Civilization, a January 1st Ritual

Every January 1st, I play Civilization. It's a ritual I picked up years ago. The logic is simple: on January 1st, nobody busts your balls. That peace and quiet is priceless. And it gives me a rare chance to do something that's basically impossible the rest of the year: play the same video game all day. There's something beautiful about being able to finish a full game of Civilization in a single sitting. Start early, pick your civilization –Teutons, obviously– expand as fast as possible, wage war on barbarians, trade with your neighbors, stumble into a total war of annihilation with some other civilization just because it felt right, move through every era of humanity, unlock every technology, culture, and civics tree, and finally complete the space program a millimeter before the Romans do… and lose the game. It's a unique, unmatched experience.

I played Civilization for the first time at the house of a friend and schoolmate, Nicolás Di Giovanni –great last name. We also played the classic Secret Weapons of the Luftwaffe by Lucasfilm Games, and he used to tell me that his godfather played something called StarCraft. Some real legends, those guys. We'd play in the living room of his casa chorizo on Acevedo Street, under the strict gaze of a portrait of John Paul II. An indelible memory.

Civilization was always about the same thing. Basically: take a civilization, with its historical leader, and carry it from the Stone Age to the space program and a trip to Alpha Centauri. You do it on randomly generated maps while competing against rival civilizations. The point is that Civilization was one of the first games to combine two key elements: on the one hand, building an army; on the other, building cities that function as civilizational nodes –almost in a SimCity mode.

Not so much because of micromanagement, but because each city has variables you can manage to make it more productive, so you can pump out units or tech faster. The mix of those two things made it pretty unique. And it had another brilliant element: scientific, technical, and cultural evolution over time.

Each scientific discovery affects what units you can create. And this includes everything: from agriculture and writing to monarchy and gunpowder. Civilization offers a deterministic path of historical development, and yet it gives you enough flexibility to play it however you damn well please. One of the most beautiful things about the first entry was that all of this required a huge amount of imagination, because the graphics were basically just a bunch of clustered pixels.

That's exactly where the magic lived. You could play through almost all of human existence –golden ages, wars, revolutions– on a 386 with 4MB of RAM.

Civilization I

Sid Meier's Civilization launched in 1991, originally developed by MicroProse and designed by Sid Meier alongside Bruce Shelley. The original game emerged as a more abstract, systemic evolution of Railroad Tycoon, Meier's earlier title. Instead of simulating a business, it simulated human history as a decision system –procedurally generated maps, turn-based play, territorial expansion, tech trees, and victory conditions beyond total war. For its time, it was radical.

From the very first game, the series' DNA was already set:

• Turns divided into "historical eras".
• A tech tree inspired by linear visions of progress.
• Diplomacy, trade, and conflict.
• The famous rule: "one more turn and I'm going to bed".

Civilization doesn't aim for strict historical realism, but for systemic plausibility: history as a game of incentives. It doesn't teach factual history; it teaches a philosophy of history –technological progress, rationalization, accumulation, and competition between states. It's almost a playable version of the late Enlightenment, with clear Western biases, and yet it's extremely influential.

Today it's a mandatory reference point in 4X design (eXplore, eXpand, eXploit, eXterminate), and one of the few games that turned world history into a stable ludic system for more than 30 years.

Civilization VI

Civilization VI is the sixth main entry in Sid Meier's series, developed by Firaxis Games and published by 2K in 2016. It marks a major shift: it leaves behind part of the classic abstract simulation and leans into a much more spatial approach, where the map stops being passive support and becomes the center of the game.

The key idea of Civilization VI is that you don't just found cities anymore –you design them. The district system forces you to plan early: how each settlement will grow, what land you'll occupy, what synergies you'll activate. Science, culture, religion, production, and economy stop living inside an abstract city and materialize on specific tiles on the map, which makes early decisions irreversible –and strategic.

Technological and civic progress changes logic too. With eurekas and inspirations, advancing faster depends on meeting certain in-game conditions, not just stacking points. That breaks the series' classic linearity and pushes you to play in a more opportunistic, contextual way –adapting to the terrain, your neighbors, and your own internal situation.

Diplomacy gains personality through leaders' agendas. Each one has preferences, obsessions, and predictable reactions, making international interaction less chaotic and more readable. It's less fine negotiation than pattern recognition: understanding what each leader values and exploiting that consistency.

The expansions finish defining the game's identity. Rise and Fall introduces historical ages and loyalty, penalizing sloppy expansion and forcing you to think of your empire as a cohesive system. Gathering Storm adds climate, natural disasters, and climate change, explicitly incorporating –for the first time– the environmental cost of progress.

Taken together, Civilization VI proposes a vision of history as engineering: interconnected systems. You don't win just by growing or researching faster, but by understanding how the pieces fit from turn one. It's a more demanding, less forgiving Civilization, where planning beats improvisation, and where every decision leaves a lasting mark on the map.

Civilization as a Cultural Artifact

Sid Meier's Civilization can be read –beyond its status as a video game– as an extremely efficient cultural machine: a device that translates human history into rules, metrics, and optimization loops. From its first version in 1991, the series didn't just represent the past; it proposed a very specific way of thinking about it. Playing Civilization is learning, almost without realizing it, a particular historical grammar.

The central operation of Civilization is systemic reduction. Thousands of years of history are condensed into turns, technologies, public policies, and strategic decisions. Time stops being narrative and becomes quantifiable; progress becomes cumulative; culture becomes a measurable variable. This gesture isn't neutral: it turns history into something manageable, governable, predictable. In that sense, Civilization functions as an ideological interface that naturalizes a modern, state-centric, technocratic vision of human development.

The famous "one more turn" experience isn't just a fun feature –it’s a feedback loop. Every decision opens new optimization branches, and the player gets trapped in a chain of causalities where everything can –and must– be improved. History is no longer tragedy or contingency: it's an efficiency problem. The empire that collapses doesn't do so because of hybris or chance, but because of mismanagement. In that way, Civilization trains you in an ethic of permanent rational control.

Another key element of this cultural machine is its teleology. Even when the game offers multiple paths, they all lead toward a very specific idea of success: expansion, technological development, symbolic or material domination. Even cultural and scientific victories rely on a notion of linear, cumulative progress. There is no real decline, no meaningful historical regression –only delay. Falling behind isn't choosing another destiny; it's failing the race.

Across its iterations –from the hard abstraction of Civilization I to the spatial, synergy-driven sophistication of Civilization VI– the series refined this logic, making it more elegant and transparent. The modular city, districts, historical ages, asymmetrical leaders: none of these break the model. They perfect it. Everything becomes legible, comparable, optimizable. History becomes a board, for good.

That's why Civilization is much more than a strategy game: it's an artifact of meaning. It produces a specific way of imagining the world –where governing is calculation, where power shows up as rising graphs, and where civilization is, above all, a matter of efficient administration of time, space, and resources. Playing Civilization is training –almost without noticing– in a particular form of historical rationality.

In that framework, Civilization's greatness isn't only in its design, but in its persistence. For more than three decades, millions of players have absorbed –and continue to absorb– this worldview through play. Like any effective cultural machine, Civilization doesn't impose. It seduces. It doesn't indoctrinate. It teaches by making you play. And that's where its true power lies.

Civilization VII?

Every player's favorite version is a story of its own. Some people have been playing Civilization II for years and consider it the pinnacle of design. In fact, I think there's a simulated game that's been running for 25 years, where three AIs constantly exterminate each other with nuclear bombs and none can ever defeat the other two. A beautiful thing.

For many, the series hit its peak somewhere between the fourth and fifth entries. That's where the core mechanics crystallized, the board changed, and you didn't need expansions to have more than 40 playable civilizations. In my case, I went many years without a desktop computer and couldn't play it –no need to explain, but yes: you fundamentally play this on PC– so I came back to the series through the sixth entry.

As a player who jumped from the first to the sixth, I didn't have many complaints. I simply accepted that this was what Civilization looked like in this era. The truth is I'm used to it now: I picked up all the DLC through various holiday sales, and I'm fully adapted to the interface and the game's rhythm. So even though this year the seventh entry in the series came out, I'm not especially interested in playing it. Just like I spent years playing only Civilization I, now I'm comfortable with Civilization VI.

Without much more to say, I just want to wish each of you a great start to the year. I hope you enjoy this January 1st as much as I do. And if you're still hungry to learn more about this iconic saga in video-game history, I recommend this excellent video by Marito Baracus, where he analyzes the series' evolution and the stories behind its spin-offs: Colonization, Alpha Centauri, and Beyond Earth.

Happy New Year!