The Unexamined Game is Not Worth Playing Series: Civilization VI and the Tragedy of the Commons.
During lockdown one of my weekly highlights has been getting a group together on a quiet Friday afternoon and playing Civilisation VI. We all have different jobs, one in advertising, another in banking and myself in tech sales.
It usually seems to be me and my banking friend (Let’s call him Badger, some banks may not be comfortable with someone playing civ in the background of billion-dollar meetings) that come into conflict.
Badger is a much more analytical player than myself; thinking of the long term implications of every move, able to break down numbers and visualise what they mean for his game. Whereas I’m much more intuitive and think about the social/political effect on my fellow players, how it may upset them or plays into what I think their goals are.
In any case Badger and I usually meet first on the map and usually get into a war.
In two of our recent games, we’ve both been placed near Natural Wonders which give a huge boost to the production of victory points in-game (Science, Culture, Religion etc). The first time around it was the Bermuda triangle giving massive science boosts per tile controlled by a player and the other an Incan mountain city that gave boosts in culture.
In each scenario, we rushed to build and expand next to it as quickly as possible. In the first case, Badger was fighting a war with a hilariously poor Spanish AI, Phillip the second. As he was distracted I moved my proud Norwegian settlers to the top corner of his island and managed to nab 3 tiles.
I did this for 3 reasons.
1: I was going for a science victory.
2: It denied him a monopoly on a game-breaking resource.
3: I knew it would wind him up.
Similarly, I got a monopoly in the second scenario and expanded my territory by buying tiles to block him from settling close enough to the wonder to take advantage. In the first game, this led us to keep a lot of militaries tied up on our borders as I knew Badger would want to claim all the science points despite his ‘reassurances’ he would not declare war on me.
In the second game, this led to a war between us where I lost and had to sheepishly surrender my city and once again place a lot of resources to maintain the status quo. Though as an aside he did try and open up a conversation in discord which I didn’t check and claimed he exhausted diplomatic channels, which is bullshit.
The sad pettiness between two grown men aside and in-jokes around this in future Civ Fridays games, I did feel a sudden chill go down my spine the other day when thinking about it.
Far from an abstract game mechanic, Civ VI was in fact employing a game mechanic based on the real world. That is competitive states, driven by scarcity and paranoia that other nations will gain a resource advantage which would deny them power, influence and maybe survival. In fact, our Civ games may, scarily, be faithful recreations of past resource wars and indicative of the inevitability of future ones.
Already, Turkey is building dams to deny its neighbours access to water on strategic rivers and US adventurism into the Middle East is often to secure stable oil access in a very volatile region in the world rather than guaranteeing the independence of traditionally tribal states or encourage democracy.
What this mostly reminded me of was the tragedy of the commons. I first came across this idea when I studied Philosophy at university.
First presented in modern times by William Forster-Lloyd in his sexily titled pamphlet ‘Two Lectures on Checks to the Population’ in 1833 and popularised later by the ecologist Garrett Hardin, the simplest example is found on this great Ted video.
To summarise, in this version a village of 4 families has access to a pond. There are enough pairs of fish in the pond to reproduce replacement fish for the pond to be a food source in perpetuity if the fishermen take one fish each every evening.
However, whether it is greed, fear or human nature each fisherman is fearful that the other will take more than their allotted share and so they start taking more than their quota every night. Eventually, there are no fish left. In the video, there’s a poor lonely fish looking around for its friends before diving and accepting its fate which weirdly made me feel quite sad!
How does this relate to a video game? Well like the real world the randomly generated maps in Civ don’t have infinite resources. Some people are lucky and have big victory point natural wonders. Others have more coal, steel, uranium etc which give them military and technological advantages over their neighbours.
In the game, the scarcity of resources is often the mechanic that drives people to war to undermine their opponent’s efforts to secure victory and technology for their own people. If we were to remove the obvious driver, which is the victory end game goal and instead have people keep their Civilisation surviving as long as possible it may be different.
Perhaps we would learn to share resources outside of our allies? Maybe I and Badger could agree that if our civilisations are to survive and thrive we split the natural wonders in half. Or if I had coal and my neighbour didn’t, we’d share it so that neither of us was at an advantage.
That makes logical sense. In Economics a lot of research and analysis is done with an educated assumption that in an economic model all of its actors are rational, logical, sensible beings who make sound fiscal decisions.
However what the tragedy of the commons shows us is that despite the solution for everyone to take just one fish each and have equal resources, humans aren’t rational actors. Perhaps evolutionarily and biologically we are driven by a fear of scarcity to such a degree that even today we feel we must take more resources than anyone else, in case they break the rules instead only to put us at a disadvantage and not have any access at all!
In the real world, this lack of cooperation at best leads to a big disparity in wealth and quality of life. At worst it leads to destructive wars that create resentment for generations, tense brinkmanship and legitimise unilateral intervention. Perhaps even global thermonuclear war.
It may be argued that it is a state’s right to pursue the best quality of life for its people. This includes defence. Which I agree with. However, this can be justified as policies that snowball and have led to the most horrific crimes in our history. Lebensraum, nuclear weapons and genocide have all been done by states who think this best secures their nation’s quality of life and security.
What Civ VI has taught me is that when there is a ‘victory condition’ or fear of a zero-sum game or big advantage over another group of people then there is a much higher chance of destructive wars and depletion of important finite resources which could be sustainable.
In our world, this human, animalistic fear of others taking unfair advantage through resources or technology needs to be mitigated by serious and consequential laws that guarantee access to resources that benefit all people even if it means a few of us to have a lot less luxury and wealth. Although I have issues with its assertions, a lot of people believe the Mutually Assured Destruction deterrence doctrine works BECAUSE both sides have weapons of mass destruction, not just one side.
Otherwise, we may destroy ourselves for a victory condition that doesn’t exist over things most of us in the west take for granted (water, food and fuel).
A victory condition for us, for humanity and our world, is one that is of a high environmental standard to live in that our children won’t have to bleed or suffer for it later. Maybe even spread to other worlds.
Though in the meantime I will be trying to undermine Badger at every turn and will die before I surrender my natural wonder buffs!
