"Fidelity to history is not the aim of Civilization. “The history that we know is only one possible path,” Meier said. “There are so many other possibilities.” He referred to the surprise of the late 1980s and early 1990s, when a new world was emerging. “The end of the Cold War is a great example of the unpredictability of history. Everything changed.” He argued that this great flux—the possibility that something wholly new might be around the corner—is represented in Civilization’s openness...
What can be fairly read into the game? Civilization players have noted certain telling omissions in its historical arc. Slavery, the single-most important economic institution of recent millennia, is entirely absent in the series. There are no Dark Ages and no Black Deaths.
Though Meier claims that history as we know it is only “one path,” the only path in the Civilization series is forward...
What does all that progress lead to? Here, the game is constrained by what its makers know. In ploughing their own course forward, every civilization can only arrive at the same destination, the same sequence of discoveries: the forging of Western modernity. No other routes are possible. Later versions of the game have tried to flesh out non-western “civilizations,” their special traits and units, but it remains the case that the only path that a civilization can chart into our present is a Western one. You may start off as a Viking marauder or an Aztec king or a Mongol warlord, but as you develop your civilization into the proliferating complexities of the modern era, the more it begins to resemble contemporary America...
Meier’s Civilization tapped into the uncertainty and promise that followed from the America’s Cold War triumph. The first iteration of the game did suggest that American liberalism was “the end of history,”"
FB: "Since its launch in 1991, the series has sold 33 million copies worldwide. It’s safe to say that the game is now embedded rather broadly in our popular culture. On the strength of its success and ubiquity, it’s worth considering what Civilization suggests to its consumers about the world, about the past, and about human societies.
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