A generation of gamers owe their understanding of the importance of improvements such as the aqueduct to fledgling civilisations to you. Was creating something more than just a "game", something enriching as well as fun, part of the plan when you started?
We didn't intend to make an educational game or a game that taught people anything specific. But there's a joy of learning in just about everyone, especially when it's presented in a way in which you feel you're controlling the process. You're not being told to do something or forced to do something, you're doing it as part of your own initiative; learning becomes a fun part of the experience of playing the game. We tapped into the idea of learning and progress, that you would go through the game experience and come out the other end as a different person, knowing a little more about the world, and maybe knowing a little bit more about yourself.
These are things that games do, not necessarily with a clear sense of purpose, but just the process of gaming allows you to explore new worlds, new places, and you are naturally going to learn things from that.
Civilization (1991)
Jesse Schell's talk at DICE explored the idea that the concept of playing games works so deeply within the player that he sees gaming being further integrated into daily life as a technique to encourage people to learn, consume - anything the designer wants. Do you see things going that way?
Well, we've certainly seen plenty of examples of games being used in education and having a lot of success, if used creatively. Games can make anything more fun and more interesting; the problem is that once you start to mould games into a specific purpose, the player becomes less important. If the player doesn't want to go in that direction, you haven't created the game they want to play. Introducing those kind of constraints to gaming isn't going to pay off the way people think they're going to; you can't transfer the compulsion to play Civilization to the compulsion to buy potato chips. The value of gaming is in the freedom of the player to explore whatever they want to explore to their own ends; once they're being pushed in a certain direction it's no longer a gaming experience, it's manipulation.
So you don't see it as being as pervasive to everyday life?
I guess I don't see that happening; we provide better, cooler, more interesting worlds, and that's a lot of the appeal of games. It seems like game design ideas will simply work less well if you're still stranded in the real world.
When you started out, how did you discover the better, cooler, more interesting worlds of gaming?
Even the real world was a different one back when I started designing games. You could just sit down in front of a computer and start typing in a program and declare yourself a game designer; that's all there was to it. A single person could make a game; it was the Wild West. No rules, no idea what we're doing, and it was a very experimental process.
I didn't have to prove anything to anyone, there was nothing established, and it was just something I was fascinated with. So I sat down and started typing. I got together with Bill Staley, and we formed Microprose. I was the game designer, he was the business person, and we had a great combination of talents where each of us was necessary and we didn't step on each other's toes. That was part of the success of Microprose, I think, those two personalities working together.
We had no idea how long this gaming thing would be around; we thought maybe in a couple of years it might go away. It was a really different environment from the one we have today, where on the one hand we know it's a solid established industry and we know how things work, and on the other hand the competition is much tougher; it's a much more difficult industry to get into.
If it worked well, why did you form Firaxis?
Microprose grew to be larger and larger, and it came to a point where I think that I, and a couple of other people wanted to work in a more design-focused environment, not in a large company with all the pressures and concerns of how these companies have to work. We were more interested in the studio approach and working with publishers, but not having to worry about the other parts of the business. It was very much a design-led transition; the purpose was to go back to more of a game-production studio rather than a publishing business.
Gaming might no longer be a Wild West but online distribution platforms, from XBLA to Steam, have changed the marketplace recently. Do you see a place for strategy titles such as Civilization on these new platforms?
It's a really dynamic and exciting area for designers; the ability to really iterate on ideas and put them out into the marketplace quickly is amazing. It's even more dynamic than when we started - you can put an application on the App Store and have it downloaded by consumers so fast it makes you head spin - but on the other hand the space may not be the best place for this kind of game or that kind of game.
But we have so many outlets now that it's not that every game needs to go everywhere, but that certain games can work best in certain ways. Certain games might be best on PC, certain games might be best on Live Arcade, certain games might be best on iPhone, on Facebook. The technology is always different in some ways that make some games work better than others.