Seize the Earth! Can we learn statecraft from Civilization V?

When I first walked into the computer labs at university they were filled with people playing SimCity, textbooks piled about them, feverishly making notes.  They had the air of people trying to learn a lesson, not playing a game.

A city is a big, complex but map-able beast.  A city requires a specific capacity of electricity, sanitation and public services.  Each of these services takes time and planning to produce to ensure its availability as the population grows.  SimCity allows students to get a sense of what makes a city aesthetically pleasing while also ensuring that the plumbing works.

That same year I discovered Sid Meier’s epic Civilization, which is to computer games what test-match cricket is to sport.  Long, filled with incredible detail, minor and major tragedy, vastly - incredibly - long and, ultimately, may finish with no discernable result.

Civilization V has just been released.  After 48 hours of non-stop play I now ask myself; what have I learned about statecraft and can a game possibly teach us anything about empire and history?

Obviously, the game is a fantasy.  No country has the benefit of the uninterrupted 6500-year leadership of a single person who has micro-control of the actions of every city, every construction project and an entire map of the social and scientific development of that society.

In the "real" world, if a politician declares, "We’re going to spend the next 100 years developing X technology," they’re likely to drag us up a dead end.  In Civilization you really can say, "Let’s invent the motorcar," without any knowledge of combustion or mechanics.

Civilization’s mechanisms of social and scientific order are based on those that have succeeded in the real world.  None of the random glitches and social disasters that we’ve also tried exist.

Within these limits, though, it is a functioning economy.  If you want your scientific advances to progress faster you have to build more schools, universities and research centres.  You have to pay for scientists to work there.

A society based exclusively on mollycoddled scientists (and soldiers, since the game is also about war and strategy) will be an unhappy one.  People working down the mines and on the farms paying for the elite will rebel.

Such civil disorder becomes extremely limiting as cities become larger.  A good leader ensures that there are entertainment and spiritual services for the people.

But these are expensive too.  To finance all this requires that markets, banks, stock exchanges and efficient distribution and energy services be available.

The more complex a society the more likely that too rapid growth will outrun the supply of cash required to finance everything.

In the game a civilisation which starts haemorrhaging cash like a member of the empowered elite at a drunken car-buying orgy will swiftly hit the rails.  In the game a nation cannot borrow to finance the deficit.

If your money runs out you have to start selling buildings and even cutting back on defence. 

I’ve lost numerous games where my massed troops are thinned out, not by enemy fire, but by budget cuts. My cities burned as citizens rioted against my rule and ignored approaching enemy tanks.

Real countries can borrow for a while.  Longer if, like the US, your economy is integral to everyone else’.  However, the experiences of Argentina and Greece demonstrate the social disorder that happens when the money plain runs out and politicians are left trying to introduce austerity when no-one is ready to leave the party.

Growth in nations (and victory in the game) requires investment in a whole host of things all at the same time.  Invest too quickly and capital costs lead to excessive debt which undermines the state.  Invest too slowly and you lag your competitors, each looking for an advantage.

You can only win when you get the balance exactly right.