Playing with power : geopolitical representations in civilization

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Playing with power

Geopolitical representations in Civilization

Paul Berkhout, 10246541 paul.berkhout@hotmail.com MSc Political Geography Supervisor: Dhr. Dr. P.S.M.Weir Second reader: mw. dr. V.D. Mamadouh University of Amsterdam 21/08/2017

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Abstract

Civilization is a videogame series in which players get to take control of a civilization and through a diverse set of ways try to become the dominant nation in a virtual world. Using references to historical characters and to the rise of civilizations through the ages, the Civilisation series tries to present a simulation of alternative history. Dealing with amongst others war, diplomatic alliances, religion and trade, the Civilization series contains a wide variety of geopolitical theories and ideas. The effect of geopolitical content in videogames on their audiences has been relatively understudied and under-theorised. This research aims to uncover how those geopolitical representations are consumed, interpreted and experienced by focusing on how the players themselves, rather than at the in-game text. Through semi-structured interviews I provide insights in the relatively young and rapidly growing world of academic scholarship about videogames.

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1. Introduction

In-depth analyses of literature, movies, pictures and other forms of art and entertainment, allow us to learn about the real world and lived experiences of people through

representation. While it is quite common to see forms of art, entertainment and media as the unit of analysis in academic study, surprisingly, games do not yet receive the same amount of attention. Scholars have argued that games can provide unique perspectives on how people interact with the virtual and the real world, as boundaries from their own life are removed and players are absorbed and immersed in the virtual world (Mazé and Jacobs, 2003; Dormann et al., 2006). Games are becoming increasingly more popular (Power, 2007) and we see more and more ways in which games are incorporated in everyday life and how aspects of life are gamified (The playful mapping collective, 2016). Furthermore, there have been several debates in the public sphere on the effect of violent video games on children. This has caused several scholars to call out and ask why, despite the widespread occurrence of gaming and the valuable perspectives games can give on how people experience the world, games are mostly seen as childish and are not being taken seriously (Woodyer, 2012).

One of the areas where games are being studied increasingly more is in the field of critical geopolitics. There is a special focus here on military- and strategy-themed video games like Diplomacy, Civilization, America’s Army and Call of Duty (Bos, 2016; Huntemann & Payne, 2009; Power, 2007; Salter, 2011), as these games are constructed on a basis of geopolitical and historical reality. In the case of America’s Army, this goes as far as being directly made and influenced by the military of the USA. Because these games aim to represent reality, they are a valuable object for critical geopolitical research when it comes to the question of how geopolitical imaginaries work in popular culture (Salter, 2011); how they manifest themselves and what effect this has on their audience. For the most part these studies have analysed how geopolitical ideologies and military culture are represented in these games, but little attention has been paid to how the players themselves understand and experience geopolitical content in games (Bos, 2016). Recently, scholars have tried to take more of a player-based approach to understanding geopolitical imaginaries in

videogames, as for example was done by Bos (2016) in his PhD research on Call of Duty: Modern Warfare.

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Following this new trend, this study will take a player-based approach to analyse the geopolitical imaginaries of the game series Civilization. Civilization, produced by Sid Meier, is a Turn-Based Strategy game series where players take control of one ‘civilization’ with specific advantages and characteristics, and compete against a variety of other ‘civilizations’ on a global scale. Players engage in war, territorial expansion and scientific and cultural innovation. There are multiple victory conditions and multiple paths to these victories, allowing the player a large freedom of control and choice into how to play the game (Salter, 2011). The civilizations, the characters, the different technologies, actions and other aspects of the game are all rooted in aspects of the real world and the game presents itself as an opportunity to replay history in a different way (Henthorne, 2003). Furthermore, the game has an active player community that discusses various parts of the game online on forums and creates and shares modifications (mods) with each other, which allows significant customisation of the game itself (Owens, 2011). Because this game series claims to be realistic, it has also been the subject of criticism, as scholars argue that the game series is Western-centric and depicts the American style liberal-democracy technocracy as the

ideological goal of victory while discourages the pursuit of other type of civilizations, through in-game mechanics (Pobłocki, 2002).

Various scholars have already done a content analysis on how geopolitical

imaginaries are present in this game series, but what is lacking from this discussion is a focus on the audience. Such an approach allows scholars to look beyond their own understanding of the game-text and draw broader conclusions about the way geopolitical content in games is understood and interacted with. An audience focused study can provide insights into the various different perspectives that players can have while playing a game. Through semi-structured interviews with players of the game, I intend to find out how these various players engage with the content of the game, how their personal positions influence how geopolitical imaginaries in the game are experienced and if the content of these games has in any way affected or helped to shape their opinions and views on real world geopolitics.

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How is the geopolitical content of the Civilization series consumed, interpreted and experienced by the players?

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2. Theoretical framework

This research will be located in the academic field of popular geopolitics. Popular geopolitics, found within the wider sub-discipline of critical geopolitics, legitimises the analysis of

popular cultural items as outlets which represent, reflect and constitute the political world (Dittmer, 2011; Mamadouh, 1998).

2.1 Critical geopolitics

The origin of geopolitics is in the late 19th and early 20th century in Europe. It was a state-centred discipline trying to find objective methods to define a nation-state’s position in the global political order (Dodds & Atkinson, 2000). A central figure in this school of thought was Halford Mackinder (1904) who in his ‘pivot thesis’ used environmental determinism to create a grand theory on the balance of power between states. The discipline of geopolitics used cartography as an objective and neutral tool to understand the world and to order and control space (Tuathail & Toal, 1994). The theories and tools created by geopolitics were later used by Nazis to, amongst other things, justify expansionist practices (lebensraum), which lead to a negative view on geopolitics. However, during the Cold War scholars became once again interested in the theories on power balance that geopolitics offered (Dodds, 2003). Later on, geopolitics became more independent from the state, moving on to other actors and institutions on the international stage in recognition of the fact that policy is not made between states alone (Flint & Taylor, 2007).

Critical geopolitics, using the concept of discourse, reinvented geopolitics by focusing on geographical imaginations and representations as opposed to the physical features (Tuathail, 1996). Discourse can be conceptualized as “sets of capabilities people have, as sets

of socio-cultural resources used by people in the construction of meaning about their world”

(Tuathail & Agnew, 1992, p. 192). Discourses in such a way are virtual; they have no actual existence, but they are “the rules by which verbal speech and written statements are made

meaningful” (Tuathail & Agnew, 1992, p. 193). Instead of taking geopolitical knowledge at

face value, critical geopolitics tries to look at the range of social and cultural practices that form geopolitics. Following the work of Foucault, critical geopolitics focused on

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deconstructing and unpacking the ways global politics are written (Tuathail & Toal, 1994). In a similar vein, cartography was viewed more critically arguing that mapping is not as

objective, neutral or scientific as it once was thought to be (Kitchen & Dodge, 2007) and the focus shifted to understanding how mapping is practiced and maps are experienced (Perkins, 2004). From there on, critical geopolitics has moved into various directions concerned with analysing how geopolitics are constructed and practiced (Jones & Sage, 2010). These directions can generally be divided in formal, practical and popular geopolitics. “Formal

geopolitics refers to the production and circulation of geopolitical theories and perspectives by so-called intellectuals of statecraft. Practical geopolitics refers to the geographical vocabularies used by political leaders in addresses to help their citizens make sense of the world. Popular geopolitics refers to various manifestations to be found within the visual media, news magazines, radio, novels and the Internet” (Dittmer & Dodds, 2008, p.441).

However, it should be noted that geopolitics can never be reduced to just one of these elements as they are all connected to each other (Dalby and Tuathail, 1998, p.5).

2.2 Popular geopolitics

Popular geopolitics looks at the everyday role of the media and entertainment industries in the construction of imaginations of national identity and distant locations (Bos, 2016). In popular geopolitics, popular culture is identified “as an important site where power, ideology

& identity are constituted, produced and/or materialised” (Grayson, et al., 2009, p.155-156).

Grayson et al. (2009, p.158) argue that through the “interplay of a host of contextual

factors… for example: the issue, the medium, the political environment and the audience … popular culture cannot be divorced from world politics nor world politics from popular culture.“ Rather, they should be seen as a continuum, constantly influencing each other

through cycles of production, distribution and consumption. In such a way, the media and popular culture provide a resource through which people can make sense of the world (Dittmer, 2010) and popular geopolitics have taken a critical look in the way that popular culture constitutes political identities and geographical imaginaries.

A core concept in popular geopolitics (and geography in general) is representations. Representations are mediated versions of places and spaces. They are ideas about places

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and spaces constructed through a mix of images, movies, books, stories etc. and as such provide cultural resources from which people can produce geopolitical imaginations. They’re not necessarily biased or accurate, as it is impossible to capture a place in a single

representation (Dittmer, 2010). One of the most influential examples of popular geopolitics and the study of representations can be found in Sharps’ (1993) study of the American magazine Reader’s Digest where she analysed how the Soviet Union was being represented to the American people, how this representation of the Soviet Union changed over the years and how simultaneously a national identity for the United States was created. Another example can be found in Dodds’ (1996) analysis of the cartoonist Steve Bell and how he criticised the dominant representation of the Falklands War by the British Empire using cartoons.

Over time, popular geopolitics have examined a whole range of elements from popular culture, such as magazines, social media, comic books and cartoons, radio and music, newspapers, the internet and children’s toys (Bos, 2016). Videogames, however, are relatively understudied and most work in popular geopolitics on video games is relatively new (Ash, 2009; Power, 2007; Salter, 2011). In these works, videogames are read as texts where they try to unpack the underlying geopolitical codes and the spatialisation of military violence. Yet despite the geopolitical relevance of these video games, there’s still only a small amount of theory and no clearly structured framework for studying video games (Bos, 2016).

New developments in critical geopolitics have borrowed ideas from the fields of feminist geopolitics, non-representational theory and audience studies (Dittmer & Gray, 2010). Two lines of criticism from these schools of thought are relevant to video games. Firstly, they argue for the need to ground geopolitical analysis in terms of the everyday life (Dittmer & Gray, 2010) and secondly, the need to look at the ‘cultural economy’: how popular culture is produced, circulated and consumed (Dittmer, 2011). Dittmer argues that through discourse analysis popular geopolitics appear to be mostly focused on ‘big issues’, like wars and diplomacy, even though those issues are all reliant on the billions of

interactions between people and media that happen every day (Dittmer, 2010). It is impossible to understand one side of the issue without understanding the other. Thrift

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(2000) describes this as the ‘little things’, large ideas like a national identity are not formed through grand military displays but are formed through every day interactions with people, the specific words you use and other ‘mundane’ things. Thrift (2000) argues thus that discourse should be understood in a broader way, focussing less on representations and more on practices. Dittmer (2010) mentions two important concepts for this shift to everyday life. There is ‘performative consumption’, describing how you are not only consuming for example a movie and constructing meaning of it, but are simultaneously performing an identity in which you interpret that medium. In this way, engaging with popular media is not passive, but the active shaping of ways in which you orient yourself on that medium (Dittmer, 2010). Representations of places or spaces are therefore not just produced by the media or a central agency but are rather produced by everyone when they engage with and imagine certain places and spaces. The second concept is ‘affect’, which describes the physical embodied experience of social life, unmediated by language (Dittmer, 2010). Affect goes beyond discourse or representations, focusing on the effects on the body and the environment. An example of affect is how playing a first-person shooter game can cause players in real life to get immersed in the game and feel the adrenaline flowing. Crampton & Power (2005) analysed the movie Saving Private Ryan and argued how the particularly gruesome depiction of war served not only to depict history and war accurately, but also to get viewers to question the motivations of the characters in the movie and the reasoning for war in the real world. Carter & McCormack (2006) use the notion of affect to study the movie Black Hawk Down and its relation with the geopolitical logistics of

intervention with the US involvement in Somalia in 1993.

2.3 Audience studies

This concern with everyday life and the way popular media affect the body fits in with the larger school of thought of audience studies, who focus on the way audiences consume and make sense of media. Within audience studies, it is argued that because “audiences have

differing degrees and varieties of cultural capital, audiences create their own systems of meanings within a text, subconsciously and unconsciously, which may or may not overlap or reflect that which it was originally intended to convey” (Barthes, 1983; de Certeau, 1984).

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people with high investments of cultural/emotional capital in an aspect of popular culture. That being said, audience studies is not limited to fans as other groups can have different levels of interest, yet still actively engage with the popular medium (Dittmer & Gray, 2010). Because of the focus on the individual positions of audiences, many scholars in audience studies have moved away from quantitative analysis and instead focused on more

contextual research. Audience studies can also bring the concept of constituent power to popular geopolitics. Constituent power is described as “the immense pool of desire and

action, the res gestae of subjective forces, that is the motor of history” (Bratich, 2008, p.35).

Instead of seeing the media producers as the dominant agency within critical geopolitics, constituent power of audiences allows us to see how the very network in which these media producers are embedded allows them to become such dominant forces. “The semiotic and

commercial success of a popular culture artefact is only understandable as a result of emergent casuality, with various elements of the techo-cultural-economic assemblage resonating with each other in ways neither predictable nor necessarily understandable after the fact.” (Dittmer & Gray, 2010, p. 1670). Audience power thus refers to “the creative processes of meaning making, the appropriation and circulation of affects, and the enhancements of these very capacities” (Bratich, 2005, p.246)

Another important angle in audience studies is the cultural geography of reading. Dittmer & Dodds (2008) argue that in many ways, the agency of an audience is structured by the space where the text is read. Local culture differences can cause texts to be interpreted differently and show the social consequences for interpreting a text in a way that is not locally actable. While most of popular geopolitical literature has been focused on deconstructing texts in a general sense, attention has to be given to, for example, how people from different locations interpret the same text or how geopolitical imaginations differ because of the different positions of the readers (Dittmer & Dodds, 2008).

A great example of the use of audience studies in popular geopolitics can be found in Dodds’ (2006) analysis of audiences of James Bond movies using the Internet Movie

Database (IMDb). By engaging with the audience online on the IMDb site, Dodds gained an insight into the different type of audiences that exist and the different ways they consume the movie. Furthermore, the research showed that audiences are capable of analysing and creating geopolitical meaning of movies, similar to how scholars can do this using a discourse analysis. Dodds (2006) made clear that there is more to geopolitical imaginations of movies

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than just an experts critique or a scholar’s analysis. Audiences can find different and interesting meanings in movies and it is meaningful to study the differences between audiences and how they affect geopolitical imaginations.

2.4 Civilization

As the games in the Civilization series continuously refer to history, use geopolitical ideas and theories and present themselves as being rooted in reality, Civilization games have received a relatively large amount of attention from academics within ludic geography, popular geopolitics and history. Similar to the advancements in critical geopolitics, where there is a shift in focus from trying to read texts and understand the geopolitical

representations in them towards a focus on audiences and how audiences consume texts and produce geopolitical imaginations (Dittmer & Dodds, 2008), we see a shift in the analysis of the Civilization games and gaming in general. Where writers used to look for the

geopolitical representations in the mechanics of (Civilization) games, increasingly they argue for a focus on how the audience engages with these games.

At the end of the 1990’s, computer game researchers banded together under the newly created discipline of ludology (Voorhees, 2009). One of the most influential academics within this group was Gonzola Frasca, who put in a great effort to distinguish and legitimize the ludological field. One of Frasca’s additions to the study of video games was to create a method to study games as simulations, as opposed to narratives (Frasca, 1999 & 2003). Studying games as simulations places a focus on the rules and goals that are in the game, which can reaffirm or call into question the player’s expectations about similar processes and outcomes in real life (Voorhees, 2009). Other academics within the field created similar approaches to studying games. Bogost (2007) argues for a procedural analysis of computer games in which “computer games should be interrogated as rhetorical texts that exert

persuasive force best described as procedural rhetoric” (Voorhees, 2009, p.257). Bogost

argues that “computation is representation, and procedurality in the computational sense is

a means to produce that expression” (Bogost, 2007, p.5). In such a way, the procedures of

the game is how games make claims about how things work and how they thus reproduce social, political, commercial and educational processes. Galloway (2006) proposes instead an

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“informatics critique” analysing the principles and protocols that structure a game. All these three methods to studying games only focus on the processes within the games. Even though players start out and execute the processes, the influence of the players input is not taken into account.

Caldwell (2000) & Friedman (1995) offer a cybernetic perspective on computer games. This perspective also focuses on the role of process, but incorporates the role of the player in this process. Caldwell & Friedman argue how games create a cybernetic feedback loophole in which graphics and narratives slip into the background while the player

internalises the logic and lessons of the game. This perspective thus offers a method that also includes the player interaction into the process of the game, however, it simultaneously reduces the player interaction to no more than an extension of the operation of the game. In the article “I Play Therefore I Am” (2009), Gerald Voorhees provides an overview of the advancements within the academic field of computer game studies and uses these to form his own approach to studying the game Civilization (III). In his approach to studying

Civilization he builds upon the ludological and cybernetic principles of studying games as described above but, as he criticises the lack of player performance in these methods, he uses a broader notion of process which encompasses machinic operations, software

protocols and player input (Voorhees, 2009, p.257). Voorhees stresses that games only exist in so far as they are engaged by players.

Over the years we have seen a wide variety of academics write criticisms on the content of Civilization. Bogost (2007), following his procedural understanding of studying games, argues that Civilization offers a procedural view of history in which ethnic origin is irrelevant and the fate of the players civilization is determined by material, social and cultural conditions. This criticism seems to indicate that Civilization builds heavily on Mackinders (1904) ‘pivot thesis’ where the success or failure of a state is completely determined by their environment. Galloway (2007) in his algorithmic understanding of the game sees the game functioning as a cultural rhetoric. He understands Civilization’s multiple victories, schemas of civilization traits, and nonlinear processes of city improvement as embodiments of a flexibility that characterizes contemporary culture (Galloway, 2007, p.101). The game therefore enacts a “shift in social life, characterized by a movement away

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from central bureaucracies and vertical hierarchies toward a broad network of autonomous social actors” (p.88). Douglas (2002) reads Civilization (III) as a text and focuses on the duality between civilization and savagery, showing that the entire game places itself on the “frontier”. He argues that through a paradox of inhabitance, wherein the land is both

populated by barbarians but also offered up as empty, the game is infused with US American ideology articulated in the expansion across the wilderness to a civilizing mission. As the players are made into actors, they are producing these ideological effects. This critique refers to the idea of manifest destiny, articulated in Anderson’s (2006) “Imagined

Communities”, where it is argued that nations become fixed in territorial states, not through a natural progression but through how nations imagine themselves. Douglas notes that the game functions on a false ideology of equality wherein every nation has the same chance of becoming successful, mimicking the American dream where everyone can become

successful in life as long as they work hard. Douglas therefore argues that Civilization misrepresents history and should instead be seen as a simulation of alternative histories. Friedman (1997), building on the cybernetic perspective, explains Civilization (II) as a spatial story of the exploration and revelation of the dark areas of the world map and of the drama of a map changing overtime. Due to the abstract level of Civilization, a large part of history is oversimplified leading to misrepresentations of world history. Similar to Douglas (2002), Friedman (1997) argues that while there’s no ‘right’ way to win the game, there are still baseline ideological assumptions in the game which determine which strategies will win and which will lose. King and Krzywinska (2006) see Civilization as an allegory of Western

imperialist impulses and argue that the game contains ideologically loaded assumptions about what constitutes a civilization. This critique is prominently articulated by Pobłocki (2003) who argues that Civilization is not a neutral simulation of world history but instead the unmitigated history of the world according to the West wherein the American style liberal-democracy technocracy is seen as the ideological goal of victory. Other types of civilizations and advancements are discouraged through in-game mechanics. Uricchio (2005) argues that Civilization is a game about “historical processes” that are “freed of the

constraints of historically specific conditions” (p.328). This allows for an understanding of Civilization as having bias in Western history and ideologies without making explicit

valuations of this history and ideologies. After all, it is impossible to have a referential game without any bias, as no representation can cover every single aspect of what is imagined.

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In trying to better understand Civilization, Voorhees (2009) groups the above mentioned academics together in 2 categories. He argues that the game’s imperialist impulse operates on a spatial logic that is uncovered by Friedman (1997), Galloway (2006) and Douglas (2002), in accord with a temporal logic identified by Pobłocki (2003), King and Krzywinska (2006) & Uricchio (2005). These two impulses are in-fact inseparable from each other and Voorhees argues, by describing the opening cinematic of Civilization III, that Civilization depicts a mastery over all time and space, and simulates this by demanding the same of the player (Voorhees, 2009, p. 270).

A different academic scholar that engages with the wider discussion on Civilization is Adam Chapman. In “Is Sid Meier’s Civilization History?” Chapman (2013) attempts to explore the game’s legitimacy as a historical form by addressing Galloway’s (2006) information critique. Galloway sees the activity of gaming as an undivided act wherein meaning and doing transpire in the same gamic gesture (Galloway, 2006, p. 104). With this interpretation, the coded algorithms contain all potential meanings and don’t allow space for critical

reflections or engagements with the games (Apperley, 2010) and thus remove any possibility for historical representation in the game. Chapman challenges this view by describing

historical videogames as a “two-way process where the fiction of the game cues him or her into understanding the rules of the game, and, again, the rules can cue the player to imagine the fictional world (Juul, 2005, p.163). With such a perspective, Chapman examines the interplay between both interaction (form) and historical context (content) which allows videogames to function as history (Chapman, 2013, p. 315). Chapman also notes that the limitations and selections in the historical content in Civilization is not enough reason to dismiss Civilization as history. Developers of games make similar choices to historians who write ‘proper’ history, as history is always a selection process of focusing on certain aspect while ignoring others (Carr, 2007). Chapman points out that by building Civilization, Sid Meier did not erase or ignore meanings of the past but rather, like other historians, constituted it (Chapman, 2013, p. 315).

Chapman then goes on to focus on the audience recognition of Civilization as history. Researchers such as Kurt Squire (2004) have praised the capabilities of Civilization in the

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classroom. Taylor (2003) introduced Civilization II into the classroom and found that its simulations are a great tool to visualise complex models and that for both “students and teachers, playing with the game was historically meaningful and produced intertextual historical narratives” (Chapman, 2013, p.316). Atkins (2005) notes how “Civilization rewards the player for their historical knowledge drawn from outside sources” (Chapman, 2013, p. 316.). The use of Civilization in the classroom is also explored by Weir & Baranowski (2011) who use Civilization as an active learning approach to teach international relations. Weir & Baranoswki find that Civilization can simulate an international political system that can help students understand the areas of: international arena history, international law and

organization, nationalism and transnationalism, diplomacy and negotiation, geography and the environment, economics, and conflict and cooperation.

Chapman also points to the various audience responses to Civilization as history in online communities. There are hundreds of volunteers from all over the world working on open source clones of the game, convinced that Civilization should be treated as a public good (Pobłocki, 2003). Apperley (2007) notes how historical strategy players recount their experiences using words in the same imaginative and referential domain as the game,

indicating that players find meaning not just in the mechanical aspect of the game but also in the referenced historical narrative. Furthermore, Apperley (2007) notes how the joy of this type of play is in the relationship to the past as some player communities go as far as “actively work to enhance the perceived historical fidelity of the games simulation by rewriting elements of the games code and distributing the alterations as modifications (mods) for download” (Chapman, 2013, p. 317). This phenomenon is described more in debt in Owens (2011) “Modding the history of science: values at play in modder discussion of Sid Meier’s Civilization”. As Chapman argues, the use of these mods indicates that players have goals that do not align with the prescribed protocols of the game but are more tuned to historical accuracy. He calls these goals “extra-telic” (not intrinsic to the game itself). This goes straight against Galloway’s (2006) information critique. Chapman argues that “The algorithmic code of videogames does not prevent them from functioning as history, it merely allows players different ways to explore representations of the past because it supports styles of play [and in these cases historying] that utilize the algorithm to execute their own exploration of ideology; by either learning the pattern of the algorithm, or by creating their

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own variances within it by altering the code” (Apperley, 2007, 10; Chapman, 2013, p. 317-318). Based on the two-way process of the game and the importance of the audience, Chapman then argues that “Civilization is history as it is a text that allows playful

engagement with, connects to and produces discourse about the past.” (Chapman, 2013, p.318). After all, if we accept that history is a narrative-making pursuit, then playing with historical simulations in videogames is undeniably history as well.

2.5 Research aim

Summarising the available literature on popular geopolitics and Civilization, it becomes clear which areas have received relatively few attention and where the field of popular geopolitics can advance. Video games are a relatively new object of analysis in the field of popular geopolitics, so they have not yet been given sufficient attention, nor are the methods by which to approach videogames fully established. The recent inclusion of ideas from audience studies offers an insight into how games can be explored further. Similarly to how Dodds (2006) applied it to the Internet Movie Database, the methodology behind this field of study can be applied to games. This offers a substitute for most literature on Civilization, which tends to focus on reading the game as a text and deconstructing the geopolitical discourse in it, but notably obscures the game’s audience and their interaction with it. This is regrettable, as Civilization has a very active community surrounding it that has a major impact on how the game is played, understood and experienced. For my research I will therefore take a player-based approach to analysing the geopolitical content in Civilization. Instead of

analysing the geopolitical content of Civilization directly, I will try to uncover how the players see the geopolitical content, how the geopolitical content of Civilization is consumed and what effect this has on players in the real world. In such a way I will be able to add to the ongoing discussion and research on video games by providing a new perspective.

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3. Research design and methods

To answer my research question I conducted semi-structured interviews over Skype with respondents gathered on the Civilization subreddit. I transcribed the interviews and then performed a qualitative analysis on them using the software Atlas.TI.

As mentioned above, I specifically did not want to perform a discourse analysis on Civilization because I wanted to focus more on the players and how they identified and experience geopolitical content in Civilization. A discourse analysis would only reveal my personal interpretation of the geopolitical content in the game and a mass survey would lack the personal perspectives and differences between respondents that make the data

interesting.

Before engaging in the actual interviews, I took two preparative steps. Firstly, I browsed around on the popular Civilization forum on reddit (www.reddit.com/r/civ) and interacted with the players on them, to learn whether players actually engaged sufficiently with the game to provide interesting data to analyse. I focused on the way players consumed the game and the thoughts they had about it. The interaction confirmed that players did have in-depth interpretations of the geopolitical content of the game and interviews with them would provide interesting insights that could not be provided by just doing a personal content analysis. Secondly, I played Civilization myself to gain a personal impression of the geopolitical content of the game but also to gain an overview of the important mechanics and other aspects that player experience while playing the game. A short description of the game and its mechanics can be found under the segment ‘case’. In this way I compiled a list of elements present in Civilization that I thought were relevant to my research question and this list guided the topics I discussed in the in-depth interviews. With the semi-structured nature of the interviews I could make sure that all the topics I thought were relevant would come up, but simultaneously there would be space for the personal experiences and ideas of the respondents.

In the following chapter I will go over the different aspects of my research more in depth.

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3.1Conceptualisation of the research question

How is the geopolitical content of the Civilization series consumed, interpreted and experienced by audiences?

To better understand this research question it is important to define and operationalise the core concepts in it, based on the theoretical framework above.

3.1.1 Geopolitical content

Geopolitical content are all the ways in which real world geopolitical ideologies, people, places and spaces are represented in the Civilization games: text, visuals, sound, and gameplay/mechanics. To order these different ideas I have divided them into 3 categories, history, culture and politics. To uncover the geopolitical content in these categories I follow a similar method that Salter (2011) used while analysing Civilization based on the theory by Frasca (2003) on conveying particular world views. This theory states that reading a video-game as a text should be divided in 3 main ways: representation of narratives and events, manipulation of rules and the goal rules of the game.

3.1.2 Consumption

Following the literature on audience and fan studies I assume that the players of Civilization actively engage with the content and construct meaning by doing so. The consumption of geopolitical content by the audience therefore refers to the way the players play the game, how they engage with the content of the game outside of playing it (trough forums and videos/streams), how they discuss the game both online and offline and why the players engage with the content in those ways.

3.1.3 Interpretation

The interpretation of geopolitical content by the audience refers to what players identify as representations of geopolitical content in the game and how this geopolitical content is represented.

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This part of the research question is concerned with if and how the geopolitical content in the game, as identified by the players, has influenced or affected the world view of the player or affected any other part of the player’s life.

3.1.5 Audience

This is the group of players I will analyse for my research question. It is important to note that I will not assume that the perspective and experience of every member in this audience is the same, rather, I stress that each individual will have their own stance on the subjects analysed in my research.

3.2 Case

“Originally created by legendary game designer Sid Meier, Civilization is a turn-based

strategy game in which you attempt to build an empire to stand the test of time. Become Ruler of the World by establishing and leading a civilization from the Stone Age to the Information Age. Wage war, conduct diplomacy, advance your culture, and go head-to-head with history’s greatest leaders as you attempt to build the greatest civilization the world has

ever known.” (www.civilization.com, retrieved: 20 August, 2017).

For my object of analysis, I chose to focus on the Civilization series.

Civilization is a Turn-Based 4x Strategy (TBS) game where players take turns and use strategy to guide themselves to victory (as opposed to Real-Time Strategy (RTS) games where all players play simultaneously). 4X is a genre of video- and board games where players control an empire and eXplore, eXpand, eXploit, and eXterminate to win the game (Emrich, 1993). Over the past decades a large amount of Civilization games have been released varying from main games to expansions and spinoffs. The first game in the series ‘Civilization’ was

released in 1991 by the videogame publisher and developer Micropose and the most recent game ‘Civilization VI’ released in 2016 by video-game developer Firaxis. In my analysis I will place specific focus on the last released edition of the game: Civilization VI. It should be noted that it is almost impossible to treat the games in the series as separate as the gameplay and content is similar to each other and it is likely that players have played

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multiple games in the series, meaning that geopolitical imaginary in one game can affect how players experience another game in the same series. As it will be too comprehensive for the scope of this study to analyse each main game separately I will only perform an in-depth analysis on the last game but if previous versions of the game turn out to be relevant I will use secondary sources to complement my understanding of them, allowing me to compare the different versions and see how they evolved over the years. This comparison can add to my research, as other scholars who researched earlier versions of Civilization have pointed out how the mechanics and content of the game series are heavily influenced by the political climate in which the game is created (Pobłocki, 2002; Salter, 2011).

There are several reasons why the Civilization game series make a good case for this research. First off, the game presents itself as being realistic and rooted in history, therefore encouraging the audience to use the game to think about the real world and how history could have happened (Pobłocki, 2002; Salter, 2011). Second, the core of the gameplay is intertwined with geopolitical ideas, focusing on clashes between civilisations, world domination and the different effects of economic, political and social policies (Voorhees, 2009). Third, there are active online communities interested in discussing not only gameplay but also the historical context of the game as well as communities that create and share modifications for the game to customise gameplay to player’s personal desires. And finally there is a relatively close level of interaction between the players and the developers of the game (Owens, 2011). This indicates that the audience of Civilization are active consumers that produce their own meaning of the game, which has a better chance of yielding

interesting data for academic analysis. Lastly, while there has been research into geopolitical imaginaries present in Civilization games through the use of discourse analysis, there has not yet been an extensive focus on the player aspect of these geopolitical imaginaries.

To be able to properly analyse Civilization 6, it is important to have an understanding of what the game is and how it functions. I gained an understanding of the game by playing it myself, interacting with the community on one of the main community forums of

Civilization, the Civilization subreddit (www.reddit/r/civ), and by reading through the information created by online communities (civ6.gamepedia.com & civilization.wikia.com). Before the analysis chapter I will give a short description on what I identified as the main

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mechanics and goals of the game, which identify the topics I needed to cover in my interviews and helps contextualising the analysis.

3.3 Sample

Participants for my study were collected through a message posted on the Civilization subreddit (Appendix A). Firaxis promotes this subreddit within Civilization 6 as the main community hub, for that reason I decided it would be the best place to gather my

respondents. In order to reach a large amount of participants, I structured my message in the following way. I did not specify the topics of my research in the message as I expected that specifically mentioning my focus on geopolitics ran the chance of attracting mostly people that already had a deeper interest in geopolitics and would skew my sample. With the tone of the message I aimed to create a relaxed and open atmosphere, indicating that the interviews would not be static or formal but rather playful and fun, hopefully convincing more people to join my research sample.

From this post on reddit I gathered 10 participants that were willing and able to conduct an in-depth interview with me. These respondents were aged between 21 and 36. I interviewed 9 males and 1 female. 3 respondents were from the Netherlands, 3 from the United States of America, 1 from Canada, 1 from France, 1 from Serbia and 1 from Sweden. The 3 interviews with Dutch people were conducted in Dutch, all the others were conducted in English. All of the respondents played Civilization 5 and 6, as well as some of them playing even more games in the series.

Unfortunately this group of respondents is heavily biased towards males and people from Western countries but this is an inherent problem when gathering respondents from online forums. There is a ‘digital divide’ where access to digital technologies is heavily skewed in favour of Europe, East Asia and North America (Castells, 2002) and even in areas of high connectivity intent usage is still biased towards young people, men and highly educated (Dodds, 2006). Furthermore, while reddit is used by people all over the world it is still an American based forum and many internet users from other countries are more often found on their national/regional social forums. That being said, even though the

respondents were from relatively similar areas on the world, they still showed remarkable differences in perspectives indicating that this sample is definitely worthy of analysis.

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25 3.4 Interviews

I conducted the interviews through Skype, all of them through the microphone, some accompanied by the webcam. Before the interviews I would state the purpose of my research, explained the procedure of the interview and asked for their consent on using their answers for my research, while ensuring that their data would be anonymised and their privacy would be protected. After asking permission I would use a 3rd party program to record the audio of the conversations. I later transcribed this audio and analysed the

transcripts in Atlas.TI. The interviews all lasted on average about 1 hour. I tried to maintain a relaxed and fun atmosphere during the interviews, allowing space for jokes and anecdotes about the game so that the respondents would feel comfortable and be enthusiastic to provide me with in-depth answers and continue the interview. Although I made it clear that my main focus was on Civilization 6, I encouraged the participants to talk about other Civilization games or other X4 games if it helped to make their point more clear. As I conducted semi-structured interviews I could make sure all the topics I thought were relevant would come up, but simultaneously there would be space for the personal

experiences and ideas of the respondents. Depending on the course of the interview and the answers given I would change the orders of the questions or asked more in-depth questions on certain topics. However, every respondent discussed the same topics and my questions were all posed in the same way. An overview of the topics I discussed in the interviews can be found in Appendix B, but I will give a more in-depth description of the general flow of the interviews and the purpose of my questions here.

3.4.1 Demographics and consumption of Civilization content

The interviews started with basic demographic questions. Then I asked them questions about why they play the game, how they play the game and the way they interact with online content like streams and forums. I asked the respondents if and why they engaged in forms of role-play while playing Civilization. On the topic of the Civilopedia, an in-game help function that provides both information on the mechanics of the game as well as some information on the background of the elements in the game, I asked the respondents if they used this source of information, how they used it and whether they thought the information in Civilopedia was useful and accurate. Lastly I discussed with the respondents whether they

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used mods and what kind of mods they used. This section of the interview so far served to gain an insight into how the players consume the content within Civilization.

3.4.2 History

On the topic of history I asked what the players identified as real-world history in the game, whether they were interested in this historical aspect of the game and whether they in any way learned or experienced something different through consuming this historical content in the game. The discussions on history started out at a basic level asking them if there were elements in the game that they recognised as having a basis in history or the real world. I then asked them how important these historical elements were for them and whether they thought the information conveyed in the game was accurate. Continuing the interview I asked whether they thought they learned anything from this content in the game.

3.4.3 Culture

Similar to the questions about history, I asked the respondents if and how they thought cultures were represented in the game, whether they thought these representations were accurate and whether they learned anything from them. Similar to the segment on history, while the questions started out broad I would narrow it down depending on how the conversation went. Within this segment I also focused on the representation or lack of representation of their home countries as a ‘civilization’ in the game. I asked the

respondents whether their ‘civilization’ was included in the game, how they thought it was represented and if it had any special meaning to them.

3.4.4 Politics and victory conditions

For the segment on politics I tried to follow the same lines as under history and culture. However, politics speak much less to the imagination than history or culture, which meant that respondents often had a harder time pointing out the ways they thought game represented politics. To help my respondents out and to ensure that every topic was

covered in every interview I had a separate list of items ready to guide the conversation. The topics that we covered under politics included: governments, diplomacy and negotiation, economy and the military. Again I tried to uncover what respondents thought of these topics, whether they thought the representations of them in the game were accurate and

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whether they learned something applicable to outside of the game from them. Finally I asked the respondents what they thought of the victory conditions and whether any of them had any relevance to the goals and achievements of real world civilizations.

3.4.5 Civilization and daily life

During the topics of history, culture and politics I would ask whether the respondent

recognised elements of Civilization in their national or international news and whether there were elements of Civilization that they recognised in their everyday life. I asked the

respondents how they thought time and space were incorporated into a Civilization game. I covered the topics of time and space by asking the respondents how they thought these elements were incorporated into a Civilization game.

3.4.6 Bias and ethics

As mentioned in the theoretical framework a wide variety of scholars have criticised the Civilization games for being biased in various ways. I therefore wanted to know whether my respondents also had identified forms of biases in the game. After asking respondents whether they thought certain representations or information was accurate I would follow up the question whether they thought the information in the game or perhaps the way it was presented was biased one way or the other.

Similar to the questions on bias I asked the respondents whether they thought there were any forms of ethical or moral bias in the game. After the respondents answered how they thought that the game was biased I would introduce them to the criticisms of Pobłocki (2003) on Civilization which states that it has a US-capitalistic-democratic bias, and asked the respondents their thoughts on that critique. This would be followed by me asking whether the respondents thought the game would be different if it were released in China or Japan and how.

Lastly I would ask the respondents a general question on the relation between Civilization and learning, whether they thought Civilization could be educational, whether it was a simulation or whether it was just a game.

3.4.7 Learning from Civilization

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learned anything by playing the game or whether playing the game in any way made them approach real-world subjects in a different way. I categorised learning in 3 ways, gaining general knowledge, rethinking your position and finally, gaining a new perspective. For every topic I asked the respondents whether one of those categories were applicable to them. Finally I asked them how they saw Civilization’s relation to learning, whether they thought Civilization could be educational and whether they saw Civilization as a simulation or as something different.

3.5 Data analysis

After conducting the interviews I used the recordings to fully transcribe them. I used the qualitative analysis software Atlas.TI to analyse the interviews. After reading through them multiple times I coded the content of the interviews into various categories, the coding list can be found in Appendix C. I then went through the texts again to make sure that I made no mistakes in the coding process. The coding roughly followed the topic list for the interviews but I added extra categories that served for a deeper analysis. After the coding was done I analysed the different categories one by one and wrote down the main findings per code. At the end I wrote down general findings and answered the research question.

3.6 Ethics

As the data collection involves personal in-depth interviews it is important to pay attention to ethical principles and protect the identity of the respondents (Bryman, 2015). When approaching research subjects, I made it clear who I am and what the subject, nature and purpose of the research was. Before each interview, I again stated the purpose of my research, explained the procedure of the interview and asked for their consent on using their answers while ensuring that their data would be anonymised and their privacy

protected. I made it clear that participation in the research was voluntary, that participants could refuse to answer questions, withdraw from the interview or withdraw their data from the research altogether if they wish. After asking permission I used a third-party program to record the audio of the conversations with the purpose of transcribing it for my later

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respondents. By taking all these factors into account it was possible to collect my data in an ethically responsible way and make sure the privacy of my respondents was protected.

4. Description of Civilization VI

The following segment serves to provide context to the topics discussed in the analysis, making it easier to understand what the respondents mean when they discuss the various game mechanics. It should be noted that this description is not part of the analysis itself as it is my aim to uncover the interpretations and experiences of the audience, not of myself.

4.1 General description

In a game of Civilization, the player chooses one of 23 ‘civilizations’, each with their own advantages and abilities, and matches up against a number of different opponents each with their own civilization. Each civilization represents a specific nation or culture and is

represented by an iconic leader belonging to that nation. Examples of this are Teddy Roosevelt for the Americans, Cleopatra for the Egyptians and Alexander the Great for the Macedonians. When a player interacts with a civilization they will see an image of this leader and it will appear as if their own leader is in conversation with the other leaders. The goal is to lead your own civilization, advance it through the ages and eventually achieve one of the several victory conditions before the other opponents. It is possible to play against online opponents, locally on the same computer or against Artificial Intelligence-controlled (AI) opponents. The game plays out on a randomly generated world full of continents, seas, islands, mountains, rivers and different type of soil surfaces. All these physical characteristics have an effect on the course of the game, as different types of land provide different types of resources. For example, mountains and hill areas are more difficult to traverse, sea tiles can only be traversed by naval units, etc. Before a game starts the player has a chance to influence physical characteristics of the world, such as its size and how many players there are, or they can opt to load a specific map type or a pre-generated map like a replication of the Earth.

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A core element of the game is the Civilopedia. This is an in-game help function that provides information on the game mechanics, general strategy and a historical background to the all the various characters, buildings, technologies and other elements that are based on a real-world counterpart.

4.3 Game control

When the game has loaded the player will be brought to the map. The game is played from a top-down perspective, giving the player a ‘gods-eye view’ as described by Tuathail and Toal (1996) and control over the map. Everything is controlled and visualised from this

perspective; cities, units and battles are all placed directly on the map and the player points at the corresponding locations on the map to command units to interact with what is there. As the map is so large and full of detail there is a small ‘Mini-Map’ in the corner of the screen that shows a complete overview of the world with some minimal details on them. The game uses the ‘fog of war’ mechanic which means that the player can only see what is happening in the direct surrounding of the units and buildings they control while everything else is obscured with a fog. The player needs to continually send scouts and other units to these obscured areas to find out what is there and have this information added to both their vision and the mini-map. In later stages of the game the player can use spies and other options to ‘copy’ what opponents can see and analyse whether these opponents form a threat to your own civilizations goals.

4.4 Actions

Cities are the driving force behind the advancement of Civilization. The different units in the game are all produced by cities, as the player advances through the game he will found more cities and cities will advance allowing a larger quantity and variety of actions. Amongst the actions a player can do is founding more cities, develop specialised districts within cities, working the soil around his cities, trading between his own cities and with different civilizations and producing military units to either defend his own empire or wage war against rivals. Lastly, players can build wonders in a city. Wonders are massive structures that provide very specific bonuses to the player; each wonder is unique and can only be built

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once per game by only one civilization. In the tutorial, the manual and in-game tips it is made clear to the player that they need to focus on developing all aspects of a civilization if they want to create a successful civilization.

4.5 Research

In the background of all these actions are a few continuous processes that gradually advance the civilization of the player over time. One of these is the ability to research ‘technologies’ and ‘civics’. Research in technologies provide scientific advancements and unlock the ability to use certain technologies, create new units and build new buildings. Researching civics unlocks social policies, different forms of government and specific buildings. Both of these forms of research are visualised in a linear ‘tree’ that shows which research unlocks which elements and, as advanced technologies and civics only unlock after completing basic technologies and civics, it shows which path you must take to unlock certain elements.

4.6 Government

The player has the ability to choose different forms of governments and implement different types of social policy. The different forms of government all provide different benefits and abilities and allow a certain number of social policies. The social policies are divided into diplomatic, economic, military and wildcard policies and the player has to pick between a wide variety of options per policy slot. Over time, the governments become more modern and complex. The players start out as a ‘chiefdom’ and end up as either a communist, democratic or a fascist state. The in-game mechanics discourage reverting to older governments.

4.7 Diplomacy

When the player scouts the surrounding area and spreads out their cities and their influence they will eventually contact other civilizations. There are 3 types of human-entities the player can encounter. The first type is the barbarians. These are AI-controlled non-player character ‘units’ whose only function is to attack and pillage the cities and units of the player and the opponents. They are mostly a nuisance and the player is encouraged by in-game mechanics to scout the area around their cities, find barbarian outposts and destroy them to

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prevent them from attacking the player’s cities. As the player advances their technology the barbarians advance as well although they never become a full-scale threat. Barbarian outposts spawn within the fog of war, encouraging players to keep tight control of the area surrounding their cities, preventing barbarians from spawning close by. The second type of human-entity the player can encounter are city-states. These are also AI-controlled non-player character units but are more important and advanced. These city-states control one city which they will advance similarly to the player by working the land around it, creating districts within the city and building up a military force, but these cities will never grow beyond that. They will not found new cities, nor will they be able to win the game. The player can conduct trade with city-states and they can send diplomatic envoys which can earn the city-states favour allowing the player to enjoy additional benefits and count on them to declare war on the player’s enemies.

The third and most important entity a player can encounter are the opposing civilizations. As mentioned before, these can be controlled by either the AI or by other players. When a player encounters a different civilization for the first time a new aspect of the game is available: diplomacy. In the diplomacy screen the player has a variety of actions. As the player advances with their civilization and researches technologies and civics, they also increase the options available to them in the diplomacy screen. Examples of diplomacy options are gifting and trading gold, resources, cities and art works; sending envoys and establishing embassies in a capital; declaring friendship and declaring alliances; denouncing civilizations and declaring war on them; asking for or demanding peace; asking for joint wars or research agreements. In the diplomacy screen it is visible how the relations are between different civilizations and by interacting with different civilizations the player gets a trickle of information on the plans and desires of their opponents.

4.8 Time

As becomes clear from the various actions that the player can do, an important element in the game is the passing of time as the civilizations advance. The game uses both a turn timer which shows how many turns have passed and an in-game year timer which shows which year it is in the game. They year starts out at around 4000 BC and as the game goes on and

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turns pass by the years tick forward. This goes fast at first, skipping multiple years per turn but eventually slows down a lot around the 18th century AD. The game ends when one of the victory conditions is achieved or when the year timer reaches 2050 AD. While the year timer passes on, the different civilizations, depending on their research in technology and civics, move through different eras from the ancient era all the way to the information era.

Advancing through eras not only provides access to new units and new technologies, it also ‘upgrades’ the visuals of the player’s buildings, cities and units. As a game advances and new technologies and new forms of diplomacy are unlocked, the game gets more and more complex. It is important to note here that even though the game tries to give the player the opportunity (or as critics call it, the illusion (Pobłocki, 2003)) to choose their own path through the ages, the game follows a more or less linear predetermined path. Players can’t properly advance through the technology tree without researching ancient or classical era technologies and players can’t realistically expect to win a game without adopting modern government systems.

4.9 Resources and reports

In order to successfully do all the above described actions the player needs to carefully micro-manage the various resources in the game. Apart from the resources there are a wide variety of parameters that indicate how successful a civilization is and what areas need improvement. To manage all of these resources and parameters the game provides the player with a wide variety of reports and overview wherein all the aspects of their civilization can be analysed.

4.10 Role-playing

A key aspect in video- board games is role-play. While role-playing, players assume the role of a character with distinct personalities and characteristics in the game they play and proceed to make decisions based on what that character would do in such the situation he or she is in. By doing so, role-players often forgo decisions that would logically give the most profit but instead opt for decisions that make the best stories. In such a way the content of the game is transformed and shaped into the players own narrative. In Civilization this often manifests itself for example in the form of players playing pacifistic as Ghandi or ruling with

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an Iron Hand as a communistic Russia. Role-playing can be based on historical accuracy but can also be based on fantasy and desires.

4.11 Victories

There are 5 ways in which a player can win a game of Civilization. With the domination victory, the player needs to conquer the capital of every other civilization in the game. This path to victory requires a strong military, a smart use of diplomacy and social policies. A culture victory can be achieved when the player attracts more visiting tourists to their civilization than any other civilization has domestic tourists. This can be done by generating high amounts of the resources ‘culture’ and ‘tourism’, by building prestigious wonders and buildings, keeping well-functioning cities and amassing large amounts of artefacts and artworks. The religious victory is achieved when the player’s religion becomes the

predominant religion for every civilization in the game. Spreading religion can be done by sending units like missionaries to opponents cities and creating large amounts of the resource ‘faith’ in your own cities. A science victory is achieved by launching a satellite, landing a man on the moon and establishing a Martian colony. For this the player needs to invest in the resource ‘science’ which allows him to quickly research the entire technology tree. Lastly, a time or score victory can be achieved when the game ends because of either the year timer or the turn timer reaches the end point (often respectively the year 2050 AD or 500 turns), the game then determines a score for each civilization based on a large variety of parameters.

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5. Analysis

5.1 General information on playing the game

When asked why they played the game the respondents explained that they like the empire-building concept where they start out with relatively nothing, they gradually explore the land, advance and expand their civilisation while seeing it all play slowly play out on the screen. The players enjoy the historical aspects of the game, as it is fun to recognise things you know from the world around and it provides you with a stepping board to learn more about the real-world information that is referenced in the game. Players like that they can create stories within the game, they like the micro-managing aspect that allows them to act like they are fully in control and finally they like the slow, relaxed pace of the game. The predominant way of playing Civilization is offline against the AI, but some respondents occasionally played games against friends. Only three of the respondents said that they played the scenarios that were included within the game. When asked why they did not like playing scenarios, all respondents gave a similar answer, saying that they liked Civilization for the amount of choice it gives you and scenarios just take that away.

“… you take a Civilization from basically nothing and you build it up into a global empire … . I like the micro management of all the aspects of your civilization, you can fine-tune anything, and I like the historical appeal to. I enjoy history so I love seeing when they add new Civilizations, the leaders they

choose, why those leaders and if they're from the same time period, how they interact with each other and if they're entwined.”

(Reasons for playing Civilization, 21 year old male from the USA (1), 30-05-2017)

“… one of the things I like about Civilization is that you can do whatever you want. Scenarios just narrow it down. I don't like the lack of choice, I get the historical aspect, I played some scenarios, but I

don't really find appeal in them. I prefer learning about the Civilization just about who they were. Most of those scenarios focus on 1 point in the history … I prefer looking at it as a whole.”

(Scenarios in Civilization, 31 year old male from Serbia, 01-06-2017)

Only one respondent (26, female, Netherlands) answered that she never engaged in role-play and always follow the same strategy and patterns. The other respondents

Playing with power : geopolitical representations in civilization