Jan 31st- the beginnings of this blog, and the early beginnings of my days as a "gamer".
does that mean I plan on forgoing basic hygenic habits, eating old pizza, staying in all the time to stay up late putting endless hours into advancing my armies? hardly. However, I hope to gain enough profiency with the game- Civilization 4- to offer mildly insightful posts. key word- "mildly". No one's swinging for the fence, and I'm female anyways, a setback as most of the hardcore nerds- er, gamers- have something I do not- that fateful 'Y' chromosome.
But I digress. In my first experience with the game, I wanted to test Jared Diamond's assertion of the importance of location for farming. He establishes how critical food surplus was to ancient culture and explores the shift in different early societies from hunter-gatherers to food producers. In the game, I wanted to stagnate my people's development and keep them as hunter-gatherers, but when I attempted this, the game went nowhere. It was a flying flop. And other leaders' civilizations quickly progressed past mine, leading ultimately to my conquerization, which is not actually a word, but probably a new term I am going to coin.
Basically I tried to create Papau New Guinea all over again. The same thing happened to my people- conquered by other nation(s). On the other hand, I learned how to roam for space really well, and to attack wild animals on hills. It showed to me the importance of farming instead of just hunting. I wanted to experiment with something relatively elementary in the game and to test a fundamental yet also equally elementary assertion of Diamond's.
Despite the game being a failure, the test was a success.
4 comments:
I find your post here interesting. For you argue that the game is a failure due to the fact that it is incapable of allowing you to develope a hunter-gatherer tribe. That is a good observation of the game's faults as it relates to the history of economics. But hunter-gatherer tribes is only one aspect of Econ universe. It would be difficult for a game to explore every aspect of economics. Thus, even though the game has its faults, I would not conclude that it is a complete failure.
Ah but Vahid, I did not mean to insinuate the game itself-Civilization 4- was a failure, instead implicating that the game I played would be deemed a failure. When in fact, it proved Diamond's point of the importance of sedentary living.
Ah, I see what you mean. You were talking about your play through of the game and not the entire game itself. Fair enough, you justify a good point. ^__^
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