The Civilization games are full of historical information, but it's mixed together and cut with fantastical contrivances that make it fun to play—which is how I recently went toe-to-toe with Harriet Tubman as Han Dynasty emperor Niccolò Machiavelli when I played Civilization 7 for this month's PC Gamer cover feature. The games aren't history tutors, but Firaxis senior historian Dr. Andrew Johnson, who's also an associate professor at Stockholm University's Department of Social Anthropology, hopes the studio's passion for history inspires some of us to pick up a book. It's the whole reason he does the job.
"I teach undergraduates in my other life, and my God, man, they don't read," Johnson told me on a call in November. "And trying to get them interested in history—if somebody plays Machiavelli, they might get really kind of interested. Machiavelli maybe has enough name recognition already, but like Amina [Queen of Zazzau], or, 'OK, so this is the Ming Dynasty, how is that different from the Han Dynasty?' If that can provoke somebody into an interest in history, that is what's important here. This is not the textbook. This is the gateway drug into the textbook. If textbooks were drugs."
For Civilization 7, Firaxis has loosened up its criteria for leaders, hence why Machiavelli can rule ancient China, although it's hard to say this is some new turn away from historicity given that the series has always been about rewriting the past, often with silly consequences. For Johnson, the problems that arise when trying to represent history in a grand strategy game are more academic.
For example, borders in Southeast Asia have a different character than borders in other parts of the world, says Johnson: "There's overlapping zones of sovereignty. Somebody can be both a part of the Cambodian state and part of the Thai state, part of the Laotian state, pay tribute to all, or none. But that doesn't work in a game where you need direct lines on the map. So that's fine. We can nod to that somewhere in the Civilopedia or the gameplay, and maybe if somebody gets interested enough in the Khmer Empire, they can go read about it."
To me, Firaxis' biggest historical problems come from the fact that Civ is a game you can win, meaning it presents history as something that can be won. Given that Civ 7's new three-act structure includes an "Exploration Age" which encourages players to construct navies and set off for distant lands—perhaps to conquer and colonize them, perhaps not— asked Johnson if he worried the game projected a Eurocentric view. Are the colonial empires the model for 'winning' here?
With his apologies to Civ 7 narrative designer Dr. Rue Taylor, an expert in medieval Europe, Johnson said that he specifically wants to counter the tendency to overemphasize European history.
"When the ordinary history buff picks up a game, they're oftentimes saturated in European, sometimes in East Asian history, and don't really look beyond that," said Johnson. "So ideas about a passive, traditional, mystical 'other' and a dynamic active Europe is one of the things that I really felt like pushing back on. And so civilizations like Chola are, to me, really interesting, because here you have large, polyreligious, multi-ethnic trade routes extending across the Indian Ocean at the time Beowulf is being written, and Europeans are looking under rocks for trolls. So I think getting the dynamism of the world outside of Europe is really what I find fascinating here.
"For me, the Exploration Age is about that age of interconnection. Yes, you have the high age of European colonization in there. But you've also got the Indian Ocean trade. You've also got the Pax Mongolica, you've got that trade across The Steppe. You have the caravans on the Sahara, you have a whole lot of other kinds of things going on. And the way the game is structured, you don't have to be a colonizer to win. There are victory conditions that have nothing to do with colonization. But on the flip side of that, going out, exploring, and settling new lands is, yes, something that non-European powers did."
Returning to Johnson's motivation for working on Civ 7, the possibility that someone will be inspired to investigate the past is not something he sees as a side benefit—he says it's why he took the job.
"That's why I'm here, really," he told me. "I just want people to appreciate the world and the strangeness of the world. Because if you appreciate how the past was different, or how other places are different, you can change your everyday as well. Then that opens up new worlds. That makes new worlds possible. If you think this is the only way it can be, the only way it should be, then you're locked into a static existence, and that's dull."
Civilization 7 is scheduled to release on February 11 on Steam and consoles, and you can read my full feature on the game in the latest issue of PC Gamer. The short version is that I had a good time beating up on Rome and struggling to build a sensible Great Wall, and expect Civ 7 to be fun, and as usual for the series, divisive. Whether or not Firaxis' big changes to the structure (which I explained in an older preview) are a total success, I'm glad that the studio continues to try new things with the series, which is well over 30 years old.
