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Popular Culture Review
notions, pointedly named Colonization, That game attempted to present native
populations in a less helpless fashion and more fully reahzed as unique cultures.
Colonization, however, never matched the success of Civilization.
While Civilization attempts to present a “Universal” history, then, it remains a
simulacraic version of 19^*" century American historical thought, simulated through
the mirror of Turner’s thesis. Throughout the 19^ century, leading up to that thesis,
frontier mythology played an important part in rationahzing the rise of capitahsm,
leading to the notion that “progress itself’ could be “asserted as a positive good
against the aristocratic and peasant traditions” that pre-dated America (Slotkin,
Environment, 31). Again, a mirrored structure is available in Civilization. Progress
(and, thus, success in game play) is determined for the player through technological
advances, ranging from bronze working and writing to such concepts as philosophy,
democracy, communism and capitahsm. Without these “advances” in both thought
and territory a player is quite Uterally doomed to defeat. Success for the player is
largely based on finding “the existence of an area of free land, its continuous
recession and the advance o f.. .settlement” (Turner, 15). At first it may seem ironic
that Civilization places success in “access to undefiled, bountiful, subhme Nature”
(Marx, 228), and then expects the player of this simulation to exercise control over
that very area and, indeed, idea. It is, as Marx says, a unique and “distinctively
American form of romantic pastorahsm” (229).
At its center, then. Civilization is a game about a specifically defined kind of
historical and socioeconomic progress. And that progress, quite simply, is measured
in very specific ways. It is through technology, territorial expansion, and, usually,
a move toward a more representative (albeit simulated) government that players of
this simulation achieve success.
But more than simply a simulacra of the American frontier thesis, as is, say.
Railroad Tycoon, the Civilization games are also an imperiahstic simulacra. This
simulated imperialism is presented in a number of ways, but it is through cultural,
economic and military hegemony that the game player achieves the greatest success.
In the first two incarnations of the v