Oops We Did It Again: Problematizing Climate Change Representations in Games with Sid Meier\u27s Civilization VI

Climate change is a prominent political and social concern—one whose importance is difficult to overstate. The nuances of how climate change is understood by various stakeholder communities—which, in aggregate, include every human on earth—are topics of interest in a variety of fields, from environmental ecology and public policy to history and literature. Indeed, any and all popular cultural spheres and prominent forms of media are generally common targets for research aiming to understand how climate change is communicated and understood. However, surprisingly, climate change and its attendant concerns are deeply understudied and undertheorized within the scholarly communities surrounding digital games. This work, then, seeks to accomplish two scholarly aims: first, to perform a brief meta-analysis of the existing work on climate change in digital games; secondly, to problematize some of the existing early theorizing in the space by using the popular and well-known historical game, Sid Meier’s Civilization VI, as a case study. This work aims to build upon the early theorizing of Abraham and Jayemanne (2017) and integrate insights from historical game studies—including the work of Adam Chapman, Thomas Apperley, and Kurt Squire—to perform the necessary analysis. Sid Meier’s Civilization is the chosen object of study for a variety of reasons. First, Sid Meier’s Civilization is, as a series, certainly the most studied historical simulation game, and it also ranks among the most-addressed games in the game studies canon (Frome & Martin, 2019). Over the series’ 28 years, Civilization has been examined across a variety of disciplines with a wide array of methodological approaches towards varied aims. Substantive scholarship—scholarship in which Civilization is the primary object of study—has come from scholars of history (Taylor 1994, 2003), game studies (Squire 2002), anthropology (Poblocki 2002), English (Douglas 2002), postcolonial studies (Lammes 2003), and media studies (Friedman 1999). This scholarly discourse can be located in sites both expected—such as Games and Culture (Voorhees 2009) & Game Studies (Squire 2002)—and unexpected—such as Rethinking History (Chapman et al. 2017) and Transformations (Jayemanne & Abraham 2017). With such varied scholarly interest, it is perhaps no surprise that even this unified object of study allows for a wide array of scholarly topoi: representations of weather (Barton 2008), historiography (Chapman 2013), educational potential (Squire 2002; Taylor 2003), (post)colonialism (Lammes 2003), American history (Douglas 2002), and numerous others. As such, Civilization is a useful object of study because of the plentiful scholarship which informs any such future analysis. It is also useful because—again—climate and ecological aspects are, as of yet, deeply understudied within even this particular object of study