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Sid Meier and the meaning of ‘Civilization’

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Re: Sid Meier and the meaning of ‘Civilization’

#111

Post by saalweachter »

hef19898 wrote: post #70
TeMPOraL wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Makes me think about Gene Roddenberry, too. The more I learn about history of Star Trek, the more it seems that Roddenberry was a bit over-the-top with his ideas. If he got his way with everything, the show would be quite cheesy (the way Andromeda is). Star Trek's golden era (TNG/DS9/VOY/ENT) is the result of other producers pushing back on Roddenberry's influence, and after his death, increasingly subverting some of…

Lower Decks is good, it is done by people that really liked the old ST series. Sometimes, I am not sure if it is mocking some of the ST tropes, like the two-hand punch, space anomalies and so on. Still light years better then Discovery (which is totally not cannon in my mind).

Orville is also in that vein, IMO.

It tries to be a comedy, a parody, but you can also tell it's a love-letter to old-school Star Trek.

Re: Sid Meier and the meaning of ‘Civilization’

#113

Post by hef19898 »

saalweachter wrote: post #111
hef19898 wrote: post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Lower Decks is good, it is done by people that really liked the old ST series. Sometimes, I am not sure if it is mocking some of the ST tropes, like the two-hand punch, space anomalies and so on. Still light years better then Discovery (which is totally not cannon in my mind).

Orville is also in that vein, IMO. It tries to be a comedy, a parody, but you can also tell it's a love-letter to old-school Star Trek.

And better Star Trek then Discovery.

Re: Sid Meier and the meaning of ‘Civilization’

#114

Post by BeetleB »

thom wrote: post #63
colinb wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Braben & Bell, no?

For the original yeah, but Frontier seemed an even bigger achievement by Braben alone. Last game I can remember fitting on a single floppy.

Frontier was a massive game, and I was in awe at how he packed so much in a single floppy.

Re: Sid Meier and the meaning of ‘Civilization’

#115

Post by BeetleB »

erikbye wrote: post #71
blindluke wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

He coded those games single-handedly AND in x86 assembly. Yep, that's a good example of a genius, right there.

Not to dismiss his achievement, but, why do people always think programming in assembly is ultra hard? This was just how we wrote games back in the day. I still know people using Assembly for a wide range of development, it's not particularly harder than any other programming. A bit tedious, yes, but with FASM and Fresh it's a lot better.

> This was just how we wrote games back in the day.

Most games written in assembly were not at the scale of Transport Tycoon, though.

Re: Sid Meier and the meaning of ‘Civilization’

#116

Post by BeetleB »

knighthack wrote: post #78

Why does the author keep referring to the player as 'her'? This neither seems in line with the traditional use of 'he/him' in English texts, or even the neutrality of 'he/him and or she/her'. It reads more like a stunted attempt to virtue signal. I'm quite confident that Civilization games skew to male players, rather than female. What a great way to alienate readers. More so when gender was not a central feature of…

> Why does the author keep referring to the player as 'her'?

Although less common, this is nothing new. I've seen texts that use "her" as the primary pronoun since the 90's.

(And yes, people have been pointlessly complaining for that long).

Re: Sid Meier and the meaning of ‘Civilization’

#117

Post by saalweachter »

torstenvl wrote: post #89
UncleMeat wrote: post #87

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Referring to abstract actors as "she" and "her" only alienates a very specific kind of reader. Consciously using female pronouns in these contexts is a very small way of pushing against the norm of everything being male, which is commendable. You'll see it more and more in CS papers nowadays. I cannot possibly imagine being upset by this.

It alienates everyone who cares about accuracy and everyone who is sick of politics infiltrating every last corner of our lives. You may not fall into either of those two camps, but let me assure you, it's a lot of people. For reference, the gender-neutral singular in English is "they/them/their" they /T͟Hā/ pronoun 2. used to refer to a person of unspecified gender.

> You may not fall into either of those two camps, but let me assure you, it's a lot of people.

I think thou'st meant "Thou may not fall into either of those two camps, but let me assure thee, it's a lot of people."

The commenter thou art replying to is a singular person, not a group, and as we know, while other words may come and go, the use of pronouns in a language does not change over time.

Re: Sid Meier and the meaning of ‘Civilization’

#118

Post by mdp2021 »

Sevaris wrote: post #80
knighthack wrote: post #78

Why does the author keep referring to the player as 'her'? This neither seems in line with the traditional use of 'he/him' in English texts, or even the neutrality of 'he/him and or she/her'. It reads more like a stunted attempt to virtue signal. I'm quite confident that Civilization games skew to male players, rather than female. What a great way to alienate readers. More so when gender was not a central feature of…

Sorry, why do you care? Why does it matter? "He/she" is simply unwieldy in writing text meant to be read by other people. Pick whatever pronoun you want to use. It. Does. Not. Matter. What I don't understand is complaining about how somebody else is not using your preferred generic pronoun.

Some languages use the form also used for masculine as generic - officially, as part of their grammar, long before the political matter about what is appropriate exploded. To find that the English language does not follow this rule ("he" as generic) leaves some confused, and even unconvinced: 'she' looks like a modification of 'he', so 'he' looks generic.

In fact, their "close" relation is just apparent: it seems that 'he' comes from variations from the demonstrative 'ki' ("this/here"), but 'she', while still coming from a demonstrative, comes from a different demonstrative, 'so' (feminine 'seo') - the source of 'the' -, which came into use to disambiguate as original feminine 'heo' collapsed into 'he' in spoken language.

Re: Sid Meier and the meaning of ‘Civilization’

#119

Post by NittLion78 »

t-writescode wrote: post #43

In an effort to prove that Civ 2 had global warming to respond to some posts in here, I found this thread on Reddit about a civ 2 game going for 10 years. I think y'all might like it: https://www.reddit.com/r/gaming/comments/uxpil/ive_been_play...

Alpha Centauri has a very active mechanic built into it that uses both global warming (on an alien planet, granted) and also the planet itself being sentient enough to attack with its native lifeforms the factions that pollute it the most.

Re: Sid Meier and the meaning of ‘Civilization’

#120

Post by dragonwriter »

TeMPOraL wrote: post #101
hef19898 wrote: post #81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Picard wasn't too bad actually, I think. Maybe a tad to gritty / realistic when compared to TNG. It did offer a plausible universe development so, incl. Picard sacrificing his career for principle.

I feel DS9 pulled off realism better - Picard seems to me to fly past realism and straight into dystopian stereotypes. And there was too much meaningless killing. I'm also pissed about the Borg subplot - in the trailer and initial episodes, they set up the scene for some amazing drama and deep storytelling, and then they just literally crashed it into a planet and discarded like space trash. It was a huge letdown to…

> Picard seems to me to fly past realism and straight into dystopian stereotypes

The “dystopian stereotypes” in Picard seem to me to be classic Trek with a very slight change of focus (largely in dwelling in aspects of the setting and social contexts which were indicated in other parts of the franchise but only briefly or tangentially interacted with.)

Kind of like what Lower Decks does, but in a different direction (and played for drama rather than laughs.)

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