Sid Meier's Memoir!: A Life in Computer Games

by Sid Meier

No subject is universally boring; everything contains a core of fascination somewhere, and the primary job of a game designer is not to make something fun, but to find the fun.

A newborn baby will play tug-of-war with its own foot before it even understands who the foot belongs to. Everyone starts out life as a gamer, and I was no different.

The question “When did you start?” would be better framed as “Why didn’t you stop?”

At the time it felt like a fun project, but not any sort of life-changing decision. The big moments rarely do, I think, and the danger of retroactive mythologizing is that it makes people want to hold out for something dramatic, rather than throwing themselves into every opportunity.

I wouldn’t even say it was magical. It was technological, and that was better than magic.

After the third or fourth document containing nothing but Xs and Os, the woman running the output desk was on to me. “Wait a minute!” she said, snatching back the paper she’d just handed over. “What do you think you’re doing? Computers are not for games!” I had no satisfactory answer to give her, since it seemed clear to me that was exactly what they were for.

The company network began to drag, and small beeps ricocheted through the halls as a sort of work-abandonment klaxon of shame. Nobody seemed especially apologetic, though, since it was easy to hear that they weren’t alone.

Games were not just a diversion, I realized. Games could make you feel. If great literature could wield its power through nothing but black squiggles on a page, how much more could be done with movement, sound, and color? The potential for emotional interaction through this medium struck me as both fascinating and enticing.

Sometimes, a game of middling popularity would end up with more legitimate sales than a big hit, because it was harder to connect with someone else who owned it. Widely celebrated titles were easy to find on local bulletin boards, and according to some estimates, up to 80 percent of the copies being played might be pirated.

I think people in general are honest, as long as the dishonest choice isn’t ridiculously easy.

I’ve always felt that our role as game designers is to suspend reality, not examine the pain of real moral dilemmas. There’s a place for that in art, certainly—and videogames do count as art—but it’s generally not a place where people want to spend their time after a long day at the office.

When I thought of pirates, I didn’t think of arduous ship maneuvers. I thought of sword fights, and swinging from ropes, and billowy white shirts with little string ties at the neckline for no reason. I thought of evil mustachioed Spaniards kidnapping damsels, and guys with peg legs singing about rum. I thought of swashbuckling, whatever that actually meant.

Either way, I can’t blame him for wanting to share credit on this one, since “Robin Williams told me to do it” is a pretty good defense for almost anything.

The good news was there were very few preconceived notions back then about what a game was supposed to be. The bad news was there were no tried-and-true conventions, either. I could put in anything I wanted, but that also meant I was responsible at every turn for what to leave out, and there were exponentially more ways to fail. It was like trying to create a recipe without any knowledge of what ingredients taste good together. With no standard expectations to guide me, I might accidentally end up with the gaming equivalent of breakfast cereal with onions. All I could do was keep asking myself, “Would I want to play this game?” As long as the answer was yes, the idea stayed in.

No one prefers fill-in-the-blank over multiple-choice. This was the real problem, I realized, with adventure games that tried to parse free-form commands: they had only one right answer, which was bad, but they also had an infinite number of wrong answers, which was worse.

Recent psychological studies have demonstrated the truth behind this theory of limiting choices. Our brains’ executive function, or decision-making capability, tires out over time. Like an overworked muscle, it doesn’t matter if you’re lifting weights at the gym or stacking sandbags to save your family’s home—the importance of the task has no bearing on your exhaustion. Insignificant decisions take just as much brain power as interesting ones, but without any of the satisfaction.

The more choices players have, the sooner they will tire of the game, and the more dissatisfied they will ultimately be. They might initially feel like they’re happier with more choice, but in the end they will walk away, just like the jam-tasters with too many flavors to choose from. It was my job, I thought, to whittle down the options and present only the best ones to the player.

A single “Arrgh, matey!” could convey the entire feel of the game, complete with setting, characters, and a likely plot. These bits of cultural shorthand allowed the player to fill in the environment without realizing they were doing it, saving us development time and, more importantly, precious computer memory.

I decided we would let the player choose when to retire, and instead of a numeric score, we would display a tally of successes, and an appropriate seafaring rank. We even factored in the character’s age when it came to fencing skill and ship maneuverability, by slowing the responsiveness of the controls and increasing the probability of a miss. Players could judge for themselves when the risk was too great, and aim to go out on top—or else stubbornly refuse to quit, risking battle after battle as a hunched old seadog until they had handed over their last doubloon. Just like the rest of the game, the decision to end it was theirs alone. Ironically, our shunning of realism had led to something more realistic than any game had yet attempted. Life is not a steady progression of objectively increasing value, and when you fail, you don’t just reload the mission again. You knock the wet sand off your breeches and return to the high seas for new adventures. And if you happen to get marooned on a deserted island a few times, well, that makes for a good tavern story, too.

very few people would waste a stamp or a phone call just to tell us they didn’t like a game. Sometimes I think we’d be better off going back to a time when communication took at least a minimal amount of investment.

As the company that had gone out of its way to add a gun to a submarine, it was no surprise that our version of the stealth fighter did, in fact, come with lots of guns. Even better, our missiles had cameras on them, so that you could ride one all the way in and watch your target explode at close range. None of us were under the impression this would be a real military feature any time soon, but in this case, Bill was happy to throw realism out the window. It gave him great pride to know that for once, the military had gotten it wrong, and we had gotten it right.

Once the mystery was solved, why would anyone play our game a second time? No problem, I thought. We’ll just have the computer write new mysteries! It was only a little bit impossible, which is not the same as completely impossible.

The important distinction was that I could do what I wanted on vacation, without any expectation of progress or success. It was the perfect time to experiment with something wild, or just mess around with whatever struck my fancy.

As major plot points, they’re practically universal: your trusted partner steals the treasure; the damsel who begged for help is a double agent; the noble scientist has a secret weapon to wipe out mankind; the princess is in another castle. Or in other words, the player did everything the designer asked of them, and then the rules changed for no reason. A sudden reversal of fortune is only exciting or dramatic when it happens to someone else.

I’m very good, for example, at ruthless self-evaluation. Even talented people have mostly bad ideas, and it’s critical in creative fields to let go of your ego and immediately bag anything that isn’t pulling its weight.

Age and experience may bring wisdom, but sometimes it’s useful to be a young person who hasn’t learned how to doubt himself yet.

Other works of art are successful when the performer is interesting, but a game is successful only when the player is interesting. Our job is to impress you with yourself, and on that, we have a monopoly.

I should have simplified the minigames, or even better, cut way back on the procedurally generated stories that I was never happy with in the first place. Each half was strong on its own, but forcing them to compete dragged them both down. Combining two great games had somehow left me with zero good ones. The notion that “one good game is better than two great games” was such a revelation that it became known in my mind as “The Covert Action Rule.”

Deciding what doesn’t go into the game is sometimes more important than deciding what does.

Each new version of a game—or anything else it suits you to make—is another opportunity to take a step forward. The more iterations you can rapidly cycle through, the more precise your final product will be.

Ideally, you’ll reevaluate your creation every single day, perhaps even multiple times a day, and each iteration is an opportunity not to pat yourself on the back, but to figure out where you’ve already gone wrong. This is not to say that every step needs to be tiny. Efficiency is the goal, which means many iterations, but also getting as much information as possible out of each iteration. One of my big rules has always been, “double it, or cut it in half.” Don’t waste your time adjusting something by 5 percent, then another 5 percent, then another . . . just double it, and see if it even had the effect you thought it was going to have at all.

This is also why I never write design documents. Some managers are irrationally devoted to them, expecting to see the entire game laid out in descriptive text and PowerPoint slides before a single line of code is ever written. But to me, that’s like drawing a map before you’ve visited the terrain: “I’ve decided there will be a mountain here.” Lewis and Clark would have been laughed out of the room if they showed up with a design document. Instead, they just said, “We’ll get back to you,” and started walking. The mountain is where the mountain is, and your job is to find it, not insist where it should have been.

The point is, there are bad things in my games, at least until I manage to pin them down, but I don’t let the possibility of mistakes hold me back. I won’t ponder for hours whether a feature would be a good idea, I just throw it in the game and find out for sure.

Then my brother, Bruce, came along a year before I graduated. (Though relatively rare today, the name peaked in popularity just as my coworker Bruce Shelley was born in the late forties, and remained in the top 100 until several years after my brother was born in the early seventies, resulting in the odd bit of trivia that the first two people ever to play Civilization were both named Bruce.)

To me, public reaction is something I have limited control over, so it would be foolish to bend over backwards for it, let alone stake my self-worth on it. Consequently, I’m not as impressed with myself as others sometimes insist I should be—but I also don’t feel too badly if a game doesn’t sell well. As long as I’m proud of my work, then it’s a success.

Bach’s widow, Anna Magdalena, still had a number of younger children to care for, so after his death she traded her portion of her husband’s music back to St. Thomas Church, in exchange for an extra six months in the cantor’s residence. The church made formal copies for republishing, so most of the songs themselves survive, but they had no particular use for the originals, and eventually began selling them as scrap paper to wrap fish and other market goods in.

He can reach across three hundred years and make me, a man who manipulates electromagnetic circuits with my fingertips on a keyboard, feel just as profoundly as he made an impoverished farmer feel during a traditional rural celebration. He includes me in the story, just as I wanted to include my players in my games; we make the story together. Bach’s music is a perfect illustration of the idea that it’s not the artist that matters, but the connection between us.

What I didn’t see at the time is that imagination never diminishes reality; it only heightens it. Just like a fantasy can awaken you to new possibilities in the real world, letting the fans play in the sandbox with us only brought them closer to the universe we had created, the one that had made their fantasy possible. Every alteration, from the smallest AI tweak to the wildest comedic parody, functioned as a kind of tribute that kept Civ fresh, rather than pushing it aside. I’d thought they were tearing the house down, when in fact they were only remodeling because they liked the neighborhood and wanted to stay. Fortunately, Brian had the wisdom to give away the construction materials.

Our office was situated in the middle of several factories owned by the McCormick spice company, and it was fun to come into work each day and find out by smell what they were dry roasting that morning. Once, we had some guests from China visiting the offices, and no one ever explained our proximity to the spice plant. I’m sure they figured it out on their own, but I like to imagine they went home believing that Americans were so decadent, we perfumed the outside air with cinnamon for no reason at all.

Separately is probably how I work best with everyone, to be honest. I’m an introvert who likes people: I want to collaborate on the whole, but do my part individually. There are so many things in the world to be good at, and I get a thrill every time I come across someone who excels in their field. The dichotomy between someone else’s talent and your own is a cause for celebration, because the further apart you are, the more you can offer each other. But the opposite is also true. I know where my own talents are, and I find that sharing those duties usually falls somewhere between inefficient and frustrating. I want to combine other people’s unique expertise with mine, and create something that none of us could have made alone—not compromise on the same task until it’s less than the sum of its parts.

I generally saw technology in terms of progress, rather than limitations, and lived in a nearly perpetual state of excitement over what we could accomplish.

Interesting decisions are not about the specifics of what you let the player choose between, but whether the investment feels both personal and significant to the outcome.

Ultimately, the most fundamental characteristic of an interesting decision is that it makes the player think, “I wonder what would happen next time, if I did it differently?”

In the right context, a game is not just a vehicle for fun, but an exercise in self-determination and confidence. Good games teach us that there are tradeoffs to everything, actions lead to outcomes, and the chance to try again is almost always out there.

It’s important to step back and view your work in terms of concrete opportunities for improvement.)

Do enough research, and you can always find an older version of any idea.

The difference between creativity and theft is that creativity adds, and each addition creates potential that wasn’t there before.

A bad game strands you in the past (as in, “What just happened?”) while a mediocre one keeps you in the present (“Sure, this is cool.”). But a really good game keeps you focused on what’s yet to come. It’s the underlying basis for that elusive “moment to learn, lifetime to master” quality.

A game that runs on speculation can expand or shrink to fit any player’s comfort level.

the value of books has not always been taken for granted. Just as this generation has fretted over the perils of gaming, the generation that grew up with the occasional county fair for entertainment considered books to be a genuine danger to their children.