Actually, it is a little spooky to read, especially the parts he gets right. For example, when deciding that Liberalism + Scientific Method = Communism, I meant to suggest that the latter is a scientific response to the former. The line between science and philosophy was pretty vague in the nineteenth-century. Of course, studying and analyzing history to predict its eventual outcome – as Marx did – is now no longer really seen as an achievable goal. I’ve always felt that his inspiration for doing so was the great leaps being made by comtemporary science in understanding the natural and physical world. Perhaps he felt the “socio-economic world” could be dissected just as well…
DESIGNER NOTES
Soren Johnson's Game Design Journal
Awesome indeed. I find it very hard to take seriously anyone who spells anything with “KKK” or a dollar sign, but at least he’s taking Civ seriously.
Tech trees like Civ’s are always interesting, especially the changes from edition to edition. It’s always fun to tease out which connections are made for “scientific” reasons and which ones are simply game related.
The links between agriculture and animal husbandry are obvious, though you can make a strong case for having agriculture as pre-condition for everything since, historically, the Agr. Revolution made civilization possible.
Having astronomy as a medieval tech, as another example, strikes me as an interesting gameplay choice since it provides yet another navigation tech after optics even though scientific astronomy goes all the way back to Babylon, if not Stonehenge.