DAY 2: Unpacking the Simulation

DAY 2: Unpacking the Simulation

Norman, still playing on a “fake” world, was mostly exploring with warriors, mapping unknown territory, and searching for barbarians and other civilizations. He planned and built his cities and secured natural resources quickly and without difficulty, in a routinized and skilled way.

Kent (Egypt, 1000 AD) still wanted to create a civilization to be like Dwayne’s and tried using negotiations to his advantage. Early in the day he met Greece and then spent a fair part of the rest of the day at war with them. He lost and restarted the game. In his next game, Kent befriended the Greeks and traded technologies with them. Several times throughout the day he sang their praises, calling out, “I love these people” and so on. He signed right of passage agreements with them and used his workers to build their infrastructure, making Kent’s alliance with the Greeks the closest alliance that would arise all week. Later, the Romans threatened to attack. Thinking that the Greeks would protect him, he did not give in, which started another war. Quickly Rome attacked and it was evident that Kent would lose again. As we watched Roman cavalry riding across Turkey, I asked Kent what he might do differently next time. I hoped to encourage him to reflect about parts of the game systems (economics, infrastructure) that he had been ignoring.

Kent looked at me incredulously and countered, “Build a bigger military?” I pressed him further, but he only answered, “I don’t know…build more stuff?” So I asked if he had thought of investing more in researching new technologies,

“Not really,” he replied.

For Kent, there was no real relationship among infrastructure, economics, exploring technologies, and his military in the game. I showed him how to save his game each turn, so that he might try different strategies and go back and replay the game. Although Kent wanted to build a civilization like Dwayne’s, it was clear that he had far less mastery of the game system. All of Kent’s strategies were single variable solutions, focusing only on the military or befriending other countries for example. In contrast, Dwayne attended to political, economic, military, domestic issues, and their interactions all at once.

Kent turned to Dwayne and asked, “Where is Rome? Do you know where Italy is?” presumably, so that he might launch a pre-emptive strike against Rome. Dwayne showed him where Rome was on his game. By the end of class, it was clear that Kent would be defeated by the Romans. He reluctantly continued the war, saying out loud to no one in particular, “I don’t like confrontation, but if someone just comes in, that’s what I have to do.” Kent continued with his plans to send immigrants to the Americas, which he now saw as much as an escape route as any chance to colonize. Knowledge of Europe, the Atlantic, and the Americas were tools that Kent used for his game play: knowledge of Rome (mediated by Dwayne), knowledge that he could sail across Iceland and Greenland to the Americas without navigation, knowledge that the Americas were less densely populated and full of natural resources. Curiously, the promise of the Americas and the importance of colonization took on near epic importance as both Kent and Dwayne thought that colonizing another continent would insure economic prosperity. While hypothetically possible, colonization is not exactly the guarantor of success in Civilization III that students seemed to think. Faith in this strategy seemed based more on real history, especially colonial narratives such as America as the land of promise or of American manifest destiny in settling the West, than on anything within the game. How their understandings of real world history were mediating their game play became clearer to me.

Exploring Game Concepts and Exploring History

Interviewer: What were the effects of being in a democracy?

Tony: At first I was in monarchy but my currency wasn’t going so well. It was hard for me to expand more in my civilization. Once I switched to democracy, a whole new door opened. I went from 10 gold to 145 per turn – 156 was highest. I became the richest civilization. I was able to bring my science up to 60 and make people happy, which gave me 10% other bonuses… I think they were military related. Switching to democracy meant that I gave it all (freedom, decision making) to the people. The people chose me, which helps my government be more organized, compared to a king doing all of the work (as in monarchy). With a lot of money (in democracy), I can buy lots of luxuries, I can make my city grow, more people come in, which means my civilization is growing. It’s a big circle.

Interviewer: Is this realistic?

Tony: Yes, close enough.
Playing Civilization III gave Tony a richer sense of the effects of technologies or social advancements compared to the particulars of that technology. From a pragmatic perspective, where concepts are known by their consequences, this pattern is not problematic. Still, the game did sharply mediate students’ thinking about history. As with the game, Tony’ game-mediated understanding of democracy has a decidedly materialist bent, demonstrated in the above example as he describes democracy in terms of its added efficiency. Still, Civilization III tied together disparate areas of history for him and allowed him to use historical ideas as tools for game play. His explanation during post-interviews of why the game would be a useful learning tool in school illustrates.

Tony: Well, it [Civilization III] should be used. This game is perfect for learning. This game has everything in a history class all at once. While you play the game the teacher can tell you about things that happened in real life. Then, you use it to take advantage in the game.

At 10:30, I instructed the students to save their games and quit so that I could show them the game editor. Students protested, but after three minutes and much prodding, they left their games and turned their attention to me. I explained that we would be learning “How these games are actually made…what goes on inside the game.” I asked them if they could recall what a simulation was. No one spoke, so I explained the textbook definition of a simulation: Taking one real life system and portraying it through another symbol system – like modeling the way civilizations grow and evolve and by showing them on the computer. I emphasized that Civilization III does not try to simulate absolutely everything about history, but rather only a few key aspects– especially relationships between geography and history. I asked them what they thought was missing from the model.

Dwayne answered, “Japan.” I asked them why Japan was not in the game.

Chris answered, “Because they came from another civilization.” I asked them if this had happened in any of their games: Had people revolted and started their own civilization? All of the students said no. I compared the forming of Japan to the American Revolution, commenting that the American Revolution could also not possibly be simulated with the game. I started a list of problems with the game, writing on the board, “You can never ‘start’ a new civilization.”

Chris added, “No one bothered the new world. The Iroquois haven’t been conquered.” We discussed what this meant, and I wrote down, “Did not predict the way the new world was colonized very well.” I explained how Civilization was not a predictive simulation. “Say that you want to predict what would happen if you bomb somebody – if we bomb Afghanistan. Would you use Civilization to predict what is going to happen in the next 1000 years after attacking the Taliban? Hopefully not. But it might help you learn things about civilization. For example, has anyone met the Aborigines? What were they like?”

Dwayne answered, “They have three cities. Aztecs have like ten.” I asked them if they knew why, and no one answered. I explained how the Aborigines were in the desert and had no nearby civilizations to trade with. They also must compete with other tribes, who are modeled as aggressive barbarians. I asked if they had any cities with similar problems. No one answered so I asked those with cities in the jungle what happened.

Dwayne answered, “The cities just sat there.”

I compared that to the Aborigines. “Much like how the Aborigines’ settlements ‘just sat there on an island.’ Because they would have to sail half way across the ocean to meet anyone, they developed in isolation.”

I turned their attention to the barbarians. “Some of you found barbarians on deserted islands. Was that realistic?” They thought that this was realistic.

Kent commented, “Yeah, but the Aztecs were considered barbarians.”

I asked, “Who were the barbarians?”

Dwayne responded, “Nomads.” I explained how historically most every civilization has called civilizations other than their own “barbaric” (e.g. To the Romans, a barbarian was anyone who was not Roman. To the Chinese, it was anyone not Chinese). I discussed this tension between nomads and barbarians in terms of the Vikings, who were a lot like barbarians but evolved into mercantilist societies. On a map I had brought to class we looked at Viking settlements in North America and western Europe during the Middle Ages. For the first time since I began working with these students, we focused attention explicitly on the properties of Civilization III as a simulation. Dwayne and Tony had already started asking questions about the game as a simulation through their game play. This discussion allowed us to open up these concepts and share them with a broader group. Despite the successes of this conversation, it was clear that students still did not have a deep understanding of the emergent properties of the simulation, as evidenced by their inability to explain why aboriginal settlements stagnated while others flourished. I decided to discuss the simulation rules more explicitly.

Next we opened the game editing tools, tools that allow designers to change the rule set underlying the simulation. Students found this exercise very confusing. I explained how they could use the editing tools to change the rules underlying the game, such as how much food it requires to make new cities. I explained how the tools would let them change anything that they saw on screen; in fact, they could convert the entire game to a Star Wars universe, creating a new planet, new military types and so on. Surprisingly to me, none of the students seemed intrigued by this at all, so I turned to their games specifically. I explained how I edited their scenarios to make them more realistic, removing horses from North America or uranium where it did not belong. I explained other minor changes I made, such as increasing the number of moves that units could make in order to speed the game along. The students still looked confused. The point of this exercise, to expose them to the properties of the model in order to make the game transparent and thereby make experimenting with the game both more fun and more pedagogically productive (e.g. Starr, 1994) seemed to be lost on the class.

I had them open up a map of the earth to make the discussion more concrete. Students immediately raised questions about icons they had not seen before. Norman asked about the oil icon in Alaska; Chris asked about aluminum and saltpeter in mountains. I showed them how to add bonus resources, such as wheat or horses. I explained that they could give North America horses if they wanted. Next I showed them how to alter their maps, creating islands, lakes, or oceans. Students quietly experimented with the controls for about five minutes. Seeing the Earth on the map, including where resources were located, was like seeing “the answer sheet” to some and they took great interest in seeing what geographic features were included and what resources were available.

I showed them how to change the basic game rules. I chose rules that I thought would be obviously unrealistic, such as how they could change the rules so that entertainers would create increased science as well as happiness. This example was confusing, so I showed them how they might add wool to the game by creating a new “sheep” icon, linking wool to a technology, and then setting the bonuses so that it would create food and / or commerce. Basically, I led them through the interface, explaining what each element did, but the entire exercise continued to confuse them. They kept struggling to grasp what I was trying to explain.

Although educators and researchers (e.g. Starr, 1994, Turkle, 1997) have long argued for the importance of “opening the hood” to simulations – giving learners access to the rules underlying simulations in order to better understand the rules by which the simulation runs, helping students understand the “positionality” of the simulation and remove interpretive barriers to understanding game rules – for these students in this context, seeing the rules underlying the simulation was too overwhelming. Even after playing the game over twenty hours, most students still had relatively little reference point for understanding the rule set presented in this raw format. This may seem surprising, even disappointing to some, but examining just how complex the Civilization III rule set and editing tools are may explain part of the issue. The “rules” tabbed interface (see Figure 5.1) contains 16 different tabs (ranging from unit type to improvements and wonders). Each tab might control 5 to 25 different choices (i.e. different unit types or different improvement types). There are on average over 12 independent attributes to set for each type, which in turn can have 20 or more different levels or factors to consider. As a result, there are literally thousands of combinations that could result⁴⁴. Changes as simple as adding “elementary schools” to the game might require fifty or sixty choices. Many of these choices themselves embody concepts relatively complex for many students, including bonus percentages, multipliers, or ratios.

Eventually, most of the students found some intellectual hook in the editing tools. I showed Chris how the prerequisites work – using outlandish examples that he seemed to appreciate. We changed the rules so that players needed to discover the printing press before they could ride horses. Then, we created a natural resource for “books”, so that books would appear on the map after discovering the printing press. Chris asked about several other settings, such as how culture, espionage, civil disorder and the artificial intelligence of other civilizations worked. Kent asked if he could create his own civilizations and then play it. I said that he could, and I helped him build a Native American civilization. Kent immediately took to this activity, perhaps because he had so much difficulty playing the game under normal settings. I noticed that he was endowing North America with bountiful resources, perhaps trying to increase his chances of winning. Kent asked about several features, including the preferred and shunned governments, cossacks and ironclads. Perhaps, given our discussion of communism, he

Figure 5.1: Screenshot of the rules interface on the game customization tool