Dr. Andrew Johnson, Associate Professor in the Department of Social Anthropology at Stockholm University and Senior Historian at Firaxis, hopes the game will inspire people to pick up books…

Civ games are full of historical information, but they also mix in fiction, such as the Han Dynasty led by Machiavelli. Civ 7 is structured in three chapters. It has an Age of Exploration, where players are encouraged to build a naval fleet and adventure to unknown lands. Johnson told PCGamer that he wanted to directly challenge the overemphasis on European history: “I teach college students in my other life, and my God, man, they don’t read. And trying to get them interested in history – if somebody plays Machiavelli, they might get really interested. Machiavelli might have enough name recognition already, but like Amina [Queen of Zazzau], or ‘OK, so this is the Ming Dynasty, how is this different from the Han Dynasty? If that can get someone interested in history, that’s what’s important here. This is not the textbook. This is the gateway drug to the textbook. If textbooks were drugs.

There are overlapping zones of sovereignty. Someone can be part of the Cambodian state and part of the Thai state and part of the Laotian state and pay tribute to all of them or none of them. But that doesn’t work in a game where you need direct lines on the map. So that’s fine. We can nod to it somewhere in the Civilopedia or in the game, and maybe if someone is interested enough in the Khmer Empire, they can go read about it,” Johnson said.

He then went on to discuss historical “exaggerations”: “When the average history buff picks up a game, they’re often saturated in European history, sometimes East Asian history, and they don’t really look beyond that. So the idea of a passive, traditional, mystical ‘other’ and a dynamic, active Europe is one of the things I really wanted to push back on. And so civilizations like Chola are really interesting to me, because here you have large, polyreligious, multiethnic trade routes stretching across the Indian Ocean at the time that Beowulf is being written, and Europeans are looking under rocks for trolls. So I think the dynamism of the world outside of Europe is really what I find fascinating here. For me, the age of exploration is about this age of connectivity. Yes, you have the high age of European colonization in there. But you’ve also got the Indian Ocean trade. You also have the Pax Mongolica, you have the trade across the steppe. You have the caravans in the Sahara, you have a whole bunch of other things going on. And the way the game is structured, you don’t have to be a colonizer to win. There are victory conditions that have nothing to do with colonization. But on the other hand, going out and exploring and settling new lands is, yes, something that non-European powers did.

I just want people to appreciate the world and the strangeness of the world. Because if you appreciate how the past was different or how other places are different, you can change your everyday life. That opens up new worlds. It makes new worlds possible. If you think this is the only way it can be, the only way it should be, then you’re locked into a static existence, and that’s boring,” Johnson added.

Sid Meier’s Civilization VII launches on February 11 for PlayStation 5, Xbox Series, PC, PlayStation 4, Xbox One, Nintendo Switch, Mac and Linux.

Source: PCGamer