When I signed up for this course, I was told to get this game while it was on sale and after learning about the game before I started for the semester, I had no idea what I was supposed to do even while searching how to play the game and what to do. This video game is called Civilization VI and as I played the game more, I now understand the game, but I am definitely not an expert at this game. For those who don’t know Civilization VI is a nation building video game where you as the player control all aspects of your civilization, kingdom, or nation. The point of the game is to dominate an aspect of your civilization over the other civilizations to win the game. You can either get a science victory, a culture victory, a domination victory, or a religious victory. Before you start the game, you choose a leader for your civilization to start whether it would be from France, Japan, Germany, India, and many others. I started with Japan and my leader was Hojo Tokimune and my goal going into my Civilization was to win by getting a Domination Victory. Due to my laptop being so difficult I had two civilizations. One was when I played in class and the other was on my Xbox in my dorm room and I was Japan for both. My first time playing the game was our first day of class and I slowly learned but still had no clue. Then after class I spent the rest of my day on my Xbox playing Civilization VI and I got a much better understanding of the game. Currently on my Xbox account I am on turn 240 in the year 1645 AD with three settlements, while on one of the PlayStation consoles in the classroom I have 4 settlements on turn 100 but that is only because I started out differently because on my console, I was able to quickly build a very strong Navy because my civilization was on water.
During this semester we had to read an article for class by a man named Adam Chapman who works in the Department of Media, Culture and Society at the University of Hull in the United Kingdom to see whether or not the Civilization video game series is history. As I was reading this there were many remarks, I did not understand fully which is ok because the basic argument of this was that Civilization is in fact a form of learning history even though there are some factors in the game that are not historically accurate you can still have learned something that possibly did happen to one’s civilization historically based on your decisions. That’s how I viewed his article on that. But how I see this game from a gamer perspective is that this is just the board game Risk, but the game is quicker and there’s more involved rather than claiming your opponent’s territories.
Although Civilization is a very similar game to Risk, there are many differences with one big one being that you have to manage your own civilization rather than only care about dominating other civilizations. You have to make your citizens happy, build stuff in your civilizations, make decisions of who to align with, who and when to fight another Civilization. This is similar to what I’m looking at a major currently in sports management. Managing a sports team isn’t as important as running a country per se but there are very similar aspects of running a country and a sports team. The one main similarity is that you have to make decisions that not everybody is going to like for example in sports if you wanted to trade a player what would the rest of the organization and the fans think about that action. When you are running a country, you have to decide on whether to go to war with someone or not and how will that impact your relationships with other countries and your people. Another aspect in sports is that if you wanted a new training facility to boost the morale of your players or a new stadium for your fans. In Civilization you have to decide what to build inside your civilization because the time it takes for your civilization to build that building takes a certain number of turns. Although in reality these two jobs are completely different in the case for how much are you willing to risk, there are similar aspects but the results could be more catastrophic if it were you running a civilization.
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