Civilization VII historian wants Civ to be the gateway drug to textbooks

While you can see samurai versus marines in Civilization, and the Inca can get the power of nuclear weapons, Firaxis does take its history seriously. The team working on the game hire historians to help shape the empires, their leaders, and more in each game, and one such historian is glad that this strategy titan exists.

Senior historian, Dr. Andrew Johnson, hopes that the history in the game will help people pick up a textbook. "I teach undergraduates in my other life, and my God, man, they don't read," he told PC Gamer. "And trying to get them interested in history—if somebody plays Machiavelli, they might get really kind of interested. Machiavelli maybe has enough name recognition already, but like Amina [Queen of Zazzau], or, 'OK, so this is the Ming Dynasty, how is that different from the Han Dynasty?' If that can provoke somebody into an interest in history, that is what's important here. This is not the textbook. This is the gateway drug into the textbook. If textbooks were drugs."

While Civilization pays heavy attention to history, sometimes the history does need to be put to one side so that the game can be balanced. "There's overlapping zones of sovereignty. Somebody can be both a part of the Cambodian state and part of the Thai state, part of the Laotian state, pay tribute to all, or none," Johnson explained. "But that doesn't work in a game where you need direct lines on the map. So that's fine. We can nod to that somewhere in the Civilopedia or the gameplay, and maybe if somebody gets interested enough in the Khmer Empire, they can go read about it."

There has also been criticism of the game ditching the idea that leaders must have been political figures in history for Civilization VII, something that we touched upon in our Gamescom interview all about the game.

Civilization VII releases on the 11th of February for PC, PS4, PS5, Nintendo Switch, Xbox One, and Xbox Series X/S.