Already done. "Bombs, barbarians, and backstories: Meaning-making within Sid Meier's Civilization" (David Myers, 2005). A pretty cool article actually.

Also "The grand narrative of video games : Sid Meier's Civilization" (Eva Vrtačič, 2014). And "You Have Unleashed a Horde of Barbarians!: Fighting Indians, Playing Games, Forming Disciplines" (Chjristopher Douglas, 2002). Fun reads, I remember.

I was just reminded of something else I find unsettling about some of the early Civilization game (including, at least, Civilization 2): The games present Monotheism as an advance over Polytheism. Basically, by making Monotheism a technological advance that comes after Polytheism (and has Polytheism as a prerequisite), the developers seem to imply that Monotheism is superior to Polytheism, a stance which I strongly disagree with.

(Incidentally, Civilization 2 also had the game-breaking Fundamentalism government type; that type would hurt science, but was overpowered in pretty much every other respect. For example, there was no unhappiness, removing a feature that was meant to counter certain degenerate gameplay styles (like building cities on every square that the game would let you), and improvements that would counter unhappiness would give you gold every turn, so money wasn't an issue. Furthermore, you got access to an exclusive unit that was very cheap for its power, and I believe you don't have to pay maintenance costs for units in this government type. Also, poor science isn't much of an issue because, if you take over an opponent's city, you get to choose one of their technologies that you don't already have.)

I think that's looking too much into it. The tech tree is a simplification/abstraction of History, mostly from a Western point of view, and polytheism came before monotheism. It was also that way in Age of Empires.

Actually it goes a tad farther than that. There's an implied hierarchy of values (later is better, benefits people more) that illustrates a naive evolutionist worldview. By naive, I mean commonplace, "common sense", but long dismissed by anthropological science. You are right about the games betraying their cultural origin (which should be expected), and oversimplifying history (even specialists wouldn't be able to model all the causal links between all aspects of societies), but it also shows a system of belief that goes beyond mere facts (such as mere chronological sequences). It implies sequential necessities, hidden mechanisms, causations, etc...

No big deal. They are games, made by game producers, they are not supposed to be avant-garde ethnohistorical treatises. Of course they will echo common beliefs, and, even today, our societies often see themselves through evolutionist lenses. A critical distance to them is obviously needed, just like you have to keep a critical distance towards what supermario teaches you about mushrooms.

The nagging thing, for me, though, is that I started playing these games at a time where I was reading Bernard Werber's third "Ants" novel. In which, a programmer designs some totally accurate Civ-like game, that modelizes our cultural evolutions perfectly, and which AI sims end up realising their conditions and revoluting against the users - making the screen explode at some point, in an attempt to kill their gods. It's not a very good novel (compared to the first "Ants"), but it really, really made me wish for a game that would indeed re-create History as an emerging process. It was a nice dream.

So I was always a bit disappointed to realise how these games just have to follow scripts or codes defined by our own models, assumptions and simplifications. Because of that little Werber romanticism.

I didn't know about this peculiarity of the last Civilization, and I have to say that it is highly worrying that they prefer to exclude a feature already present in previous chapters for fear of scaring a slice of the public (really someone would not buy the game because there is the dynamics of global warming?) and at the same time denying a factual truth now documented by all the scientists who study the phenomenon.

I'm just waiting for the day that Civilization is cited as a reason why some idiot call Ghandi the biggest hypocrite in world history.

See? Told you, the outrage mob works both ways, and it needs to go away. Don't simultaneously complain about the removal of a mechanic for political reason and talk about something you find "troubling." You're basically playing a ti-for-tat game.

And from that article, it doesn't even quote him directly, which is a huge red flag to me that they couldn't even quote him out of context to come to that conclusion. He probably went on about the global warming thing for a while about how people complaining, and one of the minor points was politics. I've heard people complaining about such mechanics before, but not as political pandering (aside from some wild people): some people want to play games like this and have easy wins by being godly in power. Global warming mechanics in these games are basically a blue shell to keep people from simply running away with the game and having now challenge simply from good early game planning.

Where did I complain about the removal of global warming from the game in this thread?

Also, my first complaint in the post I quoted isn't something that I would call "game mechanics"; one could solve the problem just by renaming the advances to not say anything about the number of gods (maybe call them "Religion" and "Organized Religion", perhaps?), and the game mechanics would be the same.

My second complaint, about the Fundamentalism government type, is a game mechanics complaint, but it's justified for non-political reasons simply because that government type, as designed, is not good for game balance. (It also, interestingly, doesn't refer to a specific religious belief, unlike Poly/Monotheism referring to the number of deities being worshiped.) In this case, the government type really needed to be tweaked or removed (I don't remember which approach Civ 3 took, but I think it may have just removed it).

It's not unusual for a game to have a mechanic that makes you "sell your soul" in the process of making the game easier. Like a game that mocks you for playing on easy.

As for monotheism over polytheism in particular, it's most likely because we're cutting down on the number of gods, ultimately going to no gods, with the intermediary steps in between. It should also be no surprise that the Jewish god is easily interpret-able from their own text to be the universe itself ("I am" →　"to be" → "to exist" → "existence itself is intelligent": "we are God when we do his works" → "God is nature and evolution" → "There is no personal god, just the universe").

Ah, thanks for clarification. I was referring to just the first few early games I've played, which, unfortunately, leaves the newer games out of the picture. But on the old ones, Earth be flat! ; )

This argument doesn't work because atheism has existed even in times where the dominant religion was not monotheistic.

Edit: Added a "not" (not a "knot").

dtgreene, do you understand what nonsense you've just said? Not only you don't take into account that different religions can coexist, but you also, apparently, don't know what "atheism" means.

One other thought, going back to the original topic:

Suppose there were a game that was like Civilization (or one of its sequels) except that, whenever global warming occurs, squares would turn into tundra rather than jungle or desert. In other words, global warming caused cold rather than hot terrain to appear. What would you think of this change?

Of course, there are stranger ideas. What if global warming made mountains appear? How about it it made fully improved plains squares appear? (Unike the tundra idea above, these changes would change the dynamics of pollution in the game.)

(Incidentally, if one wants to have a better simulation, perhaps forest and jungle squares (including jungle squares from global warming) should have a negative effect on global warming, so that worlds with more forest/jungle would take longer to warm up. Note that this could put runaway global warming in check; as more jungle squares appear, global warming would be less likely to occur again.)

I think you're misunderstanding what she is saying; it's because many kinds of religion (and non-religion) can and have coexisted throughout history that the framing of religiosity as an inevitable linear progression from "many gods" to "no gods", as kohlrak has done, is illegitimate.

Atheism or secularism? It's hard to say that atheism existed in that time, as opposed to primarily secularism, given that atheism is a truth claim: you're positive that god(s) do(es) or cannot exist. Such claims would be met with demands of proof, while secularism would allow one to be discreet, which keeps them out of trouble.

I don't necessarily doubt that it existed, but during these times monotheism and other ideas existed as well, but they weren't well received. Were the Wright brothers really the first to discover flight? Was there no one out there before who could've come up with the concept that sickness comes from "attacks" from things way too tiny for us to see (we already knew that small things and distant things were harder for older people to see than younger, clearly the concept of something too small to see was already possible in the human mind)? We can't know when an idea came to exist, but we can credit a roundabout time period when an idea finally takes hold. Atheism could be equally old as religion (religion must exist before making a claim that it's BS), but we can't say that we finally came up with it until it actually started taking root. Societies have mechanisms that keep us from making huge leaps in ideas in short periods of time: so as to keep us from rushing into something that could "crash the system." There's a reason why religion still exists (and arguably is still created in various pieces via quantum physics, politics, and the like) today: it's still useful for society.
It's society that makes the linear progression necessary: we scorn that which is "too alien" to us. We'll bite novel ideas, but we won't eat and swallow them wholesale without lots of time. Therefore, progression is naturally slow. This keeps us from simply jumping on a new idea simply because it's new, only for it to be something which destroys the foundations of society itself. It's why some science comes into the public heading of "you'll never believe" or "I know it seems outlandish, but it's actually true," or something to that effect.

Actually, that's not correct. Atheism is the lack of a truth claim: You do not claim that god(s) exist, and you proceed as though they don't.

Source:
https://www.atheists.org/activism/resources/about-atheism/