New Review for an Old Game

Steam doesn’t make a show of it, but it’s been five or so years since I wrote ‘The Resource Curse Explained’. It looks as spontaneous as any other guide, and lately its started picking up comments again. To anyone else that guide is immediately there for them, but to me it is a time capsule. It seems doomed to some sort of cyberimmortality, five but never ageing, the language never improving. ‘Improving’, the fun with words is so dense, the points so brief, the perspective so small. Not good, not really a guide, but whatever. It’s both me and definitely not me. I’m not here to critique – I want to traverse a game-sized span of life, look into the thick of something I haven’t touched in a while. Let me recite and recant myself, onward and downward, schlock and schmaltz.

I’m surprised that I did anything on Steam, but there it is. Even though they weren’t as ‘successful’, I preferred writing guides to making mods. They’re a lot more individual, and looking back, they’re much more valuable. ‘The Resource Curse Explained’ was a fun little thought experiment, applying macroeconomics theory to civ5, using the game as an example of this ‘resource curse’ idea. It was never a guide on how to play the game, or even a criticism of the bigger picture of capitalism; it wasn’t very self-aware. As if from a simpler time, perhaps it should have tried harder to look at capitalism. By which I mean, it should have been able to tell the problem of applying capitalist theory to a game and to real people without differentiation. It was… heartless. People were numbers to me, an abstraction I could describe in the same breath as a civ5 specialist slot.

What’s to blame for that mistake, for that way of seeing things? Me, yes, but beyond that? What shapes the mind of ‘a gamer’? Thanks to me, and thanks to civ5, ‘culture’ is purple. It’s something you get from monuments. Populations are green, offer beakers and hammers, but produce unhappiness. I inherited the language of the game - no different than the impressionable moment a book becomes a child’s imagination, occupies it like a force. Review: Civilization is like Harry Potter, Percy Jackson, D&D, Pokémon, Monopoly. Civilization is like the Aeneid. Or it was, momentarily, for one kid – stuck in that irreducible place where we really start to learn words. 'The Resource Curse Explained' feels alone with words.

Now that’s a word on the verge of asterisks. And what a thing to allege, if I was really making the allegation. What a word to hurl at a stream of flickering numbers. But think of candles, making smoke – I’m not trying to say anything crazier than that.

To be clear, I wasn’t ever a nationalist. I’m just wondering, what kind of language does a game offer you? In Civilisation, you can’t ever be a person. You’re an empire without real people, without real ethical consequences. You’re not unethical, either, since nothing is real. It’s just the jouissance of creating a military complex. Like EU4, there is culture and science, which serve the purpose of furthering the war machine. That is the obvious, irreducible point of the game - it’s the point where asking ‘why?’ is pointless and forbidden. Why grow? Why win? The dead end of an empire game looks like bubbles satisfyingly growing on a map, glorious music behind it. A Foucauldian lava lamp, or something.

Naturally, a game (like that) has things that are possible and impossible. There is no first person mode. No love interests. No literature that only has the purpose of being literature, not a +2 culture +2 tourism modifier. It’s insane to complain about this. When a game decides what is possible, it develops a schema of the world. Among Us has tasks, murder and voting – these are the possible things. It has democracy, infiltration and suspicion. There is a worldview in there of human nature and justice. Of course, people don’t unironically adopt those tenets, and aren’t expected to. Instead, in a pact with the developers, you’re expected not to. We are expected not to become paramnesiacs. We all tacitly agree to this term and condition. Does it hold up to the reality of our behaviour?

Good lord, countryballs makes me question that. And Drew Durnil. Isorrow. Jokes become inside jokes, that become communities, that become ideologies. Simple phrases like ‘England should’ or ‘Russia is like’, everyday sayings, are products of the anthropomorphism of countries. Treating governments like the body of an individual, a belief that even occurs in Shakespeare’s Coriolanus. Like that instinct to recognize faces where there isn’t one. We act in illogical ways. In the thick of Civilization, I started to see the world as Civilization. Countries became too easy to identify with, Civ’s idea of inherent traits that belong to countries felt as real as Nietzsche made it out to be. All this is my fault. But it’s not just my doing, and I wasn’t monstrous. I am, obviously, painfully normal. Maybe that makes it better, maybe that makes it worse. Thanks to Civilization, I did not have the ideas of a nationalist but I had the language of one. Forgive me, I was a teenager.

Like nits, I’m picking through the engrams left behind from playing a game a little too much, when I was younger. I wish there had been a better balance of gaming and real, genuine community interaction – but that’s just how it is when you live in a foreign country. You live in a bubble with reinforced walls. Putting it to words gives it a nice concluding narrative, don’t you think?

I wonder, to have done all this, just how old Civ5 is. Faintly, I remember Yogscast first getting me into it. It didn’t quite outlive them, by the looks of things. It’s impressive enough it could live beyond the release of Beyond Earth and Civ6. Somehow, that doesn’t seem to be what aged it. What makes a game old? Minecraft was released long before Civ5, yet feels much younger. Fall Guys is newer but also more dead. It’s like a craze dies.

Should we play Civ differently, now that it’s an old game? Are we supposed to be more detached? Or, paradoxically, are we supposed to be more attached – to the imaginative spirit of it, the story of beliefs and power structures, the pretence of it? Where before there was optimization, now there is nostalgia. Maybe it should be pretty, funny, ridiculous, by now.

Note:
This is not a guide, I know, but it didn’t belong in the Steam review section: I’m not trying to judge whether or not someone should buy this game, and there are probably a million different diffractions of experiencing this game other than mine. I’m only really trying to apply the sociology of Jean Baudrillard to my life in a gaming context. Please, take it as thought experiment. I hope you’ve enjoyed it, and that it’s short enough to be inconsequential to you if you didn’t. (1200 words)