Wrap-Up

Throught my experiences with "Civilization", I have noticed numerous aspects of the game that tie in to the detail explained by Jared Diamond in his book, "Guns, Germs, and Steel." As soon as I started with the game, I was simply looking for aspects in it that related to Diamond's book and I found numerous. When I began delving deeper into the game and into creating my own, long-lasting civilization based in Egypt, I steered away from going by the book and began doing things more on my own. What this brought about was a deeper understanding of how civilizations really survived, not necessarilly what was taught to me. In the end, what I realized was that no matter how hard I tried to go about the game trying not to think about the book, the book and its aspects played a deep role in what has actually been accomplished with my civilization. How could one try to have a long-lasting civilization without using what Jared Diamond spoke of in his book? One has to start off as a farming civilization and gradually move into a more sedentary, urbanized center with specialists. The religious aspects of the game, although not necessar, grabbed a lot of my attention because I am naturally biased in my beiefs. As my civilization began to strive, military and defense was a major factory in many of my decisions and I began going to war with anyone who had a problem with what I was doing. In the overall scheme of things, my civilization was very effective because of the lessons that I had learned in class and while reading Jared Diamond's "Guns, Germs, and Steel." I believe that the game, "Civilization" was a great tool to teach the lesson of the class in a much deeper way and I recommend continual use of the game.

help your neighbors?

For the purpose of experimenting, I tried to see how mean I could be to my neighbors until they had enough. The reason why I had the idea to do this was because I was getting mad at my neighbors and other civilizations asking for my help (due to my being much more sophisticated than them). I had enough of Julias Caesar asking me for just a little gold and Ghondi asking for electricity. So I decided not to play Mr. Niceguy anymore and decided to just think about myself. I played almost a whole scenario with this mindset, and it turned out that my civilization stayed as it would have been but the other civilizations were less developed without my help. I though they would get mad at me and maybe even try to go to war with me. But when I declined giving them help, they simply went away and continued to ask me, with no increasing intolerance from them. I was hoping for a little dispute to create some more controversy in my scenario, and I am always looking for a war to kick some butt. I do not believe this is quite as it would have worked in real life times like these, though. If I was to abandon my neighbors, so to say, they would probably want to do something about it in one way or another. A lack of collaboration would probably also hurt my own civlization because a lack of interaction is a cause for less information that you can gain by such interactions.