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

by Sid Meier

We are surrounded by decisions, and therefore games, in everything we do. “Interesting” might be subject to personal taste to some degree, but the gift of agency—that is, the ability of players to exert free will over their surroundings rather than obediently following a narrative—is what sets games apart from other media, regardless of whether that agency is expressed through a computer keyboard, plastic tokens, physical movement, or entirely in the mind. Without a player’s input, there can be no game; conversely, it takes only a single interaction to transform an observer into a participant, and thus a player.

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.

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.

The first step is almost always to sit down and start working, and it’s almost never to fly to Vegas and wait for somebody to offer you a business venture.

“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.

My mother had become emotionally invested in this little game, so profoundly that she’d had to abandon it entirely. A few rugged blobs on the screen had given her palpitations, and she had felt a genuine stab of guilt over each dead hostage.

I had useful knowledge that others didn’t have, but I would have to rely on those who had knowledge of my knowledge, who could be my link to the non-programming world.

Adventuring didn’t have to mean blindly groping for a set path. It could mean making up your own story, being in charge of your fate just like a pirate would be. I wanted a game that only hit the high points, taking you from one exciting scene to the next and leaving out all the walking around, looking at, and picking up.

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.

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.

Give the villain a moustache, and he would take on all the characteristics of every moustache-twirling villain since childhood. 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.

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. There’s an argument to be made that by exposing the unpleasant reality of violence, you can inspire others to push against it, too, but this generally requires a removed perspective, rather than the inherent first-person nature of games.

The industry term for this type of randomized template—or more specifically, the ideal of perfecting randomized templates into actual creativity—is known as procedural generation.

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.

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

some time mulling over just what was going wrong in Civilization. Finally, it occurred to me to try it as a turn-based game, and just like it would have in chess or racing, that one decision changed everything. Suddenly, the player was doing instead of watching, anticipating instead of scrambling to figure out what had just happened. Their whole brain was engaged, rather than just the tips of their fingers.

But a hidden map—a single settler dropped into the wilderness, able to see nothing but the nine squares surrounding them—was quietly grand. It allowed the player to imagine a seemingly infinite set of possibilities in the blackness beyond.

There is no map before you’ve explored the wilderness, and no overriding artistic vision on Day One. There’s just the hard, consistent work of making something a little better each day, and being as efficient as possible in your discovery of what it’s going to turn out to be.

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.

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.

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.

The difference between creativity and theft is that creativity adds, and each addition creates potential that wasn’t there before. If we don’t share our ideas and help one another build, we’ll never get tall enough to find out what’s next.

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.

No form of media is perfect, and no form has a monopoly on addiction, either. The important distinction is what you choose to convey with your vehicle. Imagination is good, compelling narratives are good, and empathy is good, in whatever form we express them. 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 escapism is done right, it creates a community of escapees that never existed before. The only alternative would be to knowingly create something less powerful, to deliberately dial back that human connection out of fear. That’s madness. We’re stronger together, and the more universal and effective our games are, the more knowledge, empathy, and ambition we can inspire.

The coding is the easy part; it’s like drawing a picture of something after you’ve excavated it. The sweat is in the digging, not the documentation.

AI isn’t allowed to gamble, or behave randomly, or get lucky—even though humans do all of these things on a daily basis—not because we can’t program it, but because experience tells us that players will get frustrated and quit. The same phenomenon doesn’t happen when both opponents are humans, because they’ve already tempered their expectations for the possibility that the other guy is crazy.

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.

Stephen Spielberg* can’t react in real time to the twitch of your wrist, or change the ending to suit your mood. His interaction with you, profound as it may be, is strictly one-way, and the worst thing we can do is subordinate our unique two-way abilities beneath a jealous imitation.

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. *

Civilization’s popularity brought it to the attention of professional academics, and it wasn’t long before I was being hammered in peer-reviewed journals for “trafficking in tropes” and generally glossing over the sins of Western expansion.

Americans in the early nineties were brand new to the concept of international diversity in games at all, and at least we can claim that we were at the forefront of a movement that still had a long way to go. We’ve achieved a much better balance of South American, Asian, and African cultures as the series has matured, with each game striving to be more inclusive than the last. We worked so hard at it, in fact, that we eventually encountered the opposite extreme: due to their taboos about photography and idols, the All Pueblo Council of Governors in New Mexico objected to the inclusion of the ancient Pueblo leader Popé in Civilization V.

learning history often is fun. But sometimes, it’s also super depressing. We have to offer a moral clarity to our players and eliminate the painful quandaries, because unlike other forms of storytelling, they are personally standing in for our main character. Their ego is on the line, and we have to be gentle with it.

Not everybody appreciated the presence of global warming in the original Civilization, for example, and one early reviewer called our implementation of women’s suffrage “another brick in the wall of political correctness.” So I can confidently say that, at least on occasion, we’re only unpopular because we’re ahead of the curve.

Scholars talk about us, and critique us, because they know us. Gamers didn’t magically gain credibility with academics; they grew up and became academics.

What we encourage is knowledge-seeking in itself, and ownership of one’s beliefs. We want you to understand that choices have consequences, that a country’s fate can turn on a single act of diplomacy, and that historical figures were not black-and-white paragons of good and evil—not because we’ve told you, but because you’ve faced those complex dilemmas for yourself.

It didn’t matter how many different ways this conversation played out, I couldn’t convince our testers that it made sense for them to lose a three-to-one battle roughly one-fourth of the time.

So we changed the actual odds behind the scenes, and made sure that the player would win any battle with odds of three-to-one or greater. This might have been unfair to the computer AI, but we never heard any complaints, and once players were given the advantage, they reported having much more fun.

So we started taking into account the results of previous battles, and making it extra unlikely for too many bad (or good) things to happen in a row.

The comic itself was several years old, and only generically highlighted the humor of putting Gandhi’s finger on the button at all, but in the comments that followed, half a dozen users chimed in to share the story they’d heard about the overflow error. With that many in agreement, it became truth.

Videogames have educated, inspired, broadened, and enlightened millions of people. We are translated more often, and into more languages, than the majority of books, and some of our best work has connected individuals across warring cultures and helped them find commonality.