Comment by sixothree
1 day ago
I play games like Civilization and we get these tech trees and policy trees and such. And I can never help but wonder what it would be like to play these when the people of the territory act like Americans. You try to incentivize future technology and they push back. You try and prioritize education and they push back. There is always division and infighting.
Regardless, I don't think it would actually make the game more fun.
Would you include the part where almost every technology you researched in the past made life worse or would they just hate technology for no reason in the game?
Is this some mad alternate reality where Americans don't invent any future technology?
So, "If only you could talk to the monsters" but at the level of this genre?
I mean that's kinda how Civ works already. Some civs get bonuses for education & research, others in combat, etc, and focusing on the things incompatible with your civ will "punish" you.
It sounds like you just don't agree with how they've implemented America lol.
What would prioritizing education mean in Civilization? The game's model is fairly simple:
1. There are three resources: food, industrial production, and commercial activity;
2. As the player, you can divide commercial activity between three categories: research, state revenue, and local "luxuries", which in this context just means tax relief;
3. Scientific progress occurs when you've produced enough research to learn a new technology;
4. The only appearance of "education" anywhere in the game is that there is an expensive building called a "university" that increases local production of research. (The predecessor building with the same effect at a lower cost is the "library".)
On the other hand, "there is always division and infighting" is one of the most important and fundamental mechanics in the game; if your city grows beyond a quite small population cap, new citizens are automatically unhappy and will shut down the whole city unless pacified somehow.
I think you missed the point. I was pretty clear about not focusing on Civ specifically.
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Because I don't know enough about the internal divisions in other countries. But I can tell you Americans will fight progress at every turn.
I'm not American, so this is a guess, but I'd suspect people resisting "progress" are not as irrational as you perhaps suppose.
More likely, they feel they would disproportionately bear the costs, while the benefits either trickle down diffusely from the wider societal good, or worse, accrue to some private company.
For example you may feel AI is progress, they may feel the loss of the countryside near their house to a data centre, which they may believe will primarily benefit the owners of OpenAI et al. In such a case, their opposition would be aligned with their beliefs and values.
> Americans will fight progress at every turn
On one hand, we have opposition to industrialization and the green revolution.
On the other hand, we have Greenwich Village pushing back on being razed for a highway.
Defining "progress" is fundamentally a value judgement. In one era, undeveloped land was opportunity for progress. Today, turning developed land into parks can be seen the same way.