Narrative Representation and Ludic Rhetoric of Imperialism in Civilization 5

Masterarbeit im Fach English and American Literatures, Cultures, and Media der Philosophischen Fakultät der Christian-Albrechts-Universität zu Kiel

vorgelegt von Malte Wendt

Erstgutachter: Prof. Dr. Christian Huck Zweitgutachter: Tristan Emmanuel Kugland

Kiel im März 2018

Table of contents

1 Introduction 1 2 Hypothesis 4 3 Methodology 5 3.1 Inclusions and exclusions 5 3.2 Structure 7 4 Relevant postcolonial concepts 10 5 Overview and categorization of Civilization 5 18 5.1 Premise and paths to victory 19 5.2 Basics on rules, mechanics, and interface 20 5.3 Categorization 23 6 Narratology: surface design 24 6.1 Paratexts and priming 25 6.1.1 Announcement trailer 25 6.1.2 Developer interview 26 6.1.3 Review and marketing 29 6.2 Civilizations and leaders 30 6.3 Universal terminology and visualizations 33 6.4 Natural, National, and World Wonders 36 6.5 Universal history and progress 39 6.6 User interface 40 7 Ludology: procedural rhetoric 43 7.1 Defining ludological terminology 43 7.2 Progress and the player element: the emperor's new toys 44 7.3 Unity and territory: the worth of a nation 48 7.4 Religion, Policies, and Ideology: one nation under God 51 7.5 Exploration and barbarians: into the heart of darkness 56 7.6 Resources, expansion, and exploitation: for gold, God, and glory 58 7.7 Collective memory and culture: look on my works 62 7.8 Cultural Victory and non-violent relations: the ballot 66 7.9 Domination Victory and war: the bullet 71 7.10 The Ex Nihilo Paradox: build like an Egyptian 73 7.11 The Designed Evolution Dilemma: me, the people 77 8 Conclusion and evaluation 79 Deutsche Zusammenfassung 83 Bibliography 87 1 Introduction

“[V]ideo games – an important part of popular culture – mediate ideology, whether by default or design.” (Hayse, 2016:442) This thesis aims to uncover the imperialist and colonialist ideologies relayed in the video game Sid Meier's Civilization V (2K Games, 2010) (abbrev. Civ 5) by Firaxis Games, including its two expansions Gods and Kings (2012) and Brave New World (2013), and the visual and ludic means through which they are communicated. In doing so, it will also seek to aid in closing the rift between narratology and ludology and offer a solution to their ongoing divide within the field of game studies by providing a methodology that combines both approaches to greater effect while acknowledging their mutual dependencies. While academics have, on multiple accounts, determined that the Civilization series “presents a clear narrative of empire-building that [...] is problematic when set against postcolonial theory” (Ford, 2016), none have supported their claims through an analysis dedicated to the game in its entirety, let alone with a thorough investigation into its ludic qualities. Additionally, their narratological focus often rests on the uncovering of specific narrow ideologies, avoiding the bigger picture that postcolonial theory and cultural studies in general can offer: “Some argue that the series propagates the supremacy of strategic management, while others contend that the series teaches an ideology of techno-utopianism through scientific progress. A third perspective critiques the series from a Marxist perspective, while a fourth perspective maintains that the series teaches the supremacy of geographic location.” (Hayse, 2016:446) Although these exemplary perspectives are valuable in their own right, they do upon closer inspection hint at a greater underlying ideology that combines these sub-theories, with strategic management alluding to the Enlightenment, techno-utopianism as an example of meta- narratives, and the supremacy of geographic location as a euphemism for environmental determinism, all three of which will be looked into in this thesis as some of the many pillars that have served to legitimize imperialism. One of the most prevalent perspectives in regards to the series' ludic values, however, is the claim made by strong advocates of pure ludology, such as David Myers (2003), that the series' “meaning-structuring process” was designed merely to support the ludic reward system, which is why any resulting ideologies must be coincidental and thus outside the realm of critique. Hayse (2016:446) summarizes this popular approach as the idea that “any supposed historic and cultural significance of the Civilization series

1 takes a back seat to its ludic – or game-like – qualities”, shifting “strategic systems management to the foreground as the cultural impact of video games fades into the background.” This approach tries to render the entire mechanical nature of the game only meaningful inside the game, but meaningless outside of it. Since the mechanics only serve to create gameplay, not to construct a narrative, the analysis of their conveyed ideologies must therefore be irrelevant. This view is the result of the deep ludo-narrative divide within game studies, which has shifted many ludologists into a defensive stance, according to which video games as an inherently interactive medium may under no circumstances be analyzed through the lens of narratology, as this would not only not do the game justice, but also fail to acknowledge the uniqueness of the medium. This claim, however, falls prey to two fallacies: Firstly, it assumes that ludology can create knowledge about rules and goals without the use of representation, a tool of narratology. Secondly, it assumes that the knowledge about games exists in a vacuum, within the confines of which goals and rules are the final conclusion beyond which there is no other knowledge to be produced. This thesis will neither focus on the narratological surface design of Civ 5, nor will it stop at determining its inner mechanical workings. Instead, it will use both approaches in tandem to extract evidence of imperialist ideology from both the surface design as well as the underlying rules and goals. While the analysis of narrative representation can rely on an established toolset, however, the connection between gameplay and communicated ideologies requires a relatively young joint ludo-narrative theory, which will be provided by Ian Bogost's 'procedural rhetoric' as introduced in Persuasive Games: The Expressive Power of Videogames (2010:ix): “[V]ideogames open a new domain for persuasion, thanks to their core representational mode, procedurality. I call this new form procedural rhetoric, the art of persuasion through rule-based representations and interactions rather than the spoken word, writing, images, or moving pictures.” This approach counters the nowadays diminishing, extreme ludological portrayal of games in a vacuum and falls in line with the growing realization within the field that interactivity, the unique element that sets this medium apart from all else, carries – like all other works of culture – meaning, and thus the potential for an ideological bias: Clara Fernández-Vara (2015:8) suggests that “[r]ather than limiting ourselves to thinking about games as a medium to convey messages, we can think of them as artifacts that encode certain values and ideas, which players decode and engage with as they play.” In the same vein, Egenfeldt-Nielsen (2016:35) even uses strategy

2 games (like Civ 5) as an example for games' communication of value systems: “Games are communication media: Games may communicate ideas and values. For instance, a strategy game may teach us how complex systems like cities or warring nation states work.” Accordingly, this thesis will look to one of the most popular strategy games in the world as an ideal candidate for an ideology-focused close reading. The Civilization series has developed into a staple of the strategy game genre since the series' inception in 1991. Its fifth installment, released in 2010, still holds the place as the most popular strategy game on the leading PC gaming platform Steam with peak concurrent player numbers of more than 30,000 as of March 2018, even after the release of Civilization VI (2K Games, 2016), including its first expansion Rise and Fall (2018), which falls short of its predecessor by more than 5,000 concurrent players. This makes Civ 5 the 15th most played Steam game as of 2018, according to the public daily statistics provided by Valve's Steam app itself (Newell, 2018). Even more staggering, however, is Civ 5's amount of total sales, through which “the game has become one of the most-played, with over eight million sales, making it a strong presence in modern videogame culture.” (Ford, 2016) Due to its mass appeal, combined with the game's representation of culture and history, the field of game studies has determined the Civilization series as culturally significant and thus in dire need of study, resulting in a “proliferation of scholarship that surrounds [the] series [...]”, (Hayse, 2016:445) many of which refer to its popularity as the “pinnacle” (Dor, 2016:276) of turn-based strategy games, and Civ 5 in particular as “one of the most successful and definitive works” (Ford, 2016) in its genre. It is, however, the genre's level of complexity, that, according to Dor (2016:281) has kept many experts in the field from analyzing strategy games in greater detail, as the time required to fully grasp their underlying systems can prove intimidating: “Methodological investigations in strategy analysis should address this in the future by showing how a complex activity such as strategy can be meaningfully archived.” While this thesis is not an exercise in methodology at its core, it will nonetheless offer one potential solution to this challenge by developing and executing a methodological approach specifically tailored towards the investigation into Civ 5's imperialist ideologies.

3 2 Hypothesis

While the goal of the thesis revolves around the unveiling of ideologies related to imperialism within Civ 5, its hypothesis needs to distinguish the unique nature of the ludo-narrative approach from the preceding works with similar purpose. Thus, the hypothesis cannot claim the exposure of imperialist values within the game, as their mere existence has already been acknowledged on multiple accounts. It is therefore imperative that the hypothesis emphasizes the essential role of interaction in the uncovering of the game's ideologies, and thus asserts that the game's ludic component is objectively more responsible for the game's imperialism than its narrative surface. Due to the hermeneutic nature of the analysis, however, the hypothesis cannot deal in quantitative absolutes when comparing ideological impact, especially when trying to contrast narratology with ludology, and must instead rely on a qualitative comparison of contributions from either field. In an effort to minimize arbitrariness in any such assertion, the qualitative analysis will refrain from establishing a continuum of 'impact' on which to rank the thesis' ludic findings. It will instead settle on a binary system and only distinguish between two sources of procedural rhetoric:

1. specific goals, rules, and mechanics (equal level of contribution compared to surface design) 2. interactivity of the video game medium itself (deeper level of contribution compared to surface design).

On the flip side, the thesis must assume that surface design does not hold the potential to carry imperialist values through the sheer existence of its text, video, and audio channels alone, as video games share these channels with literature, film, and music, respectively. As a result, the thesis is tasked with first finding the strongest cases of imperialism within the game's surface design, and then similarly scan its procedural rhetoric to find incidents resulting from source two in order to confirm the initial claim: The hypothesis states that Civilization 5's procedural rhetoric contributes to the game's communication of imperialist and colonialist values on a qualitative level not equal to, but more impactful than that of its surface design, whereby the existence of ludic imperialist manifestations based on the game's goals, rules, and mechanics would constitute equal contribution, while a deeper impact would require the medium's interactivity itself to inherently set up the game on an imperialist foundation from the

4 very moment the player element enters the frame. The null hypothesis must therefore state that Civilization 5's procedural rhetoric does in fact not contribute to the game's communication of imperialist and colonialist values in a way that is more impactful than that of its surface design.

3 Methodology

Because of the thesis' unique position within the framework of game studies, and, as previously mentioned, an expressed need within the field for “[m]ethodological investigations in strategy analysis” (Dor, 2016:281), the methodology upon which the thesis has settled must not only be described in detail, but so must the reasoning behind it, why some elements were deemed more useful to include than others, and why a certain structure and certain approaches were favored over their alternatives. While an established methodology specific to the thesis' premise does not exist, general methodological work within game studies, from which this newly developed methodology can draw, has been conducted. The basic guidelines and terminology of the general game studies methodology outlined by Clara Fernández-Vara in Introduction to Game Analysis (2015) will therefore serve as a basis for this process.

3.1 Inclusions and exclusions

In pursuit of verification on this hypothesis, it is important to preface the methodology by clarifying what will and what will not be included in the analysis. The hypothesis focuses on the content of the game, which extends beyond the computer screen. On the one hand, narratology reaches into any paratexts of the game that precondition the mindset with which the player enters said game (Fernández-Vara, 2015:6). On the other hand, within the field of ludology, the player herself is considered part of the game since it is her interaction that completes and in the process shapes its content: “The player is a necessary part of the text; [...] the game is not really a complete text without a player that interprets its rules and interacts with it.” (Fernández- Vara, 2015:7) Thus, both fields, paratexts and player element, enlarge the game beyond its hardware boundaries in their own unique ways. However, when, as in this case, research is not conducted within the field of psychology, questions for 'intent' and 'effect' need to be excluded from the analysis. The

5 exclusion of intent is especially recommended in video games, where “[...] one should be careful when attributing certain aspects of the game to the context, falling into the so- called intentional fallacy. [...] [T]hey are often a team effort, meaning that it is problematic to establish a single authorship [...].” (Fernández-Vara, 2015:57) Therefore, the thesis will neither pursue claims on the game's developers or publishers, nor use information from or about them in order to somehow reveal their intent, and thus the game's 'true meaning'. Although Fernández-Vara counts “context” among the recommended exclusion, it must be noted that the entire postcolonial premise of this investigation makes context an integral part of its toolset. It is therefore necessary to draw attention to the postcolonial context within which the game was produced and through which the thesis looks at the game. This also includes the fact that Civ 5 is a U.S. American game, with both publisher (2K Games) and developer (Firaxis Games) being situated there. The other aspect to be excluded from the analysis, referred to as 'effect', encompasses the psychological effects that the consumption of media has on potential players. That would be an empirical exercise that this thesis will not explore. In terms of the game itself, both the surface design and the procedural rhetoric are only examined in regard to the game's central mode of play, which is the 'Setup Game' option in the 'Single Player' category, whereby based on a plethora of player choices regarding e.g. resource density, number of competing civilizations, and difficulty of the AI (civilizations controlled by artificial intelligence), a map is procedurally generated to provide the player with a potentially infinite number of game conditions. This excludes the Single Player category 'Scenarios', which offers special pre-made and less customizable matches, as well as the 'Multi Player' category, which allows for matches between human competitors online. On the surface, the exclusion of multi-player seems to follow the trend laid out by Joseph and Knuttila (2016:211):

“From the start screen of a huge swath of games, two paths diverge. In the first, a single-player campaign laden with narrative components unfolds. In the second, gameplay hinges on the actions of other players […]. Approaches in game studies are […] often bracketing off online experiences in studies of community, leaving design, narratological, and philosophical concerns in the single-player realm.”

However, this does not apply to Civ 5, and is done for the exact opposite reason. Apart from a guided tutorial that mainly serves to teach new players the basic rules, goals and means of interaction, the game does not even feature a single-player campaign, let alone

6 one “laden with narrative components”. Instead, the narrative dynamically emerges from unforeseen interactions between the player, the game's rule system, and the AI, also called “emergent storytelling” (Fernández-Vara, 2015:108). This means that the opposite of Joseph's and Knuttila's claim applies: The exclusion of the game's multi- player aspects does not favor narrative over procedural rhetoric, but actually allows for said rhetoric to present its fullest potential, since the game not only provides a rule system, but now also needs to take on the roles of all competing civilizations, save the one controlled by the player. It needs to set goals, interact with the player in trade, diplomacy and combat, and may even adjust its actions based on certain characteristics that the game attributes to the represented culture. The thesis deems this piece of code, the AI, and the “interesting decisions” (Johnson, 2016:10) that it offers to the player, an integral part of the procedural rhetoric, and thus requires its inclusion in the object of analysis. In conclusion, outside of psychology, intent and effect are neither inferable nor relevant, while multi-player must be dismissed for the sake of including AI into the equation. Paratexts and the player element, however, are marked inclusions necessary to enhance narratology and ludology, respectively.

3.2 Structure

In terms of structure, the thesis will begin with an accumulation of all Relevant postcolonial concepts. This chapter aims to set the ideological foundation upon which the game itself can then be evaluated. It lists and defines interconnected concepts from or relating to the field of cultural studies, and presents their relevance in the light of imperialism and colonialism. While definitions of and investigations into ideology will be drawn from various authors, the basic framework of cultural studies and cultural geography will be provided by the works of Stuart Hall and Mike Crang, respectively, not only in this chapter but throughout the thesis. Following the ideological concepts, the thesis needs to bridge the “overblown” (Arsenault, 2016:476) gap between the heavily interdependent narratology and ludology, while maintaining a transparent structure. Aarseth (2016:185) claims that “ludology has been erroneously contrasted with narratology (narrative theory), but since the 'ludologists' all used narrative theory in their approaches to games, this juxtaposition is misinformed and does not bear critical examination.” However, completely erasing these convenient overarching categories presents any approach with yet another

7 problem, which is the lack of a system by which to categorize the object of analysis. Narratology and ludology are both unproductive without the respective other, but on their own, they still provide a clear pattern that structures the game in question, even when that pattern then requires knowledge from the other field, respectively, to produce any relevant knowledge. Narratology divides the game up into different categories of surface design, while ludology cuts the game into pieces of mechanics. For the thesis, this means that narratology and ludology will still structure two separate chapters, but require a preface that links them both together, to setup a basic understanding of the subject matter and allow for the two main chapters to actually produce meaning. This task is taken on by the Overview and categorization of Civilization 5, without which narratology would not be able to contextualize its evaluation of the game's design in regards to the common interactive consumption of said game, and ludology would have no semantic meaning to the player by which to categorize and actually produce knowledge on game mechanics. Therefore, the overview chapter will introduce a basic explanation of the game's design and mechanics, coupled with categorizing it in terms of genre and game studies terminology. In order to avoid ambiguity in this chapter and throughout the thesis, certain in-game terminology will consistently be capitalized: unlockable perks, i.e. technologies, policies, and tenets, such as Archaeology, game elements whose names overlap with concepts discussed in the thesis, such as Ideology, as well as any otherwise ambiguous compound word, such as Natural Wonder. After the overview, the thesis will lead with Narratology: surface design. The term 'surface design' was developed for this thesis out of the necessity to refer to anything that is not a goal, rule, or mechanic, thus not part of ludology, and therefore must belong to narratology. Bogost (2010:49-50) coined the phrase of “skinning” a static procedural rhetoric “with new graphics” that other researchers like Fernández-Vara (2015:132) adopted as the “graphical skin” of a game, resulting in far too narrow of a title, as narratology encompasses more than just graphics. Christopher A. Paul (2016:461) proposes the term “design”, which achieves the opposite effect by being too broad, as gameplay is also designed. Instead, 'surface design' perceives the game like a machine that produces visuals, audio, and text on the surface, which fall under narratology, and hides its mechanical underpinning, the realm of ludology, under its hood. Narratology will analyze the categories the game creates on its surface, the members with which it fills them, and the way in which they are portrayed. The surface elements

8 will be grouped into chapters based around the methods through which surface design communicates ideology. The game's most relevant paratexts in particular were chosen on the basis of Fernández-Vara's (2015:6) guidelines. Most importantly, these will include the game's announcement trailer, a developer interview with the game's producer, and a written review by gaming website IGN. She specifically warns, however, of the biases inherent to the nature of developer interviews and reviews. Interviews are “normally […] part of the marketing campaign and usually cover some of the same points advertisements do.” (Fernández-Vara, 2015:39) Similarly, reviews carry a high potential for a conflict of interest resulting from “economic pressures that condition its content” (Fernández-Vara, 2015:3), since the advertisements with which a game review is monetized are often bought by the same companies whose games the site reviews. Therefore, the thesis will treat all paratexts, including interview and review, as part of the game's marketing, rather than take their statements as evidence for the game's production process or its public reception. Both narratology and ludology will also often refer to so-called “postmortems” (Fernández-Vara, 2015:39) by the game's lead designer Jon Shafer. These are essays on game design, published after the release of the game, that the thesis will, as with its other paratexts, use not as insight into the actual game itself, but predominantly as the lens through which some of the game's rhetoric and representations are framed as positive or beneficial by the game's marketing, or rather publications of an advertising nature. Ludology: procedural rhetoric examines the game's underlying mechanisms, the interdependent relations they suggest, and the player actions they incentivize. It will start out by defining the basic terminology of goals, rules, mechanics, and procedural rhetoric, and then explain in detail how the game's rhetoric arises from specific sets of said goals, rules, and mechanics. Because of their more abstract nature, that often lies beyond established language, the chapters will each bear an additional title that hints at the interconnected phenomena analyzed within. A final Conclusion and evaluation chapter will briefly summarize the main points from each field and then compare the findings of narratology to those of ludology to determine whether the hypothesis holds true. Although a popular term in game studies, the evaluation will – if the findings allow it – only briefly touch upon the phenomenon of so-called 'ludo-narrative dissonance'. This concept describes “[t]he […] dissonance between the set of verbs (mechanics) and the supposed theme of the game” (Fernández- Vara, 2015:99). This would be the case if the findings of ludology would dominantly

9 point towards imperialism, while those of narratology would point towards postcolonialism, or vice versa. However, the concept sits not at the core of the hypothesis, which claims that imperialism is more deeply rooted in the procedural rhetoric than it is in the surface design, not that the procedural rhetoric's ideology directly conflicts with that of the surface design. The chapter will also evaluate the success of the developed methodology, and provide an outlook on how it could be applied in the future.

4 Relevant postcolonial concepts

According to Stuart Hall (2016:136), “[s]ystems of representation are the systems of meaning through which we represent the world to ourselves and one another. It acknowledges that ideological knowledge is the result of specific practices – the practices involved in the production of meaning.” This means that any articulation is linked to a value system, and that therefore any representation directly contributes to the manifestation of ideology. It is due to this connection that the succeeding chapters can point at articulations in the game and infer an ideology like imperialism on the basis of representation. Since the concepts of imperialism and colonialism are too broad to spot directly, it is their complex system of underlying and interconnected discourses that allows the analysis to expose one idea from a connotative set of ideas and thus point towards the overarching ideology, imperialism and colonialism, or postcolonialism, respectively, as well as other ideas from the same parent ideology: “Ideologies do not operate through single ideas; they operate in discursive chains, in clusters, in semantic fields, in discursive formations. As you enter an ideological field and pick out any one nodal representation or idea, you immediately trigger a whole chain of connotative associations.” (Hall, 2016:137) In reference to Louis Althusser, Hall (2016:131) defines ideologies as the “frameworks of thinking and calculations about the world […] with which people figure out how the social world works, what their place is in it, and what they ought to do.” Previous attempts at ideological investigation into the Civilization series were based around much narrower definitions, which yielded conclusions that – by cultural studies standards – appear inconsequential. While Hayse (2016:446) for example points out that former research has shown the series' tendency to label entire nations, like Germany, with generalizing traits such as “industrial”, he then fails to acknowledge this label's

10 inherent racism by committing to a mere analogy to examples of everyday-life racism and sexism, as if they were equally grave, but unrelated. In actuality of course, racism and sexism are interlinked in Western culture through the common idea of Othering, as are nationalism and racism, for example through the common ground of essentialism, which is why all these ideas cannot be clearly separated from one another. This thesis aims to remedy such oversights by detailing the various ways in which the ideologies found in the game are dependent on each other and can be traced back to imperialism. They will also be outlined briefly, yet no further than to the extent within which the game analysis will make use of them. The concepts to be introduced and interlinked will be imperialism and colonialism, Othering, determinism, teleology, essentialism, nationalism, the ecological fallacy, the Enlightenment, Orientalism, exoticism, Euro- centrism, sexism, and meta-narratives. Imperialism and colonialism present the overarching ideologies to which the other concepts can be put in relation. These terms are better explained through the underlying ideas explained below, but some general understanding and distinction needs to be put in place beforehand: According to Bill Ashcroft's (1999:122) definition, developed from Edward Said's interpretations, “imperialism refers to the formation of an empire [...], a process distinct from colonialism [...]”, which instead emphasizes the foundation of colonies. This already shows that while these ideologies seem distinct by name, they actually build on each other. A global empire would require initial colonies, and settlements that fly the flag of distant lands herald the expansion of an empire. The following concepts will reveal that these two main ideologies can more easily be distinguished by tendencies rather than absolutes, and by acknowledging that they are used to describe specific actions and phenomena, not to universally label an entire relation. While the thesis will frequently summarize the two under the term of imperialism for the sake of brevity, it will distinguish them by how power is used, if necessary: While imperialism will be used to describe the overt display of power through violent expansion, colonialism will refer to the more subtle empowering of hierarchies that facilitate exploitation. One of the central tools of imperialism and colonialism alike is the representation of the subaltern, with the purpose of arguing a hierarchy that legitimizes future actions against them, for example by dehumanizing the victims, by naturalizing their culture, or by weaving their desired fate into the net of romanticized manifest destiny. This is best exemplified through the binary oppositions that the colonization of the Americas opened

11 up between the Westerners and the natives, painting the colonized peoples as sub- humans or even animals:

“ Western Americas clothed naked fashion adornment labour leisure ethics pleasure masculine feminine reason emotion culture nature” (Crang, 1999:63)

This table, derived from Michel de Certeau's (1988:228) opposition of the “civilized” to the “primitive”, already shows manifestations of several relevant concepts, like sexism/feminism (masculine vs feminine), the Enlightenment (reason vs emotion, ethics vs pleasure) and essentialism (culture vs nature). It is through the revelation of these binary contrasts in represented cultures that imperialist and colonialist ideologies can best be uncovered. Binary oppositions projected onto cultures, as those pictured above, are the result of Othering, “whereby the 'self' is defined in relation to the characteristics of an 'Other' culture.” (Crang, 1999:59) It describes the process of painting the foreign as inherently different, and turning it into a canvas on which to unload the fears, burdens, and desires that one's own identity intends to exclude from its self-image. An additional artifact of Othering is thinking in clear-cut, often binary patterns that do not allow for a third space in-between. This gap is filled with Homi K. Bhabha's concept of hybridity, which “suggests that the result of modern history is vast numbers of people 'between' cultures […].” (Crang, 1999:175) Individuals like these defy standard categorization, which may lead to Othering and exclusion from all groups, rather than inclusion into any groups with which they share common attributes, which shows the overpowering impact of projection. It must also be pointed out that in general terms, “the Other […] is essential to meaning”, because “[m]eaning arises through the 'difference' between the participants in any dialogue.” (Hall, 2013:225) It is therefore never the mere concept of an Other alone, but the projection of said Other onto real ethnic groups, cultures, and nations that enters imperialist and colonialist territory. One complex tool used to project dependencies onto an Other is determinism, which describes “[a]pproaches which seek to find a single cause (or more rarely a small

12 number) for events […].” (Crang, 1999:189) Due to their simplifying nature, determinist concepts become increasingly harmful the more complex the subject matter they aim to explain becomes. Possibly the most famous representative and also the most relevant to this thesis is environmental determinism, an inherently racist tool designed for the forging of imperialist hierarchies, as Crang (1999:15), describes:

“This school saw the development of cultures as a process of human adaptation to basically climatic factors. […] [I]t suggested the northern hemisphere temperate regions had 'naturally' achieved the greatest cultural and economic development because the climate forced the populace to work, but rewarded such labor – unlike the tropics, where it suggested people had not needed to labour, and the extreme north where existence was so marginal the possibilities for accumulating wealth were limited. As such it formed a self-serving justification for European imperialism […].”

To such effect, environmental determinism is a so-called “legitimation theory”, as it only “served to legitimate the social, political, and economic ambitions of certain social formations.” (Mitchell, 2005:18) It not only naturalized the idea of an “imperial struggle for world domination” (Peet, 1985:310) in the first place, but also preemptively blessed all actions that led there. This legitimizing function marries the supposedly secular determinism closely to the originally more religious concept of teleology, which describes a “directed story where the predetermined end-point guides the interpretation of prior events. […] [I]t applies to theories that posit a generally historical evolution towards an inevitable end-state.” (Crang, 1999:194) A prominent U.S. American example would be the concept of manifest destiny, whereby functional memory selects and interprets historical events as the manifestations of an inevitable destiny steering history towards itself. Both determinism and teleology draw from the confusion of culture and nature, which they share with the concept of essentialism, “[t]he view that there are essential properties which define what something is, and without which it could not be what it is.” (Edgar, 2008:113-114) Crang (1999:190) describes essentialisms as “interpretations that seek to ascribe a fundamental and unchanging core value to something. [...] These core elements are not seen as negotiable or contestable.” Because “culture is the opposite of nature” (Mitchell, 2005:14), so-called “[n]aturalization” (Hall, 2013:234) presents the most egregiously imperialist form of essentialism, as it ascribes a natural core to a cultural phenomenon, most often a foreign ethnicity, in order to present a

13 perceived difference as natural and legitimize previously unethical means. While ethnic essentialism attempts to naturalize links between a set of core values and an arbitrary group of people, ethnic nationalism links an arbitrary group of people to a geographical space in an attempt to legitimize not only the claim on that space, but also strengthen the unity of the individuals within said group through the construction of 'home' and 'belonging': “Such ethnic nationalism identifies culture with a space and the space with a people – forming a circular logic whereby one's right to belong to a space is seen as dependent on possessing the culture that is also used to identify the territory.” (Crang, 1999:162) Ethnic nationalism represents another legitimation theory that aims to find an arbitrary fixed point in history in order to allow for Othering and exclusion on the supposed basis of the justifying past, where the authentic truth was perceived as reality. Said authentic truth is of course a desired state that would put the proponents of the theory on the top of a hierarchy. Ethnic nationalism can therefore be combined with essentialism to persuasive effect when supported by the belief in tradition, i.e. the justifying power of the “taken for granted” (Hall, 2016:138), as shall be outlined through this Fox News opinion piece on the United States' official recognition of Jerusalem as the capital of Israel in December 2017:

“President Trump has commented that his decision is 'recognition of reality.' [...] [A]ncient Israel [...] existed in the very place where modern Israel exists today. [...] By recognizing Jerusalem as Israel’s capital, President Trump is affirming the Jewish people’s history. [...] The Jewish people have in fact lived in their land of Israel for more than 3.000 [sic] years and took possession of the city of Jerusalem itself almost exactly 3,000 years ago. They have lived there continuously, even though they have not always ruled over their own land. Therefore, Israel’s legitimate claims to the land and to the city of Jerusalem itself should be accepted [...].” (Evans, 2017, italics mine)

Notice the circular logic of ethnic nationalism, where the text argues for “Israel's” claim over Jerusalem through prefacing the statement with arguments on “the Jewish people”'s claim over Jerusalem, effectively equating the country with a specific ethnic group, which leads to the literal statement that (all of) Israel should be owned by the Jewish people, because the Jewish people are those that own Israel. The essentialist rhetoric is more covertly expressed through “the Jewish people” and “they”, which assumes a unified ethnic group in the first place, the common unchanging core features of which have supposedly existed for three millennia. Therefore, only with the help of essentialism can ethnic nationalism fabricate continuity between history and today, even

14 to the extent of spanning thousands of years between the supposed reality of authentic truth and the present. Due to the neatly categorized world view that ethnic nationalism propagates, it stands in competition with globalizing trends that tend to slowly dissolve the borders that manifest the nationalist discourse. This results in increasing conservativism in order to defend the perceived 'purity' against 'contamination' from outside, that seemingly threatens the nationalist group unity as well as the essentialist core values of its members: “Seeing culture linked to identity in this way thus animates, and is animated by, a series of fears. This is then an identity of retrenchment rather than expansion – in contrast to the colonial era […]. “ (Crang, 1999:162-163) 'Isolationism', as this thesis will proceed to refer to this phenomenon, is thus the postcolonial face of imperialism, driven by fears of an impure third space. Both essentialism and ethnic nationalism dwell on the so-called “ecological fallacy, assuming what applies to the group as a whole applies to each member.” (Crang, 1999:21, italics mine) As an example, if a country's ranking in the World Happiness Report (Helliwell, 2018) decreases by 10%, this does not mean that all citizens of that nation rated their lives as 10% less satisfactory than the previous year. Factors like age or class stratify the demographic into subgroups with distinct conditions, down to individual differences. A high-income class making up 50% of a hypothetical population may have experienced a 20% happier year while the low-income class felt 40% more unsatisfied. Essentialism and ethnic nationalism look past these ruptures within a group in order to maintain clear categories. The trust in categorization in order to facilitate understanding can be traced back to one of the most central forces in the web of imperialist and colonialist ideologies, the discourse of the Enlightenment, which remains the dominant underpinning of many discourses today, most famously that of the self-governed Subject. The Enlightenment “implies a change in outlook on the world where science was seen as the key to demystifying the world, and the world was believed to be explicable by rational thought. [...] [A]lthough Enlightenment projects spoke of universal truths they were often based on the experience of white, male European scientists.” (Crang, 1999:190) While some definitions of this school of thought, such as its dominant “faith in the ability of reason” (Edgar, 2008:109) emanate an air of innocence even by today's standards, its inherent imperialism arises through the connection between 'understanding' and 'controlling'. The Enlightenment served as the overarching

15 legitimation theory of all theories, providing scientists with the confidence in their empirical knowledge, with which they could categorize and thus conquer the world. This made it an essential tool to imperialism, allowing man to “control and master the earth […].” (Crang, 1999:104) Humans create meaning through difference (Hall, 2013:225), difference requires separation, which in turn creates categories. The creation of categories inevitably results in the creation of hierarchies, and hierarchies literally put one thing on top of a list of others. Therefore, the producers of knowledge, and thus hierarchies, are biased to interpret their empirical findings in a way that favors their own position within them, compared to the inferior Other. This legitimation of power is best observed in the imperialist Othering of Africa as the 'barbaric' counterpart to the 'civilized' Europe, forming the two ends of the ethnic “evolutionary scale” (Hall, 2013:229) that the Enlightenment allowed for. This blind trust in science as the undoubted motor of good in the world helped justify even the most inhumane actions, as long as they were carried out under the disguise of supposed rationality: “Lyotard and Bauman, to name but two, have linked the atrocities and excesses of the twentieth century (for example, Auschwitz, the Gulag Archipelago, the nuclear build-up) to the overweening hubris of the Enlightenment's prediction of an emancipatory triumph of reason and virtue.” (Edgar, 2008:271-272) The imperialist potential of the Enlightenment, as it constructs supposedly objective knowledge of the Other, is best exemplified by the inner workings and lasting effects of Orientalism. According to its founder Edward Said (2016:37-38), this concept describes “a sovereign Western consciousness out of whose unchallenged centrality an Oriental world emerged, […] according to a detailed logic governed not simply by empirical reality but by a battery of desires, repressions, investments, and projections.” Orientalism thus presents a more specific case of Western Othering (“desires, repressions, investments, and projections”) supported by the Enlightenment (“empirical reality”) to construct a supposed reality of the unified, spatially and diachronically consistent Orient through observing 'it' from the outside. However, “the 'Orient' exists only through that gaze.” (Crang, 1999:61) According to Hall (2013:250), this “racialized knowledge” is then used to affirm and perpetuate imperialist hierarchies that enforces the Orient's perceived inferiority. Among these hierarchies, the opposition of future over past is the most prevalent one: “The Occident defined itself as progressive, in the sense of making history and changing the world, while the East was defined as static and timeless. [...] Europe shapes the future, while the East can only experience

16 repetitions.” (Crang, 1999:66) Where Othering describes the securing of an identity through projection, exoticism explains how this Othering is used to justify economic exploitation in regards to foreign, so-called 'exotic' goods: “[T]he exotic, the foreign, increasingly gained, throughout the empire, the connotations of a stimulating […] difference […] with which the domestic could be (safely) spiced. The key conception here is the introduction of the exotic from abroad into a domestic economy.” (Ashcroft, 1999:94) Aside from exploitation, the trading of exotic goods also served to turn the potentially dangerous because discourse-challenging foreign into a literal object that could be bought, owned and controlled, turning “each land and people into just another commodity […].” (Crang, 1999:123) Orientalism and exoticism are both tied to a Western world view that does not recognize its own bias and therefore assumes its views to be universal. This ideology, named Euro-centrism, describes “[t]he conscious or unconscious process by which Europe and European cultural assumptions are constructed as, or assumed to be, the normal, the natural or the universal. [...] Orientalism examines the ways in which Euro- centrism […] actually produces other cultures.” (Ashcroft, 1999:90-91) It needs to be highlighted that European cultural assumptions extend beyond the geographical reality that is Europe. 'European' culture equates to the broad term of Western culture, which most importantly also includes the majority of cultural biases found in North America as well as those of many other communities around the globe that are similarly rooted in European world views. They usually share a similar identity supported by similar projections onto Other cultures, while also employing a similar set of symbols to produce meaning. Since imperialism and colonialism necessarily create an Other outside of one's own culture, the theories they employ also aid in reinforcing the borders to the Other gender, the feminine. Therefore, they can also be revealed from the viewpoint of feminism in observing their inevitable sexism: “[T]he terms used to make the colonised peoples sound subordinate were heavily gendered and normally used to justify and perpetuate the subordinate status of women.” (Crang, 1999:76) This celebration of patriarchy even extended beyond the perception of women to that of civilization itself, when deemed necessary for the argument: “Patriots, such as Baden-Powell, were concerned that civilisation lead to decadence, a 'softening' of men [...]. So he turned to the frontier for a model of manhood […] equipped to rule the empire.” (Crang, 1999:73-74) This marries

17 sexism to the very essence of imperialism, while also heralding its downfall upon the end of the colonial era. Hall (2016:174-175) specifically links the “struggle for women's rights” to the collapse of colonial empires at the beginning of the 20th century, rendering emancipation as the result of the fight over the hegemonic power vacuum left by the established and highly gendered discourses of the dying imperial age. The relevant concepts shall be concluded with the all-encompassing idea of meta- narratives. Put forth by philosophers like Jean François Lyotard and Ludwig Wittgenstein (Crang, 1999:182), this theory aims to give a name to ostensibly definitive narratives that are deemed unfit to properly explain the postmodern complex reality of “competing discourses” (Mitchell, 2005:58). Also known as “grand narratives” (Edgar, 2008:151), they present “overarching explanations that claim to speak for all people; that claim to be universal and not 'particular'; that claim not to be bounded in a language game unlike the cultures they comment upon.” (Crang, 1999:182) These narratives can seek definitive explanations in all fields of life, like the Marxist meta-narrative of capitalism and class, the industrial meta-narrative of technological progress, or even the mere general conception of time as a linear progression through history that brings with itself an inevitable continuous improvement as problems are overcome one by one. A meta-narrative inherently combines some of the most egregious imperialist ideologies: It lays universal claim on objective knowledge while also creating an Other by excluding all other discourses, as it does not perceive itself as one. It presents a pure form of taking ideology for granted and equating it with nature, finding a singular determinist and undebatable cause for the events of history, while also providing a teleological, inevitable outlook into the future. Its empiricist foundation calls upon the Enlightenment to legitimize its claims through the sheer form of its approach, which often helps to reinforce existing divides in society by painting reconciliation as impossible by nature. It is therefore the foundation of meta-narratives upon which imperialism thrives best.

5 Overview and categorization of Civilization 5

This chapter will first outline the premise, goals, rules, and mechanics of Civ 5, on the basis of which it will then categorize the game according to academic terminology. Descriptions of goals, rules, and mechanics will not be satisfied with merely explaining the game's logic, as this would result in a trivial exercise without any context on what

18 these systems amount to in practice. Instead, the explanations will also be used to give insight into some of the more intricate game concepts relevant to the thesis, and even which strategies these procedures tend to motivate.

5.1 Premise and paths to victory

In Civilization 5, the player takes control of a civilization of her choice and leads her people through the ages, in constant competition over territory and resources with civilizations controlled by the AI. Her goal is to be crowned the victor among the competing civilizations, of which there can only be one. There are a total of five paths to victory, all of which can be followed simultaneously, although some benefit more from similar strategies than others. Competing civilizations can and usually do aim for different victories, in which case the civilization to first fulfill all conditions of one victory wins the game. Victory paths do not have to be determined or declared, they merely exist as overarching goals that motivate the actions during a match. Domination victory requires the civilization to control all original capitals, including one's own. This victory requires military action to conquer enemy cities, or threaten them into trading possession over cities against an armistice. It incentivizes the costly and resource-heavy training, maintenance, and technological development of competitive armies, as well as gaining the edge in the science race for access to powerful technologies. Such military might requires consistent access to a mass of resources, while also being unable to rely on trade, as civilizations may turn on frequent warmongers and refuse them diplomatic interactions. This, in turn, makes the pursuit of a Domination Victory also that of a self-sustained empire. Cultural Victory requires the civilization to reach 'influential' cultural pressure over all remaining opposing civilizations. A civilization Y is culturally dominated by a civilization X if Y's culture value is lower than the specific tourism output of X on Y. Tourism is measured independently from culture, but their means of production greatly overlap, which is why this victory requires an early focus on all means that accelerate the growth of culture. Since the touristic pressure on another civilization can be further influenced through specific intercultural relations, Cultural Victory also incentivizes additional diplomatic strategies that boost the multiplication of the civilization-specific touristic pressure. Science Victory requires the civilization to assemble and launch a spacecraft to Alpha

19 Centauri. This victory requires a focus on the output of science, accelerating research, in order to be the first civilization to reach the technologies required to build the four parts of the spaceship, which then require cities with high production values to quickly assemble them. This victory incentivizes strategies that significantly boost science output. It may also prompt a focus on espionage, both defensively and offensively, in order to steal technologies from other civilizations, and on the reverse, to prevent other civilizations from profiting off one's own research. Once all spaceship parts have been built and assembled, victory is achieved automatically. Diplomatic Victory requires the civilization to win the UN vote for World Leader. This victory requires influence over the majority of UN delegates, which can be achieved by a number of means, most effectively, however, through allying with city states, non-competing cities around the map which ally with civilizations against a number of different favors. This strategy usually entails the abuse of the power held in the congress until the World Leader vote is triggered, in order to sow grief and conflict among the adversaries deemed most dangerous to one's own pursuits. Effective strategies to curtail other civilizations' economies, military power, and political relations include a variety of bans, embargos, and taxes. Time Victory is only triggered on the rare occasion that until a certain in-game year, none of the aforementioned victories has been achieved by any of the competing civilizations. This victory creates a 'win-on-points' scenario in order to avoid a stalemate. Upon reaching the predetermined deadline, all civilizations are awarded points on the basis of calculations that – among others – evaluate their territorial, economic, military, cultural, and scientific standing. The civilization with the highest score wins the game.

5.2 Basics on rules, mechanics, and interface

Before a match, the player chooses one of 43 available civilizations that differ in their unique ability, which usually grants bonuses tied to certain mechanics, and sometimes through a unique unit or building as well. Upon starting the match, the player is greeted with a welcome screen that calls upon the player to restore her civilization to its former glory. Each nation starts with a settler unit placed somewhere on the map. Some civilizations have a so-called starting bias, which determines climatic conditions of the area in which the original settler is placed. The settler can be moved, but most often, it

20 is strategically sound to immediately use it, which deletes the unit and creates the original capital at its position. Civ 5's map is constructed through a hexagonal pattern of so-called 'tiles' and is played in turns. The player's civilization always has the first turn, followed by all other civilizations as well as the non-competing city states and the so-called barbarians, a distinct group whose military units spawn from neutral land to attack units and cities nearby. Decisions can only be made during one's own turn, but there is no limit to how long a turn may take. During a turn, the player is provided with a range of intricate mechanics to control her civilization's military, economy, infrastructure, politics, and society. She may also choose to interact in diplomacy with other civilizations, which brings their leaders on screen with a backdrop of their office, throne room, or homeland landscape. The player is also regularly 'forced' to make choices based on unstoppable processes such as the appointment of a new technology to research upon completion of the last. Player decisions usually revolve around the accumulation of desired resources and the unlocking of desired mechanics that aid in the gathering of such resources. Because of their significance to all interaction, they need to be named and explained briefly. There are five types of resources: nation-wide and city-specific resources can be produced infinitely, while strategic, luxury, and bonus resources are bound to their respective tiles and are thus finite. Figure 1 outlines the purposes of these resources, with the dominant first two types represented through their in-game icons.

science - accelerates the research of technologies - used to skip development processes of units and buildings gold - used to upgrade military units - used in trade and bribery - accumulates to trigger a Golden Age period which boosts e d i happiness several beneficial values in one's civilization w - - when negative, it curbs said values and can cause uprisings n o i t

a - accumulates to unlock new Social Policies and Ideology tenets

n culture - counteracts the cultural influence from other civilizations tourism - increases one's cultural influence over other civilizations - accumulates to automatically spawn a Great Prophet, which can faith be used to found, enhance and spread a religion - used to purchase religious units like missionaries and inquisitors

Figure 1

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The player perceives and manages the game world from a slightly angled bird's eye bird's angled slightly a from world game the manages and perceives player The the through progressing by unlocked be can boosts and mechanics Desired bonus luxury strategic city-specific wheat, bison, cotton, silk,cotton, coal, iron, coal, , t , production etc. etc. etc. he view down on the world is framed by an interface, which facilitates the facilitates which interface, an by framed is world the on down view he food - boost the food or production output of the terrain onwhich terrain they ofthe - boost the output foodorproduction - - accelerates the training ofunits andofbuildings construction the training accelerates accelerates the population growth, allowing the city to 'work' city the populationgrowth,allowing the accelerates - required for the production of specific units forthe ofspecific - required production tenets, however, are tied to mutually exclusive trees. exclusive mutually to tied however,are tenets, more tiles in order to reap their benefits their order tomore reap in tiles - raise happiness - raise and wondersand are found As can be seen in seen be can As game's vice versa, implying a round globe.

Image 1

5.3 Categorization

Game studies terminology allows for a categorization of the analyzed gameplay on three levels: game type, game genre, and game mode. There are only two game types, which form the extreme points of a continuum, namely games of emergence, and games of progression. “[E]mergence refers to the aspects of the game that relate to the player making decisions, whereas progression refers to the goals and sub-goals of the game. Since most games have both rules and goals, most games also combine both progression and emergence […].” (Fernández-Vara, 2015:152) Games of progression thus focus more on enabling the player to 'progress' through the game on a linear, predetermined path, goal by goal, while games of emergence allow the player to choose her own approaches to few, rather general overarching goals, and use the tools given to her in unpredictable ways, which causes the gameplay experience to dynamically 'emerge'. Many scholars have referred to the strategy game genre as prototypical emergent gameplay, such as Dor (2016:276), Juul (2011:73), and Fernández-Vara (2015:152) herself, with the latter explicitly citing Civ 5 as “a clear example of [...] emergence, where the player interacts with a complex game system to achieve a specific goal (become the dominant race or civilization).” (Fernández-Vara, 2015:152)

23 Egenfeldt-Nielsen (2016:18) defines strategy games as “[g]ames focusing on the ability to deal with dynamic priorities, typically in a context of resource shortage. Strategy games may be divided into real-time strategy games and turn-based strategy games.” According to this definition, Civ 5 qualifies as a turn-based strategy game, or short TBS game. Dor (2016:276) even claims that “TBS games reached the pinnacle with Sid Meier's Civilization (MPS Labs, 1991)”, in reference to the start of the series. Finally, the game mode this thesis investigates lets the player compete against the game through the use of artificial intelligence. Fernández-Vara (2015:88-89) calls this “Single Player vs. Game”, which is often simply referred to as single-player, and mostly contrasted with multi-player, which pits several players against each other, or lets them compete against the game together. In conclusion, the object of analysis is a single- player, turn-based strategy game, falling under the games of emergence category.

6 Narratology: surface design

“All cultures tend to make representations of foreign cultures the better to master or in some way control them.” (Said, 1994:120) Naturally, the surface design in Civ 5 is no exception. Its explicit portrayal of real-world cultures and their relations opens the game up to a thorough investigation into the game's representation of said cultures, both overt and subtle. Fernández-Vara (2015:149) claims that the representations in a game help “in creating a mood [and] expressing themes”, which assumes the representations within a game to share some common ground and provide an overall consistent ideology on some or all levels of design. In this case, imperialism and colonialism are assumed to govern this game's representations, as they still govern Western functional memory to this day. However, the advent of postcolonial theory brought with it a public confrontation of colonialist values, which Pethes (2008:69) refers to as subversion, in contrast to an articulation that enforces and perpetuates the already dominant discourses. This dichotomy of functional memory may prove essential in the discerning of the game's surface design. Some articulations may overtly or subtly fall in line with the imperialist mindset, while others could openly attempt to subvert it.

24 6.1 Paratexts and priming

The conditioning of the player's expectations and the world view with which they are expected to enter the game start with the game's title itself. According to Nünning, civilization derived from the Latin 'civilitas', which originally refered merely to the conglomerate of 'cives', citizens, but undertook several semantic changes throughout Western history, first to imply 'politeness', later to mean the same as 'culture', which in turn came to denote 'education', most famously through the writings of Immanuel Kant, one of the fathers of the Enlightenment (Nünning, 2003:21). The name therefore already determines a narrow Euro-centric perception of 'civilization' as the final goal of universal cultural progression, while also peddling the meta-narrative of progression itself. The game's title thus already hints at a common romanticizing thread throughout the game's paratexts, which is best explained through a more traditional example given by Hall (2016:140): “We know the words to the song 'Rule Brittania', but we are unconscious of [...] the [...] imperialist history, the assumptions about global domination and supremacy, the necessary other of other peoples' subordination, which are richly impacted in its simple celebratory resonances.” This innocent mask of romantic celebration is a veil behind which Civ 5's paratexts consistently try to hide the game's imperialist notions, and thus prime the customers to approach the game's representations accordingly.

6.1.1 Announcement trailer

This romanticization is nowhere better observed than in the Civilization V Announcement Trailer (2K, 2010), which was released seven months before release, and published through several outlets as both embedded advertisements and official youtube videos in their own right. Many sentences and phrases in the trailer, uttered by several different voice-overs, immediately introduce the most relevant ideologies through quotes attributed to a variety of historical figures, including, in that order, Indian Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru, U.S. American general Douglas MacArthur, ancient Greek general Themistocles, German Chancellor Otto von Bismarck, Chinese chairman Mao Zedong, and U.S. American politician Eleanor Roosevelt. The selection alone points towards Euro-centrism, as Nehru and Mao are the only two of the six whose nations are

25 not typically counted among the Western world. However, Nehru's quote revolves around India's liberation from Britain's colonial suppression, which, in the tradition of Orientalism, portrays India yet again through the Western gaze. Most obviously, the U.S. are represented twice, and round off the trailer with Eleanor Roosevelt talking over the reveal of the game's title with a quote on believing in the beauty of one's dreams. The quotes are not obviously presented as citations. Each has their own unique voice actor, but no actual sources or names are given, which enables the trailer to show culturally unrelated, but thematically related material in the background. This might be seen positively as it draws connections between cultures, but it also lets a single, mostly Western voice speak for an unrelated culture, which lays claim to universal knowledge. Interestingly, the accompanying clips all depict historical periods that are long gone: ancient Egypt, Vikings, the early Ottoman empire, and medieval Japan. This allows for visually more distinct and immediately recognizable cultures, but supports a form of ethnic nationalism that marries nations to their supposed heydays. The quotes themselves also communicate familiar ideologies. Nehru speaks of the “soul of a nation, long suppressed, [that] finds utterance.” (2K, 2010, 0:20-0:24) This constitutes the idea of an essentialist core to a culture, which cannot be manipulated, just “suppressed”. Themistocles exclaims: “I know how to raise a small and obscure city to glory and greatness, whereto all kindred of the earth will pilgrim.” (2K, 2010, 0:42- 0:51) This creates a hierarchy of nations, judging their cultures by the influence they have over others. This hint at the Cultural Victory path is followed by an allusion to the Domination Victory path, through Bismarck's famous quote: “The great questions of the day will not be settled by means of speeches and majority decisions, but by iron and blood.” (2K, 2010, 0:53-1:02) Not only is this quote a child of the imperial era, but the “iron and blood” phrase has arguably become a symbol for extremist nationalism ever since.

6.1.2 Developer interview

After the game's announcement, its ideologies were further perpetuated through developer interviews. In one such interview in June 2010, the game's producer Dennis Shirk emphasized what he believed the game's strengths would be. His promotion of the game can be broken down to three core arguments: the game's supposed historical accuracy, the overhauled military gameplay, and the Sid Meier legacy. Interviewer

26 Remo (2010) points out that “Civ is more about revisionism”, but that the historical theme brings with itself a “level of accountability”, to which Shirk replies: “[W]e always have to put gameplay above historical accuracy, but we always want to start out at a square that's accurate.” He later elaborates in reference to leaders: “We're not trying to keep people absolutely accurate. [...] [T]hat's part of what makes Civ fun.” (Remo, 2010) This contradictory stance hints at one of the game's biggest issues: It represents, but also allows the player to warp and create representation through its emergent gameplay, thus creating emergent storytelling that would be everything but accurate. Shirk repeatedly emphasizes the game's accuracy, calling the series a “historical simulation” with the intent to create a “believable, real world” and a “serious place”, even lauding the player community's feedback on “incorrect” (Remo, 2010) entries in previous games' Civilopedias, which are in-game lexica that roughly outline the historical accounts on entities in the game. Yet, since gameplay is king, “[p]eople still have their civs be whatever they want it to be”, again emphasizing the player's creative freedom, which directly goes against the aforementioned accuracy. Said freedom clashes with yet another premise, namely that “Sid [Meier] gave each Civ [sic, actually refers to a specific 'civ', not a game in the series] a unique flavor.” (Remo, 2010) This contradiction of starting and shaping a culture from zero, which would imply freedom, while also choosing a restrictive, preset “flavor”, will be taken up again in the Ludology chapter under the name of the Ex Nihilo Paradox. The obsession with accuracy highlights another problem: “Claiming to speak from nowhere for everywhere has often meant speaking from the position of white, Western man.” (Crang, 1999:77) Hall (2013:39) explains why universal knowledge on discourse is impossible: “This subject of discourse cannot be outside discourse because it must be subjected to discourse.” In the game, however, the Western account of history constitutes the universal truth, while everything else is mere fiction. In a few cases, Shirk's excitement about new features even reveals some essentialist understandings of 'accuracy', e.g. as he speaks about the new leader screens: “When you're playing Montezuma, there's fire, and arm-waving – he's got to be able to bring the character forward.” (Remo, 2010) The idea of accuracy in this case, however, is built solely on the basis of infering Montezuma's “character” from the colonialist picture of the Other. Fire and exaggerated gesturing conjure up images of the animalistic savage as the binary opposite to the civilized white man. It is important to note that Civ 5's Montezuma is not Montezuma II who fought the Spanish invaders, but Montezuma I,

27 someone of which there is no Western account at all, let alone a postcolonial one. Next to accuracy, Shirk stresses the importance of many overhauls to the Civilization formula, but most importantly, the military. “We've showed this overwhelming military game in our public demonstrations, but the peaceful players, the cultural players, and the science players are all going to be able to play just as easily without having to focus on the combat game.” (Remo, 2010) The heavily advertised improvements to combat, however, as well as the fact that the game's PR on multiple accounts feels the need to stress that players will not have to focus on it, not only exposes the Domination Victory path as one of the central ones, but also that the target demographic expects this path to take center stage. The expansions Gods and Kings (2012) and Brave New World (2013) focused mainly on overhauling the other victories, e.g. by reintroducing religion to the series, but the initial focus on the “military game” remains. Shirk even calls the changes to the game's combat “the most interesting.” (Remo, 2010) The ludic freedom that this focus propagates by always offering a sword next to the pen romanticizes the heavy imperialist notions of enforcing power over others not through hegemony, but brute force. The third marked focus of the interview is the genius cult surrounding Sid Meier, which stands in the way of building the community's faith in the new lead designer Jon Shafer. Shirk tries to solve this by painting Meier as the “executive producer” who is “instrumental to everything we do” and has “his hands pretty thoroughly in everything [...]” by testing the game in various stages and giving “very frequent” (Remo, 2010) feedback. He then portrays Shafer as someone who based his decisions on Meier's overarching design philosophy: “Jon wanted that same flavor.” (Remo, 2010) Sid Meier is thus used merely as a seal of approval, he remains in the background, and is not counted among the developers. This legitimizes the represented ideologies from the very start, just through the name itself, while not entering the sphere of the personal, a human face given to the ideologies, which would lower their impact, now exposed as the brainchild of a man rather than the impersonal account of objective truths. It also frames the entire game with a sentiment of theology, the precursor to teleology, whereby the assumption of an impersonal entity lending guidance to those actually in charge grants legitimacy to everything the game does.

28 6.1.3 Review and marketing

One day before release, video game website IGN released a review echoing similar ideas. While the review does explain the importance of the other victory paths, most prominently the cultural one, it also leads with the headline: “A game that's optimized for the uncivilized”, stating: “My Iroquois nation […] slowly but surely conquered the Americans and other European nations, subduing them to my rule... or simply burning their once-haughty nations to ashes. This is what Civilization V is all about.” (Gallegos, 2010) That last phrase in particular stresses that the shortcomings of the original release were not only advertised as forgivable, but to be embraced, seeing as Gallegos still awarded the game 9 out of 10 points on IGN's rating scale. While the release of the expansions mostly remedied said shortcomings, however, the advertisement texts for the 'Complete Edition', which includes all expansions, still first and foremost celebrates the violent imperialism that was prevalent in the original release. The back of the box calls on the player to “wage war by land, sea, and air, conduct diplomacy and espionage, establish religious beliefs, and discover new technologies in [her] quest to build the most powerful empire the world has ever known.” This short text alone leads and ends with concepts of overt imperialism. The five bullet points below also lead with “huge battles”, while a more peaceful, although equally important in-game feature like “international trade” is pushed to second-to-last place. Similarly, Ford (2016) points out that “the first line of the game’s description on Steam challenges players to 'become Ruler of the World […]'.” This prevalence of the concept of war and the reliance on imperialist ideas to make sense of peaceful interactions can also be explained through the strategy genre itself. Dor (2016:275) claims that “[u]sually, […] strategy games refer to military-themed computer games where the player takes the role of a commander and needs to gather resources to summon new military units.” Civ 5 may be a special case that opens up avenues for more peaceful approaches, yet it advertises itself as belonging to the 4X- strategy genre, which even finds allusion in the developers' company name Firaxis Games. Civ 5 lead designer Jon Shafer (2013, Strategy) explains that “[a] moniker often used for empire builders is '4X', for exploration, expansion, exploitation and extermination.” The imperialist implications are clear, since an empire explores the lands of which it deems its inhabitants unworthy, expands onto said land, exploits it and exterminates all resistance. It is nigh-on impossible for a hypothetical consumer seeking

29 information on Civ 5 to avoid this genre name, which in turn confirms that all paratexts leading up to the purchase of Civ 5 advertise the game as a romanticized imperialist playground.

6.2 Civilizations and leaders

Ideology revolves around inclusion and exclusion: “[W]hen designers include and exclude particular ethnicities within game action, the subtext of their design choices carries ideological weight.” (Hayse, 2016:443) Representation thus starts with the variety of playable civilizations on offer. The game's Euro-centrism can be spotted immediately when categorizing the available nations by continent, as can be seen in Figure 2.

continent civilizations present nation(s) historical nation(s) Europe 15 FRANCE CELTS (Gauls) America 7 GERMANY Teutons Asia 13 Italy ROME/ Africa 6 BYZANTINE EMPIRE/ Oceania 2 VENICE Turkey OTTOMAN EMPIRE Figure 2 Iraq/Kuwait ASSYRIA/ BABYLONIA Tunisia CARTHAGE Peru INCA Mexico AZTECS/ MAYA Iran PERSIA Thailand SIAM North/South Korea KOREA Mali SONGHAI South Africa ZULU

Figure 3

The most striking contrast is the representation of Europe through 15 nations in total, while Africa, a culturally diverse continent almost three times as large, is represented

30 through less than half as many civilizations. The same can be said for America, offering an immense variety of native peoples, but only settling for five, next to the United States and Brazil. Figure 3 highlights another problem that Hayse (2016:446) hints at by acknowledging that “Civilization [...] favors [...] an ethnocentric view of non- industrialized cultures […].” Civ 5 reserves a special form of Othering against all cultures deemed technologically less advanced than Western cultures. The ties to both ethnicity and space reveal tendencies of essentialism as well as environmental determinism. Hayse fails to recognize, however, that the imperialist Othering through the mere visual, technologically inferior depiction of cultures like the Maya, Aztecs or Zulu is just the tip of the iceberg. Instead, representation starts with dividing the cultural continuum of the world geographically and chronologically and then decide which 'cultures' to include in the first place. Figure 3 exercises one aspect of this by contrasting a selection of presently recognized countries to historical nation states and cultures that occupied a similar space in the past, and marking those included in Civ 5 through capital letters. This reveals a Euro-centric world view that favors the representation of present-day Western nations over historical ones, while also favoring the historical Orientalist Western view of non-European nations over modern representations of their current nation states. Prototypical European countries like Germany and France are included in the game, while additionally, France's historical identity, the Gauls, are arguably represented through the Celts. Italy marks a special case, where the modern nation itself was supposedly excluded due to the inclusion of three corresponding civilizations already in its place, as Venice, the Roman, and the Byzantine empire mark important items in the functional memory of Europe. This classicist and Christian view on history also explains the inclusion of Carthage over Tunisia, the Ottoman Empire over Turkey, Persia over Iran, and Assyria and Babylonia over Iraq and Kuwait. The colonialist view, on the other hand, governs the inclusion of Siam, the Inca, Maya, Aztecs, and the Zulu over their respective modern counterparts. Thus, the inclusion of certain cultures alone shows the biased perspective of Western functional memory, rather than the functional memories of the represented cultures themselves. The exclusion of South Africa in favor of the Zulu in particular marks a curious choice. Not only does it exclude an entire continent's economically strongest country, but could also have provided a fitting leader, deeply ingrained in both Western and South African functional memory, with Nelson

31 Mandela. Thus, a symbol of colonial war was chosen over a symbol of postcolonial reconciliation. The choice of represented leaders is equally telling. Their entries in the game's Civilopedia quickly show a trend towards certain skills and traits that the game presents as most valuable for leadership: Trust in and funding of 'science' is often praised to emphasize virtues of the Enlightenment. A prosperous era is often inexplicably linked to the leader, implying a teleological idea by which he or she was destined for their position from the very start. A long reign, often coupled with the founding or unification of a nation or an empire, as well as 'stability', are repeatedly stressed, upholding the values of unity and consistency, and thus nationalism. Leaders are also frequently lauded for expanding their nation's realm, which inherently promotes the very basis of imperialism, as does the celebration of their military achievements. The imperialist mindset is only subverted through leaders valued for their fight against oppression, and to some extent through those celebrated for their cunning diplomatic skills. Most relevant, however, are two kinds of leaders: The ones chosen because of an obvious Euro-centric view, and those chosen to subvert the established narratives. Arabia's Harun al-Rashid, Polynesia's Kamehameha, Spain's Isabella, and the Shoshone chief Pocatello are the most striking examples of leaders chosen because of their importance to the functional memory of a nation other than their own. Al-Rashid's palace provided setting and characters for the tales of One Thousand and One Nights, which were first translated into French “as a substitute for traveling to the Orient and actually seeing its peoples in their own lands [...]” (Mahdi, 1995:21) and thus gave birth to modern Orientalism itself (Scholz, 2002:9), shaping the Western view of Arabia to this day. Kamehameha, in turn, is tied to U.S. American history due to his reign over Hawaii. Isabella is equally tied to the U.S. as she was the one who funded Columbus' voyage that led to the discovery of the American continent and thus facilitated its invasion and the foundation of the United States. Pocatello, in contrast, is tied to U.S. history because of his wars against said invading force, and was thus chosen over leaders from before 'The Discovery'. The setting sun in his leader screen emphasizes the teleology of a nation facing its unavoidable doom, enforcing the manifest destiny narrative. Some leader choices subvert patriarchal expectations. Only eight of the 43 leaders are female, although some of them were not only chosen in spite of a more established narrative on offer, but their Civilopedia entries openly discuss them as emancipatory

32 figures enduring the continuous challenge because of their gender. Theodora I was chosen over her husband, Justinian I, emperor of the Byzantine empire, and similarly, Wu-Zetian was chosen as China's representative, in spite – or because – of the otherwise all-male list of influential emperors. This attempts to openly counter the imperialist narrative by harming its inherent sexism. When it comes to the leaders' actual portrayal, the most striking undercurrent is not how the leaders themselves are designed, but in which setting they are shown. Here, it immediately becomes apparent that leaders of cultures mostly known for their subjection in Western imperialism are often not shown in their throne rooms, offices, or even homes, but outside, which hurts their credibility as civilized politicians, most often to the backdrop of a picturesque unharmed landscape, ready to be 'explored' and exploited. This becomes most apparent with the Shoshone, the Iroquois, Indonesia, Polynesia, India, Morocco, and the Zulu. Image 2 showcases the representations of the 'civilized' and the 'primitive' by contrasting the leader screen of Germany's Otto von Bismarck (1) with that of the Shoshone leader Pocatello (2).

Image 2

6.3 Universal terminology and visualizations

The concept of universality in Civ 5 is best exemplified by the existence of so-called barbarian 'encampments', colored red, which are spawned randomly in areas not owned by any civilization or city state, and which only produce military units that attack cities and pillage their 'worked' tiles. The imperialism in this representation does, at its core, not originate from the portrayal of the barbarians as a “mindless hindrance to the business of empire-building”, as Ford (2016) claims, but actually from the fact that they appear and behave the same to all cultures and are thus referred to by all competing civilizations as 'barbarians' in the first place. The presentation of barbarians as a unified, naturally distinct entity alone, no matter which cultural perspective the player assumes,

33 marks the manifestation of an imperialist perception, purely by the game's surface design. Barbarians are just one example of how the game manifests the idea of universal knowledge while only speaking from the perspective of a specific culture. The universalization of a European world view and norm extends to the portrayal and naming of all entities within the game, as it stems from an all-encompassing ideology: “[I]mperialism was marked out by a planetary consciousness. All the world was put into typologies, hierarchies and subdivisions according to a Western conceptual map.” (Crang, 1999:78) Thus, different civilizations share, for example, the same base buildings, units and technologies, consistent in their looks and names not only across all cultures, but also across all eras. The ideological bias of universality becomes especially apparent with religious units, such as missionaries and inquisitors, that can be built even when their respective religion does, in reality, not feature these Christian concepts as prominently, as for example Buddhism. Missionaries in particular represent a deeply imperialist strategy (Crang, 1999:71). Once again, Euro-centrism starts where 'religions' were recognized as such and chosen to be included in the game, rather than through their Euro-centric portrayal after the fact. Although Civ 5 allows for the invention of custom religions, a basic pool of 13 traditional religions is provided. While all of them fit Geertz's (2000:89) definition of religion as merely “symbolic of some transcendent truths”, the game forces them into a much tighter corset, even on the surface level alone. Every religion needs a name and a symbol, they are assigned a Holy City, and they all need Great Prophets to thrive. Even the symbols used for these entities only draw from Christian symbolism: Great Prophets, for example, are depicted as white men with beards, a tunic, and a staff, conjuring up imagery of Charlton Heston in The Ten Commandments (DeMille, 1956, 3:14:16), as seen in Image 3, comparing the film's depiction of Moses (1) to the Great Prophet's unit picture (2). Simlarly, the symbol for the faith resource, represented by a white dove with an olive branch, frames religious faith exclusively as that of Noah in the God of Christianity and Judaism. This focus on the Christian concept also explains why out of the 13 religions, three are just denominations of Christianity: Catholicism, Protestantism, and Eastern Orthodoxy.

34 Image 3

Civ 5's most notable and telling universal truth, however, is the representation of time through the interface. The first naturalization lies in counting time along a linear scale, following the Western concept, rather than allowing for culturally dependent systems like a circular perception of time seen in e.g. the Mayan or Chinese calendars. In his blog, Shafer (2012, Abstraction) explains that the specific year labels were implemented “to inject a sense of progressing through history […].” The meta-narrative of progress, however, starts with the concept of linear time itself. It is further enforced through the logarithmic calculation, as the more turns have passed, the fewer years pass with each turn. Thus, as the progression of time slows down, progress per year accelerates, articulating progress of time to technological and cultural progression. The final Euro- centric assumption in the portrayal of time is the universal use of the Gregorian calendar, denoting the starting year at 5000 BC long before any religion has been founded to anchor time in the supposed birth year of its messiah, or even before any technology has been developed to determine years this accurately. This calculation never changes, even when the player's civilization adopts a religion with another calculation of time, like Islam. The strict representation of time facilitates other notions that help the imperialist persuasion. It falls in line with some of Ford's findings, which show that Civ 5 forbids access to the world's past before the player's arrival. While real imperialism had to erase existing history, Civ 5 can manifest this perception as reality by starting at a “position that begins with obscurity.” (Ford, 2016) In the same vein as Ford's claims, time counts teleologically forward, instead of continuing a past history, which effectively hands the player a blank canvas. Additionally, the year labels turn the player's decisions into major events in history, which semantically supports her strong ludic role. This can lead to

35 seemingly innocent oddities, as Shafer (2012, Abstraction) describes: “[T]here’s no way it would take 50 years to get from New York to Boston no matter how slow you walked.” These harmless artifacts lose their innocence, however, when two nations are officially at war with one another over the time span of several hundred years.

6.4 Natural, National, and World Wonders

A central aspect of Civ 5 are so-called 'wonders'. These can be Natural Wonders, which are found on specific tiles around the map, or constructed wonders, which are either National Wonders and thus generic, allowing every civilization to build them simultaneously, or unique World Wonders and thus recognizable symbols of real-world history, canceling other civilizations out of their construction upon completing them. Wonders provide large boosts and sometimes unique mechanics to their owners, which is why attention needs to be drawn to their surface design as well. 17 Natural Wonders can be found through exploration. At first glance, the represented continents, as shown in Figure 4, appear equally distributed across the globe, yet a closer look into certain in- and exclusions reveals a strong Western bias: The list features wonders from ten nations, however, three sites alone are from the U.S. In contrast, China for example is only present with Mount Kailash, despite the many unique items that Chinese geography could have provided, like Jiuzhaigou National Park, Mount Sanqing, or the South China Karst, all of which are recognized UN world heritage sites (Rössler, 2018). This imbalance is further marked by the presence of three mythical, non-existent 'wonders' that reached fame through tales of European explorers and treasure hunters, and romanticized the exploitation they encouraged: El Dorado, The Fountain of Youth, and King Solomon's Mines. All of the remaining existing Natural Wonders, except for Mount Kailash and Mount Fuji, are in some way tied to the discovery through Western explorers and colonizers as well, or are otherwise bound to Western culture, like Mount Sinai. The 46 World Wonders reveal the imperialist mindset first and foremost through Euro-centrism, as laid out by Figure 5. However, the ideological bias reaches even deeper, as a more detailed investigation into the selection of wonders and the subsequent representation of their eras shall show. Out of the 14 wonders from the Ancient and Classical Era, eight are from ancient Greece. The relevance to Western memory is emphasized through elisions that confirm an expected familiarity from the

36 consumer: The Great Library [of Alexandria], the Colossus [of Rhodes], the Great Lighthouse [of Pharos], and the Oracle [of Delphi]. This stands in contrast to e.g. The Great Mosque of Djenne from the Medieval Era, which assumes a need for clarification, precisely because it is not European. In addition, the selection of Greek wonders suggests peaceful values of religion, science, and trade, while the only two Chinese wonders in the Classical Era are the Great Wall and the Terracotta Army, both of which paint Chinese culture as revolving around its military, whereas ancient Greece's military power is left unrepresented.

World Wonders by era e n l l c l o t a a i a n n c i t n i r v a c r a i e t e s e

Natural i m s i s s d c m i s o

continent continent d u o r t n a a e d

Wonders l o n A f A n M C e M I n I R

Europe 1 Europe 5 4 3 4 3 3 America 4 America 2 3 1 2 Asia 3 Asia 4 2 5 1 1 Africa 4 Africa 1 1 Oceania 2 Oceania 1 Mythical 3 Figure 5 Figure 4

The Medieval Era is framed as a religious time, even with sacred wonders that don't pertain to Europe or Christianity, as long as their function fits the Euro-centric understanding of the religious Middle Ages. While there are few purely Christian buildings, most often a Western connection can be found: The Alhambra presents the focal point of the Christian Reconquista, the Hagia Sophia is a symbol of Christian- Muslim conflicts, and Machu Picchu, Chichen Itza, Borobodur, and Angkor Wat gained fame through their 'discoverey' by Western explorers and colonizers. The Renaissance Era revolves around the narrow definition of high culture, represented through wonders like the Globe Theatre and the Sistine Chapel. This evokes Euro-centric sentiments of Shakespeare and Michelangelo as the global pinnacles and thus universal symbols of their respective professions. Two Indian wonders are included, but the Red Fort remains a symbol of British colonialism, confirmed by the military bonuses it provides, and the Taj Mahal arguably symbolizes everything the

37 Western Orientalist gaze wants to see India for. The Industrial and Modern Eras reach the height of Euro-centrism, with Brazil as the only represented country not from Europe or North America, although even their Cristo Redentor World Wonder still symbolizes the success of the missionary work of Western imperialism. Despite connotations of two world wars and the politics that led there, these eras attempt to avoid symbols of nationalism by providing a range of wonders that represent peace and global unity rather than conflict. The Brandenburg Gate and the Statue of Liberty symbolize freedom through open borders, Neuschwanstein and the Broadway represent the manifestation of dreams, and the Eiffel Tower, while the centerpiece of an inherently colonialist world fair (Crang, 1999:123), also represents the peaceful coexistence of those nations that would send millions to their deaths only 15 years later. The Modern Era also provides the game's most overt surface attempt at countering Civ 5's otherwise dominant military narrative through the Prora, a German hotel that was turned into a hospital during the Second World War and thus became an anti-war symbol. Only the Kremlin steps out of line, which frames Russia as the inherent Other. The West attempts to reread its past by establishing a new canon of unpolitical representative wonders, while admitting to upholding the Cold War mindset in the same heartbeat. These selective attempts at subversion show that Civ 5 fails to recognize the ideological connection between the world wars and the Industrial Era's dehumanizing rationalization in the wake of the Enlightenment, through which, according to Crang (1999:106), “casualties became part of an obscene balance-sheet […].” In contrast to world-war-related wonders, Civ 5 gladly celebrates an Industrial Era technology like Replacable Parts by displaying a quote by Henry Ford on the screen: “Nothing is particularly hard if you divide it into small jobs.” This embraces what Crang (1999:106) describes as “Taylorism”, which he links to said dehumanization, as it “broke down the workers' jobs into tiny discrete [...] tasks of mind-numbing repetition […].” Lastly, three of the total of only five wonders from the Atomic and Information Eras show how the game struggles to represent isolationism. The Great Firewall is arguably a reference to China's censoring of the internet, which projects isolationism onto the Other. On the other hand, tapping into ludic territory, it provides highly beneficial bonuses and no disadvantages whatsoever. The Pentagon marks another curious choice, by representing the United States' highest achievements through a symbol of military power. The Hubble Space Telescope could have remedied this isolationist tendency as a

38 symbol for international joint scientific efforts, but is betrayed by the ludic component, which renders the wonder's benefits exclusive to the nation that built it. Noteworthy National Wonders are the East India Company, the Oxford University, and the Circus Maximus, which, in contrast to the other more generically named National Wonders, such as the Grand Temple or the National College, represent specific Western buildings and institutions. This leads to counter-intuitive situations where India itself has no other choice than to create the East India Company in the pursuit to raise trade profits, or is incentivized to construct Oxford University to raise the science output of Mumbai.

6.5 Universal history and progress

The Euro-centrism of Civ 5's surface design has a special impact on the perception of progress, a meta-narrative that governs almost all aspects of the game. Presenting the Western account of history, its stages, options, and paths, as the unquestionable history all civilizations must undergo, does not promote imperialist ideas by excluding the Other, but by including it into one's own hierarchy. Ford (2016) hints at this by pointing out that “the technology tree is tiered into eras that solidify this Eurocentric homonarrativization […].” From Ancient to Information Era, all civilizations must undergo the same technology tree and thereby inevitably follow the Western path through history. Since eras are constructed due to supposed shifts in culture, however, this implies that “[China's] society is also implicitly subjected to exactly the same socio- political reactions to events and technologies” (Ford, 2016) as those found in the history of the United States, for example. Ford (2016) also highlights that all civilizations start out at the exact same time, while the technology tree that governs progress through the eras ends with “the real-world United States’ crowning Cold War achievement […].” While the United States did not settle another galaxy, it must be noted that the initial project necessary to unlock this fictional space race is named after the actual Apollo Program, which, much like the Manhattan Project needed for the development of nuclear weapons, frames these achievements through U.S. American terminology and history from beginning to end. What Ford does not conclude, is that therefore, Western history becomes the norm by which all other history is categorized. The imperialist narrative lies not so much in the Euro-centrism and teleology of the fact that “all civilizations […] climb the same tree”

39 (Ford, 2016), but in the fact that in taking Western history as the overarching norm for progress, non-Western civilizations are not only excluded from the representation of the present, but included into the representation of the past. The universal technology tree and its Western eras manifest the imperialist idea that a nation that has not developed certain Western technologies or cultural standards represents a past stage of Western society and will therefore always lack behind the Western pioneers of development. This narrative has been coined as the 'synchronicity of the non-synchronous' by German philosopher Ernst Bloch (Dietschy, 2012:589). It can also be found in Orientalism as the Western perception of the static Orient, forever trapped in the past. Since science develops technologies and technologies, in turn, unlock eras, with universal eras and technologies also comes an implication of universal science. According to Crang (1999:77), “claims for a universal, objective science have been deeply implicated in racist and imperialist pasts”, best observed in the Enlightenment and its legitimation of hierarchies. Every civilization amasses the science resource to fill the same, singular science meter. The game's definition of science thus stays the same across all civilizations and eras, no source of science ever loses its output due to technological or societal changes, and therefore its universal claims are never questioned.

6.6 User interface

Mauger (2016:32) claims that “the primordial role of the game interface is, just like any other interface, to enable information to be provided, accessed and applied.” The presentation of said information, however, brings with it certain implied priorities and hierarchies, that reveal ideologies in their design. It has to be noted that the interface communicates with the player directly, and the player with the interface, a process that game studies refers to as “mediation” (Fernández-Vara, 2015:139-140). This shifts the topic to the very edge of surface design, as it often includes or semantically requires the player element, which belongs to the field of ludology, but does not actually discuss game mechanics itself, which keeps it outside of ludology. To include it into the surface design not only enables this discussion, that proves the absurdity of the ludo-narrative divide, but it also stacks the odds against the hypothesis by giving the surface design the benefit of the doubt. The central part of the interface is the portrayal of the world, seen through a bird's-

40 eye view. Fernández-Vara (2015:140) interprets: “Sid Meier's Civilization V (2010) use[s] this removed point of view to allow the player to get a picture of what is going on in the world. The player identifies with the point of view [...] in a generic role, such as a god of sorts or commander ruling the world.” Since the camera can be moved around freely, even to areas that have not been explored, yet, the camera does indeed imply freedom beyond that of an individual person. Fernández-Vara's claim that it implies reign over said world, however, cannot be upheld. A game's camera in itself can not imply control over anything but that which it represents, if it can be moved. Her assessment is instead already informed by the game's mechanics, which no longer belong to surface design, and therefore not to the user interface. Sharp (2016:112) more adequately likens Civ 5's camera to a third-person perspective that has been pulled back so far that it allows to see “elements controlled by either other players or by the game itself.” It needs to be conceded that the free view does bring with it an added incentive to explore even the most remote areas of the world and unearth their riches, which hints at colonialism, but camera control and perspective can only express these ideologies as wishes, not actually manifest them. Instead, the imperialist understanding is manifested through the design of the map that the camera displays. Rather than opting for a representation with less imperialist denotations, Civ 5 chooses to present its world map along with the dependent minimap entirely in the style normalized through Western imperialism. World and minimap take on a rectangular shape, with ice covering both top and bottom, heavily implying an alignment towards the north. This is further emphasized through the inability to turn the camera: It can only be panned, forcing 'north' permanently to the top of the screen. The rectangular shape itself also naturalizes the inherently deformed projection map, “a major tool of Euro-centrism” (Ashcroft, 1999:33) as actual reality, which leads to the in- game world only making sense as a cylindrical shape rather than an actual globe. A button next to the minimap allows to change the more natural presentation of the world to a heavily abstracted one. This alternate so-called 'strategic view' breaks the displayed information down to ludic matters. It represents tiles only as the resources they hold and emphasizes the location of units and borders. Comparing all of these decisions to Ashcroft's (1999:33) definition of imperialist cartography shows that Civ 5's map matches the description in all its traits:

41 “The allegorization of space (and its hierarchization) is also defined by maps, first by the decision as to which projection to favor, since this privileges some land- spaces over others; or by the decision to orient all maps on a North-South axis; or by the creation of a body of special maps that divide the land into such 'objective' categories as climactic regions, population densities and, not least, natural resources.”

One distinctly imperialist aspect of Civ 5's maps is the portrayal of unexplored and 'unowned' land. Ford (2016) points out that “[t]he map begins covered by the 'fog of war', as it is known in strategy games”, but he does not elaborate on what this surface representation alone already implies. The fog of war is portrayed as clouds on the main map and as pitch black areas on the minimap, both of which apply the metaphor of light. Tying light to civilization paints 'savagery' as inherently dark, down to the color of the skin: “It is the accounts of the West bringing light, civilising Africa, the accounts of missionaries flooding the continent with the light of reason and Christianity, that paint Africa so dark. [...] [T]he light was refracted through an imperialist ideology that urged the abolition of 'savage customs' in the name of civilization.” Crang (1999:71) Similarly, borders and territories are represented at all times on both maps, which marks territory that 'nobody' owns – other than barbarians, which can only spawn on 'unowned' land. This is particularly stressed through the use of green on the minimap for 'neutral' territory, and can be likened to the representations found in early imperialist maps, the “blank spaces” of which “signify […] an open and inviting (virginal) space into which the European imagination can project itself and into which the European (usually male) explorer must penetrate.” (Ashcroft, 1999:32) Crang (1999:66) ties this confidence in the ideologically laden “maps of empty spaces” to the “instruments of science”. This presents the early Enlightenment again as the universal tool of legitimizing ideology, in this case through the creation of supposedly scientific maps. On a final note, Civ 5's menu and font design mimic the style of Art Deco. Producer Dennis Shirk claims that “[w]ith the Art Deco, [the interface designer] wanted to evoke that prosperous time in the country, when everybody designed beautiful, forward- looking steel mammoths in cities.” (Remo, 2010) Even when looking past this statement's romanticizations, “everybody” and “the country” still refer not to the world but to the West in general and the United States specifically, while “that prosperous time” during the Roaring Twenties does not only exclude narratives from countries that did not share this economic era, but also marks a time where colonialism was still in full effect, and arguably contributing to the imbalance that brought said prosperity.

42 7 Ludology: procedural rhetoric

According to Ford (2016), who, despite his own claims, bases the largest portion of his findings on the game's surface design, Civ 5 has its “imperialist narrative coded into the game’s mechanics […].” While producer Dennis Shirk uses the intent to “put gameplay above historical accuracy” (Remo, 2010) as an argument against the game's ideologies, it is the very gameplay that has the potential to arguably carry even more persuasive power than the surface design, due to how covertly it operates in contrast to words and visuals. Just like surface design expresses ideologies through the surface rendering of mechanically interdependent ludic elements, a game's goals, rules, and mechanics articulate ideologies through creating mechanical dependencies between rendered surface elements. In order to analyze the procedural rhetoric of goals, rules, and mechanics, however, these four terms need to be clearly defined.

7.1 Defining ludological terminology

Ian Bogost (2010:29) himself defines procedural rhetoric not as a specifically video- game-related term, but one that applies to persuasion through interactive patterns in general: “Procedural rhetoric is a general name for the practice of authoring arguments through processes. […] [I]ts arguments are made not through the construction of words or images, but through the authorship of rules of behavior, the construction of dynamic models.” The choice to coin this term 'procedural' is explained through a definition that equates procedures to ritualized cultural discourses: “[W]e tend to think of procedures as fixed and unquestionable. They are tied to authority, crafted […] to structure behavior […]. Procedures are sometimes related to ideology; they can cloud our ability to see other ways of thinking; consider the police officer […] who carries out a clearly unethical action but later offers the defense, 'I was following procedure.'” (Bogost, 2010:3) The comparison with discourse would lead to the conclusion that procedures are not only “sometimes” but always related to ideology, because, as laid out in chapter 3, ideologies “operate in discursive chains” (Hall, 2016:137) that inevitably encompass all cultural behavior, to which procedures inevitably belong. As procedures are considered mostly “unquestionable”, if they are considered at all, their contribution to a game's ideology can only be brought to the fore through questioning even the most basic patterns and the seemingly fixed traditions of game design.

43 Game design involves three main aspects: goals, rules, and mechanics. Goals are defined as the elements that “dictate and reward player actions in order to lead them to a winning scenario.” (Hayse, 2016:443) While there are many subtle rewards and thus sub-goals in most games, Civ 5's main goals are constituted by the game's main victory conditions. They embody the player's desired rewards. Rules are defined as the elements that “dictate how the game works […].” (Fernández-Vara, 2015:98) They describe how one element is linked to another, what is triggered by which condition, and “act independently of player input.” (Fernández-Vara, 2015:250) One example from Civ 5 would be that a nation's access to a new luxury resource permanently raises their happiness, another that positive happiness accumulates to trigger a Golden Age. Thus, rules embody the dependencies between the game's elements. Mechanics are defined as “regulations applied to player behavior.” (Fernández-Vara, 2015:97-98) Famously, they are also often referred to as the “verbs of the game, the palette of actions available to the player.” (Fernández-Vara, 2015:98) In short, they describe what the player is allowed and able to do. Examples from Civ 5 would be the player's ability to order the production of caravans in eligible cities, another that upon completion, she can choose between which cities these caravans will trade resources. Mechanics therefore embody the player's options to interact with elements subjected to the game's rules. Figure 6 visualizes the resulting system between player, mechanics, rules, goals and procedures.

player ↑ ↓ ↑ reward interaction rhetoric ↑ ↓ ↑ goals mechanics = procedures rules

Figure 6

7.2 Progress and the player element: the emperor's new toys

As a game of emergence, Civ 5 elevates the position of the player to the author of the narrative that emerges from the dynamic gameplay. Said gameplay has a central theme, which in the case of Civ 5 is progress. In turn, tying progress to the player naturalizes imperialist ideas at the game's core level. As the surface design has shown, the meta-

44 narrative of progress governs everything Civ 5 portrays, and this theme grows only stronger on a ludic level. Jorge Albor (2010) calls Civ 5's central themes “modernist myths of linear and irreversible progress”, Hayse (2016:446) claims the series favors “the inevitable triumph of technological progress”, and even Jon Shafer (2012, Abstraction) himself admits that “the overarching theme of Civ [is] human history as the story of continual upward progress”, without acknowledging the troubling concepts that this triggers. While the following chapters will go into more detail as to how Civ 5's gameplay enables and incentivizes progress, the overarching problem in the representation of progress lies in the universal claims it legitimizes. Nünning (2003:274) defines this ideology with the constructed link between technological and cultural superiority. As Civ 5 adopts the same logic, technological progress effectively accelerates the production of everything else, most notably culture. This makes a civilization's number of researched technologies an easily understandable marker of its position in the now perfectly legitimized hierarchy of civilizations, due to the established formula for universal superiority. Said formula in turn renders the clear statistics and rankings of all competing civilizations, presented through frequently updated tables which can be accessed during a match, meaningful in the first place. The only element with the potential to subvert this universal progress is a civilization's global happiness. Progress requires population, not only to accelerate science output, but also to make use of the new technologies. Therefore, an effective strategy is the founding of new cities and boosting the already inevitable population growth tied to food surplus. However, population and number of cities lower global happiness, a trend that needs to be countered by using said technologies to facilitate the production of happiness. Thus the growth of happiness often slows down over time or sometimes even stagnates. Since – except for the triggering of rare Golden Ages – happiness only becomes relevant when it enters negative numbers, however, it never discourages progress, but actually rewards its utilization, failing to seize the opportunity for subversion. Where progress is rewarded, “stasis is death” (Ford, 2016). While a true standstill in Civ 5 is impossible due to the inevitable nature of technological progress, the speed at which technologies are researched can be controlled through a variety of means, and thus allows for the punishing of choices that lead to stagnation. This picks up concepts of the timeless Orient, as well as the synchronicity of the non-synchronous:

45 Civilizations with inferior science-output merely represent a past stage of more developed countries. The differences between countries with different stages of technological development are amplified by a design philosophy that causes most technologies to unlock new impactful mechanics, which, in the eyes of Shafer (2012, New), as laid out in his postmortem article “New Toys”, raise player “involvement”. However, the result, in which progress accelerates progress, only emphasizes the perceived standstill of less developed countries, as the technology gap widens despite tangible progress being made, further manifesting the Orientalist narrative. The player's central role as the originator of said progress is responsible for the narrative's imperialist starting point. Shafer (2012, Adaptation) himself claims that “[p]layers want to feel like they’re in control, and if they make the optimal decision in every situation nothing bad will happen. [...] True randomness eliminates that feeling of ownership.” Maximizing the player's control and minimizing uncontrollable events can indeed be observed throughout all of Civ 5's gameplay. The design philosophy pertaining to control can be broken down to three aspects of the game's rules: causality, readability, and exclusive authority. Causality describes the rules and mechanics that present every decision as the direct cause of a predictable and inevitable event in the future, and every event as the result of a decision. The player knows that every mechanic reliably does what it says and will without a doubt trigger the desired action, as well as the foreseeable events that this sets in motion. The game presents itself largely as a clockwork with set gears that turn predictably. Representing history, where meaning actually arises from the interpretation through a mere filter of causality, through a ludic system of actual causality, naturalizes both determinism and teleology. Teleology relates to how the player sets goals and thus interprets every event as the causal path to said goal. Determinism, by contrast, describes how she interprets the current condition of her nation as the result of her starting conditions or interference from foreign nations. She might for example set a goal to found the first religion, and then construct sacred buildings to accumulate enough faith to reliably reach 200 faith at turn 40, which will predictably trigger a Great Prophet to spawn, who she then plans to use to found her religion, which will turn her capital into its Holy City. This will give her an edge in the race for cultural impact and contribute to her eventual Cultural Victory. Similar to this example of teleology, determinism is encouraged through the actual causality that might lead up to a severe economical disadvantage, like the first settler being spawned surrounded by infertile

46 tundra tiles and too far away from the sea to move there without wasting too many precious turns. This rhetoric normalizes several imperialist assumptions: Every nation has an equal shot at success, which means that successful nations have earned their right for superiority and global dominance, while unsuccessful nations can only blame themselves for making the wrong decisions, unless certain conditions disadvantaged them, which means they have been a lost cause from the very start. Readability describes the rules and mechanics that provide all important data in a clear, unambiguous fashion, so the player only has to take that information and then strategize about how to act upon it. The player has access to even the most contrived information, like how much 'science' a trade route will yield the trade partner, calculated by the difference in researched technologies, or exactly how long the construction of a wonder will take calculated on the basis of the city's current 'production' rate. The game even displays the direct calculation of how long it will take to culturally dominate another culture if one's tourism output and their culture output remained the same. This can be seen in Image 4, that showcases an excerpt from the Culture Overview, according to which Egypt's tourism value will overtake the Shoshone culture value in 29 turns. While also necessary for maximizing player control, this readability paints both nature and culture as understandable in every aspect. It manifests the concept of ultimate truth by turning the ideological lens into objective reality. Since all information is not only easily accessible and understood, but also true in the truest sense of the word, this rhetoric teaches absolute trust in ideologically biased experience, the final form of the Enlightenment.

Image 4

Finally, exclusive authority describes the rules and mechanics that make the player the sole source of progress. While the player's civilization is challenged through outside interference, the player's absolute power over her civilization is never questioned, nothing happens outside of her control. More importantly, her control reaches beyond her civilization: Shafer (2012, Abstraction) admits that “even the basic abstraction of 'turns' (when some agents can act and others cannot) out of our real-time experience of living is a fairly unnatural translation.” Said translation, however, presents player action

47 as the only relevant events in history to the point that it governs the very progression of time itself. The basic turn-based system makes it appear as though time only moves forward when actions have been taken, which undeniably ties time progression to cultural 'progression'. This perception also justifies the irrelevance of the map's mythicized past: Relevant history is tied to progression and thus turns, which are tied to actions of the player. The game rules do not allow for a concept of progression of time without player interaction, therefore there is no time before the arrival of the player. This is an obvious allegory to imperial conquest. The colonization and subjection of foreign lands justified itself with dismissing local history as irrelevant because culture can by imperial ideology only be produced with the presence of the West. There is no relevant history prior to Western contact, because Western presence is considered the one essential prerequisite for time to move forward and history to take place. Similarly, the player, through her arrival on the map, does not only bring culture to the world, but – through her exclusive authority over turns and time – also the progress of time and history itself.

7.3 Unity and territory: the worth of a nation

In order to further maximize player control, Civ 5 employs two strategies of nationalism and turns them into ludic reality through the construction of its civilizations. These are the unchallenged unity and unchallenged territory of any represented civilization, as well as the heightened nationalism that results from linking the two. Unity and territory are manifested through several game rules. First, unity is constituted through rules that allow for civilizations to neither split nor merge. A civilization can only be culturally dominated, whereby it maintains name and territory, conquered, whereby its name is erased and its territory annexed, or eliminated, whereby both its name and territory are erased. On an even deeper level, rules tie every action to a civilization as a whole, denying postmodern concepts of plurality and hybridity (Nünning, 2003:219). No mechanic or rule indicates divisions within a civilization, nor are there cities or units that belong to no clearly categorized culture. Concerning intranational consistency, Ford (2016) calls Civ 5 “blind to even the nuances within that [imperialist] narrative – such as class issues”, and rightly deduces that it offers no “avenues for subaltern insurgency”. Thus, Civ 5 falls prey to the ecological fallacy, whereby every member of a nation is presented as part of the same

48 hive mind identity, and all initial and unlocked perks and features apply not to specific individuals or groups within a nation, but to everyone equally. Where nations should be “contested” (Mitchell, 2005:269) from within, they are instead portrayed through spatial and diachronic continuity, which supports “the idea of coherent ethnic or national culture” (Crang, 1999:167), or more specifically in Civ 5's case, ethnic nationalism. This unity is emphasized through player control, which is marked by both permanence and omnipotence. Permanence is enforced through the rules that make Civ 5 revolve around irreversible decisions: Technologies, Policies, tenets, unit perks, or religious perks are all presented as permanent player commitments that can neither be undone nor will ever be challenged from within. Omnipotence, on the other hand, is realized through the player's ability to micromanage her civilization's every move, every unit, every number. This allows her to focus on competing against other nations, rather than tackling her nation's own problems. It is through this omnipotence that the game's true player role is exposed: Although the surface design makes the player assume the role of a leader, on a mechanical level the game makes the player be the empire by making her omnipotent throughout her nation and allowing for cultural consistency over literal millennia. In contrast, strategy game series like City Building, i.a. Pharaoh (Sierra, 1999), Total War, i.a. Total War: Shogun 2 (Sega, 2011), and Anno, i.a. Anno 1404 (Ubisoft, 2009), put the player into the position of a leader or changing leaders of a dynasty that are in constant struggle with their subjects, confronting the player with problems absent from Civ 5 like emigration, crime, disease, or disloyalty. The absence of a tax system alone, an essential mechanic in the aforementioned titles, exemplifies how Civ 5 equates a nation's citizens with its government, and vice versa, and thus eliminates the concept of intranational divides. There is one game rule with the capacity to introduce what Hall (2016:175) calls “collectivisms” to a civilization, i.e. subaltern groups within a nation that counteract the existing hegemony. When a civilization's happiness falls into low enough negative numbers, protests start to occur throughout its territory. However, this does not constitute collectivist uprisings for two reasons: For one, the uprisings are represented as barbarians that start spawning in the respective territory. Therefore, the protests do not defy nationalist categorization, but fall into an already established imperialist category with well-known functionality. It therefore presents uprisings not as dissatisfied citizens that yearn satisfaction, but as savages that roam the land murdering and pillaging. The other reason as to why they cannot be interpreted as the successful

49 ludic translation of intranational conflict is the fact that 'protest' is triggered through the global happiness meter. Happiness being 'global', i.e. pertaining to the entire nation, denies it being tied to income and class, so as long as happiness is not at an absolute minimum, and the nation sports basic functionality, as dire as it may be, the populus is assumed to be content and united. This supports the idea of nationalism, where intranational divides are being overlooked for the sake of the outside display of unity. Even once global happiness reaches its minimum, nation-wide uprisings are subsequently painted as the result of a unified dissatisfaction, rather than that of one class exploiting another. The second strategy, unchallenged territory, is constituted through rules that bind a civilization's territory to actions of said civilization only, while other affected nations have no say in the matter. Ford (2016) identifies this rhetoric by saying that “borders do not need to be recognised by other civilizations – they simply exist. Geopolitical territories are coded into the game [...], forcing a discourse of land ownership that is inescapably imperial.” The game categorically excludes any discourse that would question a territory's belonging: Not only are there no mechanics to come to agreements with other civilizations over debated territory, but territory is never up for debate to begin with. This is because Civ 5 strictly follows the colonialist philosophy of 'you- own-what-you-settle'. Territory can only be claimed through cities. Once a city's territory has grown to its maximum, new cities need to be founded or conquered in order to further expand one's territory. Founding new cities near another civilization's borders can provoke diplomatic retaliation, but the territory itself remains set in stone. This ideology is largely owed to the concept of neutral territory, whose sole purpose is to be scouted, claimed, and colonized in order for its resources to enter the economic system established within and between the ever-expanding civilizations. Critically, it also ties a civilization's existence to its territory: Loss of all territory equates loss of all cities, which equates defeat, and the civilization is struck from the list of competitors. Once a culture belongs to no category that the game allows for, it is wiped from existence, there is no third space. The rules even employ circular logic akin to that of ethnic nationalism: Barbarians are no civilization, because they own no territory, because the territory from which they spawn is neutral, and thus owned by nobody. Rules of unity and territory thus combine to form a pure manifestation of ethnic nationalism, where civilizations depict one united entity that is bound to the land of its original capital and the territory that is claimed in its name.

50 7.4 Religion, Policies, and Ideology: one nation under God

With the inclusion of Religion, Policies, and Ideology, Civ 5 recreates a society's ideological system, and with it, its supposed underlying structure and interactions in the form of mechanics and rules. Since imperialism itself bases its core ideas on the denial of its own ideological biases, in order to paint its conclusions as objective rather than prejudiced, Civ 5's portrayal of ideology itself in the form of these three game systems allows insight into the justification process of the game's own imperialism. Said denial of ideology in the face of ideology itself is accomplished by framing ideology not as the interplay of dynamic constructs, but natural features of the societies that hold them, which raises them above scrutiny. This naturalization, in turn, is achieved through the strict use of three game design concepts: choice, commitment, and independence. All ideology is represented as the result of choice, as irreversible once commitment has been made, and as independent from other ideology. Geertz (2000:125) warns that religions, while often being manifested through “symbolic formulations” that can reach “extraordinary degrees of complexity”, can also take on different forms of expression, which makes the society in question “no less developed socially”. As the analysis of surface design already concluded, religion in Civ 5 is largely represented through the Western concepts of what constitutes religion and religious power. In this, it disregards social, ritual manifestations of religion and only counts superficial milestones found in Christianity, Judaism and Islam as valuable elements of any religion. This trend continues in the game's rules, as every religion functions exactly the same on a basic level: Prophets found and enhance a religion, missionaries spread it, inquisitors defend it, temples feed it with the production of faith, and its Holy City eternally enshrines it. This Euro-centric rhetoric leads to bizarre situations where for example Japan would found its preferred religion of Shinto with a Great Prophet, which in itself is arguably simplified, and spread it aggressively by sending out Shinto missionaries into far away lands. Additionally, it would fill its own cities with Shinto inquisitors to root out, for example, the Confucianism with which Korea's missionaries would have started to convert Japanese cities. These inherently imperialist procedures of spreading and eradicating religion are built upon certain assumptions that are enforced through universal rules: Every religion has its own Holy City, which is the city in which the Great Prophet was used to found it. Holy Cities are the only cities that will permanently emanate their inherent religious

51 pressure, even if outside pressure converted all its citizens to another religion, and thus slowly convert back its inhabitants unless permanently erased by a final use of a foreign inquisitor. This creates a rhetoric that paints foreign religion as a virus that needs to be contained and wiped out in order to most effectively pursue religious power. A Holy City's inevitable reversal after successful conversion also implies an intrinsic religious essence that no cultural and religious pressure alone can convert away, which naturalizes religion by literally binding it to a place, rather than people. Unless completely converted and then purged by an inquisitor, a Holy City will, independent from its immediate surrounding religions, cultures and ideologies, always carry natural religious pressure, which defies the concept of an ever-changing society, especially considering the huge periods of time represented. A Holy City in which a religion was founded in 200 BC, but that gets converted 500 AD, would still emanate that same original religion in the year 2000 AD, which can be likened to Alexandria still converting its citizens to the cult of Serapis to this day. The procedures also dictate that one culture can only bring forth one religion, which only furthers the narrative of nationalism, creating one people in one nation and one nation under one god. The aforementioned concept of national unity then explains why a civilization is only allowed to reap a specific religion's benefits if it poses the majority religion in the entire nation, and for cities to only benefit from the city-specific religious perks of their specific majority religion. This rule employs a binary system of power that excludes the subaltern from all ludic relevance other than religious pressure, which in itself has no value unless it succeeds in reclaiming the majority. The resulting rhetoric questions any religion that does not 'belong', represented through religious pressure of minority religions, and instigates fear of the foreign, insurgent minority, a ludic realization of isolationist thinking. In contrast to Religion, Civ 5 presents Policies and Ideology as less tangible, thus providing fewer means of interaction to the player. Instead of deciding on minute details of micromanagement as Religion allows for, Policies and Ideology are forced on the player through strict rules that inevitably trigger their foundation. The player's only interaction is the decision of which Social Policies and/or Ideological Tenets to implement when confronted with a choice, depending on which perks provide boosts or unlocks that best support her current strategy. Social Policies are unlocked through the accumulation of culture. Shafer (2013, Revisiting) claims that with this feature, he “wanted it to feel like you were slowly

52 accumulating [an] identity over time. After all, Japan and Germany changed significantly after World War 2, but they’re still Japanese and German, and maintain that legacy of honor, hard work, etc.” This statement highlights a central problem with the game's Social Policies: These 'Policies' are not policies by political standards but are only given that name to justify them being player choices, while in actuality, they would classify as discourses and their social and sometimes political manifestations. However, the idea of discourses being chosen by their respective society contradicts their very definition. Discourses reproduce themselves (Crang, 1999:17), allowing for only little change over the course of generations, which is thus shifted outside of the direct influence of any member of the affected society, let alone their outright choice. This will be further investigated in the chapter on the Designed Evolution Dilemma. Since the choice of a Social Policy becomes a permanent perk of one's civilization, they ludically perpetuate the essentialist concepts of nation that Shafer's above quote hints at under the guise of the more harmless term “legacy”. Thus, Germany or Japan can indeed choose to invest in the 'Honor' Policy tree and for example pick Discipline early on, which permanently boosts the strength of military units adjacent to each other, and later adopt Citizenship from the 'Liberty' tree, which accelerates the construction of tile improvements, such as roads, farms, or mines. Nothing can revert or erase the adoption of these Policies, and therefore the discourses are naturalized as traits inherent to every German or Japanese soldier and worker from the point of acquisition onward. Civ 5's presentation of Ideology faces similar problems to those of Social Policies through its name alone. “The function of ideology is to make an autonomous politics possible by providing the authoritative concepts that render it meaningful, […]. It is, in fact, precisely at the point at which a political system begins to free itself from the immediate governance of received tradition, […] that formal ideologies tend first to emerge and take hold.” (Geertz, 2000:218-219) Said tradition, however, arguably left the center of public discourse during the Renaissance and Industrial eras already, while Civ 5 waits until the subsequent Modern Era to allow for Ideology to enter the frame. Therefore, the game shows a much more narrow understanding of the term, while its Social Policies would actually match Geertz's definition of ideologies more closely. This narrower definition of ideology, while framing actual ideology as policy, creates a concept that paints ideology as overt and tangible, which also allows the game to deny ideology being the driving force behind the bulk of its own representations and rhetoric, since, if the game does not wear its ideology on its sleeve, it cannot have one. Because

53 the game itself makes use of the term so generously, it opens itself up to more imperialist ideas than those which the nationalist and essentialist rules of choice and commitment can uncover in for example the Social Policies. Most notably, the rules relating Ideology to Religion and science create a rhetoric that assumes a harmony between the three in an effort to legitimize the game's imperialism on its most basic ludic level, where cultural studies would actually see them as mutually exclusive forces. Geertz (2000:218-219) claims that ideology replaces the guidance of religion, yet, in the game, both can coexist and even be combined to serve the same strategy, like accelerating cultural influence over a foreign country. While there is no compromise required to run Ideology and Religion in parallel, one cannot be used to directly enhance the other, however. In regard to science, Geertz (2000:231) identifies a clear opposition: “Where science is the diagnostic, the critical, dimension of culture, ideology is the justificatory, the apologetic one [...]. That there is a natural tendency for the two to clash [...] is thus clear [...].” Civ 5, however, paints an entirely different picture: On the one hand, science is literally the cause of Ideology, since technological progress makes the player enter the Modern Era and trigger the Ideology question, while on the other hand, two of the three Ideologies allow the boosting of science, creating a representation of mutual support. This rhetoric therefore legitimizes ideology as both the result and the originator of objective science, an inherently contradictory and deeply imperialist assumption. Religion, Policies, and Ideology thus all share rules of choice, commitment, and independence. The focus on choice is owed largely to the terms' central roles in cultural identity creation. Nünning (2003:265) even counts religion among the two most important forces in the construction of culture as a whole. This importance to the game's theme calls for inclusion into its main framework, interactivity, which in turn is manifested through turning these dynamic phenomena into direct player choices, which creates a rhetoric of both teleology and nationalism. Since the entire civilization happens to agree on their Religion, Social Policies, and Ideology, these concepts erase more subtle understandings of said terms. Civ 5's Religion is a state religion, not the personal spirituality of individuals, its Social Policies and Ideologies are governmental apparatuses of nation-wide hegemony, rather than mutually suspicious schools of thought. Commitment is absolute in Religion and Social Policies, and de-facto in Ideology. While changing one's own civilization's Ideology is possible, it is only strategically

54 advisable in the rare case of extreme unhappiness generated by high cultural influence of a foreign nation with a different Ideology. Changing Ideology erases all unlocked tenets without giving the player the opportunity to spend them anew. It also brings the civilization to a complete halt for an entire turn, stopping the output of every resource without exception. The rhetoric thus teaches that choices are a de-facto commitment that is nigh-on impossible to revert, and leaves its deep mark in the culture's very core. In the case of Ideology, this is coherent with Geertz's (2000:220) claim that the purpose of ideologies to give meaning to otherwise meaningless situations creates a lasting “intensity with which, once accepted, they are held.” Regarding the absolute commitment of Religion and Social Policies, however, the natural irreversibility constructs a thoroughly essentialist sentiment. Finally, independence presents these three systems as independent from one another. Religious perks can be chosen independent from Ideology tenets and Social Policies, and tenets are not connected to Religion or Policies. In fact, this independence even applies to the relations of perks within one system: Religious and Ideological perks can be mixed and matched at will, and Social Policies in particular can end up as a nonsensical combination between Liberty and Tradition, or Rationalism and Piety. A civilization can bizarrely benefit both from Secularism and Organized Religion in the pursuit of Cultural Victory without any drawbacks other than having to spread its Social Policy perks across more trees, which merely delays the inevitable unlocking of a tree's final, most powerful perk. Civ 5 completely disregards the cultural phenomena that Hall (2016:143) calls “lines of tendential force”. He argues the term with an example of the relation between religion, policies and ideology: Ideological interdependency “[articulates] that religious formation to political, economic, and ideological structures. [...] [I]t would be idiotic to think that you could easily detach religion from its historical embeddedness and simply put it in another place. [...] Nevertheless, it has no necessary, intrinsic, transhistorical belongingness.” Essentially, while religion is bound to people, not a place, said people perpetuate discourses that tie their religion to other social discourses that mutually support each other. Ideologies do not exist in a vacuum. Civ 5 falls into the very trap Hall outlines here: Ideology does not appear static and essential because it is part of nature, but because it is part of a web of cultural discourse that holds it in place. Instead, Civ 5 holds ideology in place through the naturalization manifested in its commitment rules, while denying any interconnectedness between the ideologies it puts on offer, constructing the exact opposite of Hall's claims.

55 The resulting rhetoric promotes a certain eclectic freedom with regards to ideology that serves the game's teleological theme. According to the game's rules, ideologies do not dynamically emerge from a society's interactions, but because the society as a whole sets a goal and chooses the ideology best fit for purpose. This may apply to sophisticated governmental propaganda, but since it has already been established that the game does not distinguish between a civilization's government and its citizens, the rhetoric remains an imperialist manifestation: In Civ 5, ideology does not control the subject, but ideology represents a natural truth that the subject – the player and her civilization – can use like a tool, not for the sake of global cultural unity and equality, but natural difference and domination.

7.5 Exploration and barbarians: into the heart of darkness

The first step to any goals in Civ 5 is exploration. All rules surrounding resources, territory, or diplomacy motivate the player to start venturing into the unknown as quickly as possible. In addition to the more direct need for resources that must be within one's territory to be able to utilize them, several rules push the player more indirectly to sending her scouts and armies across the globe. The World Congress, later the UN, is founded by the first nation to make contact with all other civilizations, while also yielding them an electoral advantage in the future, which can turn out as a major political advantage for the founding nation, and serious risks for those that oppose them. Similarly, every city state rewards the first nation that makes contact with them with a significant amount of gold, which is in itself a highly imperialist assumption, echoing the romanticized myths of conquistadors being showered in Aztec gold for the divinity that by – their own account – the Aztecs saw in them. Where contact with cultures yields power and gold, the discovery of unowned Natural Wonders is awarded with a permanent increase in the civilization's happiness, arguably the resource that is most difficult to acquire in the entire game, in addition to the large amounts of resources the wonder provides when 'worked' by a city. One of the most ideologically complex phenomena to incentivize exploration, however, is the presence of barbarians. Not only do their camps send out soldiers to attack nearby cities, they also capture non-military units like workers, holding them hostage at their camps until freed by their original civilization or a foreign one. This last feature in particular ludically recreates the Western captivity narratives of the American

56 frontier, enhancing the already deeply imperialist ludic portrayal of natives: On the one hand, all natives count as one tribe, the barbarians, because that is how indigenous peoples fit the imperialist narrative best, as one generalized indistinguishable Other, categorized as one entity in the pursuit to erase it. On the other hand, despite their unified status, they are not allowed control over any cities and find themselves unable to produce anything but camps and soldiers. Since land can only be 'worked' by cities, the barbarians are unable to use the land they roam, naturalizing the imperialist perception of natives as a legitimation of exploitation: “[S]ince the inhabitants did not labour (an arguable assertion anyway), they did not use the land and thus did not own it.” (Crang, 1999:65) Barbarians only serve one purpose, which is to paint neutral territory as the natural source of danger, and to equate the unknown with constant threat until pacified through exploration and subsequent expansion. The barbarians must therefore ludically lack any resemblance of culture, and be capable of nothing but violence. Civilizations can neither trade with them nor build diplomatic relations, they are, by all accounts, not human in the sense of interaction, but might as well have been represented on the surface as wild beasts spawning from caves and thickets. Their situation as humans, however, is best described ludically by Bhabha's concept of hybridity, even though on the level of surface design, they are quite different. Just like a “hybridity identity”, the game's rules provide the barbarians with “an uncanny ability to be at home anywhere, an ability that always might become the burden of having no home whatsoever.” (Huddart, 2006:79) Initially, the barbarians are home across the entire map, but as their literal neutral territory – ne utrum, not clearly belonging to either party, and thus the third gender, like the third space – gets smaller and smaller over time, the encroaching territories of pure nations erase their neutral existence. The game's concept of territories leaves no room for those without a clearly defined home surrounded by strict borders, and once all land has been claimed by said territory that expels those who do not belong, the barbarians are home nowhere. The incentivization of the exploration that facilitates this expansion is built on the phenomenon of the 'fog of war', which has been outlined as a central aspect of the game's imperialist surface design. As a gameplay feature with rules and mechanics, it necessitates the aforementioned imperialist procedures by shrouding the map in mystery, as the presence of fog of war is linked to the absence of one's own units, and its absence to one's presence. The use of so-called “procedural content generation”

57 (Fernández-Vara, 2015:135) of Civ 5's maps from match to match, a popular feature in strategy games, helps said mystery by making the terrain itself unpredictable, rather than just the location of the opponents' units. This means the maps of two different matches will never look alike, so that with the start of a new match, the player must always revert to the same explorer mindset, a role that according to Crang (1999:77) was “closely modelled on that of the frontierman” and is thus inherently associated with imperialist actions and agendas. Civ 5's exploration rhetoric therefore indulges in a deeply imperialist perception of the foreign and the unknown. They manifest a reality of territorial control that allows for imperialist logic to apply and yield the desired outcome of ethically sound expansion. While real-world imperialism needed to “obscure the relationships of oppression that made 'exploration' possible” through its “impersonal tone” (Crang, 1999:77), Civ 5 makes oppression of natives impossible by rendering them as actual subhumans incapable of anything but war. While in reality, “'[v]irgin territories' […] were opened up by exploration to trade and settlement [and] their original inhabitants killed” because they “were considered to be uncivilized and thus having no legal rights of ownership” (Ashcroft, 1999:97), Civ 5 denies its rendition of 'natives' the rights to their land in the first place. “In extreme cases where peoples were seen to be without organizational forms recognizable as such to European eyes, as in Australia, the land was declared literally empty, a terra nullius.” (Ashcroft, 1999:97) Civ 5, however, does not even offer civilizations the option to declare desired land as no man's land, its rules simply create it as such: empty land, behind a veil of darkness, filled to the brim with precious resources ready to satisfy the needs of the first explorers to set foot on it.

7.6 Resources, expansion, and exploitation: for gold, God, and glory

Civ 5's basic gameplay loop of accumulating power revolves around the interplay between the gathering of resources and the processes of expanding one's empire. Resources enable the founding of new cities as well as the expansion of the territory that they govern. Expansion, in turn, facilitates further exploitation of resources found in the new territory. The resulting cycle can be likened to the engine that runs a match, until the hunger for more resources has eliminated those civilizations that fell prey to the single, most successful nation. The power of resources starts right at the beginning of a match, as the positioning of a

58 civilization's initial settler unit always comes with unique conditions that can both help and challenge the civilization. Shafer (2012, Adaptation) describes the resulting strategies of his own design quite accurately: “Finding a gold deposit might strongly point to adopting a cash-centric strategy. Starting in a desert poses completely different challenges from finding yourself in a lush river valley – surrounded by potential enemies.” Since all nations – no matter their starting conditions or special abilities – compete for the same set of victories, however, the game's rules create a reality where, from the very start, some nations are better fit for the universal goals of dominance than others, as a direct result of their surrounding geography. This rhetoric adopts a pure form of environmental determinism, and can easily translate into a deterministic reading of a match in retrospect, where a civilization's demise would be traced back to the climate zone and thus resources with which it was confronted in the beginning. This echoes imperialist legitimation through determinism, arguing that nations that had to work hard for survival end up as superior to those that did not. In Civ 5, a nation that finds itself tasked with fighting for the copious resources surrounding it may indeed end up with both the necessity and the resources to always be prepared for war. It will sport a large and highly trained army, while another civilization in a place far removed from these struggles, but with fewer resources at its disposal, might then be surprised to someday find a hostile army with future technology on their doorstep, as a pure result of where their original settler was spawned. Once the original capital has been founded, a civilization will do its utmost to scout the map for ideal places to found colonies, or ideal places for cities in the immediate surroundings to quickly enlarge one's territory without the hassle of dangerous trade across neutral territory. Three rules or sets of rules in particular motivate this resource- based expansion: quantity, luxury, and probability. Quantity describes the fact that all of Civ 5's resources are “quantified” (Shafer, 2013, Revisiting), which means the game tracks the quantities in which a civilization owns a resource, rather than merely whether it owns it or not. This especially applies to strategic resources, the number of which a civilization has access to determines the amount of units or machines it can build that require this resource, such as oil for battleships or aluminum for jet fighters. However, even luxury resources, which raise a civilization's happiness by the same number regardless of their amount, are still helpful when accumulated in greater numbers to trade in with other nations for resources or other benefits. These procedures create a rhetoric that incentivizes expansion beyond a

59 civilization's basic needs, as additional resources continuously improve a civilization's standing in the global economy and its ability to maintain a powerful military. Luxury encompasses the benefits of luxury resources and the rules surrounding their acquisition. In the pursuit to acquire more strategic or bonus resources, new cities must be founded, which vastly accelerates a civilization's population growth, and with it its accumulation of 'unhappiness'. Raising happiness is therefore the first step to expansion, and this is achieved best by gaining access to as big of a variety of different luxury resources as possible. Civ 5 teaches that one of the core issues regarding a nation's satisfaction is their access to rare goods from all over the world, regardless of how they are acquired. This creates an exoticist rhetoric that only cares for foreign lands so long as they provide unique goods that can be simply unearthed from their territory, while their people are deemed quite literally worthless. The importance of exotic luxury goods for a nation's global happiness creates a commodity-focused view on other civilizations: As an example, the player might feel incentivized to conquer Brazil's territory so she would no longer have to rely on their compromising trade offers but have direct access to oranges and silver. Similar procedures apply to city states, as she might consider protecting Cape Town against barbarians, not for the sake of altruism, but in order to reach allied status and be rewarded with exotic furs that they own, as would be displayed prominently on Cape Town's city state menu, an extract of which can be seen in Image 5. This rhetoric surrounding city states manifests an especially popular imperialist perception, wherein the childlike colonized provinces need the protection of the superior colonizers and will gladly submit to this role by voluntarily sharing their resources in exchange for submission.

Image 5

60 Lastly, probability refers to the game's random placement of strategic resources which cannot be seen until certain technology has been developed, like coal requiring Industrialization, which makes expansion a tool to raising the probability of future access to these resources. This creates an even greater motivation for strategies that employ rampant expansion out of the paranoia to be left out of the other civilizations' powerful achievements, simply because one's own territory was suddenly revealed to be short on the resources necessary for certain new buildings or units. Since all strategic resources are also essential to the most powerful military units throughout the ages, they are not only valued so highly that trading for them with other nations will usually yield disadvantageous deals, but trade would also tie the upkeep of one's army to diplomatic relations, which often prove temporary, especially in times of war, where said army would be most needed. In matches where some civilizations pursue an obvious Domination Victory, this strategic resource paranoia often makes the reveal of uranium through Atomic Theory a pivotal moment in in-game history that may cause a complete shift in the balance of power. Because of the imminent threat, even peaceful nations are heavily encouraged to expand with the intent to claim rare strategic resources for their own, as a double defensive measure, both securing the resource for one's own use, but more importantly, preventing it from falling into the hands of a hostile neighbor. The power and necessity of expansion can thus be seen even where Civ 5 attempts to construct the opposite. Venice, for example, is the only civilization incapable of founding new cities, and is instead given the ability to outright purchase city states. However, the alternative mechanic does not seem to outweigh the disadvantages of being tied to the territory of one's capital and that predefined by the existing city states, as “Venice tends to rank extremely low in competitive rankings […].” (Ford, 2016) A different aspect of imperialism is reflected in the way in which cities automatically expand their territory. While the city menu allows for the purchase of unowned neutral surrounding tiles with gold, this method is usually costly and inadvisable unless the nation's treasury is bursting at the seams or a highly valuable tile is just within reach, but at the immediate risk of being claimed by a foreign neighboring city. The common way of expanding a city's territory is a passive ability inherent to every city, that counts the city's specific culture output, calculates the currently most valuable neighboring neutral tile, and claims it once a certain number of culture has been reached. Since the accumulation of the culture resource is tied to a narrow, Euro-centric understanding of what qualifies as culture in the first place, as will be explained in the next chapter, this

61 rhetoric naturalizes an assumption that sits at the very heart of imperialism: Western values of culture legitimize the empire's superiority and thus its claims on land of the uncultured barbarians. This approach interprets culture not merely as a tool for the storage of collective memory (Nünning, 2003:64), but turns it into a universal marker of superiority or inferiority, respectively.

7.7 Collective memory and culture: look on my works

Due to its imperative role in the path towards one's own and the defense against foreign Cultural Victory, as well as being the core mechanic to expand a city's territory, the rhetoric surrounding Civ 5's culture resource is central to understanding the game's definition of culture and civilization. In order to allow nations the production of culture, Civ 5 provides them with mechanics that can be divided up into two representations of collective memory: works and wonders. While so-called Great Works represent music, literature, and visual arts, Natural, National, and World Wonders represent so-called mnemotopes (Assmann, 2013:60): buildings, institutions, public spaces, and natural formations. While they employ very different rules and mechanics leading up to the final yield of culture, both approaches share a heavy reliance on a narrow, Western definition of high culture that inherently carries with it the denial of broader, or non- Western cultural concepts. Works of art are acquired in the form of so-called Great Works, which in turn are produced by Great Musicians, Artists, or Writers. Once such a unit is spawned, it can be used to create one artwork of its respective profession. In order to create these Great People, a civilization's cities must contain buildings that consistently add to the city's accumulated Great People Points, once part of the city's population has been assigned to said buildings as 'specialists'. As soon as the Great People Points bar is filled, a Great Person of the respective type is spawned near the city. This incentivizes early construction of the relevant buildings, such as the Musicians', Artists', or Writers' Guild. The focus on guilds, and thus the Western institutionalized understanding of art, already hints at the form of Euro-centrism found in this approach. Its full imperialist potential, however, lies not in the procedures behind the production of Great Works, but in how these then must be used to actually produce ludically tangible culture that the game acknowledges through its resource counter. Great Works not only require a free slot of the respective type in a city's building or wonder in order

62 to produce culture, it can not even be produced in the first place as long as there is no way to immediately store it. Civ 5's procedures thus tie art to a very narrow range of modes of presentation, and acknowledge 'high' culture only where it is put on display in clearly marked, institutionalized spaces of art: According to the game, music belongs to concert halls and opera houses, the visual arts are confined to cathedrals and museums, and works of writing are either locked into theaters or buried in a library. The fact that their production is tied to their immediate archival results in a situation where Monet would paint his Water Lilies quite literally under the patronage of the Louvre, who would claim and display them immediately upon completion. This rhetoric measures a civilization's cultural status solely by how many distinct pieces of art it has stored away in designated, closed-off areas, preferably in the form of buildings, which manifests the discourse behind, and thus the authority of, museums. Through the rules surrounding archival, this museum discourse is not merely outlined, but meticulously reconstructed in great detail. Buildings have limited amounts of slots, and usually feature a so-called 'theming bonus', which promises additional production of culture if the stored works' traits conform to predefined features. All songs, paintings, and texts are attributed an era and a country of origin, and a theming bonus might for example ask for three paintings from the Renaissance Era, but from three different countries. In order to achieve this, civilizations can trade in their works against those of other nations. The same rules apply to artifacts, which can be found once Archaeology has been researched and archaeologists have been sent to investigate Archaeological Sites, areas that are generated around the map on the basis of previous events, mostly battles. Said sites can only be accessed as long as they are discovered on one's own territory, which also portrays their accumulation in museums as a tradition free from the narrative of imperialist exploitation, which in itself presents a troubling exclusion. When set against investigations into the role museums have taken throughout history and still do today, the resulting rhetoric shows only few subversive procedures, and many based heavily on the legitimation strategies of imperialism. On the one hand, Civ 5's need for archival to make sense of art can actually be seen as subversive, as one obvious alternative game design could have been to render meaning as inherent to the artifact itself, a narrative that real-world museums do frequently indulge in: “The status of the object as invariant in […] meaning is underpinned by the popular representation of museums as grand institutions [of] safeguarding […]. The traditional perception of

63 curatorial practice as a descriptive rather than an interpretative activity lends further support to this elision.” (Lidchi, 2013:129, italics mine) If Civ 5's museums were to just describe the semantics of an artwork or an artifact, the procedures would ascribe meaning to it even when not stored in a museum or similar institutions, i.e. the game would allow the production of culture from the work alone. Since the rules render museums necessary to draw culture from these objects, however, the rhetoric implies that the meaning is indeed not inherent to the artifact or artwork, but merely constructed around it by the institution in which it is archived. On the other hand, this strict dependency on a specific form of interpretation also claims Western authority over said artifacts and artworks, as they cannot be used to create meaning in any other way than institutionalized exhibition, which portrays artifacts, for example, as an exclusive prop of museums, determining their place before their unearthing. This view legitimizes colonialist exploitation that robbed foreign heritage to collect and interpret as an Other rather than leave it to the peoples that, according to the invaders, lacked the appropriate systems of exhibition, thus not making use of them and therefore not owning them. In addition, with its inclusion of the theming bonuses, the game goes out of its way to recreate another problem originating from the motivated practice of interpretation: “[B]eing made visible is an ambiguous privilege […]. [The] significance of differences in material culture can only be 'seen' if one is already implicated in a discourse that applies an evolutionary schema in which these objects can be used as 'proof' of the discourse […].” (Lidchi, 2013:167) Just like real-world museums can only arrange objects as evidence of existing conceptions, and are thus motivated to only make those objects visible that already adhere to an established narrative, Civ 5's theming bonuses represent predetermined discourses that yield more meaning, and thus culture, when fulfilled. If no theming bonuses require Ethiopian artworks or artifacts, for example, the player is incentivized not to make that culture visible in her museums, concert halls, or libraries. Wonders generate culture in a more direct fashion, but usually alongside the production of other resources, some accelerate the production of Great People and thus their works, while other wonders generate no culture at all. Nevertheless, the culture boost most of them do provide is significant, which is why their construction is vital to the pursuit of culture, especially when aiming for a Cultural Victory. Precisely because of the very specific resource bonuses unique to every wonder, however, Civ 5 establishes a narrative of meaning that is inherent to the wonders, rather than

64 constructed around them based on the collective memory they intend to evoke. This is because unlike, for example, artifacts, which hark back to actual battles fought during a match, Civ 5's wonders hold no memory to the ludic past. Because of this, the game effectively represents wonders and collective memory by turning their causal order around: While usually, culturally marked events lead up to the construction of a new, or reinterpretation of an existing monument or place, the construction of Civ 5's wonders precedes their meaning. This turns the originally causal relationship into a utilitarian one. In the game, a civilization does not construct or interpret wonders looking back, in order to memorialize or celebrate historical events, but it does so looking forward, with the intent to create a historical impact on their global standing in the first place. This point is closely related to the Designed Evolution Dilemma discussed in chapter 7.11. Since Civ 5 naturalizes this idea of meaning being tied to a place rather than its people, the rhetoric perpetuates an essentialist concept of ideology, best exemplified by the economy surrounding Natural Wonders. These are of course not constructed, and could therefore theoretically only become meaningful symbols through interpretation, which would tie their meaning to the people, rather than the place. Such a rhetoric, however, would admit that collective memory has to precede the meaning that is given to said place, which is why Civ 5 constructs the exact opposite: If, for example, France incorporates Mt. Fuji into their territory and 'work' it, it yields the respective city, say Orléans, 3 culture, 3 faith, and 2 gold. Notice how the French have no choice but to regard Mt. Fuji as a religious site, considering its output of faith. Even if they have not adopted the Shinto religion, and instead practice Catholicism, Mt. Fuji will inevitably produce faith. More importantly, it will do so forever, seemingly immune to shifts in the French culture and ideology – even if they were to adopt a purely secular mindset, they could not subsequently reinterpret this wonder's meaning, since the rules forbid them to. According to the game, Mt. Fuji was not interpreted as holding religious value, it simply holds it by nature. An additional rule that disallows civilizations the construction of buildings on top of Natural Wonder tiles further emphasizes that their meaning is never derived from culture, but always pure nature, even though the construction of buildings on top of culturally important landmarks is, according to Pethes (2008:88), commonplace throughout the world: “Mnemotope sind einzelne Orte, Stadtkomplexe oder Landschaften, die entweder als Schauplatz historisch bedeutsamer Ereignisse gelten oder an denen solche Ereignisse erinnernde Monumente vorfindlich sind. Oft geht beides Hand in Hand, so wenn über der angeblichen Geburtshöhle Jesu die

65 Gedächtniskirche errichtet wird.” For the sake of its consistent essentialism, however, Civ 5 passes this opportunity, that would otherwise have contributed to the game's self- declared intent for accuracy. The procedures behind 'wonders' thus manifest an ideology by which one's perception of the cultural meaning of an object is not understood as the result of one's own culture, but as inherent to the object, an idea that naturalizes one's own ideology and understands it as universal truth, while competing understandings of said object are rendered false. Such imperialist ideology is capable of not only justifying virtually any action necessary to claim possession over a foreign place, but also of forging a belief in an eternally consistent identity, never to be challenged from within. The combined rhetoric behind works and wonders paints an understanding of culture and civilization that is not broad and outside of anyone's control, but extremely narrow and, most importantly, directed. This makes culture not a dynamically emerging force, but an asset of power, a tool. It is, by all its surrounding rules and mechanics, translated as a natural resource used to support an empire's agenda, with complex systems regarding its acquisition, but never as a separate entity removed from the material world, and thus always able to be possessed, contained, and controlled.

7.8 Cultural Victory and non-violent relations: the ballot

As can be seen in the game's rhetoric of culture carrying power, Civ 5 provides a plethora of systems that allow for non-violent interactions between nations. At the forefront stands the Cultural Victory path and the related systems that support it, but in order to better understand the game's rhetoric of international relations, special attention needs to be drawn to trade and diplomacy, as well as the basics behind the more opportunistic Diplomatic and Science Victories. Of particular interest concerning these systems is their shared portrayal of nationalism in an international framework and the resulting motivation of isolationism. Disregarding the unpursuable Time Victory, all of Civ 5's victories except the cultural one ensue strategies that will always yield some profit regardless, even if strategies are shifted later on. The pursuit of a Domination Victory yields cities and a powerful military, a Science Victory motivates quick research of as many game-changing technologies as possible, and the strategies leading up to a Diplomatic Victory grant not only UN seats and thus power over the economic fate of the world, but also allied status

66 with plenty of city states, who provide frequent gifts, reliable trade partners, access to more luxury resources, and de-facto control over more territory. In contrast, pursuing a Cultural Victory in Civ 5 means to go against the grain and embrace decisions that would otherwise be considered unwise, not necessarily because they harm one's own culture, but because they aid a competing one, and could thus cause more harm than good in the long run. However, the congenial attitude displayed in the actions of countries that aim for Cultural Victory is, as constituted by the very goal of the game, an elaborate confidence trick. Since there is only one winner, even the support of alliances, peace, and equality, when conducted in a meticulous way that aids Cultural Victory, must still inevitably lead up to a point where one partner of a bilateral agreement is declared the loser, and thus permanently defeated. Defending against the possibility of hostile Cultural Victory is thus turned into a game of constant suspicion, as it makes the player second-guess even the most harmless and inviting foreign proposals. On the flip side, if the player follows the cultural path herself, and her strategies start showing results or become too blatant, allied AI- controlled civilizations may turn, call her out, shut down all relations, and some particularly aggressive leaders may even declare war. Pursuing Cultural Victory is therefore warped into a game of 'red light – green light', where the player can be harshly punished for pushing her unifying agenda too openly or quickly. The following shall describe the rules surrounding the most effective offensive and defensive strategies and the rhetoric that the power of these procedures behind embassies, open borders, and trade conveys. In order to start accumulating cultural influence over another nation, a civilization must have met and established diplomatic contact with the nation in question. From the moment of first contact onward, a civilization may propose to a neutral nation to establish embassies in each other's capitals. This is seen as a commitment to peaceful future relations and unveils the foreign nation's capital on the map, which is necessary for the assigning of diplomats, who, when stationed in a foreign nation's capital, accelerate cultural influence by 25%. On the other hand, it also reveals one's own capital to the embassy holder and lays its position bare not just for hostile military efforts, but also for enemy spies attempting to steal technologies. Once Espionage has been unlocked, civilizations with foreign embassies are thus encouraged to place a spy of their own in their own capital in order to increase their chances of intercepting infiltrators. This rhetoric surrounding embassies, diplomats, and spies instigates a

67 constant fear of infiltration and mistrust towards diplomacy as a whole, even from the perspective of the nation pursuing Cultural Victory, as diplomats do not just serve a political function, but are portrayed by the game's rules as foreign agents spreading propaganda among the public. Once embassies have been established, an agreement can be made to establish open borders and allow for the free passage of foreign units, both civil and military. Open borders add another 25% toward the acceleration of cultural influence and facilitate further cultural strategies. Those include the sending of Great Musicians into a nation's territory to perform influence-boosting concerts, as well as missionaries to more effectively convert a neighbor, adding yet another 25% to the nation-specific tourism output due to 'shared religion'. However, mutual agreements also open up one's own borders to foreign actions of the same nature, or to civilizations with the pursuit to map out one's territory and city positioning in order to plan troop movements for an eventual invasion. The AI understands these risks and will issue diplomatic warnings when it detects suspiciously large amounts of troops passing through or gathering in their territory, or when foreign Great Musicians or missionaries perform actions within their borders. These procedures thus encourage isolationist strategies on both sides, particularly the nation afraid of 'losing' against the other nation's cultural influence. In the case of major distrust in another civilization's declared motives, the rhetoric would suggest to outright decline the open borders proposition, effectively teaching the nationalist upholding of strict borders and the idea that the cultural contamination risks of globalization far outweigh its benefits. Lastly, trade routes to another nation also result in a 25% acceleration of cultural influence over them. However, trade routes between two cities of different technological progress and with different majority religions cause an exchange beyond mere gold, and may sometimes cause more harm than good in the pursuit of victory. Depending on the amount of researched technologies, a less technologically developed nation will gain a scientific boost through foreign caravans from nations with superior research, but also become more prone to the religious pressure that the caravans might carry from their city of origin. Trade routes can therefore additionally be used to amplify religious pressure, targeted at specific cities that have yet to be converted. If the target country would receive too high of a science boost, however, the trade route might be dismissed as too advantageous for the opposition. On the one hand, this rhetoric portrays ideology as tied to people, rather than place, acknowledging that no exchange between cultures

68 happens without an exchange of ideology. On the other hand, it manifests an isolationist assumption, by which science must be protected from pouring out, while religion must be prevented from pouring in, framing trade as an inherently grave risk to a nation's cultural integrity. Due to these rules of incremental progress, the procedures for Cultural Victory do not paint it as a war decided in one final battle, but as a slow but steady takeover of a foreign nation through public approval in all branches of culture. This fight for international cultural dominance can be likened to Hall's (2016:178) description of the fight for national dominance: “[Hegemonic] victory is not the great battle which ends with the final collapse of the enemy. Victory is the seizing of the balance of power on each of those fronts of struggle. It is commanding the balance of political, social, and ideological forces at each point in the social formation.” Civ 5's rules do not only copy this concept, but encourage its application, with the decisive twist that the enemy does indeed collapse. Pursuing Cultural Victory thus lets the player engage in colonialist strategies, celebrating the complete erasure of a foreign culture, not by murdering their people but by conquering their minds. From the opposite perspective, it forces the player to indulge in extremist nationalism to defend her people against the tidal wave of globalization, creating a rhetoric of xenophobia. The procedures behind the Science Victory display a similar rhetoric, mostly because the same isolationist course is rewarded. Science is not portrayed as a neutral joint effort across borders, but as a tool subject to an agenda that is all about borders, as is also suggested by this victory's Cold War-themed surface design. While throughout the ages, Civ 5's science repeatedly taps into the humanities, as with Drama and Philosophy, the end-game clarifies: It is just the natural sciences that qualify as science, and of those only the technologies contributing to the space race are worth pursuing. Neglecting the humanities in favor of the pursuit of a specific goal, such as the spaceship, makes sense from an imperialist perspective: The humanities investigate culture, which must eventually lead to ideology, the existence of which imperialism denies, while it rather wants to see science as an objective legitimation tool that produces knowledge proving one's own superiority. This mindset is even seen in the most basic technology tree mechanics, as science is not simply let loose to study nature and culture with the hope of happening across some useful findings. Instead, research is directed towards specific technologies that the civilization chooses before research can commence, suggesting a concept closer to government-funded research than independent academia. This

69 nationalist rhetoric behind science extends to the espionage system, where the AI's universal and frequent use of spies with no regard for existing profitable relations and close alliances breaks any trust in the genuineness of diplomacy. In light of these procedures, every civilization appears to be on its own, and diplomacy becomes just a mask behind which foul play is acted out. This rhetoric carries over into the systems behind the Diplomatic Victory. Unlike its namesake, Diplomatic Victory has little to do with actual diplomacy, which is largely owed to the fact that the AI is aware of the victory conditions and would never allow them to be fulfilled for a foreign nation under any circumstances. This effectively negates any attempt at persuasive diplomacy from the very start, and renders alliances between civilizations useless when it comes to electing a World Leader, as everyone will persistently vote for themselves. Civilizations aiming to win a majority must thus turn to the city states' mandates, which can be seized by establishing alliances with them. In order to achieve this, a civilization can fulfill a city state's quests, involving a wide range of frequently changing wishes, possibly the most imperialist of which is longing to be converted by a specific foreign religion, an obvious romanticization of Western missionary work through the narrative of consent. Furthermore, affiliation can be bought through rather large amounts of gold, so-called gifts, the most costly but also the quickest path to success. Here, the player is incentivized to embrace procedures of corruption as a valid and perfectly normal approach to politics. Lastly, spies can be sent to city states in order to either rig their elections or attempt a coup, offering high rewards for comparatively low risks. All of these procedures paint democracy as an inherently stagnant system that must be exploited in order to ensure public approval of a democratic vote to end democracy itself and institute an autocracy, a World Leader. This emphasis on the fragility of democracy extends to the UN as a whole, as its power is not a unifying one, but is instead used to strong-arm political opponents through initiating and manipulating votes on crippling resolutions: “The UN in Civilization V is a mockery of the actual international body. […] [T]here can be […] no peace settlements through UN channels, and certainly no human rights declaration. The UN functions as a narrative facade, obscuring one method to declare a single individual the winner.” (Albor, 2010) Whether diplomacy, trade, or tourism, all of Civ 5's non-violent international affairs revolve around gaining power over others and acting upon this sense of superiority. Any form of relation with another country is based on the mutual understanding that both

70 partners assume to come out of the agreement as the winner. Even a national issue like science feeds into this concept, precisely because it is not portrayed as an international affair. As a result, non-violent relations are doused in the rhetoric of nationalism and exploitation of the Other, with the overarching concept that no two cultures can peacefully coexist, let alone merge or even unite. The constant struggle for national purity does not allow for a third, shared identity, which is why all international dealings inevitably become acts of aggression, even without resorting to military action.

7.9 Domination Victory and war: the bullet

Despite the game's numerous options for non-violent strategies, war and conquest remain Civ 5's primary means of expressing power, as represented by the last X in the game's 4X-strategy genre: exterminate. Not only does the game's advertising position these mechanics front and center, but their ludic presence constantly looms over even the most peaceful matches. The systems and strategies behind war and military thus give insight into the procedures behind the game's core theme, around which all other features are constructed. Domination Victory presents the most straightforward path to success, communicating a 'take-what's-mine' rhetoric: If a nation was able to conquer a foreign city, it must therefore deserve to own it. However, unlike Cultural Victory, with tourism and culture as separate values, Domination Victory does not distinguish between the means of defense and offense. Therefore, if the player is able to successfully defend her culture against AI set out for domination, she also has the means to achieve world domination herself. Because military force offers the most direct path to claiming power, however, all civilizations – no matter their pursued victory – are heavily encouraged to utilize it, which also means that those not willing to participate in wars have to invest in defending against a potential threat nonetheless. The resulting arms race leaves most civilizations capable of both initiating and defending against an attack, creating the aforementioned omnipresence of military threat. While this constant threat creates the imperialist baseline rhetoric of a world that is naturally hostile and must thus be taken by force, the more detailed rules surrounding military and battles also reveal traces of the dehumanizing ideology of the Enlightenment. Civ 5 operates, not only in regards to its economy, but also its military, on what Hayse (2016:445) calls a “macro-scale”. This means that it elevates the level of

71 abstraction to a point where individual humans are no longer portrayed ludically or narratively, leaving an observer incapable of building an emotional connection to individual persons or personal stories. In cities, this can be seen by the abstraction of population, where a large city is not represented through millions of single inhabitants, but a conglomerate of skyscrapers, yet its population count would sit at '30', thus denoting not single citizens but an arbitrary impersonal number to represent the city's size. This philosophy is carried over to the military. Armies look as if their surface design shows single soldiers fighting, yet the ludic component reveals that this is not actually the case. One unit of musketeers, for example, is represented through fourteen individual musketeers, standing in formation and moving as one. However, the unit only has one health bar to display its status. If the unit engages in a fight and is damaged, individual musketeers appear to get shot and vanish, but the health bar does not reflect the amount of soldiers on screen, instead the amount of soldiers approximates the dynamic continuum that their single health bar allows for. As long as at least one soldier remains alive, the unit can be healed completely, refilling the ranks with new soldiers, and thus rendering the tragic death toll ludically irrelevant. The means by which military units can be healed range from placing it in a city for a few turns, which requires no resources, or an unlocked perk that simply requires the unit to stand still, to pillaging the tile upon which a unit stands, may it be a farm, an industrial enhancement or any other civil tile upgrade. This last tactic, heavily incentivized during a siege, leaves the tile unusable for the hostile owner until it is repaired, basically encouraging war crimes. The same dehumanizing abstraction can be seen in the game's translation of military tactics. Since all movement and positioning is tied to the map's hexagonal tiles, even battles appear – and thus become – clean and sterile, and provide oversight that paints war as an easily graspable and controllable rational concept. The state of a battle is always clearly visible, and units can be minutely ordered around to act out the most effective strategies, which is only helped through the turn-based system, stripping battles of all urgency. The player has unlimited time to analyze the situation and ponder her next move, turning war from chaotic slaughter into a battle of wits akin to postal chess. These abstractions ultimately serve the ideology of Enlightenment, and through it the moral facilitation of crimes against humanity. They help in legitimizing the unethical

72 and controlling the inhumane through the same rationality that naturalizes intercultural differences. Through this, Civ 5 follows an understanding of rational superiority that Crang (1999:69) also identifies in the legitimation and language behind modern warfare, as for example in the Second Gulf War: “The whole description of the West's 'surgical strikes', its laser-guided 'smart' bombs echoes the language of [...] a medicalized conflict with the West as a hyper-rational figure.” Omnipresence of military threat and dehumanizing procedures of rationality combine to form an imperialist rhetoric that justifies extermination, and thus all game mechanics that support it. It is because of this legitimation of violence, that the concept of world domination is universally accepted as everyone's final goal in the first place, extending the formula to all non-violent interactions as well: Since Domination Victory must inevitably end with the demise of all other nations, and because all victories must be equal in value, all other victories also have to adopt the 'winner-takes-all' philosophy.

7.10 The Ex Nihilo Paradox: build like an Egyptian

At the heart of Civ 5 sits a basic premise: The player chooses one of a diverse range of unique civilizations to compete against other civilizations. Ford's (2016) analysis draws imperialist ideology from the claim that while these civilizations carry different names, they are not unique enough in their surface design as well as the rules surrounding them. According to his view, Euro-centrism forces civilizations into a strict Western corset, while gameplay leaves all remaining nuance trumped by player choice, rather than giving cultures unique differences: “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.” (Ford, 2016) While, as this thesis has shown, Civ 5's civilizations are indeed constructed around a Western idea of culture and progress, Ford's interpretation is not accurate. A civilization's starting bias articulates their culture to a preferable climate zone, their unique ability defines their field of expertise, and their unique building or unit opens up unique paths for economy and military. Ford acknowledges these differences implicitly as minor deviations from a Western civilization prototype, that merely exist to offer the player a strategic choice. What he fails to infer, however, is that these features, then, also determine a culture's preferable ambitions through their impact on gameplay. While a player eager to construct wonders

73 would choose Egypt to build them 20% faster, on the flip side, this means that the game ascribes to the Egyptians an expertise in architecture inherent to the culture. Ford is correct in stating that the game does not communicate the culture's unique ambitions through attributing unique goals to them. The amibition is instead expressed indirectly by manifesting a unique ability, the procedures of which create a rhetoric of ambition that is then projected back onto the culture: Egyptians are good at building wonders, therefore the most efficient playstyle involves focusing on the construction of wonders, therefore Egyptians – usually – have the ambition to build wonders. This however begs the question as to why the Egyptians are sophisticated architects in the first place, why the Japanese are “maritime”, the Mongols “warlike”, and the Germans “industrious” (Shafer, 2013, Asymmetry). From the prevalent perspective of surface design, the reason seems obvious: Since the depicted civilizations are references to real-world cultures, the rules are simply abstracted manifestations of Western stereotypes commonly associated with said cultures. Ford's criticism of the cultures' similarities and his call for even greater disparity are understandable results of this perspective. When shifting the focus towards the ludic framework, however, this approach cannot be upheld. When all civilizations start the match with their original settler unit in 5000 BC, the mechanics and rules firmly support what the indicated time suggests: These peoples stand at a fictional starting point of progress, with no past history to draw from, and thus no tradition, they also display a complete ignorance of even the most basic technology, let alone show sophisticated societal structures. They cannot possibly be colonizers from a far land, not only because they lack knowledge of navigation and ship-building, but most importantly because the world map is implied to represent the entire globe (i.e. cylinder), leaving no room for a hypothetical highly developed motherland from whence these tribes could have come. It is in fact a miracle – and ideologically charged game design – that these settlers share an unbreakable sense of group identity to begin with: “National identity often relies upon a shared history as ground for both commonality and defining characteristics of the people. The shared history brings together the above mass relationship – the 'demos' of a witnessing public – with the 'ethnos' of a particular cultural identity.” (Crang, 1999:165) Somehow, these groups of people standing at the 'beginning' of history already feel united through a shared history from a non-existent past. The situation becomes absurd when these groups not only stand united, but also claim

74 shared, seemingly innate unique abilities and preferences regarding technologies with which they have never made contact before. In keeping with the previous examples, at the start of a match, the Egyptians are inherently fast builders, even though they have not built anything, yet, let alone sheer wonders of architecture. The Japanese gain extra culture from fishing boats and atolls, even though they have never even lived near a river or a lake, let alone sailed the sea. Meanwhile, the Mongols sport an inherent military talent boosting their soldiers' strength in battle, and giving their horsemen faster movement, even when they do not own any military, and have yet to fight their first battle or even tame their first horse, which is impossible as long as they have not researched Animal Husbandry first. This predetermined essential identity, thrown into a historical context before said identity would even have been possible, is the axiomatic paradox to which the narrative of tradition must inevitably be traced back to: “These invented traditions reinforce the idea that national identity can be passed down over generations as though it were some precious essence and that the rituals are a container for a pre-given national identity.” (Crang, 1999:166, italics mine) The focus of an investigation into the game's imperialist rhetoric should therefore not be on the observation that e.g. the Zulus resemble the English far too closely in their Western society, technology tree, and expansionist agenda, but on the fact that they do still start out with differing features out of seemingly nowhere – ex nihilo – to begin with. This phenomenon shall therefore be called the Ex Nihilo Paradox. When Shafer (2013, Asymmetry) claims that “the goal of the design team was to have factions that were unique enough to all be worth playing”, he offers one out of many arguments that could be used to argue the fun factor that this system, contradictory as it may be, provides. In order to motivate replayability, the game offers the player a wide range of permanent conditions that not so much force as cautiously push her towards different paths, strategies, and mechanics. These conditions take the form of different civilizations, whose apparently innate differences fulfill the narrative of tradition, while also exposing its shortcomings. However, this line of reasoning does not exempt the game from the imperialist ideology tied to this rhetoric. It strongly supports the concepts of essentialism and ethnic nationalism, as civilizations carry their talents from the beginning of time, and will do so until they either perish or 'win'. In the same vein, Crang (1999:169-170, italics mine) emphasizes that “[t]he idea of culture as container [sic] places a premium

75 on 'purity' within cultures, as an essence that is handed down, and on boundaries between cultures maintaining this.” Since cultural differences are set in stone, so are their conflicts, and the civilizations' now naturalized cultures provide them with a manifest destiny, authority, and legitimation that can justify even the most imperialist claims: Since the Egyptians are the builders of wonders, they carry an inherent privilege to hold the majority of World Wonders and rob other countries of the ability to build these themselves. The Japanese have the right to conquer Seoul, since the Koreans are inherently inept in comparison at utilizing the sea. Lastly, the Mongols should embrace their own lust for war, as it is in their nature to reign terror on those that oppose them. On the flip side, the Germans can easily cast aside any plans on diplomatic relations with Mongolia, as its people are – by nature – warmongering savages. Therefore, ethical considerations would be out of place in dealing with them, and no mercy must be shown until their kind is annihilated. This last example in particular shows the rhetoric at work even when there is no sign of threat at all: If the player realizes that her closest neighbor is Mongolian, she would be heavily advised to invest in a powerful army to defend her cities against the inevitable invasion, and deny Genghis Khan any and all diplomatic interactions, especially embassies or open borders treaties. All of this would be acted out on the mere premise that the Mongolians are Mongolians, even though they have not shown a single military initiative or acts of aggression, yet. Their Mongolian essence, however, convinces its AI to inevitably follow the Domination Victory path more often than not, and will provide it with the necessary advantages to achieve it, unless the necessary precautions are taken by their neighbors before the first incident even occurs, thus legitimizing prejudice, xenophobia, and even genocide. All of these examples outline the deeply imperialist rhetoric created by a system that only leaves nature as the culprit behind a nation's inherent perks. It is, however, not inherent to the medium itself, as the development of a culture could have alternatively been portrayed through a system by which identity is not pre-given, but completely adopted over time, as is already the case with the game's Ideologies and Social Policies. In this hypothetical design, civilizations would all start as the same undefined group, accumulate perks as they face unique conditions, and undergo changes as they adapt to their surroundings. The Ex Nihilo Paradox is thus tied not to the video game medium as a whole, but specific design choices based around Civ 5's essentialism.

76 7.11 The Designed Evolution Dilemma: me, the people

While the Ex Nihilo Paradox describes a phenomenon unique to Civ 5's game design, said design represents only one – albeit highly essentialist – solution out of numerous possible approaches to an inherent obstacle posed by the video game medium itself: the necessity of player agency. As discussed repeatedly throughout this thesis' ludological analysis, most of the game's imperialist rhetoric is owed to the fact that mechanics, rules, and goals have been put in place to maximize player agency and thus inevitably equate attributes of the player element to the attributes of an entire culture. As a nation is represented by a single human player, so is its unity, consistency, process of decision- making, memory, and – most importantly – will and declared purpose. One of the game's plentiful examples of this can be observed in the procedures behind the acquisition of an Ideology. Once her civilization reaches the Modern Era through researching one of the era's technologies, the player can choose an Ideology for her culture. In reality, of course, ideology is not 'chosen' by an arbitrary union of unrelated people once a technology, free of ideology, has been invented. Instead, it is the interactions between these people that dynamically form an ideology, that in turn manifests their unity and motivates inventions that better aid the new social circumstance: “[I]t is not the case that the social forces, classes, groups, political movements, et cetera are first constituted in their unity by the objective economic conditions and then give rise to a unified ideology. The process is quite the reverse.” (Hall, 2016:145) By reaching an objective economic condition, the civilization is thus prompted to choose an ideology, when actually, these economic conditions would be brought about by the ideologies that facilitate them. The only way to 'fix' this rhetoric would be to let these social ideologies, and everything they trigger, simply play out on their own. The civilization would still progress, develop, and adapt, but do so dynamically, without requiring any top-down decisions, making the player redundant. Since no interactivity would be required, however, the game would defy the very definition of its medium, creating a dilemma, whereby the medium itself forbids the communication of a certain ideology, or in the words of Marshall McLuhan (2008:13): “[T]he medium is the message.” The game's theme allows the player to experience the history of a society, as it dynamically evolves through the ages, but in giving her control over every cultural milestone, the gameplay defeats the point of the exercise by replacing the concept of

77 causal evolution with purposeful design. This contradiction between surface design and procedural rhetoric shows the confusion of the two answers to the ambiguous question of 'Why?'. There are two answers, one, the teleological response, is bound to the concept of the subject: 'For the purpose of X.' The other, the deterministic response, is bound to the concept of subjection: 'Because of X.' One looks to the future as the cause for the present, the other looks back. While the surface design of a game can answer in both ways, the procedural rhetoric in its centering around the decisions of the player can only do so in the former, else the game would lose its gameplay entirely. Gameplay as a challenge, the element of "Agon" (Egenfeldt-Nielsen, 2016:63), assumes a player subject, because it presents her with goals – or the creative freedom to create her own goals – and rules to achieve them, which means it assumes both will and logic in the player, that, when combined, create the concept of purpose. Since the player is inherently an element of the game, no game therefore escapes the element of purpose. All a game can do is diminish this element into meaninglessness, taking the challenge element with it. This creates a dilemma where gameplay inevitably forces purpose into the procedural rhetoric of a game, even if the surface design presents a situation where no actual purpose is existent. This inescapable situation will be referred to as the Designed Evolution Dilemma, defined as follows:

This dilemma results from a player position that represents an entity whose complexity inherently exceeds the decision-making of an individual subject. This situation – the predetermined complex non-human role of the player matched with the human decision-making inherent to gameplay – inevitably results in the player's decisions representing phenomena that are precisely not that, decisions, but the causal outcomes that evolved from the complex interactions between the members of the represented system – actually devoid of any overarching design, will or guidance.

In Civ 5, this situation arises when the player, as an assumed singular subject, represents a collective, a relation that inherently reproduces discourses of essentialism and nationalism, as it gives a people one voice, one will, one power. The player's civilization must inevitably be portrayed as an undivided hive mind, forming a logic by which traditions and events did not come about as the effects of complex interactions, but because everyone collectively decided it be so. Here, then, lies an incident that fulfills the hypothesis: The entire premise of Civ 5 – the player choosing a culture over which to take control – sets up the game on a deeply imperialist foundation, as the video

78 game medium itself, combined with the game's premise, triggers the Designed Evolution Dilemma. The dilemma, in turn, when combined with the surface design of human cultures, makes its inherent procedures inevitably appear as the manifestations of imperialist ideology.

8 Conclusion and evaluation

In their thorough investigations into Civ 5's imperialism and colonialism, the narratological and the ludological approach both yield a multitude of cases in which these ideologies are conveyed. Narratology reveals that the game's paratexts advertise the game through imperialist concepts and language. Similarly, it shows that the game's surface design displays an imperialist rendering – and most importantly selection – of its civilizations and wonders. Civ 5's ubiquitous Euro-centrism thus also creates the basis for imperialist representations of most other game elements, marked by a naturalization of the Western norm, perception, and meta-narratives as universal truths, best observed in the game's portrayal of time, its rendition of barbarians, and critically, the representation of progress. The user interface's camera angle and map design express sentiments of exploration, expansion, and exploitation in a particularly grave fashion, as they represent the lens through which the player must perceive the game- world, and are thus present at all times. Ludology, in turn, focuses on the centrality of the player element, and how the mechanics surrounding it inject imperialist values into the game's core systems through their procedural rhetoric. Most cases of ludically communicated imperialism can be traced back to the nationalism and essentialism that the game's rules manifest, most notably the procedures behind national unity, terrain, and barbarians, and summarized by the Ex Nihilo Paradox. On the basis of this unity, rules then incentivize the player to explore, expand, exploit, and exterminate, by perpetuating familiar imperialist understandings of science, resources, ideology, and culture. Comparing the rhetoric behind the Cultural and Domination Victories further shows how the game's peaceful interactions are translated through the same ideology that legitimizes violent imperialism. The sum of all these imperialist procedures then points towards their underlying Designed Evolution Dilemma, which directs the analysis back to the player: Precisely because Civ 5 is a video game, and because its inherent player role thus represents a conglomerate of individuals, all game systems are doused in a rhetoric of

79 not only unity, but purpose. This ties the game's imperialism to prerequisites of the medium itself. The Designed Evolution Dilemma supports the hypothesis. Since the game's procedural rhetoric communicates imperialism through conditions set by its medium, its contribution to the game's ideology is anchored deeper than that of its surface design, and thus more impactful overall. It must be noted, however, that this rhetoric can only be achieved through the semantics introduced by the game's surface design. While the procedures inherently cement Civ 5's imperialism, this potential is only fulfilled because these elements are 'appropriately' incorporated into a familiar sign system through a fitting coat of paint, in this case human civilizations. A grave ludo-narrative dissonance in regards to the hypothesis does not occur, as both narratology and ludology predominantly paint an imperialist picture. Minor subversive narratives do appear, as with female leaders in the realm of narratology, or the necessity for the interpretation of Great Works in regards to ludology, but their rarity renders them insignificant. The strongest case for ludo-narrative dissonance relates to the Ex Nihilo Paradox. While the actual paradox lies in the civilizations' inherent perks, combined with their situation at the start of history, it points to another contradiction when considering the nations' leader and welcome screens. These suggest societies with distinct identities that often look back on centuries of history, creating a dissonance when compared to their ludic situation. The developed methodology has proven useful to constructing a framework within which the analysis of strategy games can be successfully carried out. Furthermore, it has shown that both fields, narratology and ludology, are dependent on one another, while also justifying a distinction in their own right for the sake of structure. Said structure, however, produces its own challenges. The process of linking highly interdependent game aspects to separate overarching concepts, represented as independent chapters, becomes more unwieldy the more all-encompassing the investigated matter becomes. Its binary nature also exposes game aspects that sit near the middle of the ludo-narrative continuum, such as the user interface, and thus defy clear categorization. This also shows that narratology and ludology are separate only in their abstract form, able to highlight two sides of the same object. While this thesis focuses on Civ 5 and imperialism, the same methodology could be applied to different combinations of games and ideologies. Of particular interest would be influential landmarks of the real-time strategy genre, such as Age of Empires II: The

80 Conquerors (Microsoft, 2000), Warcraft III: The Frozen Throne (Blizzard Entertainment, 2003), or Command & Conquer: Red Alert 3 (Electronic Arts, 2008). Since the player takes on similar roles to the one in Civ 5, an investigation into their imperialist ideology should yield similar results, and reinforce the dominance of the Designed Evolution Dilemma in the strategy genre. Their varying themes would also shed light on the surface design's influence on how the procedural rhetoric can communicate imperialist concepts in the first place, since their respective medieval, fantasy, and alternate history settings position them in varying distances to a real-world context. Instead of focusing exclusively on American games, comparative research could also look at the aforementioned Anno 1404 by German developer Blue Byte and contrast its imperialist representations and rhetoric to that of Civ 5, which was released just one year later. For a more diachronic analysis, Civ 5's successor Civilization VI would provide an ideal candidate for comparison, as it reenacts the very same premise, but with a different take on game design. Particularly interesting would be the subversive impact of new features like city districts, as well as the mechanics surrounding governors and loyalty, introduced in the expansion Rise and Fall (2018), all of which would point towards breaking with the nationalist unity depicted in its predecessor. Such an investigation would be of major relevance, too, as in January 2018, Cree Nation headman Milton Tootoosis openly accused the makers of Civilization VI of Euro-centric colonialism, stating that the game's portrayal of the Cree people “perpetuates this myth that First Nations had similar values that the colonial culture has, and that is one of conquering other peoples and accessing their land. That is totally not in concert with our traditional ways and world view.” (Campbell, 2018) It remains to be seen whether the seventh entry in the series will be able to take further steps to remedying these imperialist concepts, not just through changes to the game's surface design, but to its mechanics, rules, and – most importantly – goals.

81

Deutsche Zusammenfassung

Videospiele vermitteln Ideologien, sowohl durch ihre grafische und auditive Oberfläche, als auch durch ihre Spielsysteme. Der anhaltende Konflikt zwischen Narratologie und Ludologie innerhalb der Game Studies schränkt die Wissensproduktion jedoch beträchtlich ein, weshalb diese Arbeit eine neue Methodologie entwickelt, um die Potenziale beider Felder zu vereinen. Als Analysegegenstand dient der Einzelspielermodus des rundenbasierten Strategiespiels Sid Meier's Civilization V (2010) mitsamt den Erweiterungen Gods and Kings (2012) und Brave New World (2013), welches mit mehr als 8 Mio Verkäufen zu den einflussreichsten Spielen auf dem Markt gehört. Im Fokus steht hierbei die Betrachtung der Methoden, durch die das Spiel imperialistische Konzepte vermittelt, und die Prüfung der Hypothese, dass die Ludologie tiefergreifende Ursachen einer solchen Ideologie aufdecken kann als die Narratologie es vermag. Beide Ansätze agieren jedoch stets unter Zuhilfenahme des jeweils anderen Feldes, um Wissensproduktion erst möglich zu machen. Während die Narratologie hierbei auf bewährte Konzepte zurückgreifen kann, wendet die Ludologie Ian Bogosts (2010:ix) Konzept der prozeduralen Rhetorik an, welches überhaupt erst ermöglicht, mechanischen Prozeduren eines Spiels die Vermittlung von Werten zu unterstellen. Besagte Werte werden mit einem Netz ineinandergreifender postkolonialer Konzepte abgeglichen, um ihren inhärenten Imperialismus herauszustellen. Diese umfassen Othering, Determinismus, Teleologie, Essentialismus, Nationalismus, den Ökologischen Fehlschluss, die Aufklärung, Orientalismus, Exotismus, Eurozentrismus, Sexismus, und Metanarrativen. Die Narratologie zeigt zunächst, dass die Paratexte des Spiels dieses als imperialistische Simulation vermarkten. Hierzu wird vor allem die angebliche historische Genauigkeit, auf der anderen Seite aber auch die scheinbar völlige spielerische Freiheit hervorgehoben. Ein ähnlicher Widerspruch findet sich in der oft betonten Offenheit des Spiels, jede, auch friedliche, Herangehensweise zu erlauben, während tatsächlich die militärischen Mechaniken bei der Vermarktung in den Vordergrund gerückt werden. Der den Paratexten bereits inhärente Eurozentrismus zieht sich auch durch die Darstellungen im eigentlichen Spiel. Die Auswahl an Zivilisationen, Wundern, Religionen, etc. unterstreicht eine westliche Sicht, die weiter unterstützt wird durch die lineare Repräsentation von Zeit und Fortschritt, sowie die universelle Darstellung westlicher Normen als natürliche und daher globale Phänomene. Das

83 Interface legt zu guter Letzt das ludo-narrative Kontinuum bloß, da es Eigenschaften beider Felder fast zu gleichen Teilen vereint. Als narratologische Betrachtung zeigt es seinen Imperialismus jedoch vor allem durch Methoden der Kartendarstellung. Im Gegensatz dazu untersucht die Ludologie die Ziele, Regeln und Mechaniken des Spiels, um die daraus hervorgehende prozedurale Rhetorik zu erschließen. Im Zentrum steht dabei das Spielerelement. Um der Spielerin die Kontrolle über ihre Zivilisation zu erleichtern, werden Prozeduren mit vorwiegend nationalistischer Rhetorik ermöglicht. Imperialismus erwächst somit aus der dem Spiel inhärenten Kausalität und Lesbarkeit, sowie der der Spielerin zugeschriebenen exklusiven Autorität über ihre Zivilisation. Ein ähnliches ideologisches Grundgerüst findet sich in der Darstellung sozialer und territorialer Einigkeit. Hier wird über die Allmacht der Spielerin sowie ihre unwiderruflichen, permanent wirksamen Entscheidungen eine grundlegende nationale Kohärenz und Konsistenz geschaffen. Gleichfalls erwecken die Systeme hinter Religion, Sozialpolitiken und Ideologien den Anschein, dass gesellschaftliche Diskurse kollektiv gewählt werden, ewig unverändert bleiben und keine Abhängigkeiten untereinander aufweisen, wodurch Ideologie nicht als unkontrollierbares soziales Phänomen, sondern als Werkzeug präsentiert wird. Das mit dieser Ideologie verwobene imperialistisches Othering findet sich wiederum vorrangig in den Mechaniken hinter Erkundung und Expansion. So werden Ureinwohner als Barbaren einer unberührten und unbewohnten Landschaft manifestiert, die es im Streben nach imperialer Macht auszubeuten gilt. Ressourcen werden hierbei durch die Belohnung von weitem Territorium und die Anhäufung jenseits direkter Nutzbarkeit zum Kern allen imperialistischen Handelns, nicht zuletzt durch die kolonialistische Rhetorik hinter exotischen Luxusgütern. Die Ideologie gipfelt sowohl in den dominanten militärischen Prozeduren des Herrschaftssieges, als auch der Feststellung, dass selbst die Mechaniken des Kultursieges dieselbe isolationistische Ideologie aufzeigen. Besonderes Augenmerk gilt abschließend zwei Artefakten der Spielprämisse, welche sich aus den zuvor erarbeiteten Fällen erschließen. Das Ex-Nihilo-Paradoxon erwächst aus der Ambiguität des Spiels hinsichtlich Identitätsbildung. Während die Spielerin eine Zivilisation von Grund auf formt, trägt diese bereits zu Beginn eine Identität, die auf Geschehnissen beruht, welche erst im Verlauf des Spiels erwachsen könnten. Hierdurch propagiert das Spiel den inhärenten Essentialismus nationalistischer Tradition. Das Dilemma geplanter Evolution hingegen ergibt sich aus der Kombination aus Spielprämisse und der dem Medium selbst inhärenten Interaktivität. Da diese ein

84 Spielerelement fordert, bedingt sie gleichermaßen die Einbindung des Konzepts von Absicht. Wird diese Absicht jedoch mit der Prämisse einer Spielerrolle vereint, welche komplexe Kollektive repräsentieren soll, ist es unvermeidlich, dass komplexen, unkontrollierbaren, und dynamisch erwachsenden Interaktionen eine Einheit und ein gemeinsamer Wille zugeschrieben wird. Grundlagen von Othering, Essentialismus und Nationalismus sind somit unabdingbar Teil eines Spiels, das Spielerrollen dieser Art zulässt. Die Hypothese wird dahingehend bestätigt, dass imperialistische Rhetorik aus der Interaktivität an sich hervorgeht, und die Ideologie daher tiefer in den Methoden der Ludologie verankert ist als in denen der Narratologie.

85

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Erklärung

Hiermit erkläre ich, dass ich die vorliegende Arbeit selbständig und ohne fremde Hilfe angefertigt und keine anderen als die angegebenen Quellen und Hilfsmittel verwendet habe. Die eingereichte schriftliche Fassung der Arbeit entspricht der auf dem elektronischen Speichermedium. Weiterhin versichere ich, dass diese Arbeit noch nicht als Abschlussarbeit an anderer Stelle vorgelegen hat.

26.3.2018, Malte Wendt