Jacques Ellul and Civilization VI

Okay, so I know that most of my long-form blogging for the past few months has touched on Jacques Ellul in some way, but I’m reading a lot of his work right now, and I wouldn’t keep referencing his work if I didn’t find it relevant in some way. I’m particularly pleased that Ellul’s writing is helping me revisit some ideas (and concerns) that I had over a decade ago, when I was applying to and then first beginning grad school. I thought that I would spend my PhD researching games and learning, and even though I’m happy with my decision to pivot to social media research, I kind of miss some of those ideas I was playing around with at the time, and I’m glad that reading Ellul is helping bring them back.

Let’s cut to the chase: Kiddo and I often spend a little time on weekend mornings playing video games together. On Saturday, she remembered our playing Civilization together a few years ago and decided that would be fun to do again. Civ V doesn’t seem to work properly on my computer anymore, but Civ VI was on sale for 90% off on Steam (since it’s now one generation old, I guess), so I bought a copy of that, and we started a hotseat multiplayer game that I think we’ll have some fun with over the summer. (As a side note, later that afternoon, she found in one of her current collection of library books a description of a statue that’s visually referenced in the Civ VI interface, so I’m counting all of this as an educational experience).

I don’t often play video games on my own (this is one of the reasons I didn’t buy the brand new Civ VII), but I have a track record of getting sucked into the Civ games (this is one of the other reasons I didn’t buy the brand new Civ VII), so over the course of the weekend, I also started (and pretty quickly lost) two single-player games. It’s unsurprising that I lost both of the games—I like playing games to explore ideas, especially ethics, and as I personally explore non-violence as a guiding philosophy, it makes sense that I would downplay the military aspects of the game, eventually twice leading to my capital (and only) city being pretty easily taken over before I could even get to the Common Era in either game.

So, maybe I need to pay the military aspects of the game a bit more attention in order to survive long enough to pursue one of the other ways to victory in the game. Here’s where Ellul comes in, though: I’m not sure that there’s any way to win a game of Civ VI (or any other entry in the series) in Ellulian terms. Here’s a paragraph from Presence in the Modern World, one of his books that I’m currently reading (and that, in a happy coincidence, uses the word civilization):

There are in fact a certain number of values and forces that are decisive in our world civilization: the primacy of production, the constant increase in the powers of the state and the formation of the nation state, the autonomous rise of technique, and so on. These among others are the elements that make up this world, much more than ownership of the means of production or any totalitarian doctrine. And these elements are static to the very extent to which they are not called into question. All development today consists in advancing the structures of our civilization. All parties, whether revolutionary or conservative, liberal or socialist, on the right or the left, are in accord about preserving these fundamental phenomena.

This book is one of Ellul’s religiously focused ones, but his Christianity is an anarchist Christianity, and you can get that anarchist perspective in this paragraph. You also get that anarchist perspective in the paragraphs and pages that follow, where he repeatedly argues that too many calls for revolution and societal change leave in place the basic structure of civilization but fail to make the changes that actually matter.

Bringing us back to Civ VI, even if there are ways of winning the game that forego military conquest, all of the paths to victory in the game accept that world dominance is desirable. The very design of the game precludes the kind of anarchist victory that Ellul argues for, assuming that people must be organized in state-like civilizations and that power must be imposed on others. There’s no way to win Civilization as an anarchist—there’s no Ellulian way to win Civilization. You would need a deeper revolution than simply turning attention from military power to scientific progress.

This doesn’t necessarily make Civilization VI (or any other entry in the series) a morally objectionable game, but I think it does provide a really interesting point of exploration in games, and I’m hoping to explore that more personally and professionally as I continue to read Ellul (and maybe not immediately lose the next time I try Civ VI).

• Jacques Ellul
• Civilization
• Civilization VI
• games
• video games
• meaningful games
• games and learning
• non-violence
• anarchism
• Christian anarchism
• Presence in the Modern World