When James Moore was 14 years old, he began playing Sid Meier’s Civilization II, a game in which competing empires vie for global domination. And he kept playing one particular scenario just to see how long he could last. Moore started in 2002. Fourteen years later, his world lives on—but it’s not one in which any of us would ever want to live.
In June 2012, after 10 years of playing, Moore took to Reddit and revealed his situation:
The post went viral. It made headlines. The actual saved file was archived at Stanford University. (You can find my coverage here.) Now Rosie Cima, reporting for The Kernel, follows up on James Moore, his now-legendary game, and the parallels with his own tumultuous life.
This isn’t to say there’s much else to compare between our global reality and Moore’s world in the year 3991. The ice caps have not melted 20 times and there is no radioactive fallout from nuclear conflicts. But what to make of the behavior of the nation-states operated by the AI (artificial intelligence)?
Moore found himself to be in constant struggle against the rival powers. Short periods of peace were merely moments of preparation for the next war. As a democracy, his civilization had less martial tendencies, but the other civs, particularly the authoritarian ones, had the mindset of totaler Krieg. It’s just in their nature. (In 2007 I profiled Civilization creator Sid Meier for THE WEEKLY STANDARD. You can find a more lengthy description of how the game is played here.)
Likewise, in my experience playing Civilization V (for research purposes only!), I’ve found the AI to be mostly friendly when they are a continent away. In fact, one of the keys to winning is to establish an entire continent as one’s own sphere of influence. Of course there may be other civs initially sharing the land with you, so it’s best to, shall we say, acquire their turf as early as possible.
On one such occasion, my civilization prospered all by itself, having access to a vast array of resources like iron, oil, and aluminum (not to mention luxuries like fur, gold, spices, and wine). At some point I ventured across the ocean to explore the other continent. What I discovered were two major powers in constant conflict, just as Moore himself had witnessed. Cities were burned to the ground. And when both of these civs completed the Manhattan Project, they didn’t hesitate to drop atom bombs on each other.
There are different ways to win Civilization. You can achieve a military victory (conquest), a cultural victory, a diplomatic victory, or a scientific victory (similar to the Apollo program). But none of these comes easy without first dominating the continent, if not the globe. As Sid Meier told me back in 2007, “We always intended for there to be multiple ways to win, different strategies with military being one of them. But it seemed to always come down to the most interesting strategies involved the military and war in some sense…. Theoretically you can [win without war] but you do, I mean there’s other people out there and they’re not going to be, you know, they have their own agendas, so you better prepare. Preparing is a good strategy.”
Indeed, a neighboring power may ask you to sign a joint declaration of friendship, only to betray you once their forces are mobilized and assembled at your border. Is it unrealistic for the AI to turn itself around so radically?
During the Nuremberg trials, Nazi foreign minister Joachim von Ribbentrop was asked why the Germans violated the Nazi-Soviet Pact, since it led to an unwinnable two-front war.
According to Ribbentrop’s spin (with no mention of the need for Lebensraum),
And the result was truly “a hellish nightmare of suffering and devastation.”
