Re:Nvidia prepares to abandon $40B Arm bid
by AtlasBarfed on Tuesday January 25, 2022 @12:42PM
(#30075000)
Acquiring/stealing/conquering techs from competing players via any means necessary in Civilization was a key means to closing the power gap with rivals on upper levels of difficulty.
China has done this to perfection in the real world.
Stealing a tech was a massive diplomatic blow in Civilization. The US just shrugged (because the rich made a huge amount of money and increase of relative wealth status by acquiring a massive slave labor force in China rather than deal with the uppity American middle class).
I just did a light google pass to see if any international relations academics have done anything with Sid Meier's Civ and various other types of games. I expected them to not, because of course academics are STILL "ew, computers" and even worse, it's gauche mass market entertainment.
But the abstraction is, I would argue, more detailed than a lot of academic analyses which are largely bloviation, the game theory quantifiable and measurable, and reduces a lot of complexity that normally would be hard for a garden variety person (aka a gamer) to wrap their head around.
Civ always tried dropping historical tidbits and education into it, but arguably its most potent contribution is simply the more honest treatment of history: civilizations rising and falling, fighting over resources, getting conquered, and getting destroyed, and the roles of economic strength, military strength, and tradeoffs.
China has done this to perfection in the real world.
Stealing a tech was a massive diplomatic blow in Civilization. The US just shrugged (because the rich made a huge amount of money and increase of relative wealth status by acquiring a massive slave labor force in China rather than deal with the uppity American middle class).
I just did a light google pass to see if any international relations academics have done anything with Sid Meier's Civ and various other types of games. I expected them to not, because of course academics are STILL "ew, computers" and even worse, it's gauche mass market entertainment.
But the abstraction is, I would argue, more detailed than a lot of academic analyses which are largely bloviation, the game theory quantifiable and measurable, and reduces a lot of complexity that normally would be hard for a garden variety person (aka a gamer) to wrap their head around.
Civ always tried dropping historical tidbits and education into it, but arguably its most potent contribution is simply the more honest treatment of history: civilizations rising and falling, fighting over resources, getting conquered, and getting destroyed, and the roles of economic strength, military strength, and tradeoffs.