Civilization World

~ the obit ~

I have played Civilization. Not this one. anyway, in 2011 i was twenty-seven and working as an engineer in Ankara, and the games that arrived through Facebook notifications arrived as a thing to be turned off rather than a thing to be opened. That is not a judgment about the game (roughly). It is where i was standing, and it turns out to be roughly where almost everybody else was standing too.

Firaxis built it, 2K published it, and Sid Meier designed it, which is not a name that gets attached to filler. The thing was announced in 2010 under the name Civilization Network and reached the public as Civilization World. Public beta opened on 6 july 2011 as a Flash application inside Facebook. free to play, and persistent, meaning it kept running whether you were logged in or not.

Meier's own line about it was that it would give you everything you enjoy in Civ in a fully persistent environment, playable as much as you like whenever you like, and free. back then. Every clause in that sentence is a promise about availability and none of them is a promise about the game.

~ the rap sheet ~

~ how it landed ~

The design change is the whole story. Civilization is turns. You take your turn and the world waits while you think for as long as you want, which is why the famous thing about the series is looking up and finding it is four in the morning. Civilization World ran in real time because Facebook games run in real time, so the world moved while you were at work and the thinking had nowhere to go.

What replaced the turn was social structure. really though, players joined nations with a rank ladder that ran from noble up to king, and everybody competed for fame points earned by achievements or by finishing a wonder. There were battles with ranged and naval units. in fairness, the pieces were all there and the clock underneath them was somebody else's.

~ the day it died ~

On 28 february 2013 the closure was announced with 29 may given as the final day of play. close enough. the reported figure at that point was about ten thousand monthly active users. For a Facebook game in 2013, when FarmVille was still counting in the tens of millions, ten thousand is a rounding error attached to one of the most valuable names in strategy gaming.

it ran the full three months and went off on schedule, which is more courtesy than most Facebook titles managed. Firaxis went back to making Civilization the way Civilization gets made, and Civilization V went on selling for years afterward to people who wanted to lose a night rather than a lunch break.

the part worth keeping is that this was not an outside studio licensing a name. Meier designed it himself, put it on the largest platform that had ever existed, took out the turn because the platform demanded it, and the thing that was left could not hold ten thousand people. The platform was not neutral. It never was.

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