Campbell
James Campbell
mailto:jcampbel@pegasus.cc.ucf.edu
Civilization III and its Discontents
God's Eye View and the New World Order
This paper investigates the Civilization series of computer games as interpretations of culture. It is part of a larger project investigating some of the most popular computer games (especially the Myst and Tomb Raider series) as complicitous critique of global capitalism and US neo-imperialism. I tend to see the Civilization games less as critique, however complicit, and more as digital expressions of a kind of political unconscious.
Civilization provides a uniquely interactive version of many of the assumptions that underlie global capitalism. As a classic God game, the player looks down upon a world from an objective position. At first, only a small portion of the world is revealed but, literalizing enlightenment metaphor, expansion and colonization gradually illuminate the rest of the globe. Of course, a player eventually bumps up against other civilizations and conflict is all but inevitable. But the player moves not only over the world but through time as well, and it is here that the assumptions of an enlightenment trajectory of history fully emerge. Civilizations progress by developing technologies on a sequential basis: although paths may differ, all civilizations nonetheless drive toward such goals as industrialization, internal combustion, and nuclear power. Moreover, the cities of each civilization at the beginning of a game differ stylistically: their graphics reflect different cultures' architectural styles. Once a civilization achieves industrialization, however, its city icons all change to uniform Western skyscrapers. All cultures are working toward the same ends in other words (an assumption also underlying the phrase 'the developing world'): everyone has the right to discover the same preordained path. Western industrialism is the future (whether desired or not), and the goal of the world is a literally enlightened map that has literally become all one color.
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