
7.11 The Designed Evolution Dilemma: me, the people 77
8 Conclusion and evaluation 79
Deutsche Zusammenfassung 83
Bibliography 87
1 Introduction
“[V]ideo games – an important part of popular culture – mediate ideology, whether
by default or design.” (Hayse, 2016:442) This thesis aims to uncover the imperialist and
colonialist ideologies relayed in the video game Sid Meier's Civilization V (2K Games,
2010) (abbrev. Civ 5) by Firaxis Games, including its two expansions Gods and Kings
(2012) and Brave New World (2013), and the visual and ludic means through which they
are communicated. In doing so, it will also seek to aid in closing the rift between
narratology and ludology and offer a solution to their ongoing divide within the field of
game studies by providing a methodology that combines both approaches to greater
effect while acknowledging their mutual dependencies.
While academics have, on multiple accounts, determined that the Civilization series
“presents a clear narrative of empire-building that [...] is problematic when set against
postcolonial theory” (Ford, 2016), none have supported their claims through an analysis
dedicated to the game in its entirety, let alone with a thorough investigation into its ludic
qualities. Additionally, their narratological focus often rests on the uncovering of
specific narrow ideologies, avoiding the bigger picture that postcolonial theory and
cultural studies in general can offer: “Some argue that the series propagates the
supremacy of strategic management, while others contend that the series teaches an
ideology of techno-utopianism through scientific progress. A third perspective critiques
the series from a Marxist perspective, while a fourth perspective maintains that the
series teaches the supremacy of geographic location.” (Hayse, 2016:446) Although these
exemplary perspectives are valuable in their own right, they do upon closer inspection
hint at a greater underlying ideology that combines these sub-theories, with strategic
management alluding to the Enlightenment, techno-utopianism as an example of meta-
narratives, and the supremacy of geographic location as a euphemism for environmental
determinism, all three of which will be looked into in this thesis as some of the many
pillars that have served to legitimize imperialism.
One of the most prevalent perspectives in regards to the series' ludic values, however,
is the claim made by strong advocates of pure ludology, such as David Myers (2003),
that the series' “meaning-structuring process” was designed merely to support the ludic
reward system, which is why any resulting ideologies must be coincidental and thus
outside the realm of critique. Hayse (2016:446) summarizes this popular approach as
the idea that “any supposed historic and cultural significance of the Civilization series
1
takes a back seat to its ludic – or game-like – qualities”, shifting “strategic systems
management to the foreground as the cultural impact of video games fades into the
background.” This approach tries to render the entire mechanical nature of the game
only meaningful inside the game, but meaningless outside of it. Since the mechanics
only serve to create gameplay, not to construct a narrative, the analysis of their
conveyed ideologies must therefore be irrelevant. This view is the result of the deep
ludo-narrative divide within game studies, which has shifted many ludologists into a
defensive stance, according to which video games as an inherently interactive medium
may under no circumstances be analyzed through the lens of narratology, as this would
not only not do the game justice, but also fail to acknowledge the uniqueness of the
medium. This claim, however, falls prey to two fallacies: Firstly, it assumes that
ludology can create knowledge about rules and goals without the use of representation,
a tool of narratology. Secondly, it assumes that the knowledge about games exists in a
vacuum, within the confines of which goals and rules are the final conclusion beyond
which there is no other knowledge to be produced.
This thesis will neither focus on the narratological surface design of Civ 5, nor will it
stop at determining its inner mechanical workings. Instead, it will use both approaches
in tandem to extract evidence of imperialist ideology from both the surface design as
well as the underlying rules and goals. While the analysis of narrative representation can
rely on an established toolset, however, the connection between gameplay and
communicated ideologies requires a relatively young joint ludo-narrative theory, which
will be provided by Ian Bogost's 'procedural rhetoric' as introduced in Persuasive
Games: The Expressive Power of Videogames (2010:ix): “[V]ideogames open a new
domain for persuasion, thanks to their core representational mode, procedurality. I call
this new form procedural rhetoric, the art of persuasion through rule-based
representations and interactions rather than the spoken word, writing, images, or
moving pictures.” This approach counters the nowadays diminishing, extreme
ludological portrayal of games in a vacuum and falls in line with the growing realization
within the field that interactivity, the unique element that sets this medium apart from all
else, carries – like all other works of culture – meaning, and thus the potential for an
ideological bias: Clara Fernández-Vara (2015:8) suggests that “[r]ather than limiting
ourselves to thinking about games as a medium to convey messages, we can think of
them as artifacts that encode certain values and ideas, which players decode and engage
with as they play.” In the same vein, Egenfeldt-Nielsen (2016:35) even uses strategy
2
games (like Civ 5) as an example for games' communication of value systems: “Games
are communication media: Games may communicate ideas and values. For instance, a
strategy game may teach us how complex systems like cities or warring nation states
work.”
Accordingly, this thesis will look to one of the most popular strategy games in the
world as an ideal candidate for an ideology-focused close reading. The Civilization
series has developed into a staple of the strategy game genre since the series' inception
in 1991. Its fifth installment, released in 2010, still holds the place as the most popular
strategy game on the leading PC gaming platform Steam with peak concurrent player
numbers of more than 30,000 as of March 2018, even after the release of Civilization VI
(2K Games, 2016), including its first expansion Rise and Fall (2018), which falls short
of its predecessor by more than 5,000 concurrent players. This makes Civ 5 the 15 th
most played Steam game as of 2018, according to the public daily statistics provided by
Valve's Steam app itself (Newell, 2018). Even more staggering, however, is Civ 5's
amount of total sales, through which “the game has become one of the most-played,
with over eight million sales, making it a strong presence in modern videogame
culture.” (Ford, 2016)
Due to its mass appeal, combined with the game's representation of culture and
history, the field of game studies has determined the Civilization series as culturally
significant and thus in dire need of study, resulting in a “proliferation of scholarship that
surrounds [the] series [...]”, (Hayse, 2016:445) many of which refer to its popularity as
the “pinnacle” (Dor, 2016:276) of turn-based strategy games, and Civ 5 in particular as
“one of the most successful and definitive works” (Ford, 2016) in its genre. It is,
however, the genre's level of complexity, that, according to Dor (2016:281) has kept
many experts in the field from analyzing strategy games in greater detail, as the time
required to fully grasp their underlying systems can prove intimidating:
“Methodological investigations in strategy analysis should address this in the future by
showing how a complex activity such as strategy can be meaningfully archived.” While
this thesis is not an exercise in methodology at its core, it will nonetheless offer one
potential solution to this challenge by developing and executing a methodological
approach specifically tailored towards the investigation into Civ 5's imperialist
ideologies.
3
2 Hypothesis
While the goal of the thesis revolves around the unveiling of ideologies related to
imperialism within Civ 5, its hypothesis needs to distinguish the unique nature of the
ludo-narrative approach from the preceding works with similar purpose. Thus, the
hypothesis cannot claim the exposure of imperialist values within the game, as their
mere existence has already been acknowledged on multiple accounts. It is therefore
imperative that the hypothesis emphasizes the essential role of interaction in the
uncovering of the game's ideologies, and thus asserts that the game's ludic component is
objectively more responsible for the game's imperialism than its narrative surface. Due
to the hermeneutic nature of the analysis, however, the hypothesis cannot deal in
quantitative absolutes when comparing ideological impact, especially when trying to
contrast narratology with ludology, and must instead rely on a qualitative comparison of
contributions from either field. In an effort to minimize arbitrariness in any such
assertion, the qualitative analysis will refrain from establishing a continuum of 'impact'
on which to rank the thesis' ludic findings. It will instead settle on a binary system and
only distinguish between two sources of procedural rhetoric:
1. specific goals, rules, and mechanics (equal level of contribution compared to surface
design)
2. interactivity of the video game medium itself (deeper level of contribution compared
to surface design).
On the flip side, the thesis must assume that surface design does not hold the potential
to carry imperialist values through the sheer existence of its text, video, and audio
channels alone, as video games share these channels with literature, film, and music,
respectively. As a result, the thesis is tasked with first finding the strongest cases of
imperialism within the game's surface design, and then similarly scan its procedural
rhetoric to find incidents resulting from source two in order to confirm the initial claim:
The hypothesis states that Civilization 5's procedural rhetoric contributes to the
game's communication of imperialist and colonialist values on a qualitative level not
equal to, but more impactful than that of its surface design, whereby the existence of
ludic imperialist manifestations based on the game's goals, rules, and mechanics would
constitute equal contribution, while a deeper impact would require the medium's
interactivity itself to inherently set up the game on an imperialist foundation from the
4
very moment the player element enters the frame. The null hypothesis must therefore
state that Civilization 5's procedural rhetoric does in fact not contribute to the game's
communication of imperialist and colonialist values in a way that is more impactful than
that of its surface design.
3 Methodology
Because of the thesis' unique position within the framework of game studies, and, as
previously mentioned, an expressed need within the field for “[m]ethodological
investigations in strategy analysis” (Dor, 2016:281), the methodology upon which the
thesis has settled must not only be described in detail, but so must the reasoning behind
it, why some elements were deemed more useful to include than others, and why a
certain structure and certain approaches were favored over their alternatives. While an
established methodology specific to the thesis' premise does not exist, general
methodological work within game studies, from which this newly developed
methodology can draw, has been conducted. The basic guidelines and terminology of
the general game studies methodology outlined by Clara Fernández-Vara in
Introduction to Game Analysis (2015) will therefore serve as a basis for this process.
3.1 Inclusions and exclusions
In pursuit of verification on this hypothesis, it is important to preface the
methodology by clarifying what will and what will not be included in the analysis. The
hypothesis focuses on the content of the game, which extends beyond the computer
screen. On the one hand, narratology reaches into any paratexts of the game that
precondition the mindset with which the player enters said game (Fernández-Vara,
2015:6). On the other hand, within the field of ludology, the player herself is considered
part of the game since it is her interaction that completes and in the process shapes its
content: “The player is a necessary part of the text; [...] the game is not really a
complete text without a player that interprets its rules and interacts with it.” (Fernández-
Vara, 2015:7) Thus, both fields, paratexts and player element, enlarge the game beyond
its hardware boundaries in their own unique ways.
However, when, as in this case, research is not conducted within the field of
psychology, questions for 'intent' and 'effect' need to be excluded from the analysis. The
5
exclusion of intent is especially recommended in video games, where “[...] one should
be careful when attributing certain aspects of the game to the context, falling into the so-
called intentional fallacy. [...] [T]hey are often a team effort, meaning that it is
problematic to establish a single authorship [...].” (Fernández-Vara, 2015:57) Therefore,
the thesis will neither pursue claims on the game's developers or publishers, nor use
information from or about them in order to somehow reveal their intent, and thus the
game's 'true meaning'. Although Fernández-Vara counts “context” among the
recommended exclusion, it must be noted that the entire postcolonial premise of this
investigation makes context an integral part of its toolset. It is therefore necessary to
draw attention to the postcolonial context within which the game was produced and
through which the thesis looks at the game. This also includes the fact that Civ 5 is a
U.S. American game, with both publisher (2K Games) and developer (Firaxis Games)
being situated there. The other aspect to be excluded from the analysis, referred to as
'effect', encompasses the psychological effects that the consumption of media has on
potential players. That would be an empirical exercise that this thesis will not explore.
In terms of the game itself, both the surface design and the procedural rhetoric are
only examined in regard to the game's central mode of play, which is the 'Setup Game'
option in the 'Single Player' category, whereby based on a plethora of player choices
regarding e.g. resource density, number of competing civilizations, and difficulty of the
AI (civilizations controlled by artificial intelligence), a map is procedurally generated to
provide the player with a potentially infinite number of game conditions. This excludes
the Single Player category 'Scenarios', which offers special pre-made and less
customizable matches, as well as the 'Multi Player' category, which allows for matches
between human competitors online. On the surface, the exclusion of multi-player seems
to follow the trend laid out by Joseph and Knuttila (2016:211):
“From the start screen of a huge swath of games, two paths diverge. In the first, asingle-player campaign laden with narrative components unfolds. In the second,gameplay hinges on the actions of other players […]. Approaches in game studiesare […] often bracketing off online experiences in studies of community, leavingdesign, narratological, and philosophical concerns in the single-player realm.”
However, this does not apply to Civ 5, and is done for the exact opposite reason. Apart
from a guided tutorial that mainly serves to teach new players the basic rules, goals and
means of interaction, the game does not even feature a single-player campaign, let alone
6
one “laden with narrative components”. Instead, the narrative dynamically emerges
from unforeseen interactions between the player, the game's rule system, and the AI,
also called “emergent storytelling” (Fernández-Vara, 2015:108). This means that the
opposite of Joseph's and Knuttila's claim applies: The exclusion of the game's multi-
player aspects does not favor narrative over procedural rhetoric, but actually allows for
said rhetoric to present its fullest potential, since the game not only provides a rule
system, but now also needs to take on the roles of all competing civilizations, save the
one controlled by the player. It needs to set goals, interact with the player in trade,
diplomacy and combat, and may even adjust its actions based on certain characteristics
that the game attributes to the represented culture. The thesis deems this piece of code,
the AI, and the “interesting decisions” (Johnson, 2016:10) that it offers to the player, an
integral part of the procedural rhetoric, and thus requires its inclusion in the object of
analysis. In conclusion, outside of psychology, intent and effect are neither inferable nor
relevant, while multi-player must be dismissed for the sake of including AI into the
equation. Paratexts and the player element, however, are marked inclusions necessary to
enhance narratology and ludology, respectively.
3.2 Structure
In terms of structure, the thesis will begin with an accumulation of all Relevant
postcolonial concepts. This chapter aims to set the ideological foundation upon which
the game itself can then be evaluated. It lists and defines interconnected concepts from
or relating to the field of cultural studies, and presents their relevance in the light of
imperialism and colonialism. While definitions of and investigations into ideology will
be drawn from various authors, the basic framework of cultural studies and cultural
geography will be provided by the works of Stuart Hall and Mike Crang, respectively,
not only in this chapter but throughout the thesis.
Following the ideological concepts, the thesis needs to bridge the “overblown”
(Arsenault, 2016:476) gap between the heavily interdependent narratology and
ludology, while maintaining a transparent structure. Aarseth (2016:185) claims that
“ludology has been erroneously contrasted with narratology (narrative theory), but since
the 'ludologists' all used narrative theory in their approaches to games, this juxtaposition
is misinformed and does not bear critical examination.” However, completely erasing
these convenient overarching categories presents any approach with yet another
7
problem, which is the lack of a system by which to categorize the object of analysis.
Narratology and ludology are both unproductive without the respective other, but on
their own, they still provide a clear pattern that structures the game in question, even
when that pattern then requires knowledge from the other field, respectively, to produce
any relevant knowledge. Narratology divides the game up into different categories of
surface design, while ludology cuts the game into pieces of mechanics.
For the thesis, this means that narratology and ludology will still structure two
separate chapters, but require a preface that links them both together, to setup a basic
understanding of the subject matter and allow for the two main chapters to actually
produce meaning. This task is taken on by the Overview and categorization of
Civilization 5, without which narratology would not be able to contextualize its
evaluation of the game's design in regards to the common interactive consumption of
said game, and ludology would have no semantic meaning to the player by which to
categorize and actually produce knowledge on game mechanics. Therefore, the
overview chapter will introduce a basic explanation of the game's design and
mechanics, coupled with categorizing it in terms of genre and game studies terminology.
In order to avoid ambiguity in this chapter and throughout the thesis, certain in-game
terminology will consistently be capitalized: unlockable perks, i.e. technologies,
policies, and tenets, such as Archaeology, game elements whose names overlap with
concepts discussed in the thesis, such as Ideology, as well as any otherwise ambiguous
compound word, such as Natural Wonder.
After the overview, the thesis will lead with Narratology: surface design. The term
'surface design' was developed for this thesis out of the necessity to refer to anything
that is not a goal, rule, or mechanic, thus not part of ludology, and therefore must belong
to narratology. Bogost (2010:49-50) coined the phrase of “skinning” a static procedural
rhetoric “with new graphics” that other researchers like Fernández-Vara (2015:132)
adopted as the “graphical skin” of a game, resulting in far too narrow of a title, as
narratology encompasses more than just graphics. Christopher A. Paul (2016:461)
proposes the term “design”, which achieves the opposite effect by being too broad, as
gameplay is also designed. Instead, 'surface design' perceives the game like a machine
that produces visuals, audio, and text on the surface, which fall under narratology, and
hides its mechanical underpinning, the realm of ludology, under its hood.
Narratology will analyze the categories the game creates on its surface, the members
with which it fills them, and the way in which they are portrayed. The surface elements
8
will be grouped into chapters based around the methods through which surface design
communicates ideology. The game's most relevant paratexts in particular were chosen
on the basis of Fernández-Vara's (2015:6) guidelines. Most importantly, these will
include the game's announcement trailer, a developer interview with the game's
producer, and a written review by gaming website IGN. She specifically warns,
however, of the biases inherent to the nature of developer interviews and reviews.
Interviews are “normally […] part of the marketing campaign and usually cover some
of the same points advertisements do.” (Fernández-Vara, 2015:39) Similarly, reviews
carry a high potential for a conflict of interest resulting from “economic pressures that
condition its content” (Fernández-Vara, 2015:3), since the advertisements with which a
game review is monetized are often bought by the same companies whose games the
site reviews. Therefore, the thesis will treat all paratexts, including interview and
review, as part of the game's marketing, rather than take their statements as evidence for
the game's production process or its public reception. Both narratology and ludology
will also often refer to so-called “postmortems” (Fernández-Vara, 2015:39) by the
game's lead designer Jon Shafer. These are essays on game design, published after the
release of the game, that the thesis will, as with its other paratexts, use not as insight
into the actual game itself, but predominantly as the lens through which some of the
game's rhetoric and representations are framed as positive or beneficial by the game's
marketing, or rather publications of an advertising nature.
Ludology: procedural rhetoric examines the game's underlying mechanisms, the
interdependent relations they suggest, and the player actions they incentivize. It will
start out by defining the basic terminology of goals, rules, mechanics, and procedural
rhetoric, and then explain in detail how the game's rhetoric arises from specific sets of
said goals, rules, and mechanics. Because of their more abstract nature, that often lies
beyond established language, the chapters will each bear an additional title that hints at
the interconnected phenomena analyzed within.
A final Conclusion and evaluation chapter will briefly summarize the main points
from each field and then compare the findings of narratology to those of ludology to
determine whether the hypothesis holds true. Although a popular term in game studies,
the evaluation will – if the findings allow it – only briefly touch upon the phenomenon
of so-called 'ludo-narrative dissonance'. This concept describes “[t]he […] dissonance
between the set of verbs (mechanics) and the supposed theme of the game” (Fernández-
Vara, 2015:99). This would be the case if the findings of ludology would dominantly
9
point towards imperialism, while those of narratology would point towards
postcolonialism, or vice versa. However, the concept sits not at the core of the
hypothesis, which claims that imperialism is more deeply rooted in the procedural
rhetoric than it is in the surface design, not that the procedural rhetoric's ideology
directly conflicts with that of the surface design. The chapter will also evaluate the
success of the developed methodology, and provide an outlook on how it could be
applied in the future.
4 Relevant postcolonial concepts
According to Stuart Hall (2016:136), “[s]ystems of representation are the systems of
meaning through which we represent the world to ourselves and one another. It
acknowledges that ideological knowledge is the result of specific practices – the
practices involved in the production of meaning.” This means that any articulation is
linked to a value system, and that therefore any representation directly contributes to the
manifestation of ideology. It is due to this connection that the succeeding chapters can
point at articulations in the game and infer an ideology like imperialism on the basis of
representation. Since the concepts of imperialism and colonialism are too broad to spot
directly, it is their complex system of underlying and interconnected discourses that
allows the analysis to expose one idea from a connotative set of ideas and thus point
towards the overarching ideology, imperialism and colonialism, or postcolonialism,
respectively, as well as other ideas from the same parent ideology: “Ideologies do not
operate through single ideas; they operate in discursive chains, in clusters, in semantic
fields, in discursive formations. As you enter an ideological field and pick out any one
nodal representation or idea, you immediately trigger a whole chain of connotative
associations.” (Hall, 2016:137)
In reference to Louis Althusser, Hall (2016:131) defines ideologies as the
“frameworks of thinking and calculations about the world […] with which people figure
out how the social world works, what their place is in it, and what they ought to do.”
Previous attempts at ideological investigation into the Civilization series were based
around much narrower definitions, which yielded conclusions that – by cultural studies
standards – appear inconsequential. While Hayse (2016:446) for example points out that
former research has shown the series' tendency to label entire nations, like Germany,
with generalizing traits such as “industrial”, he then fails to acknowledge this label's
10
inherent racism by committing to a mere analogy to examples of everyday-life racism
and sexism, as if they were equally grave, but unrelated. In actuality of course, racism
and sexism are interlinked in Western culture through the common idea of Othering, as
are nationalism and racism, for example through the common ground of essentialism,
which is why all these ideas cannot be clearly separated from one another. This thesis
aims to remedy such oversights by detailing the various ways in which the ideologies
found in the game are dependent on each other and can be traced back to imperialism.
They will also be outlined briefly, yet no further than to the extent within which the
game analysis will make use of them. The concepts to be introduced and interlinked will
be imperialism and colonialism, Othering, determinism, teleology, essentialism,
nationalism, the ecological fallacy, the Enlightenment, Orientalism, exoticism, Euro-
centrism, sexism, and meta-narratives.
Imperialism and colonialism present the overarching ideologies to which the other
concepts can be put in relation. These terms are better explained through the underlying
ideas explained below, but some general understanding and distinction needs to be put
in place beforehand: According to Bill Ashcroft's (1999:122) definition, developed from
Edward Said's interpretations, “imperialism refers to the formation of an empire [...], a
process distinct from colonialism [...]”, which instead emphasizes the foundation of
colonies. This already shows that while these ideologies seem distinct by name, they
actually build on each other. A global empire would require initial colonies, and
settlements that fly the flag of distant lands herald the expansion of an empire. The
following concepts will reveal that these two main ideologies can more easily be
distinguished by tendencies rather than absolutes, and by acknowledging that they are
used to describe specific actions and phenomena, not to universally label an entire
relation. While the thesis will frequently summarize the two under the term of
imperialism for the sake of brevity, it will distinguish them by how power is used, if
necessary: While imperialism will be used to describe the overt display of power
through violent expansion, colonialism will refer to the more subtle empowering of
hierarchies that facilitate exploitation.
One of the central tools of imperialism and colonialism alike is the representation of
the subaltern, with the purpose of arguing a hierarchy that legitimizes future actions
against them, for example by dehumanizing the victims, by naturalizing their culture, or
by weaving their desired fate into the net of romanticized manifest destiny. This is best
exemplified through the binary oppositions that the colonization of the Americas opened
11
up between the Westerners and the natives, painting the colonized peoples as sub-
humans or even animals:
“Western Americasclothed nakedfashion adornmentlabour leisureethics pleasuremasculine femininereason emotionculture nature” (Crang, 1999:63)
This table, derived from Michel de Certeau's (1988:228) opposition of the “civilized” to
the “primitive”, already shows manifestations of several relevant concepts, like
sexism/feminism (masculine vs feminine), the Enlightenment (reason vs emotion, ethics
vs pleasure) and essentialism (culture vs nature). It is through the revelation of these
binary contrasts in represented cultures that imperialist and colonialist ideologies can
best be uncovered.
Binary oppositions projected onto cultures, as those pictured above, are the result of
Othering, “whereby the 'self' is defined in relation to the characteristics of an 'Other'
culture.” (Crang, 1999:59) It describes the process of painting the foreign as inherently
different, and turning it into a canvas on which to unload the fears, burdens, and desires
that one's own identity intends to exclude from its self-image. An additional artifact of
Othering is thinking in clear-cut, often binary patterns that do not allow for a third space
in-between. This gap is filled with Homi K. Bhabha's concept of hybridity, which
“suggests that the result of modern history is vast numbers of people 'between' cultures
[…].” (Crang, 1999:175) Individuals like these defy standard categorization, which may
lead to Othering and exclusion from all groups, rather than inclusion into any groups
with which they share common attributes, which shows the overpowering impact of
projection. It must also be pointed out that in general terms, “the Other […] is essential
to meaning”, because “[m]eaning arises through the 'difference' between the participants
in any dialogue.” (Hall, 2013:225) It is therefore never the mere concept of an Other
alone, but the projection of said Other onto real ethnic groups, cultures, and nations that
enters imperialist and colonialist territory.
One complex tool used to project dependencies onto an Other is determinism, which
describes “[a]pproaches which seek to find a single cause (or more rarely a small
12
number) for events […].” (Crang, 1999:189) Due to their simplifying nature,
determinist concepts become increasingly harmful the more complex the subject matter
they aim to explain becomes. Possibly the most famous representative and also the most
relevant to this thesis is environmental determinism, an inherently racist tool designed
for the forging of imperialist hierarchies, as Crang (1999:15), describes:
“This school saw the development of cultures as a process of human adaptation tobasically climatic factors. […] [I]t suggested the northern hemisphere temperateregions had 'naturally' achieved the greatest cultural and economic developmentbecause the climate forced the populace to work, but rewarded such labor – unlikethe tropics, where it suggested people had not needed to labour, and the extremenorth where existence was so marginal the possibilities for accumulating wealthwere limited. As such it formed a self-serving justification for Europeanimperialism […].”
To such effect, environmental determinism is a so-called “legitimation theory”, as it
only “served to legitimate the social, political, and economic ambitions of certain social
formations.” (Mitchell, 2005:18) It not only naturalized the idea of an “imperial struggle
for world domination” (Peet, 1985:310) in the first place, but also preemptively blessed
all actions that led there.
This legitimizing function marries the supposedly secular determinism closely to the
originally more religious concept of teleology, which describes a “directed story where
the predetermined end-point guides the interpretation of prior events. […] [I]t applies to
theories that posit a generally historical evolution towards an inevitable end-state.”
(Crang, 1999:194) A prominent U.S. American example would be the concept of
manifest destiny, whereby functional memory selects and interprets historical events as
the manifestations of an inevitable destiny steering history towards itself.
Both determinism and teleology draw from the confusion of culture and nature,
which they share with the concept of essentialism, “[t]he view that there are essential
properties which define what something is, and without which it could not be what it
is.” (Edgar, 2008:113-114) Crang (1999:190) describes essentialisms as “interpretations
that seek to ascribe a fundamental and unchanging core value to something. [...] These
core elements are not seen as negotiable or contestable.” Because “culture is the
opposite of nature” (Mitchell, 2005:14), so-called “[n]aturalization” (Hall, 2013:234)
presents the most egregiously imperialist form of essentialism, as it ascribes a natural
core to a cultural phenomenon, most often a foreign ethnicity, in order to present a
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perceived difference as natural and legitimize previously unethical means.
While ethnic essentialism attempts to naturalize links between a set of core values
and an arbitrary group of people, ethnic nationalism links an arbitrary group of people
to a geographical space in an attempt to legitimize not only the claim on that space, but
also strengthen the unity of the individuals within said group through the construction of
'home' and 'belonging': “Such ethnic nationalism identifies culture with a space and the
space with a people – forming a circular logic whereby one's right to belong to a space
is seen as dependent on possessing the culture that is also used to identify the territory.”
(Crang, 1999:162) Ethnic nationalism represents another legitimation theory that aims
to find an arbitrary fixed point in history in order to allow for Othering and exclusion on
the supposed basis of the justifying past, where the authentic truth was perceived as
reality. Said authentic truth is of course a desired state that would put the proponents of
the theory on the top of a hierarchy. Ethnic nationalism can therefore be combined with
essentialism to persuasive effect when supported by the belief in tradition, i.e. the
justifying power of the “taken for granted” (Hall, 2016:138), as shall be outlined
through this Fox News opinion piece on the United States' official recognition of
Jerusalem as the capital of Israel in December 2017:
“President Trump has commented that his decision is 'recognition of reality.' [...][A]ncient Israel [...] existed in the very place where modern Israel exists today.[...] By recognizing Jerusalem as Israel’s capital, President Trump is affirming theJewish people’s history. [...] The Jewish people have in fact lived in their land ofIsrael for more than 3.000 [sic] years and took possession of the city of Jerusalemitself almost exactly 3,000 years ago. They have lived there continuously, eventhough they have not always ruled over their own land. Therefore, Israel’slegitimate claims to the land and to the city of Jerusalem itself should be accepted[...].” (Evans, 2017, italics mine)
Notice the circular logic of ethnic nationalism, where the text argues for “Israel's”
claim over Jerusalem through prefacing the statement with arguments on “the Jewish
people”'s claim over Jerusalem, effectively equating the country with a specific ethnic
group, which leads to the literal statement that (all of) Israel should be owned by the
Jewish people, because the Jewish people are those that own Israel. The essentialist
rhetoric is more covertly expressed through “the Jewish people” and “they”, which
assumes a unified ethnic group in the first place, the common unchanging core features
of which have supposedly existed for three millennia. Therefore, only with the help of
essentialism can ethnic nationalism fabricate continuity between history and today, even
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to the extent of spanning thousands of years between the supposed reality of authentic
truth and the present.
Due to the neatly categorized world view that ethnic nationalism propagates, it stands
in competition with globalizing trends that tend to slowly dissolve the borders that
manifest the nationalist discourse. This results in increasing conservativism in order to
defend the perceived 'purity' against 'contamination' from outside, that seemingly
threatens the nationalist group unity as well as the essentialist core values of its
members: “Seeing culture linked to identity in this way thus animates, and is animated
by, a series of fears. This is then an identity of retrenchment rather than expansion – in
contrast to the colonial era […]. “ (Crang, 1999:162-163) 'Isolationism', as this thesis
will proceed to refer to this phenomenon, is thus the postcolonial face of imperialism,
driven by fears of an impure third space.
Both essentialism and ethnic nationalism dwell on the so-called “ecological fallacy,
assuming what applies to the group as a whole applies to each member.” (Crang,
1999:21, italics mine) As an example, if a country's ranking in the World Happiness
Report (Helliwell, 2018) decreases by 10%, this does not mean that all citizens of that
nation rated their lives as 10% less satisfactory than the previous year. Factors like age
or class stratify the demographic into subgroups with distinct conditions, down to
individual differences. A high-income class making up 50% of a hypothetical population
may have experienced a 20% happier year while the low-income class felt 40% more
unsatisfied. Essentialism and ethnic nationalism look past these ruptures within a group
in order to maintain clear categories.
The trust in categorization in order to facilitate understanding can be traced back to
one of the most central forces in the web of imperialist and colonialist ideologies, the
discourse of the Enlightenment, which remains the dominant underpinning of many
discourses today, most famously that of the self-governed Subject. The Enlightenment
“implies a change in outlook on the world where science was seen as the key to
demystifying the world, and the world was believed to be explicable by rational
thought. [...] [A]lthough Enlightenment projects spoke of universal truths they were
often based on the experience of white, male European scientists.” (Crang, 1999:190)
While some definitions of this school of thought, such as its dominant “faith in the
ability of reason” (Edgar, 2008:109) emanate an air of innocence even by today's
standards, its inherent imperialism arises through the connection between
'understanding' and 'controlling'. The Enlightenment served as the overarching
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legitimation theory of all theories, providing scientists with the confidence in their
empirical knowledge, with which they could categorize and thus conquer the world.
This made it an essential tool to imperialism, allowing man to “control and master the
earth […].” (Crang, 1999:104) Humans create meaning through difference (Hall,
2013:225), difference requires separation, which in turn creates categories. The creation
of categories inevitably results in the creation of hierarchies, and hierarchies literally put
one thing on top of a list of others. Therefore, the producers of knowledge, and thus
hierarchies, are biased to interpret their empirical findings in a way that favors their own
position within them, compared to the inferior Other. This legitimation of power is best
observed in the imperialist Othering of Africa as the 'barbaric' counterpart to the
'civilized' Europe, forming the two ends of the ethnic “evolutionary scale” (Hall,
2013:229) that the Enlightenment allowed for. This blind trust in science as the
undoubted motor of good in the world helped justify even the most inhumane actions, as
long as they were carried out under the disguise of supposed rationality: “Lyotard and
Bauman, to name but two, have linked the atrocities and excesses of the twentieth
century (for example, Auschwitz, the Gulag Archipelago, the nuclear build-up) to the
overweening hubris of the Enlightenment's prediction of an emancipatory triumph of
reason and virtue.” (Edgar, 2008:271-272)
The imperialist potential of the Enlightenment, as it constructs supposedly objective
knowledge of the Other, is best exemplified by the inner workings and lasting effects of
Orientalism. According to its founder Edward Said (2016:37-38), this concept describes
“a sovereign Western consciousness out of whose unchallenged centrality an Oriental
world emerged, […] according to a detailed logic governed not simply by empirical
reality but by a battery of desires, repressions, investments, and projections.”
Orientalism thus presents a more specific case of Western Othering (“desires,
repressions, investments, and projections”) supported by the Enlightenment (“empirical
reality”) to construct a supposed reality of the unified, spatially and diachronically
consistent Orient through observing 'it' from the outside. However, “the 'Orient' exists
only through that gaze.” (Crang, 1999:61) According to Hall (2013:250), this
“racialized knowledge” is then used to affirm and perpetuate imperialist hierarchies that
enforces the Orient's perceived inferiority. Among these hierarchies, the opposition of
future over past is the most prevalent one: “The Occident defined itself as progressive,
in the sense of making history and changing the world, while the East was defined as
static and timeless. [...] Europe shapes the future, while the East can only experience
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repetitions.” (Crang, 1999:66)
Where Othering describes the securing of an identity through projection, exoticism
explains how this Othering is used to justify economic exploitation in regards to
foreign, so-called 'exotic' goods: “[T]he exotic, the foreign, increasingly gained,
throughout the empire, the connotations of a stimulating […] difference […] with which
the domestic could be (safely) spiced. The key conception here is the introduction of the
exotic from abroad into a domestic economy.” (Ashcroft, 1999:94) Aside from
exploitation, the trading of exotic goods also served to turn the potentially dangerous
because discourse-challenging foreign into a literal object that could be bought, owned
and controlled, turning “each land and people into just another commodity […].”
(Crang, 1999:123)
Orientalism and exoticism are both tied to a Western world view that does not
recognize its own bias and therefore assumes its views to be universal. This ideology,
named Euro-centrism, describes “[t]he conscious or unconscious process by which
Europe and European cultural assumptions are constructed as, or assumed to be, the
normal, the natural or the universal. [...] Orientalism examines the ways in which Euro-
centrism […] actually produces other cultures.” (Ashcroft, 1999:90-91) It needs to be
highlighted that European cultural assumptions extend beyond the geographical reality
that is Europe. 'European' culture equates to the broad term of Western culture, which
most importantly also includes the majority of cultural biases found in North America as
well as those of many other communities around the globe that are similarly rooted in
European world views. They usually share a similar identity supported by similar
projections onto Other cultures, while also employing a similar set of symbols to
produce meaning.
Since imperialism and colonialism necessarily create an Other outside of one's own
culture, the theories they employ also aid in reinforcing the borders to the Other gender,
the feminine. Therefore, they can also be revealed from the viewpoint of feminism in
observing their inevitable sexism: “[T]he terms used to make the colonised peoples
sound subordinate were heavily gendered and normally used to justify and perpetuate
the subordinate status of women.” (Crang, 1999:76) This celebration of patriarchy even
extended beyond the perception of women to that of civilization itself, when deemed
necessary for the argument: “Patriots, such as Baden-Powell, were concerned that
civilisation lead to decadence, a 'softening' of men [...]. So he turned to the frontier for a
model of manhood […] equipped to rule the empire.” (Crang, 1999:73-74) This marries
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sexism to the very essence of imperialism, while also heralding its downfall upon the
end of the colonial era. Hall (2016:174-175) specifically links the “struggle for women's
rights” to the collapse of colonial empires at the beginning of the 20 th century, rendering
emancipation as the result of the fight over the hegemonic power vacuum left by the
established and highly gendered discourses of the dying imperial age.
The relevant concepts shall be concluded with the all-encompassing idea of meta-
narratives. Put forth by philosophers like Jean François Lyotard and Ludwig
Wittgenstein (Crang, 1999:182), this theory aims to give a name to ostensibly definitive
narratives that are deemed unfit to properly explain the postmodern complex reality of
“competing discourses” (Mitchell, 2005:58). Also known as “grand narratives” (Edgar,
2008:151), they present “overarching explanations that claim to speak for all people;
that claim to be universal and not 'particular'; that claim not to be bounded in a language
game unlike the cultures they comment upon.” (Crang, 1999:182) These narratives can
seek definitive explanations in all fields of life, like the Marxist meta-narrative of
capitalism and class, the industrial meta-narrative of technological progress, or even the
mere general conception of time as a linear progression through history that brings with
itself an inevitable continuous improvement as problems are overcome one by one.
A meta-narrative inherently combines some of the most egregious imperialist
ideologies: It lays universal claim on objective knowledge while also creating an Other
by excluding all other discourses, as it does not perceive itself as one. It presents a pure
form of taking ideology for granted and equating it with nature, finding a singular
determinist and undebatable cause for the events of history, while also providing a
teleological, inevitable outlook into the future. Its empiricist foundation calls upon the
Enlightenment to legitimize its claims through the sheer form of its approach, which
often helps to reinforce existing divides in society by painting reconciliation as
impossible by nature. It is therefore the foundation of meta-narratives upon which
imperialism thrives best.
5 Overview and categorization of Civilization 5
This chapter will first outline the premise, goals, rules, and mechanics of Civ 5, on
the basis of which it will then categorize the game according to academic terminology.
Descriptions of goals, rules, and mechanics will not be satisfied with merely explaining
the game's logic, as this would result in a trivial exercise without any context on what
18
these systems amount to in practice. Instead, the explanations will also be used to give
insight into some of the more intricate game concepts relevant to the thesis, and even
which strategies these procedures tend to motivate.
5.1 Premise and paths to victory
In Civilization 5, the player takes control of a civilization of her choice and leads her
people through the ages, in constant competition over territory and resources with
civilizations controlled by the AI. Her goal is to be crowned the victor among the
competing civilizations, of which there can only be one. There are a total of five paths
to victory, all of which can be followed simultaneously, although some benefit more
from similar strategies than others. Competing civilizations can and usually do aim for
different victories, in which case the civilization to first fulfill all conditions of one
victory wins the game. Victory paths do not have to be determined or declared, they
merely exist as overarching goals that motivate the actions during a match.
Domination victory requires the civilization to control all original capitals, including
one's own. This victory requires military action to conquer enemy cities, or threaten
them into trading possession over cities against an armistice. It incentivizes the costly
and resource-heavy training, maintenance, and technological development of
competitive armies, as well as gaining the edge in the science race for access to
powerful technologies. Such military might requires consistent access to a mass of
resources, while also being unable to rely on trade, as civilizations may turn on frequent
warmongers and refuse them diplomatic interactions. This, in turn, makes the pursuit of
a Domination Victory also that of a self-sustained empire.
Cultural Victory requires the civilization to reach 'influential' cultural pressure over
all remaining opposing civilizations. A civilization Y is culturally dominated by a
civilization X if Y's culture value is lower than the specific tourism output of X on Y.
Tourism is measured independently from culture, but their means of production greatly
overlap, which is why this victory requires an early focus on all means that accelerate
the growth of culture. Since the touristic pressure on another civilization can be further
influenced through specific intercultural relations, Cultural Victory also incentivizes
additional diplomatic strategies that boost the multiplication of the civilization-specific
touristic pressure.
Science Victory requires the civilization to assemble and launch a spacecraft to Alpha
19
Centauri. This victory requires a focus on the output of science, accelerating research, in
order to be the first civilization to reach the technologies required to build the four parts
of the spaceship, which then require cities with high production values to quickly
assemble them. This victory incentivizes strategies that significantly boost science
output. It may also prompt a focus on espionage, both defensively and offensively, in
order to steal technologies from other civilizations, and on the reverse, to prevent other
civilizations from profiting off one's own research. Once all spaceship parts have been
built and assembled, victory is achieved automatically.
Diplomatic Victory requires the civilization to win the UN vote for World Leader.
This victory requires influence over the majority of UN delegates, which can be
achieved by a number of means, most effectively, however, through allying with city
states, non-competing cities around the map which ally with civilizations against a
number of different favors. This strategy usually entails the abuse of the power held in
the congress until the World Leader vote is triggered, in order to sow grief and conflict
among the adversaries deemed most dangerous to one's own pursuits. Effective
strategies to curtail other civilizations' economies, military power, and political relations
include a variety of bans, embargos, and taxes.
Time Victory is only triggered on the rare occasion that until a certain in-game year,
none of the aforementioned victories has been achieved by any of the competing
civilizations. This victory creates a 'win-on-points' scenario in order to avoid a
stalemate. Upon reaching the predetermined deadline, all civilizations are awarded
points on the basis of calculations that – among others – evaluate their territorial,
economic, military, cultural, and scientific standing. The civilization with the highest
score wins the game.
5.2 Basics on rules, mechanics, and interface
Before a match, the player chooses one of 43 available civilizations that differ in their
unique ability, which usually grants bonuses tied to certain mechanics, and sometimes
through a unique unit or building as well. Upon starting the match, the player is greeted
with a welcome screen that calls upon the player to restore her civilization to its former
glory. Each nation starts with a settler unit placed somewhere on the map. Some
civilizations have a so-called starting bias, which determines climatic conditions of the
area in which the original settler is placed. The settler can be moved, but most often, it
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is strategically sound to immediately use it, which deletes the unit and creates the
original capital at its position.
Civ 5's map is constructed through a hexagonal pattern of so-called 'tiles' and is
played in turns. The player's civilization always has the first turn, followed by all other
civilizations as well as the non-competing city states and the so-called barbarians, a
distinct group whose military units spawn from neutral land to attack units and cities
nearby. Decisions can only be made during one's own turn, but there is no limit to how
long a turn may take. During a turn, the player is provided with a range of intricate
mechanics to control her civilization's military, economy, infrastructure, politics, and
society. She may also choose to interact in diplomacy with other civilizations, which
brings their leaders on screen with a backdrop of their office, throne room, or homeland
landscape. The player is also regularly 'forced' to make choices based on unstoppable
processes such as the appointment of a new technology to research upon completion of
the last.
Player decisions usually revolve around the accumulation of desired resources and
the unlocking of desired mechanics that aid in the gathering of such resources. Because
of their significance to all interaction, they need to be named and explained briefly.
There are five types of resources: nation-wide and city-specific resources can be
produced infinitely, while strategic, luxury, and bonus resources are bound to their
respective tiles and are thus finite. Figure 1 outlines the purposes of these resources,with the dominant first two types represented through their in-game icons.
natio
n-w
ide
science - accelerates the research of technologies
gold- used to skip development processes of units and buildings
- used to upgrade military units- used in trade and bribery
happiness- accumulates to trigger a Golden Age period which boosts
several beneficial values in one's civilization- when negative, it curbs said values and can cause uprisings
culture - accumulates to unlock new Social Policies and Ideology tenets- counteracts the cultural influence from other civilizationstourism - increases one's cultural influence over other civilizations
faith- accumulates to automatically spawn a Great Prophet, which can
be used to found, enhance and spread a religion- used to purchase religious units like missionaries and inquisitors
Figure 1
21
city
-spe
cific food - accelerates the population growth, allowing the city to 'work'more tiles in order to reap their benefits
production - accelerates the training of units and construction of buildingsand wondersstr
ateg
iccoal, iron,
etc. - required for the production of specific units
luxu
ry cotton, silk,etc. - raise happiness
bonu
s wheat, bison,etc.
- boost the food or production output of the terrain on which theyare found
Figure 1
Desired mechanics and boosts can be unlocked by progressing through the game's
three 'trees': the technology tree, the Social Policy tree, and the Ideology tree. The
research of a technology usually requires the successful research of up to three previous
technologies. Technologies are also assigned to eras, which causes a civilization to
officially enter an era upon completing the research of one of its technologies, which in
turn unlocks new mechanics. Social Policies are divided into different trees that can be
accessed simultaneously. Ideology tenets, however, are tied to mutually exclusive trees.
As a civilization enters the Modern Era, it has to commit to one Ideology, locking it out
of the other two.
The player perceives and manages the game world from a slightly angled bird's eye
view, often falsely described as isometric. Initially, all but the tiles close to one's
original settler are covered by a so-called 'fog of war', represented by clouds. The
presence of own or allied units or cities reveals the surrounding tiles. As can be seen in
Image 1, the view down on the world is framed by an interface, which facilitates theinteraction with and the visualization of the game's abstract systems. The basic and
strategic resources are listed prominently at the top left to center (frame 1), while the
currently researched technology and its progress is shown on the top left (frame 2). The
top right shows the number of the current turn and year (frame 3), with the latter being
calculated logarithmically in relation to the former. A match usually starts at 5000 BC
and the Time Victory deadline usually ends at 2050 AD. At the bottom right a so-called
'minimap' gives an overview of the world (frame 4), dividing it up into territories, cities,
unowned land, unexplored land, water, and lastly ice, which frames the map at the top
and bottom. Ships can travel to the eastern border of the map by sailing westward, and
22
vice versa, implying a round globe.
Image 1
5.3 Categorization
Game studies terminology allows for a categorization of the analyzed gameplay on
three levels: game type, game genre, and game mode. There are only two game types,
which form the extreme points of a continuum, namely games of emergence, and games
of progression. “[E]mergence refers to the aspects of the game that relate to the player
making decisions, whereas progression refers to the goals and sub-goals of the game.
Since most games have both rules and goals, most games also combine both progression
and emergence […].” (Fernández-Vara, 2015:152) Games of progression thus focus
more on enabling the player to 'progress' through the game on a linear, predetermined
path, goal by goal, while games of emergence allow the player to choose her own
approaches to few, rather general overarching goals, and use the tools given to her in
unpredictable ways, which causes the gameplay experience to dynamically 'emerge'.
Many scholars have referred to the strategy game genre as prototypical emergent
gameplay, such as Dor (2016:276), Juul (2011:73), and Fernández-Vara (2015:152)
herself, with the latter explicitly citing Civ 5 as “a clear example of [...] emergence,
where the player interacts with a complex game system to achieve a specific goal
(become the dominant race or civilization).” (Fernández-Vara, 2015:152)
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Egenfeldt-Nielsen (2016:18) defines strategy games as “[g]ames focusing on the
ability to deal with dynamic priorities, typically in a context of resource shortage.
Strategy games may be divided into real-time strategy games and turn-based strategy
games.” According to this definition, Civ 5 qualifies as a turn-based strategy game, or
short TBS game. Dor (2016:276) even claims that “TBS games reached the pinnacle
with Sid Meier's Civilization (MPS Labs, 1991)”, in reference to the start of the series.
Finally, the game mode this thesis investigates lets the player compete against the
game through the use of artificial intelligence. Fernández-Vara (2015:88-89) calls this
“Single Player vs. Game”, which is often simply referred to as single-player, and mostly
contrasted with multi-player, which pits several players against each other, or lets them
compete against the game together. In conclusion, the object of analysis is a single-
player, turn-based strategy game, falling under the games of emergence category.
6 Narratology: surface design
“All cultures tend to make representations of foreign cultures the better to master or
in some way control them.” (Said, 1994:120) Naturally, the surface design in Civ 5 is no
exception. Its explicit portrayal of real-world cultures and their relations opens the game
up to a thorough investigation into the game's representation of said cultures, both overt
and subtle. Fernández-Vara (2015:149) claims that the representations in a game help
“in creating a mood [and] expressing themes”, which assumes the representations within
a game to share some common ground and provide an overall consistent ideology on
some or all levels of design. In this case, imperialism and colonialism are assumed to
govern this game's representations, as they still govern Western functional memory to
this day. However, the advent of postcolonial theory brought with it a public
confrontation of colonialist values, which Pethes (2008:69) refers to as subversion, in
contrast to an articulation that enforces and perpetuates the already dominant discourses.
This dichotomy of functional memory may prove essential in the discerning of the
game's surface design. Some articulations may overtly or subtly fall in line with the
imperialist mindset, while others could openly attempt to subvert it.
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6.1 Paratexts and priming
The conditioning of the player's expectations and the world view with which they are
expected to enter the game start with the game's title itself. According to Nünning,
civilization derived from the Latin 'civilitas', which originally refered merely to the
conglomerate of 'cives', citizens, but undertook several semantic changes throughout
Western history, first to imply 'politeness', later to mean the same as 'culture', which in
turn came to denote 'education', most famously through the writings of Immanuel Kant,
one of the fathers of the Enlightenment (Nünning, 2003:21). The name therefore already
determines a narrow Euro-centric perception of 'civilization' as the final goal of
universal cultural progression, while also peddling the meta-narrative of progression
itself.
The game's title thus already hints at a common romanticizing thread throughout the
game's paratexts, which is best explained through a more traditional example given by
Hall (2016:140): “We know the words to the song 'Rule Brittania', but we are
unconscious of [...] the [...] imperialist history, the assumptions about global domination
and supremacy, the necessary other of other peoples' subordination, which are richly
impacted in its simple celebratory resonances.” This innocent mask of romantic
celebration is a veil behind which Civ 5's paratexts consistently try to hide the game's
imperialist notions, and thus prime the customers to approach the game's representations
accordingly.
6.1.1 Announcement trailer
This romanticization is nowhere better observed than in the Civilization V
Announcement Trailer (2K, 2010), which was released seven months before release, and
published through several outlets as both embedded advertisements and official youtube
videos in their own right. Many sentences and phrases in the trailer, uttered by several
different voice-overs, immediately introduce the most relevant ideologies through
quotes attributed to a variety of historical figures, including, in that order, Indian Prime
Minister Jawaharlal Nehru, U.S. American general Douglas MacArthur, ancient Greek
general Themistocles, German Chancellor Otto von Bismarck, Chinese chairman Mao
Zedong, and U.S. American politician Eleanor Roosevelt. The selection alone points
towards Euro-centrism, as Nehru and Mao are the only two of the six whose nations are
25
not typically counted among the Western world. However, Nehru's quote revolves
around India's liberation from Britain's colonial suppression, which, in the tradition of
Orientalism, portrays India yet again through the Western gaze. Most obviously, the
U.S. are represented twice, and round off the trailer with Eleanor Roosevelt talking over
the reveal of the game's title with a quote on believing in the beauty of one's dreams.
The quotes are not obviously presented as citations. Each has their own unique voice
actor, but no actual sources or names are given, which enables the trailer to show
culturally unrelated, but thematically related material in the background. This might be
seen positively as it draws connections between cultures, but it also lets a single, mostly
Western voice speak for an unrelated culture, which lays claim to universal knowledge.
Interestingly, the accompanying clips all depict historical periods that are long gone:
ancient Egypt, Vikings, the early Ottoman empire, and medieval Japan. This allows for
visually more distinct and immediately recognizable cultures, but supports a form of
ethnic nationalism that marries nations to their supposed heydays.
The quotes themselves also communicate familiar ideologies. Nehru speaks of the
“soul of a nation, long suppressed, [that] finds utterance.” (2K, 2010, 0:20-0:24) This
constitutes the idea of an essentialist core to a culture, which cannot be manipulated,
just “suppressed”. Themistocles exclaims: “I know how to raise a small and obscure city
to glory and greatness, whereto all kindred of the earth will pilgrim.” (2K, 2010, 0:42-
0:51) This creates a hierarchy of nations, judging their cultures by the influence they
have over others. This hint at the Cultural Victory path is followed by an allusion to the
Domination Victory path, through Bismarck's famous quote: “The great questions of the
day will not be settled by means of speeches and majority decisions, but by iron and
blood.” (2K, 2010, 0:53-1:02) Not only is this quote a child of the imperial era, but the
“iron and blood” phrase has arguably become a symbol for extremist nationalism ever
since.
6.1.2 Developer interview
After the game's announcement, its ideologies were further perpetuated through
developer interviews. In one such interview in June 2010, the game's producer Dennis
Shirk emphasized what he believed the game's strengths would be. His promotion of the
game can be broken down to three core arguments: the game's supposed historical
accuracy, the overhauled military gameplay, and the Sid Meier legacy. Interviewer
26
Remo (2010) points out that “Civ is more about revisionism”, but that the historical
theme brings with itself a “level of accountability”, to which Shirk replies: “[W]e
always have to put gameplay above historical accuracy, but we always want to start out
at a square that's accurate.” He later elaborates in reference to leaders: “We're not trying
to keep people absolutely accurate. [...] [T]hat's part of what makes Civ fun.” (Remo,
2010) This contradictory stance hints at one of the game's biggest issues: It represents,
but also allows the player to warp and create representation through its emergent
gameplay, thus creating emergent storytelling that would be everything but accurate.
Shirk repeatedly emphasizes the game's accuracy, calling the series a “historical
simulation” with the intent to create a “believable, real world” and a “serious place”,
even lauding the player community's feedback on “incorrect” (Remo, 2010) entries in
previous games' Civilopedias, which are in-game lexica that roughly outline the
historical accounts on entities in the game. Yet, since gameplay is king, “[p]eople still
have their civs be whatever they want it to be”, again emphasizing the player's creative
freedom, which directly goes against the aforementioned accuracy. Said freedom
clashes with yet another premise, namely that “Sid [Meier] gave each Civ [sic, actually
refers to a specific 'civ', not a game in the series] a unique flavor.” (Remo, 2010) This
contradiction of starting and shaping a culture from zero, which would imply freedom,
while also choosing a restrictive, preset “flavor”, will be taken up again in the Ludology
chapter under the name of the Ex Nihilo Paradox.
The obsession with accuracy highlights another problem: “Claiming to speak from
nowhere for everywhere has often meant speaking from the position of white, Western
man.” (Crang, 1999:77) Hall (2013:39) explains why universal knowledge on discourse
is impossible: “This subject of discourse cannot be outside discourse because it must be
subjected to discourse.” In the game, however, the Western account of history
constitutes the universal truth, while everything else is mere fiction. In a few cases,
Shirk's excitement about new features even reveals some essentialist understandings of
'accuracy', e.g. as he speaks about the new leader screens: “When you're playing
Montezuma, there's fire, and arm-waving – he's got to be able to bring the character
forward.” (Remo, 2010) The idea of accuracy in this case, however, is built solely on
the basis of infering Montezuma's “character” from the colonialist picture of the Other.
Fire and exaggerated gesturing conjure up images of the animalistic savage as the
binary opposite to the civilized white man. It is important to note that Civ 5's
Montezuma is not Montezuma II who fought the Spanish invaders, but Montezuma I,
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someone of which there is no Western account at all, let alone a postcolonial one.
Next to accuracy, Shirk stresses the importance of many overhauls to the Civilization
formula, but most importantly, the military. “We've showed this overwhelming military
game in our public demonstrations, but the peaceful players, the cultural players, and
the science players are all going to be able to play just as easily without having to focus
on the combat game.” (Remo, 2010) The heavily advertised improvements to combat,
however, as well as the fact that the game's PR on multiple accounts feels the need to
stress that players will not have to focus on it, not only exposes the Domination Victory
path as one of the central ones, but also that the target demographic expects this path to
take center stage. The expansions Gods and Kings (2012) and Brave New World (2013)
focused mainly on overhauling the other victories, e.g. by reintroducing religion to the
series, but the initial focus on the “military game” remains. Shirk even calls the changes
to the game's combat “the most interesting.” (Remo, 2010) The ludic freedom that this
focus propagates by always offering a sword next to the pen romanticizes the heavy
imperialist notions of enforcing power over others not through hegemony, but brute
force.
The third marked focus of the interview is the genius cult surrounding Sid Meier,
which stands in the way of building the community's faith in the new lead designer Jon
Shafer. Shirk tries to solve this by painting Meier as the “executive producer” who is
“instrumental to everything we do” and has “his hands pretty thoroughly in everything
[...]” by testing the game in various stages and giving “very frequent” (Remo, 2010)
feedback. He then portrays Shafer as someone who based his decisions on Meier's
overarching design philosophy: “Jon wanted that same flavor.” (Remo, 2010) Sid Meier
is thus used merely as a seal of approval, he remains in the background, and is not
counted among the developers. This legitimizes the represented ideologies from the
very start, just through the name itself, while not entering the sphere of the personal, a
human face given to the ideologies, which would lower their impact, now exposed as
the brainchild of a man rather than the impersonal account of objective truths. It also
frames the entire game with a sentiment of theology, the precursor to teleology, whereby
the assumption of an impersonal entity lending guidance to those actually in charge
grants legitimacy to everything the game does.
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6.1.3 Review and marketing
One day before release, video game website IGN released a review echoing similar
ideas. While the review does explain the importance of the other victory paths, most
prominently the cultural one, it also leads with the headline: “A game that's optimized
for the uncivilized”, stating: “My Iroquois nation […] slowly but surely conquered the
Americans and other European nations, subduing them to my rule... or simply burning
their once-haughty nations to ashes. This is what Civilization V is all about.” (Gallegos,
2010) That last phrase in particular stresses that the shortcomings of the original release
were not only advertised as forgivable, but to be embraced, seeing as Gallegos still
awarded the game 9 out of 10 points on IGN's rating scale.
While the release of the expansions mostly remedied said shortcomings, however, the
advertisement texts for the 'Complete Edition', which includes all expansions, still first
and foremost celebrates the violent imperialism that was prevalent in the original
release. The back of the box calls on the player to “wage war by land, sea, and air,
conduct diplomacy and espionage, establish religious beliefs, and discover new
technologies in [her] quest to build the most powerful empire the world has ever
known.” This short text alone leads and ends with concepts of overt imperialism. The
five bullet points below also lead with “huge battles”, while a more peaceful, although
equally important in-game feature like “international trade” is pushed to second-to-last
place. Similarly, Ford (2016) points out that “the first line of the game’s description on
Steam challenges players to 'become Ruler of the World […]'.”
This prevalence of the concept of war and the reliance on imperialist ideas to make
sense of peaceful interactions can also be explained through the strategy genre itself.
Dor (2016:275) claims that “[u]sually, […] strategy games refer to military-themed
computer games where the player takes the role of a commander and needs to gather
resources to summon new military units.” Civ 5 may be a special case that opens up
avenues for more peaceful approaches, yet it advertises itself as belonging to the 4X-
strategy genre, which even finds allusion in the developers' company name Firaxis
Games. Civ 5 lead designer Jon Shafer (2013, Strategy) explains that “[a] moniker often
used for empire builders is '4X', for exploration, expansion, exploitation and
extermination.” The imperialist implications are clear, since an empire explores the
lands of which it deems its inhabitants unworthy, expands onto said land, exploits it and
exterminates all resistance. It is nigh-on impossible for a hypothetical consumer seeking
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information on Civ 5 to avoid this genre name, which in turn confirms that all paratexts
leading up to the purchase of Civ 5 advertise the game as a romanticized imperialist
playground.
6.2 Civilizations and leaders
Ideology revolves around inclusion and exclusion: “[W]hen designers include and
exclude particular ethnicities within game action, the subtext of their design choices
carries ideological weight.” (Hayse, 2016:443) Representation thus starts with the
variety of playable civilizations on offer. The game's Euro-centrism can be spotted
immediately when categorizing the available nations by continent, as can be seen in
Figure 2.
continent civilizations present nation(s) historical nation(s)
Europe 15 FRANCE CELTS (Gauls)America 7 GERMANY Teutons
Asia 13 Italy ROME/Africa 6 BYZANTINE EMPIRE/
Oceania 2 VENICE
Figure 2 Turkey OTTOMAN EMPIREIraq/Kuwait ASSYRIA/
BABYLONIATunisia CARTHAGE
Peru INCAMexico AZTECS/
MAYAIran PERSIA
Thailand SIAMNorth/South Korea KOREA
Mali SONGHAISouth Africa ZULU
Figure 3
The most striking contrast is the representation of Europe through 15 nations in total,
while Africa, a culturally diverse continent almost three times as large, is represented
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through less than half as many civilizations. The same can be said for America, offering
an immense variety of native peoples, but only settling for five, next to the United
States and Brazil.
Figure 3 highlights another problem that Hayse (2016:446) hints at byacknowledging that “Civilization [...] favors [...] an ethnocentric view of non-
industrialized cultures […].” Civ 5 reserves a special form of Othering against all
cultures deemed technologically less advanced than Western cultures. The ties to both
ethnicity and space reveal tendencies of essentialism as well as environmental
determinism. Hayse fails to recognize, however, that the imperialist Othering through
the mere visual, technologically inferior depiction of cultures like the Maya, Aztecs or
Zulu is just the tip of the iceberg. Instead, representation starts with dividing the cultural
continuum of the world geographically and chronologically and then decide which
'cultures' to include in the first place. Figure 3 exercises one aspect of this bycontrasting a selection of presently recognized countries to historical nation states and
cultures that occupied a similar space in the past, and marking those included in Civ 5
through capital letters. This reveals a Euro-centric world view that favors the
representation of present-day Western nations over historical ones, while also favoring
the historical Orientalist Western view of non-European nations over modern
representations of their current nation states.
Prototypical European countries like Germany and France are included in the game,
while additionally, France's historical identity, the Gauls, are arguably represented
through the Celts. Italy marks a special case, where the modern nation itself was
supposedly excluded due to the inclusion of three corresponding civilizations already in
its place, as Venice, the Roman, and the Byzantine empire mark important items in the
functional memory of Europe. This classicist and Christian view on history also
explains the inclusion of Cart