Whether fellow players are friends or strangers or artificial intelligence, the action of the game is propelled not by hand-eye coordination or fantastical role-playing but by deliberation.
A digital variation on nerdy board games like Risk, Civilization emulates the span of human history: Over hundreds of turns (often filling days, if not weeks, of playtime), a player chooses a culture (the Romans, say, or the Zulu) and then embarks on a long evolution from nomadic settlers to hegemony-seeking, space-exploring empire. That opportunity came in the form of Sid Meier’s Civilization VI, the latest in a legendary computer-game franchise that started in 1991. The real world was out of control, but here was an opportunity for me to play emperor. A friend in another city suggested that we game together remotely, and I felt a pang. Netflix and novels couldn’t distract me from scrolling through the news or counting the fibers in my couch pillows. I quit gaming outright, and I mostly stayed away as adulthood unfolded- until the boring horror of 2020’s shutdowns arrived. But then one week during my sophomore year in high school, a realization hit me: Spending so much time questing on a screen might get in the way of other quests-for a driver’s license, a social life, a career. Much of my childhood was spent in that silvery chute, where I commanded alien armies and cast spells. The $179 billion gaming industry is by now bigger than the global movie business and North American professional sports combined, and its decades-long rise has been credited with declines in reading, TV viewership, workforce participation, and even sex. No other activity, it becomes clearer every year, can compete in delivering kicks per second-and gaming’s magnetic pull is bending civilization itself. The likes of Minecraft and Zelda turn the drag of time into a silvery chute you drop into and emerge from after hours in a state of flow. If the point of life was simply to enjoy the moment that you’re in, we’d all be playing video games constantly. Illustration by Katie Martin images by Universal Images Group / Sylvain Grandadam / Print Collector / Getty
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