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

by Sid Meier

If you have children, you probably have a pile of toys in your house with more processing speed than what we were working with.

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.

According to the West German government, Gunship was guilty of “promoting militarism,” which made it “particularly suited to disorient youths socially and ethically.” Germany has a complicated relationship with its last hundred years of history. In 1986, a sizeable percentage of the population still held the horrors of World War II in living memory. There was—and still is—a profound sense that the cultural conditions leading up to it must never be allowed to happen again, and many corrective measures were imposed both internally and externally during the postwar years.

“Robin Williams told me to do it” is a pretty good defense for almost anything.

when it comes to the creations that happen to inspire me, I don’t think violence is necessary. The world is often a very negative place, and I’d rather push it in the opposite direction whenever I can.

Other works of art are successful when the performer is interesting, but a game is successful only when the player is interesting.

Mistakes are a given, and the important thing is to catch as many as you can, as fast as you can. 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.

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. If it went too far, now you know you’re on the right track, and can drop back down accordingly. But maybe it still didn’t go far enough, and you’ve just saved yourself a dozen iterations inching upward 5 percent at a time.

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.”

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. If it’s clunky, I cut it back out again.

Many would stay after-hours playing the prototype for fun, and random coworkers began coming into my office with feedback.

A mark of success is a deluge of feedback.

He also had a fondness for puzzle canons, in which he would write alternating lines of music and leave the others blank for his students—often his own children—to figure out what most logically belonged in between.

Bach’s music is a perfect illustration of the idea that it’s not the artist that matters, but the connection between us.

Bach would be an interesting biography to read.

Good games don’t get made by committee.

I even have a vague memory that we were supposed to pretend I was taking some kind of sabbatical, instead of starting a new company.

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.

Business and creativity were both necessary components, but they ought to keep their distance.

my foreword to the F-15 Strike Eagle strategy guide, published in 1990, includes the dramatic line, “Decisions. Decisions. Decisions. Just like in real life.”

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.

Fellow game designer Peter Molyneux once told a reporter that his bladder had almost exploded while playing Civ,

Civilization has even made me late to my own meetings about Civilization,

Alexey Pajitnov, the creator of Tetris, was once asked about the addictiveness of his game, and whether he was disturbed by it. “No, what else would people be doing?” he scoffed. “They’d read a stupid book, go see a movie? No, playing a game is a good thing.”

one day, my future grandchildren will sneer at whatever new thing is captivating the attention of their youth. They, too, will call it addictive, and grumble about how kids these days ought to go play a good videogame instead of wasting their time on those newfangled psychogels, or whatever.

Addiction is a problem, but it can happen with any type of escapism—leisure, substance, behavior, food, even social approval—and it should be addressed through individual circumstances, not the banning of excellence. We shouldn’t fear the things that enthrall us, but instead acknowledge our responsibility to harness them as a tool, and determine what good can be accomplished with them.

when it comes to games I think addiction is usually just another word for the intense connection we feel toward a work of art.

This whole paragraph sets forth some unconventional ideas about addiction

in SimGolf. Testing had revealed that when laying down tiles of fairway, the confirming sound effect of each square quickly escalated from helpful to annoying. So I replaced the ordinary clacking sound with the notes to a well-known Bach cantata called “Jesu, Joy of Man’s Desiring.”

A designer who’s only interested in games will find it very hard to bring anything original to the table, and I’m sure this is true in other fields, too. Whatever it is you want to be good at, you have to make sure you continue to read, and learn, and seek joy elsewhere, because you never know where inspiration will strike.

All projects ebb and flow to a certain degree, and at some point most will reach “the Valley of Despair.” It’s that moment when it seems nothing is working, no one understands your vision, the interface is ugly, the gameplay is boring, and you can’t imagine how you’ll ever finish it. Usually it happens about halfway through the project, when the game gets too big to hold in your head all at once, and the days fill up with meetings, and every adjustment throws eight other variables out of whack.

to be honest, I’m still wary of 3D cinematics even today. Certainly there are appropriate uses for it, but 3D has an almost hallucinogenic ability to convince game designers that they’re moviemakers.

it’s important as a designer to sit in all the chairs. Understanding the needs of each department and learning their requisite tools will improve your output, ease communication with your coworkers, and provide a critical perspective when it comes time to admit you were wrong about an idea.

Ideas are cheap; execution is valuable.

The best way to prove your idea is a good one is to prove it, not with words but with actions. Sit in the programmer chair until you have something playable, then sit in the artist chair until you have something crudely recognizable, then sit in the tester chair and be honest with yourself about what’s fun and what’s not. You don’t need to be perfect at any one job, you just need to be good enough to prove your point, and inspire others to join you.

in 1997, one author coined the term “screenager” to describe our audience,

I’ve always been uncomfortable with the label “educational software.” I’ve always preferred the word “learning,” myself. Education is somebody else telling you what to think, while learning is opening yourself to new possibilities, and grasping a concept because you understand it on a personal level.

Bruce Shelley used to joke that we do our research in the children’s section of the library, and it’s not entirely a metaphor. Kids’ books skipped the details, and got right down to the important themes.

Nicholas Meyer, the writer responsible for the even-numbered Star Trek movies—the good ones, if you follow Trek fandom—once said, “The audience may be stupid, but it’s never wrong.” Around the Firaxis office, we have a similar saying: feedback is fact.

Since then, Civilization VI has moved to an entirely new Combat Strength system that compares military units numerically rather than by ratio, and allows them to engage beyond a single skirmish.

Even Sid Meier can get details mixed up! I believe he means civ5 here.

But it’s not the countless callbacks and references that make the nuclear Gandhi story so funny to me. It’s the fact that none of it is true. The overflow error never happened at all.

Once you start talking about your own legacy, you’re done—and I’m definitely not done.

Ive just read 350 pages of you setting forth your legacy, Sid!