RE: Learning the Wong things from the White games?
What an astounding reply, thank you.
It's a little strange though as you seem to have contradicted your original assertion that Civ is not Western-centric. I believe you have in fact supplemented more arguments against that point. But I guess that's not the most interesting thing on the table.
A lot of what you're saying here is what I was attempting to allude to, such as the role of the "savage" in progressivist linear history, and the stupidity of "white guilt", and wondering about how an anti-Civilization perspective would view the implicit lessons of the game of the same name.
Elsewhere, I still come up again against the fatalistic idea of "why bother", now in the richer context of Civilization era length cycles of life, death and rebirth you spoke about. While I agree that utopia is by definition a mirage, aiming for better is not a waste of time.
So back to the game Civ, you say that "it's impossible to promote an universal standard for measuring progress and virtues" but that's exactly what the game tries to do. As I said before, I'm mainly wondering how this is picked up by players, if at all.
It's good that you also challenge this. I really didn't get this from your Civ-as-management-training post and I'm glad you've been commenting on these. I'd really like to see more from you from the more philosophical perspective on games, I intend to dive in there a bit more too.
I'll watch that video, thanks for the recommendation.
An important work to read is Decline of the West by Oswald Spengler.
For a game to function, it needs to have clear winning and losing conditions. So in that sense, there is a universal set of metrics to determine who wins. However, I don't necessarily see that as promoting universalism. I see that as a necessity for the game to function. You can go for many different types of victories: domination, cultural, science, diplomacy... and even more in other 4x games: expansion, wonder, etc. Different cultures pursue different "win conditions"... but of course there aren't clearly defined win conditions in real life and there is no hivemind overlord in charge of the goals of any culture.
Civ is more open and less Eurocentric than Europa Universalis or Crusader Kings. In Europa Universalis, if you don't Westernize by the 1700s, you will lag behind in tech and lose wars... but that's also the reality of how history actually played out. You can still play as the Mayans and Aztecs and invade Europe, but it's more realistic and less feasible than in Civ.
Do you listen to Dan Carlin's Hardcore History or Daniele Bolelli's History on Fire?
That Civ is not as eurocentric / western bias, etc. as Europa Universalis or Crusader Kinds does not mean that it is not also centric in that way. I consider that point shown at this point.
I haven't listened to Hardcore History yet, it's on my "must watch" list. The other I haven't heard of.
One small point which I don't want to make too much of: a game functions on rules, but it need not have clear winning or losing conditions in order to be a game. A good example of this is the original SimCity, which was just a sandbox. "Winning" is the continued survival of your city, which has parallels to real life, in that there is no defined way to win, you are winning as long as you continue drawing breath. Civ of course is very different.