When I was very young, and already a history buff, I loved to devour books about the history of dinosaur paleontology and play two groundbreaking MS-DOS turn-based strategy videogames on a clunky INTEL 80286, Centurion: Defender of Rome (Bits of Magic, 1990) and Sid Meier’s Civilization (MicroProse, 1991). Both videogames were early examples of what would have become known as “4X” empire-building strategy games, i.e., videogames that involved the exploration of a virtual map, expansion of territory with the conquest or annexation of provinces, exploitation of the resources available on the map, and extermination of (or diplomatic alliance with) enemy factions (Ghita and Andrikopulos 2009). As their names suggest, Centurion allowed the player to take active part in Roman military history as an army officer, while Civilization offered the exhilarating possibility of replaying history with several civilizations on ever-different scenarios and maps.
While superficially similar, the two games differed rather drastically in so far as their mechanics were concerned. In Centurion, the management of the well-being of the populace of each province was paramount: if exploited, neglected, plundered, or burdened with too much taxes and manpower demands, the government’s authority and prestige would plummet and provinces would erupt in rebellion. Ennui and restlessness were appeased and staved off mainly through panem et circenses, that is, holding games (chariot races or gladiatorial ludii) and adjusting financial policy (see Fig. 1).
FIGURE 1. The initial state of the Roman people’s morale (right) in Centurion: Defender of Rome, and the possible choices immediately available to the player to assuage their anger (mainly, “Tribute Policy” and “Hold Games;” left). Other possibilities to increase social status and prestige, and thus win the favor of both the people and the Senate, were: expansion and addition of provinces; signing diplomatic alliances; holding and winning chariot races or gladiatorial spectacles; and building an amphitheatre. Unlike provinces, Rome (i.e., the Italic Peninsula) could not be plundered (plundering would negatively impact prestige). The neurosocial states of the populace were: Rebellious (which foreboded revolt), Angry, Restless, or Content. ©1990 Bits of Magic/EA.
The defining feature of Civilization, instead, was the possibility to advance any given civilization, from proto-historical stage to interstellar voyage, through a non-linear societal development intended as the accumulation of sequential upgrades available through the technology tree and chosen each time by the player. As in Centurion, entertainment and fiscal policy were central, but Civilization also added two additional variables, luxury goods and religion, both tied to cultural development (in particular, religion was the result of the implementation of both philosophy and writing in the technology tree; see Fig. 2). Population growth and overall standard of living were considered inversely proportional, but culture and religion helped strike a balance and set a new acceptable standard for further growth and progress.
FIGURE 2. The “Religion” entry from the built-in encyclopedia (or Civilopedia) of Sid Meier’s Civilization, which describes the game’s understanding of religion as a terror-management civilization advance. Civilization’s Religion was the eminently ultrasocial product of the cumulative development of two previous technological advances, i.e., Philosophy and Writing. The implementation of Religion allowed for one further technological/architectural advance (“Cathedral improvement”) and the creation of two Wonders (“J.S. Bach's Cathedral” and “Michelangelo’s Chapel Wonder”). All had the effect of decreasing unhappiness in crowded social settings and increase social contentment. Two previous discrete advances in the technology tree, i.e., “Mysticism” and “Ceremonial Burial”, were not directly conducive to ultrasocial “Religion.” ©1991 MicroProse.
Little did I know that playing those two historical simulations would have come in handy decades later to understand the main academic developments of the cognitive and evolutionary sciences of religion interested in historical research: on the one hand, like Centurion, we have a specific focus on the interdisciplinary interconnections between history and neurology; on the other hand, in a way not dissimilar to what Civilization did, there are both a developmental technology-tree perspective and a competitive intra-/inter-societal framework.
While the difference between these trends can be blurred at times (and they do in fact overlap at times), I think that two recent and interesting books exemplify, for better or for worse, the paths previously mapped by those classical videogames. The multi-authored The Emergence and Evolution of Religion (Turner et al. 2018) shares with Centurion an uncompromising attention to the social management of negative emotions, to violence, and to assortative sociality. Just like Civilization, Religious Evolution and the Axial Age (Sanderson 2018) privileges the specific relationship between territorial expansion and specific forms of religion as consequence of the development of philosophy and writing technologies.
As Civilization pointed out almost thirty years ago, ultrasocial religion is just a psychosocial tile in the technology tree of humanity, something that, as Centurion suggested, can be co-opted in a larger set of neurohistorical exploitative or self-deceptive ploys to manipulate moods, behaviours, and mental states. The Emergence and Evolution of Religion and Religious Evolution and the Axial Age have shown us the path ahead: as awkward as it may seem, to advance the qualitative study of socio-cultural evolution we should better restart from the manuals of some pioneering 4X videogames.
Notes
This post has been originally written in pre-pandemic December 2019.
Obviously, this post is not meant to offer in any way, shape, or form a critical overview of the concept of “Religion” as implemented in the mechanics of those videogames. Besides, this is not quite the right place to provide the readers with a comprehensive summary able to do justice to these two multidisciplinary volumes. For that, you’d need a full-fledged discussion - and I’m quite delighted to tell you that this time I’ve got you covered. The next issue of the Journal of Cognitive Historiography (6/1-2, 2020-2021) will include a wide-ranging, critical conversation with the authors of these thought-provoking books. Stay tuned!
Addendum: if you’re interested, the go-to historiographical reference for Civilization is Ferrell, Keith. 1992. The Official Guide to Sid Meier’s Civilization. Greensboro, NC: Compute Books.
Refs.
Ghita, Cristian, and Georgios Andrikopulos. 2009. “Total War and Total Realism: A Battle for Antiquity in Computer Game History.” In Dunstan Lowe and Kim Shahabudin (eds.), Classics for All: Reworking Antiquity in Mass Culture, Newcastle upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholars, 109-126.
Sanderson, Stephen K. 2018. Religious Evolution and the Axial Age: From Shamans to Priests to Prophets. London and New York: Bloomsbury.
Turner, Jonathan H., Alexandra Maryanski, Anders K. Petersen, and Armin W. Geertz. 2018. The Emergence and Evolution of Religion by Means of Natural Selection. London and New York: Routlegde.