Civilization Network will allow you and your friends to band together to create the most powerful, wealthy, or most intelligent civilisation. Think Mafia Wars, only with shifty Romans instead of shifty Italians. I suppose that’s pretty much the same thing these days. Toss giant plumed helmets on the mobsters and off you go.

Sid Meier himself announced the upcoming app in the CivFanatics forums.

I wanted to let you know we’ll soon be looking for beta testers to help us develop a unique new way to play Civilization. Ever since we finished Civilization® Revolution™ last year, I’ve been looking at ways of expanding the Civ gameplay experience to include solo, competitive and cooperative play to take advantage of the uniqueness of social networks. We’re calling this project Civilization® Network™ and the full game will be available next year on Facebook. Civilization Network will allow you to join together with your friends to create the world’s most powerful, richest, smartest, or just plain coolest civilization. You can coordinate your strategy to win great battles, share your technology to jump ahead of your rivals, lobby your family and friends to form your own government and win vital elections, manage and grow your cities to maximize production and happiness, spy on your enemies, and work with your friends to create the great Wonders of the World. The game will offer everything you enjoy in Civ in a fully persistent environment – you can play as much as you like, whenever you like, and it’ll be free to play.

Thanks a lot, Sid. I still had a little free time left, and that was bugging the hell out of me.

As the man says, they’ll be looking for beta testers soon. Your best bet? Head over to the Civilization Network Facebook page and become a fan. Might as well get it over with now.

Announcing Civilization Network! [Civilization Fanatics centre - Thanks Mike!]

Human history is the greatest story ever told. It’s also, courtesy of the attached social, political and religious significance, the most dangerous. So what happens when games try and tell it?

All kinds of things.

See, games do history a little differently. Other mediums, such as film, books and even comics, are re-telling a story. They add drama and embellish the facts to varying degree (see: Braveheart), yes, but in essence, they’re historical, as they’re re-counting actual events.

Games, though, are interactive. You’re not being told a story. You’re the one telling it, acting it out. Every man you kill, every city you conquer and every nation you destroy isn’t a case of retreading history. It’s rewriting it.

Which, in many ways, is exciting! It’s a blast seeing Babylon become an atomic power in Civilization, or to see Sweden become a global superpower in a game of Total War. But in many ways, it’s also a challenge for developers. How do they balance the need for some degree of historical accuracy with the need to create an entertaining video game?

Some don’t. There are developers – and these can often be found creating games in which action is the primary focus – who use historical events as a bullet point on the back of the box. The glut of Second World War games over the past decade are probably the best example, using the 20th century’s most brutal conflict as nothing more than window dressing for a fast-twitch action experience.

Which is disappointing. Like any other medium telling a historical tale, there is always a danger that the audience, presented with a product that is claiming to be “historical”, takes the action at face value, which can colour and distort their impressions of a particular period or sequence of events.

“There is potentially great hazard in attempting to reduce the nature of conflict to a simple matter of button-bashing” says Dr Cliff Williamson. Cliff is the senior lecturer in Modern British and American history at Bath Spa University, nestled in (and named after the key attraction of) the ancient Roman city.

Cliff is also, handily, a keen gamer.

“The most serious issue for me is the separation of the protagonists from the nature of the regime they represent”, he says. In reducing history’s protagonists to characters and factions, Nazis are reduced to targets, crusaders to a selectable faction. You don’t, for example, perform missions in Company of Heroes rounding up a town’s Jewish population. You just do the “fun” stuff.

But while some games do a poor job, there are many others that do not. And the ones that get it “right”, in Dr. Williamson’s opinion, may surprise you. Because while open-ended games like Civilization – which let you completely rewrite the history books – may seem the least historically responsible, in many ways, they can be not only incredibly historical, but educational as well.

How? It’s all in their structure. Their building blocks. Civilization, for example, may sound ridiculous by allowing you to convert Britain to Islam and build a fleet of Zulu fighter bombers, but scratch the surface and the game design that got you to that stage in the first place has been teaching you some very important lessons about history.

“I think that the games like Civilisation and Total War series are less of a problem to historians”, Dr. Williamson believes, “as they do offer an insight into the forces that shape history via technology trees and an appreciation of the subtleties of diplomacy”.

So while you may not be learning the true history of Britain’s religions over the millennia, you’re learning something potentially even more valuable: an understanding of the dynamics of history; of the forces that have shaped, and will continue to shape, human society.

While Dr. Williamson mentions Civilization and Total War, other similar games that instruct you in the “dynamics of change” are Pirates!, Colonization (yes, there’s a Sid Meier theme here), Paradox Interactive’s strategy titles (Hearts of Iron, Europa Universalis & Victoria) the Age of Empires series and Railroad Tycoon.

That’s a historian’s take on matters, then, but how do the developers of probably the year’s biggest “historical” game feel about portraying history in their games? And how do they reconcile the need for accuracy with the need to make a game fun?

“Whilst we pride ourselves on historical accuracy in our games, we only take it as far as it’s entertaining.” Says Kieran Brigden, from Total War developers The Creative Assembly. “We could, for instance, represent the coffee or spice trade more fully in Empire, but we chose to keep it included but not as a full market system. “

Why? “Because although it would have been more accurate, it wouldn’t have been as fun for the majority of players.”

This challenge of balancing history with fun when developing a historical game is hard enough. But then, developers making history games are often faced with an even tougher challenge: balancing their own take on history.

The field isn’t science. Outside of simple facts – there’s no disputing the Battle of Hastings took place in 1066, for example – much of history is subjective. How it’s told depends on who is telling it.

“History is always contentious, one man’s hero is another’s villain”, Brigden says. “Everything down to national flags can be disputed.” So include one nation in a game and you could insult another. Make one nation stronger than a rival and you’ll upset customers.

The Creative Assembly face this challenge the same way they do the accuracy vs fun debate: fun has to come first. “We try and treat these issues with respect, but always with an eye to entertainment as our ultimate goal”, says Brigden.

Which explains why, for example, Empire: Total War only depicts a handful of the 18th century states that made up what we now know as Germany, while Dr. Williamson says that, if it were accurate, there should have been around 300. Including all of them may have been more accurate, sure, but Empire: Total War just couldn’t handle that many “postage stamp principalities” clogging up the map.

So The Creative Assembly struck a balance. And that balance goes back to what Dr. Williamson says about the “dynamics of change”. Yes, the final game shipped about 296 Germanic states short of 300, but in playing the game you still get a sense that Germany as we now know it was, in the time period, fragmented and surrounded by hostile states.

So as far as this “balance” goes, in the end, we’re split. For every shoddy shooter set in the Second World War or Vietnam, which outside of uniforms and gun effects has done little to really deal with the people or events underpinning the game, there has been a game like Civilization, Colonization, Total War or Railroad Tycoon (a personal favourite of Dr. Williamson’s) able to show us how history actually works.

But as we move forward, and games grow not only more realistic-looking but are pitched at larger and more “accessible audiences”, the challenges facing developers in treating history with respect will only grow sterner. Something that, in a surprise for an industry that in many other ways is often labelled as juvenile, Dr. Williamson reckons it might just be able to handle.

“There is the pote
ntial for games to mess it up as badly as the film industry has at times, because for every Das Boot made there is a U-571 just around the corner”, he says. “The tension is always there”.

“But I feel that the gaming industry – with young, involved and devoted developers – is still very respectful to the need to be faithful to the past.”

Even though the music of a more “traditional” game may not affect the gameplay on the level of the code, it can certainly affect the way we experience the game mechanics, just as the game mechanics can alter our understanding of the music.

Indeed, since experience is ultimately what matters, I would argue that any deeply synergistic soundtrack-gameplay relationship that acts on an emotional or cultural level can be just as “musical” as the formal mechanisms of rhythm games – physical game controllers or no.

… Take a closer look at Civ IV, and you’ll see that the real meaning of the game lies somewhere between the mechanics, at those interstitial places where gameplay slides into and intersects other forms of expression.

Is Civ IV a music game? My favourite films (and games, for that matter) manage to weave together story, music, visuals, and all those other little bits that go into the making of media — often to splendid effect. But does that make them musicals, or music movies, or music games? Or “just” splendid, thoughtfully produced media? I’m not convinced on some of Wilson’s points, but his overall meditation is worth a read.

Grand Pianola Game Music [GameSetWatch]

A universal game design wouldn’t just stop with action games or titles where you’re directly in control of the protagonist. It could extend out to strategy, space combat, anything really. What else is Starcraft but an action game where you hover high above the battlefield? The concept has been experimented with before in games, but with the kind of refinement we’re talking about it’d be possible to mix completely unrelated players in one game. Take Left 4 Dead. One player controls all of the zombies, the others are all playing characters trapped in the fray. One is engaged in a strategic battle, the other is having a frantic shoot-out. A player who isn’t a huge fan of playing Halo may nevertheless buy a game where they get to control the battlefield while skilled players opt for FPS mode and try to take them out while they control armies overhead. Beyond the always promising broad economic perks of such a game, there’s the co-mingling of different players and preferences in one Universal Design. It’s not a game within the game, it’s a game that has every means of interaction possible in it.

It’s an interesting thought, though the old ‘jack of all trades, master of none’ warning seems like it would come into play pretty easily. Co-mingling, though, is certainly intriguing. It’s an interesting piece on choice and game design choices.

Universal Game Design [PopMatters via GameSetWatch]

Not playing Civ taught me some important lessons about the audience for games. Yes, I may want to screw around with history and make bizarre alternate timelines but most players want to be authentic to their perception of history, not to their boundless imaginations, at least in the context of nation-building games. I may feel constrained by a tech tree which encodes certain preconceptions about history, but most players of Civ find in the technology tree a vibrant advancement mechanic that they enjoy exploring and min-maxing to their benefit.

Not playing Civ taught me that I am not the audience for games, even though I have spent my life playing them. And that, I suppose, helped push me into further exploring just who the audience for games really were…

The whole Round Table set is worth a read, as always. There are twelve entries thus far, which is more than enough to while away an hour or two with.

What I Learned From Not Playing Civ [Only a Game]

Variety reporter Ben Fritz knows that Sid Meier made a Colonization game back in the day. And he knows that the new one, the upcoming Sid Meier’s Civilization IV: Colonization, won’t quite force you to sail to a new land so you can kill all the natives and screw them with the exchange rate.

But he’s troubled. He’s spent a good amount of time on his blog to show that he’s thought this through. Colonization was and is racist and appalling, he states. He doesn’t call for a ban. He’s a First Amendment guy. But he does call for a reaction.

Goddamit, am I the only one who think it’s morally disturbing to make a game that celebrates COLONIZATION?

Bonus reader challenge: Reply to this post, pro or con, without using the old conversation-stopper: “It’s just a game”.

Civilisation IV: Colonization… Wow that looks offensive [Variety's The Cut Scene Blog]

Civ Revolution demo upends XBLA, PSN [GameSpot]

“I’m fortunate to be able to do what I love and am grateful for all of the wonderful recognition I’ve received over the years,” said Sid Meier. “It is every kid’s dream to make it into the Guinness World Records and I’m thrilled to be a part of the prestigious book. I’m thankful to the many game critics who have enjoyed our games and hope they are as excited about our upcoming Civilization Revolution title as I am.”

And there, my friends, is why great men are great. They are never too proud to slip in a little marketing. Go read some more marketing in the official press release, while I apply some watercolour Photoshop filter love to this great, great man.

Sid Meier Enters Guinness World Records Gamer’s Edition 2008

As Industry’s Most Award-Winning Developer

Sid Meier, creator of the Sid Meier’s Civilization® franchise and Director of Creative Development at 2K’s world-renowned Firaxis Games development studio, has officially won more game awards than any other video game creator according to the Guinness World Records Gamer’s Edition 2008.The Civilization series boasts some of Sid’s most impressive game awards, including Sid Meier’s Civilization IV™, which was selected as Strategy Game of the Year by the Academy of Interactive Arts and Sciences (AIAS) and 1UP.com. Next up from the award-winning developer is Sid Meier’s Civilization® Revolution™, which promises to uphold the franchise’s gold standard.

Sid Meier’s awards for his game design genius are numerous. In 1999, Sid was the second person ever to be inducted into the Academy of Interactive Arts and Sciences’ Hall of Fame. He was inducted into the Computer Museum of America’s Hall of Fame in 2002 and received a commemorative star on the Walk of Game in 2006. Meier was recently awarded a Lifetime Achievement Award at the 2008 Game Developers Choice Awards.

“I’m fortunate to be able to do what I love and am grateful for all of the wonderful recognition I’ve received over the years,” said Sid Meier. “It is every kid’s dream to make it into the Guinness World Records and I’m thrilled to be a part of the prestigious book. I’m thankful to the many game critics who have enjoyed our games and hope they are as excited about our upcoming Civilization Revolution title as I am.”

Built from the ground up solely for console and handheld gaming systems, Sid Meier’s Civilization Revolution features fast-paced, pick-up-and-play action involving strategic global domination and history’s most intrepid leaders, as well as a highly competitive multi-player experience. Sid Meier’s Civilization Revolution brings the renowned Civilization franchise to current gen consoles and handhelds for the first time, delivering the vast re-playability and unmatched addictive gameplay that has become synonymous with the works of Sid Meier. New graphical designs and a streamlined interface will transport the Civilization franchise to a level that fans have never seen before.

Sid Meier’s Civilization Revolution is rated E10+ for everyone 10 and older and will be in stores beginning July 8, 2008 for Xbox 360® video game and entertainment system from Microsoft, PLAYSTATION®3 computer entertainment system and Nintendo DS™. For more Civilization Revolution information, visit www.civilizationrevolution.com.

Sid Meier is very much involved. It’s a little known fact that he only developed Civilization 1 by himself, the next iterations had different Lead Designers. This is the first Civ since Civ1 where Sid Meier is in charge of the design and coding himself.

I wouldn’t say it’s a “little known fact” that Sid crafted the original Civ by his lonesome. All I’m hoping is that he hasn’t been out of the game, as it were, for too long.

If you missed it yesterday, I had a chance last week to play a preview build of Civilization: Revolution.