I was born in an age without video games. I played Pong in my twenties maybe, and spent too many quarters at arcades, but the first time I ever got down and dirty with a real video game in the modern sense, I was about 35.

It was called Civilization 2, and as things turned out, it was a pretty good simulator of the real world, in my empire, in my lifetime.

The Imperial Dilemma of Civilization

I know you’re not going to burn two hours on that video essay like I did, but let me just share a list of keywords or topics from it, which I scribbled down while multitasking and listening to it:

Civilization, of course …
Imperialism
Capitalism
Colonization (and ‘pioneering’, etc.)
Nationalism
and most importantly of all:

Progress.

In the years since 35, I haven’t played many more titles, and most of the ones I have played were variations on the theme of Civ 2. And in fact, the only game I still sometimes play is, arguably, its closest relative. It’s called Alpha Centauri. The single most notable difference between it and its civ-sib is that it doesn’t play out on Earth, but on the first other planet humankind is supposed, in the conceit of the franchise, to have … colonized. In “The Future”.

The reason I still play that one singular game once in a while is simply that:

Alpha Centauri is NOT Civilization in space

And that, for now,
is all I gotta say

about that.