FORM OF TIME IN CIVILIZATION

Finish a game of Civilization and the game will show you a recap. Playing the game is long and hard. You lead a civilization through thousands of years of (alternate) history. The Sioux from 4000 B.C. into the 25th century. During your turns, there are so many units to move and options to choose from about how cities will develop or research should proceed. Save, sleep, come back, load, and continue. While playing, you only know what you can see, what you’re in a diplomatic position to hear about. There a lot of cities, units, actions, and situations they can all get into.

In the replay, all activity becomes a series of states (change between them must be inferred), only a few kinds of events appear, turns where these events do not occur are not shown, and your view is no longer limited to what your units can see. This yields something like animation.

Animation shows the position of objects in motion in still images that switch so quickly they blur together into movements. Each frame is a slice of time, and the audience will see them as invariant intervals. (If things change faster in the first hundred frames than the next hundred, we will see movement as faster then slower. We will not recognize the interval between frames has varied.)

Civilization’s replay shows a surfeit on information; it summarizes in a minute everything that happened in hours of play. It simplifies by showing each frame, and moves through these frames like a fast slideshow. The pace of time attempts to find the upper limit of the user as information processor, concealing the reality that this time is arbitrary and causeless.

This form of time does not depend on perspective, is simultaneous for the entire system, marks events with a year (deploying time as a tag), and is just one possible way to display the dataset that gameplay generates for the purpose of this recap at the end.

It’s hardly time at all. It does not conceptualize temporal relationships. It is strictly external to the events it describes. This time does not come from rhythms of action. Software generates it from information it has been recording as you played the game. It represents this information as history, in its strange form of time.