Civilization 6: Educational Games Critique

Civilization 6 is a turn based strategy game developed by Firaxis and designed by Sid Meiers. It’s the most recent entry in the civilization series. Players play as real-life historical leaders, and they must compete with other civilizations (real life players or ai) in order to win, which can be achieved by fulfilling a predetermined list of conditions.

Overall, Civilization 6 is a complex and challenging resource management game that requires players to think historically while immersing themselves in a (loosely) historically accurate depiction of different civilizations, empires, and political figures.

Educational Goals

Civilization teaches you a very broad set of skills. The game itself doesn’t boast itself in being a historically accurate source of information on world history. For example, the idea that a nation = civilization, or the ability for any one civilization (player) to retain dominance over a significant period of time. However, I don’t think anyone is playing and consuming the content of civilization the same way they read a history textbook. In my first game of Civ, I decided to play as Pericles, a famous greek politician. I founded my capital, Alexandria, on a tile that is technically located in south Africa.

Anyone playing the game is probably smart enough to understand that this isn’t an accurate portrayal of history. However, just from my playthrough, I learned that Pericles was a leader in Athens during its golden age, and that the ancient Greeks were known for their contributions to philosophy, with Athens being a center of culture and the arts in ancient Greece, among other things.

The game can be enjoyed at all ages, but is probably ideal for middle school aged kids and up, as it requires a good deal of reading comprehension and strategizing.

Other educational goals in Civ 6

• World history and politics: You can adopt different political systems and philosophies as you move through the game. You learn how different civilizations establish their own dominance (British developing culture through museums and artefacts, Greeks through building cultural districts like the acropolis.
• Diplomacy: Players interact, conduct trade deals, treaties, and declare war with other nations.
• History of civilizations: By controlling their civilization from the ancient era to the information era, players learn how nations grow and come to be, and the factors that might cause one civilization to gain dominance over another.
• Resource Management: Players must make decisions about resource allocation, trade, and they can learn about the different economic systems used throughout history, such as mercantilism, capitalism, and socialism.

Game Elements

Using Zubeck’s Elements of Game design to understand core mechanisms in Civilization 6

Nouns

• Civilizations: Playable nations that are controlled by players (or ai) that develop throughout the game.
• Cities: Tiles in a civilization which produce resources, technology, and generate units.
• Units: Moveable tiles that players can control around the map which accomplish different goals, such as soldiers, scouts, settlers, and workers.
• Technologies: Scientific advancements that players can research and develop, providing new benefits and capabilities to their civilization
• Wonders: structures in a civilization that players can build in their city tiles that provide various benefits
• Resources: Materials that players must manage such as production, food, gold, and culture
• The world: The physical environment, including land and sea, by which players must traverse, claim, and reap resources from.

Verbs

In each turn, players can expand their civilization by building new cities, claiming new territory (tiles in the world) or occupy from another civilization. Players gather resources through reaping the benefits of their infrastructure in order to further improve infrastructure, technology, and culture. Players engage in diplomacy by negotiating trade deals with other civilizations or city states, as well as wage war through military action.

Gameplay Loop

After players establish their civilization in the early game (finding an ideal location to settle, dealing with barbarians, and establishing a number of cities), players expand their civilization through a positive feedback loop by which resources are reaped from resource tiles, which are then used to build cities, wonders, and other units that will increase production. Competition between other civilizations, barbarians units, as well as resource management is a primary source of challenge for players.

Civilization games may take several hours to fully play through, so a game will usually take multiple days. I was not able to complete a full playthrough of the game for this assignment, but I have completely a few playthroughs of previous editions of civilization in the past. There are five different ways you can win in the game, which involves fulfilling a number of conditions. Each civilization is naturally predisposed to certain types of victories. For example, in a Culture victory, the total number of visiting tourists in your civilization must be greater than any other single civ’s domestic tourists. Civilizations like Greece can produce a of culture points through various sources, which makes it much more suited for a culture victory.

Learning Mechanisms

Scaffolding: Civ gets more complex as you get deeper into the game. In the early stages of your civilization, your turns are extremely short and simple as you are managing a small number of tiles and have not come into contact with other civilizations yet. As you expand your civilization, discover more territory and build more structures, there are many more things to be learned.

Anchored Learning: Civ deals with loose interpretations of real world scenarios by making you play as a historical figure.

Spacing: Even when playing against AI, there is a good deal of time spent waiting for your turn. While this annoyed me a little bit initially, the lack of immediate feedback actually prevents me from rushing my decisions, as I want to make every turn matter. This also gave me time to sift through the in game encyclopedia which has a lot of valuable information about the real-world historical information behind the game.

Overall Critique

Civ is a difficult game to pick up, and with the time commitment required to learn and play the game the way it’s supposed to be played, paired with the knowledge that you gain being difficult to measure up against conventional assessment-based school curriculums, makes the game less ideal in a real-world educational setting.

However, the limitations of the game can be attributed to the flaws of our educational system in teaching history as being merely the recall of significant names, dates, and events. The true essence of studying history lies in developing cultural sensitivity, empathy, and a nuanced understanding of the past, all of which will aid in making informed decisions in the future.

I’ve always hated history as a subject. However, one lesson I took away from my history classes that will always stay with me is from Jared Diamond’s award winning book, ‘Guns Germs and Steel’, which argues that the differences in development and power among civilizations can be explained by geographical and environmental factors, including access to useful plants, animals, and technologies. I do see this concept manifesting itself in Civ 6. If your starting area either doesn’t have good starting resources or is not close to any bodies of water, you’ll probably have a harder time growing your civilization, making the game much more challenging. Obviously, Jared Diamond’s ideas around geographic determinism goes a lot further than that, and at the end of the day, Civ 6 is designed to be a fun game. It wouldn’t be fun if your nation was set up to fail from the get go.

It would be interesting to see how the game mechanics can be tweaked to better reflect these real world issues. For example, adding a disease mechanic, or the inclusion of domesticated animals and food sources that can be spread across civilizations.

Overall, with these limitations in mind, I believe that Civ 6 is a great educational game that introduces non-experts into the complexities and challenges of expanding civilizations and managing a nation. I believe it can be incredibly educational for people who aren’t familiar with history, policy, and politics, but it only provides broad, surface level knowledge that needs to be supplemented in a more academic setting.