the international journal of volume 16 issue 2

computer game research December 2016

ISSN:1604-7982

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eXplore, eXpand, eXploit,

Dom Ford
eXterminate: Affective Writing of
Dom Ford holds an MA in Postcolonial History and Education in
English Literary Studies
from the University of Civilization V
Exeter where he also by Dom Ford
completed his BA in
English. His research
focuses on Game Studies Abstract
as it intersects with
postcolonialism, late Civilization V as one of the most successful and definitive works of the
medieval and Arthurian 4X videogame genre presents a clear narrative of empire-building that,
literature, and theories
of narrative and space. I will argue, is problematic when set against postcolonial theory. With
dominic.ford@live.com many studies lauding the series for its educational capacities I argue
that with an affective turn to the role of the player, the games
homogenization of narratives of societal progression reinforces a
Western-centric notion of history. This co-opts non-colonial societies
into imperialism, while in the process silencing their histories. For this
study, I will read the games goals and mechanics through postcolonial
theorists such as Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak and Michel-Rolph Trouillot,
and then turn to affect theory to consider what role the player takes in
writing this history. To conclude, I will consider what implications this
has on the use of 4X games like Civilization V for education and the
conception of history in the minds of the players, drawing on other
recent scholars who have similarly problematized the series.

Keywords
postcolonialism, empire, imperialism, history, education, affect,
technological determinism, homogeny, Civilization V

Introduction
Figure 1. The introduction to the Scramble for Africa scenario when
playing as Queen Victoria.

January 1881, the Scramble for Africa. Queen Victoria commands the
English Empires expansion into inland Africa, already controlling a
handful of settlements around its coast and on the near coast of
Europe: Cape Town, Port Elizabeth, Lagos, Accra, Freetown, Gibraltar,
and Victoria. Her mission: explore Africa, expand her territory into it,
exploit its riches, and exterminate those who conflict with these aims,
be they native Africans or rival Europeans.

This is, of course, not the historical so-called Scramble for Africa of
the late 19th to the early 20th century, but the beginning of a staged
scenario in Sid Meiers Civilization V. Players choose one of 12 leaders
with corresponding empires. Jules Grvy leads the French, Otto von
Bismarck the Germans, Giuseppe Garibaldi the Italians, and so on. Or,
the player may defend Africa from the Europeans as Cetshwayo
kaMpande of the Zulu, for instance. In 100 turns (each turn
representing a period of months: the first turn is in January, the second
in April, the third in July, the fourth in October) the civilization with the
highest score is declared the winner (see Victory Conditions in Figure
1 for how points are scored in this scenario).

While this example is particularly relevant to postcolonial lines of

thought due to it being a direct representation of a significant historical
moment in colonialism, its key elements such as gameplay, goals and
characterization are typical of the 4X genre of videogames. The four Xs
refer to the first four words of my title, a genre name that has stuck
since it was coined in 1993 by Alan Emrich in a preview of Master of
Orion, a game released in the same year by MicroProse:

I give MOO a XXXX rating because it features the essential

four Xs of any good strategic conquest game: EXplore,
EXpand, EXploit and EXterminate. In other words, players
must rise from humble beginnings, finding their way around
the map while building up the largest, most efficient empire
possible. Naturally, the other players will be trying to do the
same, therefore their extermination becomes a paramount
concern (Emrich, 1993, p. 92).

Whether descriptively or prescriptively, this overview encapsulates the

core strategies of many games since then. From humble beginnings,
players manage a fledgling empire as they explore the map around
them, expand their territory outwards, exploit the land for its resources
and eventually exterminate all rival empires. This is the crux of all 4X
games, however each step might be emphasised, re-presented, or
complicated. In this essay, Civilization V (with its expansion games
Gods and Kings and Brave New World) serves as a case study for
exploring its representation of empire building and the writing of
imperial histories and narratives. Through its primary means of sale --
digital purchase on the online distribution platform Steam -- the game
has become one of the most-played, with over eight million sales,
making it a strong presence in modern videogame culture. Postcolonial
thinkers such as Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak and Michel-Rolph Trouillot
provide a useful lens through which the games reworking of colonial
history and its treatment of oppressed voices can be further
complicated. These considerations will be brought together with affect
theory to consider the players impact on the process of writing these
histories, in particular looking at the implications of using Civilization V
in education.

Postcolonial Literature Review

To begin, I will briefly outline Spivaks and Trouillots relevant thinking
and their position in the field of postcolonial studies. Spivaks work on
the subaltern has been highly influential. Challenging theorists such as
Michel Foucault and Gilles Deleuze, she is sceptical of critics who fail to
recognise their own ideological frameworks in their writing. This, she
argues in Can the Subaltern Speak?, leads to generalizing the subject
under totalizing concepts of power and desire (Spivak, 1988, p. 279).
In Conversations with Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, she concisely tells
Suzana Milevska that the central concept in Can the Subaltern
Speak? was that once a woman performs an act of resistance without
an infrastructure that would make us recognise resistance, her
resistance is in vain (Spivak; quoted in Chakravorty, Milevska &
Barlow, 2006, p. 62 [1]. This infrastructure refers to hegemonic
structures of empire and patriarchy, and in this essay I will make links
between these structures and the games encoded structures. Spivak
has been criticized by writers such as Ania Loomba, Benita Parry and
Lata Mani, but her core concept of voices unheard by structures unable
to hear them remains useful for this essay.

Michel-Rolph Trouillot focuses on the writing of history in Silencing the

Past: Power and the Production of History. Using specific examples like
the Haitian Revolution of the late 18th century to the early 19th
nineteenth century and Christopher Columbuss landing on the
Bahamas in 1492, he observes the processes of historicisation, how
they work, what they emphasize and what is silenced. With regards to
the Haitian Revolution, he remarks on what he calls formulas of
erasure and banalization which serve to, respectively, erase
directly the face of a revolution and empty a number of singular
events of their revolutionary content so that the entire string of facts
becomes trivialised (Trouillot, 1995, p. 96). In the example of
Columbuss landing, he observes a fading of context as the act of
exploration is celebrated as a great European achievement. As context
is faded out, the event begins to be championed and lauded despite
being, as he terms it in a way he feels is more accurate, the Castilian
invasion of the Bahamas (Trouillot, 1995, p. 114). Trouillots thinking
will be useful for conceptualizing the ultimate function of particular
game mechanics and structures.

Civilization V and Technological

Progress
Civilization V is a game of great strategic depth, and so I will not be
able to cover all its elements in this essay. However, as I am primarily
concerned here with the writing of history and the voices that are heard
and silenced in that process of writing, I will start with the games
timeline, the temporal progression from turn one to victory (or defeat).
What are players aiming to achieve? How do the games structures
guide them? The technology tree provides a clear timeline to trace.
Beginning with agriculture, the player is provided with four choices to
start researching: pottery, animal husbandry, archery and mining. Each
choice leads to a further branch in the tree, culminating in the internet,
globalization, particle physics, nanotechnology and stealth. Once
everything else is researched, only Future Tech is available, which
provides nothing but additional score. Crucially, the technology tree
presents a homogenous timeline of technological progression. All
civilizations -- from Shaka kaSenzangakhonas Zulu to Augustus
Caesars Romans to Sejong the Greats Koreans -- climb the same tree.
While there is choice, that choice is limited to a handful of discrete
choices made for strategic purposes -- to emphasise strengths or cover
weaknesses -- rather than to forge a truly separate narrative. Indeed,
the technology tree is tiered into eras that solidify this Eurocentric
homonarrativization: ancient, classical, medieval, renaissance,
industrial, modern, atomic and information.

Tuur Ghys observes the use of the term technological determinism to

describe technology trees in strategy games and applies the concept to
Civilization IV -- the previous game in the Civilization series which uses
a similarly-structured technology tree. He uses Michael L. Smiths
definition of the term as the belief that social progress is driven by
technological innovation, which in turn follows an inevitable course
(Smith; quoted in Ghys, 2012), and remarks that there is an inclusion
of social and political principles in the tech tree with links in which
mechanical technologies lead to social ones (Ghys, 2012). Some are
quite subtle, he says, such as either plastics or fission being
prerequisites to researching environmentalism in Civilization IV. Ghys
asked lead designer Soren Johnson about this particular link, who
called it a cause-effect relation plastics led to a boom in disposable
items, which eventually made people more sensitive to how wasteful
we are as a civilization (Johnson; interviewed by Ghys, quoted in
Ghys, 2012).

These kinds of particular socio-political causal chains in Civilization IVs

technology tree make the games narrative even more specific and
restrictive in its homogeny. Not only does Wu Zetians Chinese empire
have to research the same listed technologies in roughly the same
order as George Washingtons empire, but her society is also implicitly
subjected to exactly the same socio-political reactions to events and
technologies. A comparable example in Civilization V is the requirement
for a civil service and guilds to be researched to lead on to chivalry,
which triggers to medieval era complemented with a quote from Le
Morte Darthur: Whoso pulleth out this sword of this stone and anvil, is
rightwise king born of all England (Malory; quoted in Civilization V).

The implications of this technological determinism in the technology

tree are further exposed when technological links are followed beyond
their first step. Ghys observes that researching mysticism in Civilization
IV is, by tracing the chain of prerequisites, required for robotics (Ghys,
2012). Similarly, by following Civilization Vs technology chain it is
revealed that chivalry is a required technology for particle physics. It
seems incongruent when put like that, but what it illuminates is that
when technology trees are structured in this linear fashion, they do not
provide the players civilization with a technological progression unique
to their society, and in this process alternative narratives are
destroyed. All empires in Civilization V begin at the same pre-
determined starting point of human development. The game fails to
account both for societies which do not follow the same path of
technological progression and for societies that emerge at different
times relative to other societies. Indeed, a Scientific Victory is won
through what is essentially a version of the 20th-century Space Race.
Certain technologies towards the end of the tree enable the production
of parts of the space shuttle, once the Apollo Program wonder is
completed. When all parts are assembled and gathered in the players
capital city, the ship is launched and the game ends under the premise
that the spaceship will be used to colonize nearby star Alpha Centauri.
The goal of technological advancement in Civilization V, in other words,
is to reach the real-world United States crowning Cold War
achievement -- no matter which civilization the player chooses.

Exploration, Expansion, Exploitation,

Extermination
The first of the four Xs -- exploration -- perhaps seems the most
innocuous. In the following, I will direct most attention to this specific
aspect of 4X games.

Apparently driven by mere curiosity, the word exploration suggests no

active harm as expansion, exploitation and extermination do. It
suggests observation and detached study. However, in this section I will
focus closely on exploration firstly because it serves as the foundation,
catalyst and prerequisite for the other three Xs, and secondly because
the concept and narratives of exploration hold particular colonial
connotations that are not as immediately clear. Michel-Rolph Trouillot
recounts the historicizing of Christopher Columbuss landing in the
Bahamas in 1492. How interesting, he remarks, that 1492 has
become Columbuss year, and October 12 the day of The Discovery
(Trouillot, 1995, pp. 112--113). Columbuss famous landing has
become a clear-cut event much more fixed in time than the prolonged
fall of Muslim Granada, the seemingly interminable expulsion of
European Jews, or the tortuous consolidation of royal power in the early
Renaissance (Trouillot, 1995, p. 113). Unlike the latter examples,
[t]he Discovery has lost its processual character become a single and
simple moment. The creation of that historical moment facilitates the
narrativization of history (Trouillot, 1995, p. 113). Trouillot asks
whether anyone would care to celebrate the Castilian invasion of the
Bahamas (Trouillot, 1995, p. 114) and it is in this that the simple
narrativization of this single moment in history exposes the colonial
frames of exploration. This narrativization fades the context of
Columbuss landing -- the making of Europe, the rise of the absolutist
state, the reconquista, and Christian religious intransigence all spread
over centuries to mention just the Old World (Trouillot, 1995, p. 113) -
- into the background, subsumed among the antecedents to The
Discovery (Trouillot, 1995, p. 113). The exploration, itself the
desperate adventure of one of the rejects of Europe (Trouillot,
1995, p. 113), becomes romanticized and celebrated as a great
achievement of Europe.
Figure 2. Screenshot of the fog of war at the beginning of the
Scramble for Africa scenario.

Exploration is codified into the game in a way that rewards such

narrativization. Firstly, returning to the goals of the game, exploration
enables the next three Xs. The map begins covered by the fog of war,
as it is known in strategy games (Figure 2). The player must send
explorers into this fog to unveil the land to expand into, the resources
to exploit, and the opponents to exterminate.

Exploration is not done for curiositys sake. In Nintendo and New World
Travel Writing, Mary Fuller and Henry Jenkins remark on the de-
narrativization of the gamespace in Nintendo games: Its landscapes
dwarf characters who serve, in turn, primarily as vehicles for players to
move through these remarkable places we dont really care whether
we rescue Princess Toadstool or not (Fuller & Jenkins, 1995, p. 60). In
Civilization V (and perhaps strategy games more generally) the
opposite is true: Players do not care so much about the natural beauty
of the world of the pleasures of traversing it, rather they explore as a
means to an end. That end being, of course, the acquisition of strategic
resources and information with which to expand their empire.

The landscape itself is homogenized, divided up and categorized by

type of terrain. Tiles are not part of an organic, unique landscape,
rather each tile is merely a visual representation of a type of terrain,
and it is the type that is important to players. Hill tiles provide more
vision and range when occupied, rough terrains such as forest or marsh
slow movement, grassland has a higher base food value. Land is
favoured only because of its strategic value. Players do not place new
cities next to a mountain because it looks awe-inspiring and the views
will be wonderful (indeed, each mountain in the game looks the same).
Players settle there because cities next to a mountain are able to build
an observatory, which increases that citys science output by +50
percent. Or when playing as the Incas, because they can build the
unique structure of the terrace farm which, erected on hill tiles,
provides additional food for each adjacent mountain. Some tiles contain
natural wonders like Uluru, Great Barrier Reef and Krakatoa, but again,
their only use in the game is statistical. Discovering a natural wonder
(unveiling it in the fog of war) grants happiness to the players
civilization. Exploration is rewarded. Once inside the players territory,
each natural wonder grants a unique bonus yield. For example, Uluru
generates +2 food and +6 faith. Expansion and exploitation are
rewarded off the back of exploration.
Figure 3. Screenshot of the Strategic View with Hex-Grid and Yield-
Icons view options switched on.

Paul Virilios notion of violent speed can also be used to read these
gameplay mechanics. In Speed and Politics, Virilio talks of political
power as a compression of time and space, the ability to enact violence
faster and from further away. Around 1870 Colonel Delair notes the
art of defense must constantly be in transformation; it is not exempt
from the general law of this world: stasis is death (Virilio, 1986, pp.
12--13). This is truly a maxim at the heart of Civilization V. The fog of
war masks strategic resources and must be traversed through to
uncover those resources. The only codified bonus to staying put is
increased happiness. But, even then, the only use for maintaining
positive happiness is to build points towards a Golden Age, which
provides an empire with bonus production and culture points as well as
increased gold income. In other words, its only use is to facilitate other
forms of victory, all of which require exploration. The only civilization
that remains in relative stasis is Venice, which cannot build more than
one city. However, one of Venices unique abilities is the option to
purchase city states using gold, enveloping them into the Venetian
empire: expansion. And, even so, Venice tends to rank extremely low in
competitive rankings compiled by players such as FilthyRobot (2015)
and shared within communities.

To return this argument to Trouillot, exploration is an act celebrated by

the game, championed as the means by which success as an empire is
achieved. Celebrations of exploration, Trouillot argues, mythologizes
history. They impose a silence upon the events they ignore, and they
fill that silence with narratives of power about the event they celebrate
(Trouillot, 1995, p. 118). This mythologizing process in-game strips the
world of all history prior to exploration. Natural wonders serve no
purpose except in the resources they provide, for example. Indeed, the
games swarms of barbarians are part of this process. The game
spawns barbarian encampments across the map, which do nothing but
produce unwaveringly hostile military units with technology equal to
the games most advanced players technology (so once the most
advanced player can produce musket-wielding troops, so can the
barbarians). These barbarians are generic: they have no history and no
aim besides destruction for destructions sake, attacking the players
relentlessly no matter the odds. While the game might be said to be
nothing more than its code -- and these barbarians are literally nothing
more than that, they have no history, objectively speaking -- they are
emblematic of Trouillots point: context reduced to obscurity under the
celebration of exploration. Civilization Vs barbarians have no history or
identity precisely because the game celebrates exploration under the
same framework as we celebrate Columbuss landing in 1492. Except
here the game does not need to render those details obscure in this
mythicizing of history. It can place those contextual details in a
position that begins with obscurity.

Much of Civilization V has a homogenizing effect, and this in parallel

relates to a further point Fuller and Jenkins make on characterization:
In Nintendos narratives, they claim, characters play a minimal role,
displaying traits that are largely capacities for action The games
dependence on characters borrowed from other media allows them to
simply evoke those characters rather than fully develop them (Fuller &
Jenkins, 1995). Although here they have fictional characters in mind, a
similar technique is employed in Civilization V. Leaders are borrowed
from history, but are ultimately only strategic vessels for the games
action. The course of the game clearly has little to do with accurate
historical narratives and so becomes distilled down to strategic
decisions. The only differences between civilizations that impact games
(rather than the cosmetic differences) are in their unique units,
buildings and abilities. The choice of which leader to play as is therefore
a strategic decision. Does the player prefer Englands unique ability, or
Indias? In creating an arena with more competitive integrity, each
civilization finds their entire history filtered into two unique
buildings/units and one unique ability. Their history does not provide
them with a unique starting point, nor does it alter their ambitions as a
society. That is up to the player, who makes a strategic decision in
choosing their civilization, not a narrative one.

It has been argued that this element is, in fact, a redeeming feature.
Ted Friedman, writing on Civilization II in 1999, is not unaware that the
games dynamic of depersonalization elides the violence of exploration,
colonization, and development even more completely than the stories
of individual conquest described by Fuller and Jenkins (Friedman,
1999, p. 145). However, he argues, what makes this palatable is the
abstractness of Civilization II. Any nation can be the colonizer
Barbarian hordes are never specific ethnicities; theyre just generic
natives (Friedman, 1999, p. 145). This degree of abstraction is echoed
by other critics. Rolfe Daus Peterson, Andrew Justin Miller, and Sean
Joseph Fedorko, for instance, agree that the games actual historicity is
entirely inaccurate, but contend that its historical accuracy lies in its
conceptual simulation of diplomacy, geopolitics, resource management,
and so on (Peterson, Miller & Fedorko, 2013, p. 43).

In a way, abstraction is precisely my point. Though far from Friedmans

celebration of the equal opportunity of all nations to conquer, and of the
non-ethnicity of barbarians, and of Peterson, Miller and Fedorkos praise
of the conceptual accuracy of the simulation, this abstraction becomes
a totalizing and damaging force. (Peterson, Miller & Fedorko 2013 do
pick up on this in their conclusion, a point I will return to later.) What I
mean by this is that the ethnicity of the barbarians does not matter
because they do not matter; the games interface presents them as a
mindless hindrance to the business of empire-building, rather than as a
native people with their own history, culture and values being removed.
While all nations do have the opportunity to become the imperial force
themselves, they also cannot do anything but be that. In the slow
march to the state of eponymous civilization, the game presents a
Eurocentric imperialist narrative of socio-political and technological
development that morphs into a Western Cold War narrative as the only
way to do that.

Affect and Education

With this imperialist narrative coded into the games mechanics, what
role does the player then take on? Can the player of Civilization V be
considered a detached observer, or does s/he write this colonial history
herself/himself by immersing herself/himself in the gamespace? Diane
Carr criticizes the kind of analysis this essay has so far been engaged
in, arguing that they (the players) share a tendency to focus on the
games rules and pseudo-historical guise, at the expense of its more
playful, less quantifiable aspects (Carr, 2007, p. 222). Indeed, while
my analyses thus far have largely agreed with what Kacper Poblocki in
2002 argues about the Civilization series (I, II and III at that point) --
succinctly put as every Civilization has an equal opportunity to
become the United States of America (Poblocki, 2002, p. 168) -- Carr
is right to insist on a fresh angle. Drawing on Katie Salen and Eric
Zimmermans influential Rules of Play, she reminds us that policy
makers, sociologists and civil servants looking to scientific simulations
for evidence and players enjoying games will differ in what they are
looking for, and how they are likely to interpret and apply what they
find (Carr, 2007, p. 225). The games Western bias and forced
imperialist narrative is clear and codified, but in examining the role of
the player in writing postcolonial histories it is important to question
how players interpret the games rules. From that, perhaps it will be
possible to forge the links between modes of play inside the magic
circle of the game and the larger ideological issues of postcolonialism.
I am, of course, not saying that players of Civilization are staunch
Western imperialists who fetishize the British empire. That would be a
very damning conclusion from an author with over 200 hours of
playtime on Civilization V clocked. Rather, what needs to be considered
is the extent to which the process of rehearsing this narrative through
gameplay is problematic.

There is a certain rhythm to 4X games like Civilization V. It is intrinsic

to the name -- the player chooses her or his civilization and then
explores, expands, exploits and exterminates. S/he then finishes the
game and repeats the process, playing this narrative again and again.
In Civilization V, this process is set in no fantasy world: In playing, the
player rehearses the development of Western civilization. Anna Gibbss
chapter After Affect: Sympathy, Synchrony and Mimetic
Communication provides a useful framework through which the
players interaction with the gameworld can be understood. Although
she is not writing on videogames specifically, she remarks that reading
fiction produces new affect states in us, which change not only our
body chemistry, but also our attitudes and ideas as we shaped from a
narrative a structure of meaning (Gibbs, 2010, p. 193). This, she says,
is the result of mimicry: a response to the other, a borrowing of form
(Gibbs, 2010, p. 193). Civilization V might not be breeding a generation
of ruthless imperialists, but it may well be reinforcing notions of history
that focus on the West and champions war in a way that celebrates
singular events to the detriment of their contexts, to refer back to
Trouillot. Josef Kstlbauer uses the word mimicry, in this case
borrowing from Johan Huizinga, to apply directly to simulation games
such as Civilization, remarking that simulation games inhabit the
spaces in between play and reality (Kstlbauer, 2013, p. 172).

Carr takes a ludic approach that suggests a degree of separation

between the game inside the magic circle and the world outside. She
draws on David Myers who, after analysing online discussions between
dedicated players, concludes that the most frequently discussed
aspects of the game are the relationships among in-game signifieds --
without reference to or really any concern about their significance (or
signification) outside the game context (Myers; quoted in Carr, 2007,
p. 227). However, many have been calling for just that connection
between in-game signifieds and the real world histories to which they
refer. John K. Lee observes in his study that students did develop
factual knowledge by playing Civilization III (Lee, 2010, p. 23), and
concludes that teachers might want to consider using games such as
Civilization III in whole class learning activities (Lee, 2010, p. 24). On
the website LearningWorks for Kids, Civilization V is given a Learning
Quotient of 9.6 out of 10, reflecting how well the media balances
entertainment quality with the potential for improving thinking skills
and academic proficiency (LearningWorks for Kids, n.d.). Edward Webb
reflects on his use of Civilization IV to teach undergraduate students,
stating that he has had increasing success in helping upper-level
undergraduates grasp the nuances of complex political, social, and
economic processes (Webb, 2013, p. 3). These suggestions are all
made under the implicit assumption that the history provided in the
Civilization series is accurate and therefore suitable for learning.

There are, of course, more nuanced discussions that do problematize

the content of the series. While Jeremiah McCall makes a compelling
case for the use of historical simulation games such as Civilization in
secondary education, he acknowledges that the series is not
particularly well suited to retracing the exact path of a specific historical
civilization (McCall, 2011, p. 45). He instead focuses on the broader,
conceptual elements that such games can reinforce, such as the
importance and balance of geopolitical relationships, resource
management, and so on. While precise historicity is not part of the
Civilization series remit, as a general model of how civilizations
develop and interact, however, Civilization offers some highly defensible
models, citing the link between productivity and happiness as an
example (McCall, 2011, p. 24). Similarly, as discussed earlier in this
paper, Peterson, Miller and Fedorko remark also on the usefulness of
the simulating aspects of the Civilization series, but temper that with
an acknowledgement that the series reveals a bias toward
representing all of history as inevitable and constant scientific
advancement and social progressivism but that aspect affords room
for critical thinking and critique (Peterson, Miller & Fedorko, 2013, p.
44). Adam Chapman in his paper Is Sid Meiers Civilization history?
stresses that if the games are to be considered histories, then they
must be treated as such: subjective, biased narratives guided by
Althusserian ideological pulls (whether consciously or unconsciously)
(Chapman, 2013, pp. 312--332).

In this vein, responsible employment of Civilization games in

educational contexts should include some degree of engagement with
the games embedded imperial ideology. However, not all proponents
have included this caveat. Carr (2007), quoting Myers, is right to bring
up the distinction between in-game signifieds and external sign
systems, but the discussions she quotes are conducted between
dedicated, high-level players on online forums who clearly have an
interest in optimizing their play for victory: an inherently more ludic
approach. Advocacy for Civilization games to be used as learning tools
suggests in itself that this disconnect is not universal or intrinsic to the
game. Indeed, the game makes an explicit connection by using the
names and likenesses of historical leaders and setting up game
scenarios based on historical events. So, the question then becomes
whether or not using 4X games as educational tools is intrinsically
problematic. Lee provides examples of his students educational
progress, noting that students we [sic] able to define embassy and
were able to articulate at least one problem that beset Jamestown
settlers (Lee, 2010, p. 23). This might seem a laudable (if small)
achievement for the use of Civilization III in education; but here,
Gibbss notion of mimicry is helpful. Students learn what an embassy is
in basic terms, but in playing the game they also rehearse the historical
narrative coded into the structures of gameplay that frames the
implementation of embassies in the game. As a specific example,
embassies in the game are implemented through the diplomacy menu.
If the target leader accepts the players request to set up an embassy,
their capital is revealed to that player through the fog of war.
Therefore, a strategic move can be to establish an embassy under the
guise of diplomacy simply to get the precise location of their capital city
marked on the games map so that the player can attack. This
gameplay mechanic is not based off of real world military or diplomatic
strategy, and yet comes packaged with the concept of diplomacy-
through-embassy in-game. The same can be said of elements
discussed previously in this essay. A student might learn the etymology
of the term barbarian, but may receive with it the dehumanizing
colonial ideology that surrounds in-game barbarians.

Postcolonial theory on the writing of history and the treatment of

colonized voices allows us to consider further why games in the
Civilization series are problematic, particularly when used in education.
In Can the Subaltern Speak?, Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak contends
that there is a need to avoid reintroduc[ing] the subject through
totalizing concepts of power and desire (Spivak, 1988, p. 279) in
colonial discourse and analysis. She is concerned that critics who fail to
acknowledge their own ideological framework in which they live,
observe and write, merely end up generalizing and co-opting subaltern
peoples into the Western narrative. With a framework such as
Civilization V, the subaltern in Spivaks terms is inextricably suppressed
within the games rules. There is no path to victory that does not
employ the internal and external logics of empire structures, nor are
there any avenues for subaltern insurgency. Spivak discusses a violent
aporia (Spivak, 1988, p. 206) within which the female subaltern lies.
Constricted by native patriarchies and foreign imperial hegemonies,
there is no structure within which their voice can be heard, no mode of
interpretation for their acts.

Similarly, Trouillot notes the trend in history to silence events and

zeitgeists by modifying the structure in which they are read. Using the
example of the Haitian Revolution of the late 18th century to the early
19th century, he claims that the chain of events that constitute the
Haitian Revolution was unthinkable before these events happened and
then as they did happen they were instead systematically recast by
many participants and observers to fit a world of possibilities (Trouillot,
1995, pp. 95--96). In other words, overarching grand narratives deny
the inclusion of contradictory voices, and in doing so silence those
voices. Defined by a coded set of rules, Civilization V presents a
framework that is even less impenetrable. Not only do the tragic acts of
female subalterns (to use Spivaks examples of sati) go unregistered,
they simply do not even exist in the gameworld. Indeed, women
themselves are a scarcity, appearing almost nowhere except as leaders
(who belong to a significantly less oppressed class of people anyway).
These insurgent acts, the cries of the subaltern as it may be put, do not
need to be ignored or co-opted because the games framework does
not even permit their existence in the first place. Under these terms,
then, Civilization V becomes a pure manifestation of the imperial grand
narrative that allows for no competing narratives, blind to even the
nuances within that narrative -- such as class issues. When employed
in historical education, it is this conceptualization of history that is
being engaged with.

Western Space
Bernadette Flynns work can offer a more spatially-oriented way into
this dilemma:

As reinforced by Foucault and Soja this notion of space as

empty, static and disembodied has become central to a
Western ontology of spatial creation and representation. We
can see how this has become the standard for the majority of
computer games in which the objects and avatars are made
up of 3D geometry placed in an empty and bounded space
(Flynn, 2008, p. 120).

This is also the case with Civilization V -- indeed it is immediately

apparent in the hex tile formation of the gamespace. Navigation of the
computer space is a cultural act where social practice, gender, and
ideologies of representation are inoperable for the gameplay event,
Flynn claims (2008, p. 141). Building on the work of space and place by
theorists such as Lefebvre, it becomes increasingly clear that the lived,
navigated space is inseparable from that spaces ideological constructs.
And why should that not also be the case in games? Writers including
Flynn, but also Brett Nichols and Simon Ryan have equated gameplay
to Edward Sojas third space and Lefebvres lived space which --
while being distinct from the empirical and representational spaces that
precede it -- are also inextricably involved in it: Space operates as a
metaphoric, expressive, and sensual language operating in a dialogue
with the embodied subjectivity of the player, concludes Flynn (2008, p.
144). This spatial approach would suggest that even for the more ludic
player who has detached in-game signifiers from real-world sign
systems moving through the gamespace is inescapably ideological.
Figure 4. Screenshot of a typical space in Civilization V with Hex-Grid
and Yield-Icons view options switched on.

If moving through the gamespace is a social, ideological,

representational act in terms of that players relationship with space,
then we must return to how players move through that space. This
brings us back to the games rules and structure, by which movement
are heavily guided and incentivised with spatial expansion. In high-level
strategy, two types of macro game plan are referred to as tall
empires and wide empires. Tall empires harbour few cities (usually
three to four) and funnel their resources into them, typically aiming for
a cultural, diplomatic or scientific victory. Wide empires, by contrast,
expand aggressively and rapidly, intending to hold large amounts of
wide-distributed territory for stronger military positioning and
monopolization of resources. But both methods are intrinsically
engaged with space and expansion. Unlike in real wars, borders do not
need to be recognised by other civilizations -- they simply exist. This is
a Western conception of space too: Geopolitical territories are coded
into the game. Stepping into anothers territory without an open-
borders agreement automatically declares war. The game enforces
Western conceptions of space even more strongly than in real life, both
in more abstract terms -- geometrically as Flynn mentions -- and
geopolitically, forcing a discourse of land ownership that is inescapably
imperial. To return to Spivak, this quashes even further the possibility
of insurgency, which is obliterated spatially from the game map. The
only agents that are able to traverse space are those belonging to
empire -- all others are reduced to statistics and sub-humans:
(un)happiness, barbarians, production levels.

Conclusions
The question posed asks whether or not Civilization V is a problematic
game in terms of postcolonial thinking, how and why that might be,
and what implications that might have. Ignoring the role of the player
for one moment, the games structures and rules clearly develop an
imperialist narrative. This is not something the games developers have
tried to hide. Even aside from the 4X genre, the first line of the games
description on Steam challenges players to become Ruler of the World
by establishing and leading a civilization from the dawn of man into the
space age: Wage war, conduct diplomacy, discover new technologies,
go head-to-head with some of historys greatest leaders and build the
most powerful empire the world has ever known (2K Games, 2010).
For why this kind of game might be problematic, the player must be
included into the equation, along with the games standing in
videogame culture and wider society.

The games position in the videogame world is well-established. Over

eight million sales on Steam solidify it as one of the current most-
played games, and as established earlier in this essay, the title has
gained some traction more widely for its perceived educational capacity
Carr (2007) argues for a level of detachment between in-game
signifiers and the real world ideologies they refer to. When players talk
about expanding into enemy territory, killing the natives as if they were
annoying flies, and using religion purely as a tool to further their
empire, that discourse is not seeping into real world discourses on
empire. For Carr (2007), the barrier between in-game signifiers and
real world sign systems is impermeable -- one is not influenced by the
other in any significant way. There is certainly true in this line of
argument: Civilization V is not breeding a generation of ruthless
imperialists.

However, this detachment is not universally steadfast. Those who call

for the series use in education expose a permeability in the passage of
in-game signifiers to real world applications. They hope for students to
play the game, make connections between events, objects and
concepts within the game and reapply those to their real world
counterparts. The game exposes a different problem which pertains to
how players engage with a version of history that is presented from a
limited and limiting Western perspective and the structure that, as
Spivak and Trouillot -- and, for example, the subaltern historians --
illuminate, silence voices and histories that run counter to the Western
narrative of progress and modernity linked to imperialist notions of
civilization and conquest. Taken on its own, therefore, it seems logical
to conclude that Civilization V is unsuitable for a balanced, globalized
education of history and colonialism. However, there could well be
success found in balancing the use of the Civilization series with
discussions of these problems, using the game as a way of engaging
students and introducing the basic elements before discussing
postcolonial thought through a critiquing and problematizing of the
games underlying structures and of historiography itself. Such an
approach would align with Adam Chapman, who proposes that
approaching the historical videogame from the historians perspective
allows us to allay many concerns and criticisms by showing that these
are epistemic issues that are inherent to history rather than the
videogame (Chapman, 2013, p. 327). Studies of an empirical nature
on this topic of education using Civilization could also go a long way to
revealing more comprehensively the affective impact of the games on
students and players view of history and colonialism.

Endnotes
[1] Caught between patriarchy and imperialism, subject-constitution
and object-formation, the figure of the woman disappears, not into a
pristine nothingness, but into a violent shuttling which is the displaced
figuration of the third-world woman caught between tradition and
modernization a violent aporia between subject and object status, as
she puts it in Can the Subaltern Speak? (Spivak, 1988, p. 206).

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