David Rosenthal: observation

Transcript context

…David, I toyed with the intro to this show being, “And we are your hosts. Civilization is a video game upon which…,” but I decided not to. It’s laughable, but no, this is really important here. September 1991, when Mark is seven years old, Civilization or Civ as its fans call it, comes out for PCs, and young Mark gets hooked. For those of you who haven’t played Civ, it is a very particular type of turn-based strategy game, and is probably the foremost example of what is known as the 4X genre. 4X stands for explore, expand, exploit, exterminate. Despite that nefarious-sounding nature to the last one there, especially, Civ in 4X games were this radical branch of video games at the time where the action of playing and the way to win wasn’t just about killing all the enemies on screen. It’s a lot more like a board game or like Risk if you’re familiar with that. It’s about strategy, it’s about growing and marshaling your resources effectively. Most importantly, there are multiple ways to win the game. Most other games out there you can win by defeating all the other players. But you can also win by completing a technology development tree, and reaching the peak of technology, which is in the game, launching a spaceship to go colonize a new planet. That’s another way to win. In modern versions of the game, you can also win by diplomacy. By getting elected the leader of the UN. You can also win by dominating all the other players on either culture or religious dimensions too. It’s like this amazing simulation of what it’s like to run one of the top 10 market cap mega capitalization companies in the world today. But to your point, this idea that it’s turn-based, you try to amass resources, figure out how to deploy your resources, have multiple concurrent strategies so that as the roll of the dice of the universe happens and things unfold before you……

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