From a discussion of creatures found in a 2000-year-old religious document, we turn abruptly to consider a video game released barely a month ago. Sid Meier’s Civilization: Beyond Earth is a turn-based grand strategy game where the player controls one of several human colonial expeditions on an alien world. The premise is that in the future humans on Earth are quickly becoming an endangered species due to The Great Mistake. The explanation is incomplete, but the Great Mistake seems to have been a human-caused ecological catastrophe which has made Earth increasingly inhospitable. Humanity’s only hope is to send out colony ships, sponsored by different national blocs, with the most cutting-edge technology to create a new home on a distant planet and somehow think of a way to save the humans left on Earth.
How the colonists, and the player, choose to solve humanity’s plight is based on the ideology they adopt, known in the game as affinities. There are three affinities: Purity, Harmony, and Supremacy. Purity means humans stay as they are, trying to terraform the new planet to resemble Old Earth so that humans back home, when they arrive, will find themselves among familiar settings. Harmony means the colonists have abandoned the idea of rescuing humans back on Old Earth and have instead chosen to integrate themselves biologically and genetically as much as possible into the new ecology of their adopted world. Supremacy means that humans have decided to embrace the benefits of a purely digital and mechanical existence by uploading themselves into technology, and they plan to return to Old Earth to “liberate” flesh-bound humans from their imprisoning bodies.
From the premise alone, it is not difficult to imagine the creators of this game conceiving of it as an apocalyptic scenario. The world is dying and humans, whether through pride, greed, or ignorance, are at fault for it. It is not even clear if the Great Mistake refers to a single event or if it is an umbrella term for all the sins humanity has inflected upon the Earth which has led to the doomsday scenario in which they find themselves. The only source of salvation is for humanity to turn to space, to find a New Earth beneath a New Heaven where the mistakes of the past, their sins, will no longer return to punish them. If humanity survives this apocalypse and in what form depends entirely on the colonists and thus on the player.
The beauty of Civilization: Beyond Earth as an artistic representation of apocalyptic themes is how the developers fully embraced the multiplicity of views one might have undertaking such a venture. In other words, they were not content to simply present the player with an apocalyptic scenario back home on Old Earth. Many things throughout the game reinforce the idea that the colonists are wrestling with heady issues of religion, bioethics, the importance of the past (positive and negative), cultural adaptation, economic utility weighed against the worth of the individual, and other such topics. These ideas are not linearly presented. They occur as players progress and make branching choices in the development of their colonies. The player is never told that there is a “right” choice, only that such a choice will advance them further along the path of a particular affinity. For instance, the player can choose what to do about the local indigenous (non-sapient) alien population. Choosing to exterminate them, befriend them, or domesticate them for labor purposes increases one’s Purity, Harmony, or Supremacy points, respectively.
As one progresses further down an affinity path, quotes from the colonists appear that express the emerging ideology the player is promoting through their choices. These quotes are short but they provide an incredible degree of richness and immersion for those interested in such things. The quotes touch on topics of religion, philosophy, regret, loneliness, responsibility, hope, banal daily interactions, colonial storytelling – all from the point of view of the chosen affinity. For instance, the transhuman Supremacy affinity begins to take on a religious zeal to liberate humanity from flawed human bodies and upload into advanced machines. One quote far down the Supremacy path is an adaptation of Matthew 26:41, “The spirit has always been willing. The flesh has always been weak.” This saying, in context, is a justification for privileging digitized humanity over organic people. Alternatively, the Purity affinity has this to say, “Actual human beings everywhere now are more important than potential ‘improved’ humans that may or may not exist in the future.” This quote comes from a holy figure in the game’s lore expressing the desire to remain human without tampering with the definition of “humanity” with either gene splicing (Harmony) or transhumanism (Supremacy).
The importance of these choices and the way Civilization: Beyond Earth implements them is that the player is left with the understanding that he or she is resolving an apocalypse that has permeated every aspect of life for the colonists. The ideology chosen makes the entire culture adjust its attitudes, mobilizing the whole of society behind one idea, until it comes to a single conclusion on how to bring about humanity’s salvation. For Purity, it is finding a way to make this New Earth what the old one should have been and bringing those suffering back home into this new paradise, rapturing them away from a fallen world. For Harmony, it is abandoning humans on Old Earth to their fate because of their ecological sins – sins which will not be repeated on this new planet that has remained an Eden. For Supremacy, it means returning home as crusaders with a new proselytizing religion of circuits and computer processors to uplift those who embrace it or crush those who refuse. In short, the Great Mistake was not the apocalypse. Rather, each of these affinity-specific outcomes is one kind of apocalypse for mankind, and the player gets to decide which one will happen. The task of the game isn’t simply to save humanity. It is to decide what Heaven will be like.
One final note. Take a quick look at the game’s opening cinematic embedded below. In it you will see a young woman, one of the few “chosen” worthy to leave behind an impoverished, lifeless world to be reborn in the heavens. To me, the symbolism is not only possibly but explicitly apocalyptic in the full meaning of the word. But, of course, I am rather biased.
If you have perspectives on what you have read, whether or not you have played Civilization: Beyond Earth, feel free to share your thoughts.
Stables of the Apocalypse 