On the lighter side, you also have an opportunity to build World Wonders, including Stonehenge, the Pyramids of Giza, the Oracle at Delphi, the Parthenon, Notre Dame, the Globe Theater, and many other lovely edifices – but only if another Civilization doesn't do it first. And Civilizations are frequently blessed with Great Artists, Scientists, and Generals. If you're lucky, you might even earn a Golden Age (though I haven't figured out how yet).
Personally, I like the odd quirks of history that take place during a game. While working on the Hanging Gardens of Babylon, for example, don't be surprised if a machine gun-toting Mayan chief declares war on you.
Ultimately, players discover uranium and develop nuclear physics. Soon, they're shooting nuclear missiles at each other (yikes!) while tying to contain the radioactive fallout from missiles shot at them (double yikes!). All Civilizations eventually pass into the future – if they survive nuclear holocaust – and a player wins when he or she is the first to land a colonizing party on a planet near the star Alpha Centauri.
Whew.
I've never made it that far, though my son has. I usually bow out around 1830. This is partly due to my consistently poor performance (I never seem to discover gunpowder before Caesar
And everything has become bewilderingly complex.
This isn't a problem for my son, who has no trouble at all navigating the cascade of new technologies, aggrieved neighboring dictators, sprawling cities, endless trade deals, diverse military units, marauding raiders, and sneaky spies, not to mention the occasional natural disaster. I, on the other hand, begin to have trouble distinguishing cannon-wielding Mongolians from steel-making Babylonians from rice-growing Englishmen. As the variables, and the casualties, mount, my brain begins to close its shutters one-by-one, until it finally sends a signal to my finger to click the 'Play Again' button. Presto! A crowded, dreary, and war-weary world is suddenly wilderness again.
And all is quiet and simple.
I bring all this up because I think this game sheds an important light on the Age of Consequences in two ways: first, by the message it sends to young people (and not-so-young) about the nature of "Progress;" and second, by what it says about the role of complexity in the decline of civilizations – or in the case of this game specifically, the lack of decline. Both have relevance to our modern predicament, though not in ways that the game's designers intended, I'm sure. On the second point, I'll leave the game behind and explore a book instead.
On the first point, the game's message is straightforward:
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