The Civilization games rely on historical facts, so for the next game, the team hired senior historian Dr. Andrew Johnson, who’s an associate professor at Stockholm University’s Department of Social Anthropology in his other life. The consultant admitted he actually has a particular reason to work on the game – he hopes that one day, the game will inspire a lazy student to open a book.
“I teach undergraduates in my other life, and my God, man, they don’t read,” Johnson said in an interview with PC Gamer. “And trying to get them interested in history – if somebody plays Machiavelli, they might get really kind of interested. Machiavelli maybe has enough name recognition already, but like Amina [Queen of Zazzau], or, ‘OK, so this is the Ming Dynasty, how is that different from the Han Dynasty?’ If that can provoke somebody into an interest in history, that is what’s important here. This is not the textbook. This is the gateway drug into the textbook. If textbooks were drugs.”
Sid Meier’s Civilization VII
The professor also discussed the challenges behind the game and why representing history in a grand strategy title is a more academic task. For example, in Southeast Asia, a region can have overlapping zones of sovereignty, so one territory can belong to the Cambodian state and be a part of the Thai state. “That doesn’t work in a game where you need direct lines on the map. So that’s fine. We can nod to that somewhere in the Civilopedia or the gameplay, and maybe if somebody gets interested enough in the Khmer Empire, they can go read about it,” noted the consultant.
Johnson emphasized that inspiring people to read is not a side quest for him when working on the project – it’s the main reason why he agreed to work on Civilization VII.
“I just want people to appreciate the world and the strangeness of the world. Because if you appreciate how the past was different, or how other places are different, you can change your everyday as well. Then that opens up new worlds. That makes new worlds possible. If you think this is the only way it can be, the only way it should be, then you’re locked into a static existence, and that’s dull,” Johnson said.
Sid Meier’s Civilization VII
You can read the full interview here. In case you missed the news, Civilization 7 will be available on February 11 on Steam and consoles. In other news, 2K, the publisher of BioShock, Civilization, and Mafia, has recently removed its launcher from all PC games on Epic and Steam. You might want to check out a tutorial on deleting the launcher.
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