On Being Stuck in Sid Meier’s Civilization: The Promise of Freedom in Historical Games

Abstract

In this paper we investigate a fundamental tension in historical games: how they promise to let us experience the past as a playground while at the same time not offering the freedoms to radically explore and experiment with it. Historical games, for all their simulative and immersive power, are still rather stuck in specific forms of past-play. To investigate these borders, and what could lie beyond, we will employ a new political theory of the past, vested in archaeological and anthropological scholarship, as developed by Graeber and Wengrow in their book The Dawn of Everything: A New history of Humanity. In particular, we will use their ideas about fundamental freedoms to analyse how and to what extent processes and moments of radical historical change can be experienced in games. We will do so by focusing on the popular and influential game series Sid Meier’s Civilization.