{"id":23182,"date":"2014-05-27T02:09:36","date_gmt":"2014-05-27T07:09:36","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/?p=23182"},"modified":"2014-05-27T02:11:54","modified_gmt":"2014-05-27T07:11:54","slug":"errant-signal-civilization","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/?p=23182","title":{"rendered":"Errant Signal &#8211; Civilization"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><table class='nomargin' cellspacing='0' width='100%' cellpadding='0' align='center' border='0'><tr><td><iframe loading=\"lazy\" width=\"1024\" height=\"576\" src=\"https:\/\/www.youtube.com\/embed\/xBlEscMLjy0\" frameborder=\"0\" allowfullscreen class=\"embed\"><\/iframe><br\/><small><a href='http:\/\/www.youtube.com\/watch?v=xBlEscMLjy0'>Link (YouTube)<\/a><\/small><\/td><\/tr><\/table><\/p>\n<p>See, this is why I love the work that Chris does. 14 minutes of thoughts on what the mechanics of Civilization (the game) says about how the developers view or frame civilization (not the game). I never really thought about things from this angle until now. My complaints with the game never went much deeper than &#8220;These spearmen shouldn&#8217;t be able to defeat my tank&#8221;.<\/p>\n<p>I&#8217;ve actually never really cared all that much about the historical leaders. Aside from the comedy of having Mohandas Gandhi dropping nukes on you, I always thought it detracted from the sort of high-level abstractions going on in the rest of the game. Why is Montezuma still prancing around in animal skins when his civ has landed on the moon? How is Lincoln &#8220;President&#8221; of a nation when we&#8217;re in the bronze age and Democracy-type ideas are thousands of years away? And hang on, is he really supposed to be immortal? Are all the leaders? I understand this is the kind of thing you&#8217;re not supposed to think about, which makes it all the more confusing that these idiots keep calling me up on their bronze-age civ-phones and making me think about it. <\/p>\n<p>I understand why this is done. The leaders give a face to the game. They make the human element visible, to save the game from being all about grids and charts. But it&#8217;s <em>strange<\/em>, you know?<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Link (YouTube) See, this is why I love the work that Chris does. 14 minutes of thoughts on what the mechanics of Civilization (the game) says about how the developers view or frame civilization (not the game). I never really thought about things from this angle until now. My complaints with the game never went [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[120],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-23182","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-videogames"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/23182","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=23182"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/23182\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=23182"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=23182"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=23182"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}