ABSTRACT
Civilization is frequently considered among the all-time most influential video game series. In this paper, I contribute an exhaustive updated discussion of the academic literature on Civilization, written mainly by US historians, teachers, political and educational scientists. Empirically, I add an unpublished anthropology classroom report from Europe to the debate, discussing methodological problems in using Civilization as a teaching tool in social theory courses, and analysing essays written by Spanish undergraduate students. Comparing scholarly literature with student essays, I make the case for a more balanced view on Civilization, between cultural critique and its learning potentials. In the domain of teaching anthropology, I argue that considering computer games for training theoretical sensibilities could complement the current focus on virtual worlds and roleplay on the one hand, and on traditional text and film formats on the other.
Keywords: Sid Meier’s Civilization; Anthropological Theory; Video Games; Spain; Serious Games; Games and Learning; Anthropology Teaching.
RESUMEN
Civilization es considerado a menudo entre las más influyentes series de videojuegos de todos los tiempos. Este trabajo contribuye a una revisión exhaustiva y actualizada de la literatura académica en torno a Civilization, escrita principalmente por historiadores, maestros y desde las ciencias políticas y educativas en EE. UU. Empíricamente, añado al debate una experiencia inédita en un seminario de antropología en Europa, discuto los problemas metodológicos en cuanto al uso de Civilization como una herramienta educativa en cursos de teoría social y analizo ensayos escritos por estudiantes de Grado en España. Comparando la literatura académica con los ensayos de los estudiantes, defiendo una lectura más equilibrada de Civilization, entre la crítica cultural y sus potenciales educativos. En el ámbito de la enseñanza antropológica, considero que el uso de videojuegos para entrenar sensibilidades socio-teóricas podría complementar el énfasis actual en los mundos virtuales y los juegos de rol por un lado, y los tradicionales textos y películas por el otro.
Palabras clave: Sid Meier’s Civilization; Teoría antropológica; Videojuegos; España; Juegos serios; Juegos y aprendizaje; Enseñanza antropológica.
Video games are increasingly an important field of inquiry for those disciplines reflecting
on selfhood and society (Boellstorff, Tom. 2006. “A Ludicrous Discipline? Ethnography and Game Studies”. Games and Culture 1(1): 29-35. doi: <
First, we have contributions with an orientation on games, media and communication,
that focus on the players’ experience, such as discussions among expert players, designers
or modders (this is players manipulating the source code) of Civilization (Friedman, Ted. 1999. “Civilization and Its Discontents: Simulation, Subjectivity,
and Space”, in Greg Smith (ed), Discovering Discs: Transforming Space and Genre on CD-ROM: 132-150. New York: New York University Press. Friedman 1999; Squire, Kurt D. and Levi Giovanetto. 2008. “The Higher Education of Gaming”. E-Learning and Digital Media 5(1): 2-28. doi: <
In the following section I will discuss this academic literature dealing with Civilization in more detail. Starting with different definitions of the game and its genre, I will then proceed to present available reports of learning experiences that tend to see the potentials of Civilization for teaching. Then, I will turn to the critical inquiries that are looking at the underlying ideological bias of what is seen as only an apparently (pedagogically) worthwhile game. I will subscribe the argument of those underrepresented authors who see in the exercise of critically assessing video games their main utility for training in social scientific thinking. In the subsequent sections, I will elaborate on the methodological framework of a Civilization gaming exercise in anthropological theory, conducted in November 2017 with undergraduates at the University of Seville in Spain. This is followed by an analysis of the outcomes of the exercise by relating the students’ essays to the expert discourse on Civilization found in the literature. In the conclusions I turn to the ways in which anthropology education has incorporated digital media and games over recent decades. My empirical findings show that beyond the now popular use of multiplayer online worlds for ethnographic experimentation, the discipline could also benefit from considering traditional computer games for training socio-theoretical sensibilities.
Civilization is a commercial entertainment “history game” that emulates the growth of “civilizations”
over time by simulating complex concepts, such as trade, diplomacy, science, religion,
resources, warfare, wealth, citizenship, production, topography, government, infrastructure,
borders, nationhood, tax, revolution, policy, culture, free will or fate. This all-encompassing
attempt of the designers stimulated many debates over the accuracy of the game’s simulation
of all these diverse and complex socio-ecological phenomena. Voorhees (Voorhees, Gerald A. 2009. “I Play Therefore I Am. Sid Meier’s Civilization, Turn-Based
Strategy Games and the Cogito”. Games and Culture 4(3): 254-275. doi: <
The multiple learning experiences reported for Civilization are often embedded in a more general interest of the authors in the potentials of
“immersive interactive technologies” (Squire, Kurt D. and Levi Giovanetto. 2008. “The Higher Education of Gaming”. E-Learning and Digital Media 5(1): 2-28. doi: <
This “educational” Civilization literature holds that learning principles are present in video game design (Gee, James Paul. 2007. What Video Games Have to Teach Us about Learning and Literacy. New York: Palgrave Macmillan.Gee 2007), such as problem solving, communication, resourcefulness or adaptability (Barr, Matthew. 2017. “Video Games Can Develop Graduate Skills in Higher Education
Students”. Computers & Education 113: 86–97. doi: <
A different set of authors are particularly interested in Civilization as a so called “serious game” with supposedly intrinsic educational value. Arguments
of this kind range from rather uncritical assumptions of one to one transfers between
game concepts and learning goals, to more sophisticated analysis of the underlying
game concepts. Weir and Baranowski claim that students can learn the workings of international
politics through playing Civilization (Weir, Kemberly and Michael Baranowski. 2008. “Simulating History to Understand International
Politics”. Simulation & Gaming 42(4): 441-461. doi: <
Different to those authors discussing the added intellectual value of gaming Civilization, there is a whole branch of critical inquiries. These are following a more general
trend in cultural studies to uncover hidden power relations expressed by symbolic
means in popular cultural artefacts. Here the “postcolonial undertones” in video games
(Mukherjee, Souvik. 2016. “Playing Subaltern. Video Games and Postcolonialism”. Games and Culture 13(5): 504-520. doi: <
In the following I will give a short description of a typical game experience of Civilization. My text is based freely on my own memories. Hopefully, my prose conveys a feeling for the gameplay experience to the reader. More importantly, it shall help you to better grasp the arguments of the cultural critics of Civilization. This is how I remember my days of intensive play of the first three editions.
I feel physically and mentally exhausted after a four-hour playing session. But I am also happy to finally dominate the world. Me means the Zulu civilization and its aggressive male leader Shaka. I was the first among my artificial intelligent opponents, the Americans and the Egyptians, to discover key-technologies such as democracy, build crucial infrastructure such as railroads or world-wonders such as the pyramids. Other nations were destroyed early in the game by Cleopatra, Abraham Lincoln or myself. I have grown my stone-age settlements into mega-cities producing a tank every second turn. I avoided discontent or revolutions due to overpopulation and warfare by spending more on luxuries, culture and building temples. Partly I was lucky because of the abundant coal, rivers and grasslands close to my first settlements. These crucially contributed to fast growth in demography and production. (To be honest, I started a new game several times to get that advantageous opening situation). In addition, eliminating a barbarian tribe crucially granted me an early extra settler. Nevertheless, it was also my own merit to use resources efficiently. Meticulously and obsessively controlling each little aspect of my ever growing empire—from diplomacy over infrastructure to science—thousands of my small decisions led me to victory.
To Voorhees, this presumably typical gamer experience I recall from playing Civilization, can be described as a symbiosis between the feeling of pure intentionality of the
Cartesian or capitalist subject and the imperialist project of domination (Voorhees, Gerald A. 2009. “I Play Therefore I Am. Sid Meier’s Civilization, Turn-Based
Strategy Games and the Cogito”. Games and Culture 4(3): 254-275. doi: <
Most of the supporters and sceptics of Civilization discussed so far seem to view the different ways of approaching the game as irreconcilable,
either implicitly or explicitly, as for instance Voorhees (Voorhees, Gerald A. 2009. “I Play Therefore I Am. Sid Meier’s Civilization, Turn-Based
Strategy Games and the Cogito”. Games and Culture 4(3): 254-275. doi: <
The background of this research is my work as a lecturer of anthropology at the University
of Seville. For thirteen years I taught social theories to students of anthropology,
communication, tourism or (art) history. Many anthropology text-books focus in their
outline of the discipline on schools (Barnard, Alan. 2000. History and Theory in Anthropology. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.Barnard 2000), with a chronological order (Harris, Marvin. 1968. The Rise of Anthropological Theory: A History of Theories of Culture. New York: Thomas Y. Crowell.Harris 1968), divided by national traditions (Barth, Frederic, Robert Parkin, Sydel Silverman and Andre Gingrich. 2005. One Discipline, Four Ways British, German, French, and American Anthropology. Halle lectures. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.Barth et al. 2005), with specific contributions from “founding fathers” (Kuper, Adam. 1983. Anthropology and Anthropologists: The Modern British School. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul.Kuper 1983). Two basic problems are cutting through these orientations. The first is related
to the specificities of the dominant medium of anthropological knowledge, namely text
production and reception, in contrast to fieldwork experience (Geertz, Clifford. 1988. Works and Lives: The Anthropologist as Author. Cambridge: Polity.Geertz 1988; Clifford, James and George E. Marcus. 2010. Writing Culture: The Poetics and Politics of Ethnography. Berkeley: University of California Press.Clifford and Marcus 2010). The second has to do with the question of what makes a theory “socio-anthropological”
in the first place (Ellen, Roy. 2010. “Theories in Anthropology and ‘Anthropological Theory’”. The Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute 16(2): 387-404. doi: <
In 2014, I firstly took my undergraduate history students to the faculty’s computer room and conceived a short playing and discussion exercise based on a Civilization tutorial. I wanted to see whether my students were able to analyse this game in some of the ways I was since the idea first came to my mind. Endowed with my instructions on a range of anthropological theories, I expected them to uncover some of the game’s underlying ethnocentrism, Marxism or structural-functionalism. I thought they might be motivated by the refreshing change of the habitual classroom media. Nevertheless, many of my students were not able to make meaningful connections between gameplay, mechanics or narrative, and the key concepts of my seminar. I mostly received superficial observations. Based on the problems of this first experience, I learned that I would have to put more effort into my own preparation, calculate more seminar time for the exercise and eventually turn to students with more specific training in anthropological theory. The readings I have presented in the previous section made me aware that it was far from original to conceive Civilization as a teaching tool or as subject for serious cultural analysis. Ground-breaking works were done already at the turn of the century in the first area by Squire (Squire, Kurt D. 2004. Replaying History: Learning World History Through Playing Civilization III. PhD, Indiana University. 2004) and in the second by Friedman (Friedman, Ted. 1999. “Civilization and Its Discontents: Simulation, Subjectivity, and Space”, in Greg Smith (ed), Discovering Discs: Transforming Space and Genre on CD-ROM: 132-150. New York: New York University Press. 1999), Poblocki (Poblocki, Kacper. 2002. “Becoming-State: The Bio-cultural Imperialism of Sid Meider’s Civilization”. Focaal: European Journal of Anthropology 39: 163-177. 2002) and Kapell (Kapell, Matthew. 2002. “Civilization and its Discontents: American Monomythic Structure as Historical Simulacrum”. Popular Culture Review 13(2): 129-135.2002). Second, I found that currently there was a plurality of conflicting and highly sophisticated ways of approaching the game in the literature. Each of these could be interesting in relation to the two major learning goals of my course, that I had referred to at the beginning of this section as cutting through most anthropological theory textbooks. These are the role of the medium for knowledge production and the very nature of social theories. Finally, I would have to divide my exercise in several steps giving room for each of these different dimensions. By moving gradually from more general observations on video games and social sciences to more specific analysis of anthropological theories in Civilization, I would eventually get better learning results. I would have to give room for more obvious and more sophisticated analysis from players, more critical and more favourable views of Civilization. I also considered the difference between interpretations of video games as cultural artefacts as opposed to gaming as social practice. Starting with these assumptions in mind, I conceived the first exercise to reflect on the medium video game and their users, analogous to the prevalence of text readers and writers of anthropological theory. The second exercise asked for the modelling of social life in computer games, in comparison to the ways in which complexity is simplified in academic social theories. Particularly, I wanted students to look at the specific models used in Civilization to simulate evolution, workings and morphology of “civilizations”, in comparison to those models used by anthropologists to frame society.
Planning how to build both exercises into a classroom setting, there were several
methodological aspects that had to be taken into account. Students would need to learn
playing before they could be expected to engage in the refined analysis (McCall, Jeremiah. 2012. “Navigating the Problem Space: The Medium of Simulation Games
in the Teaching of History”. The History Teacher 46(1): 9-28.McCall 2012: 25). Some lecturers have solved this time problem by commissioning students to play
outside the classroom (Weir, Kemberly and Michael Baranowski. 2008. “Simulating History to Understand International
Politics”. Simulation & Gaming 42(4): 441-461. doi: <
Concerning the selection of the adequate game version for the classroom, most scholars
have either worked with Civilization II (Friedman, Ted. 1999. “Civilization and Its Discontents: Simulation, Subjectivity,
and Space”, in Greg Smith (ed), Discovering Discs: Transforming Space and Genre on CD-ROM: 132-150. New York: New York University Press. Friedman 1999), III (Kapell, Matthew. 2002. “Civilization and its Discontents: American Monomythic Structure
as Historical Simulacrum”. Popular Culture Review 13(2): 129-135.Kapell 2002; Squire, Kurt D. 2004. Replaying History: Learning World History Through Playing Civilization III. PhD, Indiana University. Squire 2004; McMichael, Andrew. 2007. “PC Games and the Teaching of History”. The History Teacher 40(2): 203-218. doi: <
Trying to give credit to most of these methodological problems, I finally opted for five in classroom sessions of one hour each distributed over three days. I was moving pairs of students through two subsequent intervals of play/data gathering and writing/analysis. The concluding session was a final collective discussion. For each session I provided students with a written handout giving general explanations and specific instructions. These had to be returned with brief notes (playing sessions) or short essays (analysis sessions). The first sequence was dedicated to getting a feeling for the game and to undergo a player experience. The handout gave some brief information of the game series, some instructions on how they could get started with playing Freeciv 2.5.7 with Spanish interface. It asked students to take some short notes of their first impressions. The only analytical frame given at that moment was alerting that we would examine this game just as any other source analysed in previous occasions, such as texts and documentaries. The second sequence was designed to stimulate students to think about the medium. They were asked to write a short commentary comparing the presentation of human evolution in a video game for ludic purposes and the presentation of human evolution in a text for scientific purposes. The third session was dedicated to learning some of the game’s mechanics, rules or concepts. The student’s attention was drawn to reading the extensive Wikipedia-like in-game instructions and to take notes. This “reading the game” was also thought to tackle the before mentioned time problem and to provide the opportunity to understand the game’s overall workings to the less game enthusiastic students. In the fourth session, students were asked to write a commentary on social theories and Civilization, based on the notes and information they had collected previously. Particularly, students were encouraged to discuss whether specific theories (such as functionalism, materialism, particularism) or paradigms (such as relativism or determinism) where at the heart of the game’s philosophy or imbricated in any of its specific mechanisms. The final session was dedicated to collectively discussing the game as well as the exercise itself.
A medium of 34 undergraduate students of anthropology at the University of Seville participated during three different days of the exercise in November 2017, fairly in the middle of the Spanish fall term. I have dedicated over 8% of my available seminar time for teaching “classic anthropological theories” for the exercise. The following sections provide an analysis of the outcomes based on my own interpretation and translation of the written and oral Spanish commentaries provided by my students. These were informed previously by a note on the handouts that I would eventually use their contributions anonymized for research purposes.
In the previous section I have argued that one of the foremost tasks of learning social theory is the reading, writing and interpretation of texts. It is the contribution of the so-called writing culture debate of the 1980s to underline the importance of text for practicing and understanding anthropology (Clifford, James and George E. Marcus. 2010. Writing Culture: The Poetics and Politics of Ethnography. Berkeley: University of California Press.Clifford and Marcus 2010). One way of raising the awareness of the potentials, limitations and conditions of the medium text for anthropological knowledge is the comparison with other media. McCall suggests that “simulation games” provide closer analogies with the “real world” than “text” (McCall, Jeremiah. 2012. “Navigating the Problem Space: The Medium of Simulation Games in the Teaching of History”. The History Teacher 46(1): 9-28.2012: 13) but he also suggests that they are just another “simplified version of complicated realities […] like historical monographs and articles” (McCall, Jeremiah. 2012. “Navigating the Problem Space: The Medium of Simulation Games in the Teaching of History”. The History Teacher 46(1): 9-28.2012: 19). McCall’s ambivalent take on this problem shows two different ways of reflecting on the role of the medium of social theory. One can either underline the differences or the similarities between the writer/text/reader and the designer/game/player. Taking this problem as a starting point, in the first exercise I have asked my students to write a short essay on the following topic, after they had previously played for an hour and taken some brief notes. This is a transcript of what I asked them to do in my handout.
Let us consider the video game Civilization as an anthropological text for a moment. Civilization, just as the theories we read in class, is a simplified narrative of the world based on causality or probability of human collective behaviour. Nevertheless, the video game is different to the texts we read in class in at least two ways. First it is an interactive text that grants protagonism to the “reader” to participate in “writing” the text. On the other hand, the game was not designed to claim scientific accuracy for the way it portrays society, but to entertain. Write a short essay considering both observations and try to use specific experiences you have made with playing Civilization to sustain your arguments.
When looking at the reactions to the first two sessions, the short notes from playing
and the essay response to the previous question, it is interesting to see how many
students took for granted the seriousness or intrinsic value of the game. Thus, they
were putting little obstacles to the idea of a one to one comparison between scientific
text and game narrative. It seems that especially the overwhelming complexity of Civilization for the beginners (or the dominion of this complexity by some students with previous
Civilization experience) were taken as a proof for the game’s characteristic “seriousness”, thus
having an additional value to mere entertainment. This was expressed by many students
through quantitative accounts or listing the numerous game features they have encountered.
This in a way suggested that all those functions were worthwhile, and proof of analogies
with social scientific theories. A student wrote a list of skills eventually developed
through Civilization, arguing that players “interpret, observe, comment, administrate, critique, are emphatic,
and most importantly, creative”. This echoes McCall’s observation that “choice” and
the “what-if-questions” raised by gaming are its greatest potential (McCall, Jeremiah. 2016. “Teaching History with Digital Historical Games. An Introduction
to the Field and Best Practices”. Simulation & Gaming 47(4): 517-542. doi: <
Nevertheless, I do think that this is not necessarily a problem specific to computer
games. Similar reactions can be seen from students to the more complicated texts we
discuss in the classroom, such as for instance those of French structuralisms. Here,
Kuper provides a parallel of how over-complexity is also sometimes confused with quality
in academic circles. He is recalling a “highly esoteric” lecture by Claude Lévi-Strauss
in London praised by Edmund Leach as exclusively comprehensible for a selected group
of insiders (Kuper, Adam. 1983. Anthropology and Anthropologists: The Modern British School. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul.1983: 161). Therefore, not framing a video game “critically” in the classroom right from the
beginning seems to lead many students assume that their professor elevates only intellectually
important games to a worthwhile subject of inquiry. In our case, longevity also seems
to convey high “intellectual” status to computer games. These are more often supported
by middle-aged professionals having played them since the 1990s. For instance, in
an ethnographic account of adults’ justifications of their own computer gaming in
the UK, Thornham cites gamers using the example of the PC game Civilization. Informants distinguished sophisticated gaming for grown-ups from “anything contemporaneous
on the Playstation” (Thornham, Helen. 2009. “Claiming a Stake in the Videogame. What Grown-Ups Say to Rationalize
and Normalize Gaming”. Convergence 15(2): 141-159. doi: <
In turn some of the fewer critical observations of the game were immediately related to the flaws of the medium video game in general. This somehow excused Civilization, which may be appreciated in the following quotes from two different student essays.
It has the typical mechanical perspective of video games.
[Civilization] has a lineal conception based on a constant cause and effect logic, which is normal because it’s a video game.
Their arguments overlap exactly with Schut’s excuse for the mono-cultural reductionism
of Civilization. One cannot critique computer games for being mechanic (Schut, Kevin. 2007. “Strategic Simulations and Our Past. The Bias of Computer Games
in the Presentation of History”. Games and Culture 2(3): 213-235. doi: <
After half an hour trying to found the Andalusian nation and the cities of Cái [sic] and Graná [sic] I have declared war, without intention, on the Iroquois, but I have no military […] We need help from the Swedes to get out of this one!
Such a “ludic framing”, I suggest, consists of reducing games to the dimension of entertainment. This viewpoint is largely absent from the academic Civilization literature. This is also the reason why I will give this way of looking at the game some more room for discussion here. For instance, one could easily read the student’s text as a creative metaphor used to comment on the regional separatist crisis in Spain that dominated the public debate in the country at the end of 2017. Eventually Andalusia was employed as a metaphor for Catalonia by the student because both regions have separatist-nationalistic movements. The Iroquois then would stand for the Spanish, because the Iroquois are “aggressive” in Civilization. The debate over the hostility of the Spanish state was a central debate in often pro-independence social-science University circles at that time. The Swedes eventually stand for the European Union, because in southern Spain, Europe is often associated in ordinary language with the northern countries writ large. The EU was held a key party to mediate the Catalan-Spanish conflict. This reading of the essay is also interesting because the heated political climate in Spain complicated straight forward speaking about one’s own position on the conflict. Therefore, ironic or metaphoric framing of the conflict parties (Catalans, Spaniards and the EU) became extremely popular on (social) media during this period. Yet, I probably went too far with this interpretation of the student’s essay.
Another possible reading of the student’s comment is that of an acid comment on the weak Andalusian separatist movement. Never really catching up with the more powerful Catalans or Basques, Andalusia would try to copy other regions by desperately “trying to found a nation”. Writing from the perspective of the Andalusian capital Seville, the nation’s foremost cities are Granada (challenging Seville’s status as the capital both in the game and in reality) and Cádiz (the smaller ancient city south of Seville often considered for the humour of their inhabitants). By writing both cities in dialect, the student eventually plays with the ambivalence of whether these were the “real” names within a new “fictional” Andalusian nation, or the other way round. The unintended war and the need for outside intervention, to which the student refers in his comment, plays into familiar tropes of tranquillity, oppression or dependency of Andalusia, which is also often seen as the major obstacle (or argument) for independence. As demonstrated, a “ludic framing” of game elements is not necessarily the most banal mode of social analysis. Eventually my second interpretation of the student’s essay also went a little too far. Still, this example is suggesting that humour and entertainment through gaming can encourage imaginative writing and creative ways of reflecting intellectually on social issues. I will now turn from considerations about computer games as social theory to the application of anthropological theories to games such as Civilization.
Already a first quick assessment of Civilization reveals some analogies with classic anthropological theories. There are hints to enlightenment naturalist-evolutionism (civilizations move at different pace through identical development stages), cultural diffusionism (civilizations granted with different assets start at different points on the map), sociological-functionalism (everything within a civilization has a specific utility, nothing occurs by chance), materialism (the overall survival of civilizations depends on the natural resources at their disposal) or historical-particularism (the players/civilizations are rewriting history according to their will and intentions). In this line, I asked students in the second exercise to play again, to take notes and to examine the extensive in-game instructions in order to get familiar with more specific game concepts (such as government, diplomacy, science, religion, cities) or general features of the game (such as the importance of randomness/determination, the winning-requirements or the comparison with other games). After one hour of playing, I asked students to write an essay on the following question (I quote again from my handout).
You have seen in this and other seminars the specificities of grand theoretical models, such as historical particularism, functionalism, individualism, hermeneutics, physical plasticity, Marxism, positivism or the culture and personality school, among others. Write a comment relating any of these models to some of the dimensions of Civilization, such as a) the game narrative, b) the player experience or c) the explicit or implicit rules.
Many of my students forced an analysis where every theory had to be accommodated with
some of the game’s concepts. Others embarked on a lofty appraisal of learning opportunities,
similar to Weir and Baranowski (Weir, Kemberly and Michael Baranowski. 2008. “Simulating History to Understand International
Politics”. Simulation & Gaming 42(4): 441-461. doi: <
Nevertheless, there were also some more sophisticated essays. Some students focused
on the ways in which the game portrayed or reflected uneven power relations and on
a set of social theories that have this problem at their core. A specific essay focused
on the lack of “interpersonal relations” within the game, stating that there were
only “collective archetypes”, expressed through the units and cities. Just as McMichael,
this student found that “individuals disappear” in the game (McMichael, Andrew. 2007. “PC Games and the Teaching of History”. The History Teacher 40(2): 203-218. doi: <
A second much smaller group of comments reflected on the economic, technological or
ecological bottom line of the game and those social theories that favour a materialist
understanding of social life. This line of analysis also resonates strongly among
the professional game analysts. Civilization is economic-reductionist (Poblocki, Kacper. 2002. “Becoming-State: The Bio-cultural Imperialism of Sid Meider’s
Civilization”. Focaal: European Journal of Anthropology 39: 163-177. Poblocki 2002: 165), teleological (Salter, Mark. B. 2011. “The Geographical Imaginations of Video Games: Diplomacy, Civilization,
America’s Army and Grand Theft Auto IV”. Geopolitics 16(2): 359-388. doi: <
Boellstorff sees a natural connection between games studies and anthropology, as cultures
are shaped by gaming and video games foment new cultural forms (Boellstorff, Tom. 2006. “A Ludicrous Discipline? Ethnography and Game Studies”. Games and Culture 1(1): 29-35. doi: <
My extensive review of the literature from across the social sciences also supports my finding that Civilization is a potentially suitable tool for social theory training. Surprisingly, to my knowledge, no similar experience has yet been reported from the anthropology classroom. One of the reasons for this gap in the literature might be the limited scholarly interest in anthropology education more generally. There is a widespread “amnesia that surrounds teaching” in anthropology, as Mills, Dracklé and Edgar put it (Mills, David, Dorle Dracklé and Iain R. Edgar. 2004. “Learning Fields, Disciplinary Landscapes”, in Dorle Dracklé and Iain R. Edgar (ed.), Current Policies and Practices in European Social Anthropology Education: 1-17. New York: Berghahn.2004: 5). Still, within the marginal field of anthropology teaching research, the trend since the 2000s might be described as a move in two directions. One could be labelled as “gamifying” of student learning processes, and the other as a trend to “digitalize” education. In a path breaking edited volume on the state of the art of anthropology teaching across Europe (Dracklé, Dorle and Iain R. Edgar (ed.). 2004. Current Policies and Practices in European Social Anthropology Education. New York: Berghahn.Dracklé and Edgar 2004), the overwhelming majority of contributors discussed either digital technologies or experimental-performative elements as cutting-edge educational practice. For instance, Tescari (Tescari, Giuliano. 2004. “Ethnodrama in Anthropology Education”, in Dorle Dracklé and Iain R. Edgar (ed.), Current Policies and Practices in European Social Anthropology Education: 181-192. New York: Berghahn.2004) explains the use of role-play exercises to recreate a Mexican pilgrimage experience. Pink (Pink, Sarah. 2004. “Ethnography, Experience and Electronic Text: A discussion of the Potential of Hypermedia for Teaching and Representation in Anthropology”, in Dorle Dracklé and Iain R. Edgar (ed.), Current Policies and Practices in European Social Anthropology Education: 97-111. New York: Berghahn.2004) describes the virtues of the non-linear hypertext that she wrote for students, so that they could autonomously learn about video and photography from her ethnographic fieldwork on bullfighting in Spain. Nevertheless, reports on computer games in the classroom (that perhaps combine in new ways both of the mentioned trends) were not only absent from this book. In a more recently edited volume on anthropology teaching experiences in the US, I found the same gap (Shanafelt, R. 2012. Building Bridges in Anthropology: Understanding, Acting, Teaching, and Theorizing. Knoxville: Newfound Press, University of Tennessee Libraries.Shanafelt 2012).
Another plausible explanation of the little attention computer games have received
as a way to practice theorizing in anthropology, is that recent writing on anthropology
instruction is principally concerned with how to teach “doing ethnography”. Mills
has identified disciplinary prejudices in this respect, for example that fieldwork
cannot be taught (Mills, David. 2011. “Have We Ever Taught Anthropology? A Hidden History of Disciplinary
Pedagogy”. Teaching Anthropology 1(1): 12-20. doi: <
In conclusion, this research contributes new insights to both anthropology educators and game scholars. First, I provide the first comprehensive review of the academic literature of one of the most popular videogames to date. Second, while focusing on student experiences with computer gaming, I also critically incorporate the points made by digital ethnographers and critical game studies. Therefore, I put the critical and the educational research in conversation. I do so by analysing the extent to which my students’ essays reflected similar epistemic-theoretic observations or bodily experiences discussed by senior game scholars. Third, different to the focus on the US, digital ethnography, massively multiplayer online games and expert gamers, I provide an unprecedented report from an anthropology classroom in Europe to the conversation. Thus, gamifying anthropological theory education is an interesting, yet largely unexplored possible complement to working with texts, films and online environments.
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