Wtf? I clicked that link expecting some screenshots.
Player stuck in an eternal Civ II war
31–40 of 47 posts
Re: Player stuck in an eternal Civ II war
#32I love how this sim makes you a tyrannic psychopath. As if one man was the Nation and that people had no rights on their own lives and could not have a free will. These games are wrong on so many level. Some RPG can transform your psyche, like the jail experiment in SF has proven. Civlization/colonization have let me with a bitter taste in the mouth as a player once I realized how it was making me think, in the real…
I don't know if the downvotes are fair here. She's making a point worth discussing even if we disagree. I think that even just since the first civ came out, there has been a little bit of cultural shift where maybe people are seeing national power relations in a different way. Where people are less likely to see acquisition of lands for their nation as being quite such a good thing.
Re: Player stuck in an eternal Civ II war
#33Wtf? I clicked that link expecting some screenshots.
Here's some screenshots from the original reddit thread
Re: Player stuck in an eternal Civ II war
#34Earlier quoted context omitted.
I once participated in a Civ-style, turn-based, global game for a Political Science class, and, full disclosure, I was easily the most controversial person to have participated up to that point. The way the professor set up the game it actually had grade-implicating consequences. The class before mine essentially sat down in a giant circle and worked together to solve the 'built in' problems so they could maximize th…
Actually sounds like a problem with the class scoring system. Rational actors will maximize their returns, and in a game that has a set number of rounds, the equilibrium won't be met unless there are returns and costs associated to each round. Your professor should have graded on a running score, per turn, so that there would have been a reason (other than reputation cost with class peers) for the teams to collude up…
The odd thing is that from what I remember of International Relations classes, the core debate in that subfield is whether states avoid cooperating to achieve absolute gains if there's any risk of compromising their relative strength
(and whether game theory is the right analytical framework to use, and whether models of iterative games which penalise defectors are the best explanation for why international cooperation is possible).
So I'd have thought a PolSci professor would be far more likely than most people to have designed a game to penalise somebody trying to enrich themselves at the expense of much of the rest class.
(if it had been an economics professor, they'd have designed the game so that somebody trying to enrich themselves and their allies at the expense of the rest of the class nevertheless made everybody score higher...)
Re: Player stuck in an eternal Civ II war
#35Earlier quoted context omitted.
Have you tried Crusader Kings 2? It's a strategy game which tries to simulate all the people from courtiers to kings all with their own motivations.
And Europa Universalis IV, the sequel in the series, has you leading one of the nations at the dawn of the European Age of Colonization. Colonial genocide, holy wars, force-conversion, and state executions to quell rebellions are all explicit game mechanics.
one of my favorites of all time. Haven't found a bigger time sink.
Re: Player stuck in an eternal Civ II war
#36Earlier quoted context omitted.
Actually sounds like a problem with the class scoring system. Rational actors will maximize their returns, and in a game that has a set number of rounds, the equilibrium won't be met unless there are returns and costs associated to each round. Your professor should have graded on a running score, per turn, so that there would have been a reason (other than reputation cost with class peers) for the teams to collude up…
The odd thing is that from what I remember of International Relations classes, the core debate in that subfield is whether states avoid cooperating to achieve absolute gains if there's any risk of compromising their relative strength (and whether game theory is the right analytical framework to use, and whether models of iterative games which penalise defectors are the best explanation for why international cooperati…
That's the problem with game theory in politics - unlike hypothetical scenarios, the game never really ends in the real world. There are typically unseen (or ignored) consequences to actions made during engagements, that come back years later. When I said rational actors, I was referring to the students themselves and the scoring system put in front of them.
But you're right - it seems odd that a poli sci professor would give a team zero points if they were wiped out. What if they had previously used trade of luxury goods to maintain peace on a continent for centuries?
Re: Player stuck in an eternal Civ II war
#37I love how this sim makes you a tyrannic psychopath. As if one man was the Nation and that people had no rights on their own lives and could not have a free will. These games are wrong on so many level. Some RPG can transform your psyche, like the jail experiment in SF has proven. Civlization/colonization have let me with a bitter taste in the mouth as a player once I realized how it was making me think, in the real…
I don't know if the downvotes are fair here. She's making a point worth discussing even if we disagree. I think that even just since the first civ came out, there has been a little bit of cultural shift where maybe people are seeing national power relations in a different way. Where people are less likely to see acquisition of lands for their nation as being quite such a good thing.
The idea that Civilization makes you, personally, a tyrannical psychopath is not worth discussing. There are vaguely related topics like the one you bring up here that might have some conversational value, but the comment with the downvotes is attributing a positively insane level of mind control to video games.
Re: Player stuck in an eternal Civ II war
#38Earlier quoted context omitted.
There are several options to play (and win) peacefully if you so choose, even while other nations battle it out around you. If anything it teaches temperament, resource management, and how to turn failures into learning experiences - the last of which is considered important for being successful in business.
I once participated in a Civ-style, turn-based, global game for a Political Science class, and, full disclosure, I was easily the most controversial person to have participated up to that point. The way the professor set up the game it actually had grade-implicating consequences. The class before mine essentially sat down in a giant circle and worked together to solve the 'built in' problems so they could maximize th…
That reminded of a network security class I took. The goal was to hack the protocol of a game server and win points (we could run a packet sniffer or something like that). Instead I hacked the game server itself, got root on it, and injected a hack in the game server source to give our an advantage. Some people were upset, however we still won. I argued, that is how real security works. It is some seemingly unrelated backdoor or weakness that lets the attacker in.
Re: Player stuck in an eternal Civ II war
#39I love how this sim makes you a tyrannic psychopath. As if one man was the Nation and that people had no rights on their own lives and could not have a free will. These games are wrong on so many level. Some RPG can transform your psyche, like the jail experiment in SF has proven. Civlization/colonization have let me with a bitter taste in the mouth as a player once I realized how it was making me think, in the real…
[deleted]
Re: Player stuck in an eternal Civ II war
#40Earlier quoted context omitted.
The book "The Player of Games" by Iain M. Banks was inspired by the computer game "Sid Meier's Civilization" and it paints a picture of a profoundly dysfunctional empire which is governed by the use of an elaborate game. Mark Zuckerberg recently recommended the book, but it's highly thought of by SF fans generally. ("Civilization" was a development of "Railroad Tycoon", an earlier PC game inspired by the boardgame se…
Just to correct myself: it's Banks's later book Excession which was directly inspired by Civ. The video game hadn't yet been released when "The Player of Games" was published, and I can't provide evidence that Banks was aware of Railroad Tycoon or its predecessor board games. "Excession" is a good book as well, and appears to draw on email mailing list culture. http://www.tor.com/2015/03/06/on-iain-m-banks-and-the-vi…
Maybe I was just slow in the uptake, but it took until the end of the book for me to realize the interactions between and lives of the minds were the whole point of the story, not so much the main plot line.