[laughter] But in terms of actual ideas they were probably more from other sources
than theCivilizationboard game.
A lot of your games seem to be inspired in part from board games. But, as you
just said,Civilizationwould never really work as a board game. How do you
take an idea that you liked in a board game and transfer it into something that
really is a computer game instead of just a straight translation?
Before there were computers, I played a lot of board games and I was into Avalon Hill
games, et cetera. I think they provided a lot of seed ideas for games. Often they are a
good model of what’s important, what’s interesting, and what’s not about a topic. But
once you get into mechanics and interface and those kind of things, really there starts to
be a pretty significant difference between board games and computer games. There’s a
lot of interesting research material sometimes in board games. Often they’re interest-
ing for “we need some technologies” or “we need to think about which units,” et
cetera. There’s that kind of overlap in terms of the basic playing pieces sometimes. But
how they are used and so forth, those things are pretty different between board games
and computer games. I would say board games provide an interesting review of topics
that are available and topics that are interesting. But once it gets into the actual game
itself there is a wide difference between computer games and board games, in my mind.
One of the most remarkable things aboutCivilizationis its addictive quality. I
was wondering if that came about by luck or if you planned it from the start.
We didn’t really envision
that. We intend for all of
our games to be fun to
play and hope that they
are addictive to some
degree. But Civilization
had a magic addictiveness
that we really didn’t
design, that we really
didn’t anticipate. I think
any game where every-
thing falls together in a
really neat way is going to
have that quality. I think
that it’s really a result of
how well the pieces fit
together and how I think
we picked a good scale, a good complexity level, a good number of things to do. I think
we made some wise decisions in designing that game. And the sum of all those deci-
sions is addictiveness. And I think that it was a good topic. A lot of things were right
about that game, and that all came together to create this addictive quality. It was not
something that we designed in, but it was something that we were kind of aware of.
26 Chapter 2: Interview: Sid Meier
Civilization