This point about tiny changes holds true, mostly, for the history of the series, over the past quarter century. They tap into my desire to reorder chaos, to render it tamed, as if it were a disastrously unalphabetized record collection. I have taken into my hands an item that is almost nothing and somehow turned it into another item that is just about everything.Īll this holds true for each of the Civilization games, from the first back in 1991, to the newest, Sid Meier's Civilization 6, due to be released on Oct. During the game, I've completed thousands of infinitesimally trivial tasks: upgrading, improving, building, allocating, choosing, resting, moving, beginning and completing. This absolute transformation from beginning to end is glacial, impossible to comprehend at any particular moment. By sundown, that same village is a metropolis at the center of a hyper-connected world, the hub from which lesser empires are bullied, coerced and crushed. At each game's dawn, I gaze upon my solitary village, adrift in an ocean of wild tundra and untamed wilderness.
