![civilization ii dos civilization ii dos](https://www.bestoldgames.net/img/games/civilization-2/civilization-2-04.gif)
That the most extensive resource for the Civilization series development is in a rare collector’s edition should hint at the level of historical inquiry this series has received. Perhaps the two most prominent popular and journalistic accounts of Civilization are Benj Edwards’s history of Civilization for the Gamasutra website, and Troy Goodfellow’s history in the companion booklet for the Civilization Chronicles boxed set.
![civilization ii dos civilization ii dos](https://assets.misjuegos.com/7/23557/77635/pre-civilization-2-bronze-age-screenshot-1.jpg)
There are other more developed popular histories that account for some of the criticism here, but not all of it (see Bogost and Montfort, Maher and Peterson). The G4 example is a single manifestation of a general trend in pop game journalism.
![civilization ii dos civilization ii dos](https://tagz.eu/download/games/screens/sid-meiers-civilization-ii/cover.jpg)
![civilization ii dos civilization ii dos](http://cdn.toucharcade.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/07/Photo-2014-07-07-16-55-32.jpg)
The most significant omission being that the series has had seven principal designers and that even the first title in the series was co-developed with another Microprose employee, Bruce Shelley. The focus on the initial game and its initial designer clouds the perception of the series as a whole. Featuring short interviews with Sid Meier himself, the half-hour documentary finds other designers and members of the press lauding the achievements of his work as “perhaps the greatest game ever”, paying little attention to its design influences, its growth as a series, or the contributions of the designers past the game’s first installment.
#CIVILIZATION II DOS TV#
This singular designer focused, fan serviced history is no better encapsulated than in a G4 TV special on the creation of the Civilization series. The history of the series in modern gaming press is generally relegated to either a blurb in a “top games of X” list, a fan-centric evaluation of how “awesome” the game is or a nod to its addictive play. The attention paid to Meier’s contribution to the series generally overshadows the deeper development story, one that involves countless individuals working for literally decades to get the Civilization series to its current cultural prominence. His name has preceded the titles of numerous games, beginning with Sid Meier’s Pirates in 1987, and cemented a popular perception of Meier as a modern day game design “god” (PC Gamer, “Game Gods”). The popular perceptions of the development and importance of the Civilization series tend to center on Sid Meier’s position as its principal designer.
#CIVILIZATION II DOS CODE#
The Civilization series served as a model because of its long history, involved player community, open sourced code and interview-able constituents. To clarify, this examination is of both the evolution of Sid Meier’s Civilization series and a sometimes micro-focused look at its individual titles.Īll details of the games development will be introduced through a fragmentary structure, the important thing is that each narrative is a perspective on the historical study of games in general. I wanted to telegraph how future researchers might use an object like Civilization and from there developed a number of fragmentary, non-linear, and multicursal perspectives on the games in series and individually. My initial interest stemmed from archival work for the Preserving Virtual Worlds II project. The work presented below is simply my examinations of the various types of historical narratives revealed as I chipped away at the fractal, crystalline complexity of the Civilization series. They are the expressive medium most apt to examine and reveal life in the current century and they deserve a deeper historical foundation. Computer games are complex items, a new media form situated at the convergence of computation and society. They seek to entertain and popularize, not problematize and explain. Such histories are not looking deep into the technical underpinnings of the objects, and are generally uncritical. Most histories of computer games are framed in popular or journalist language (see Herz, King, Kushner and Sheff for examples) aimed at selling to fans of games in general or of a particular title. I want to highlight the process of historical study and the many paths revealed in looking deeply into a computational object seeing it situated in a design tradition and in the context its larger influence on a society of players. My purpose is to provide a few methodological incursions into different, fragmentary pieces of the series history and engage with the games on technical, social and design-centric grounds not usually mentioned in general popular histories. I have little interest in reciting a general account of the series’ development or the early history of its developer Microprose, the company founded by Bill Steele and Sid Meier. The approach here is not a comprehensive history of Sid Meier’s Civilization series.