Transcript
Introduction
"A billion hours ago, Neanderthals were making spearheads in the stone age. A billion hours from now, it will be the year 116,174 AD. With a billion hours to play with, you could make roughly 13,000 round trips to Alpha Centauri at the speed of light or you could spend it all playing Sid Meier's Civilization, so I'm told. One billion hours is the sort of number that is humbling to the point of incomprehensibility and it is a wildly conservative estimate at that.
The game distribution service, Steam, only began collecting player data in earnest within the last decade, and one billion is actually the number of hours played on Civilization V from its release in 2010 up through 2016. A six-year window into one game in a series that spans 29 years and 12 additions, not to mention the expansion packs. To imagine the hours devoted to all the incarnations of Civilization since 1991 is, well, incomprehensible. I wouldn't want to try.
What's more, any fair assessment of Civilization success would have to include all the other games I've crafted along the way, including titles like Pirates! and Railroad Tycoon, which were popular series in their own right, but also overlooked projects that started strong, but fizzled early because sometimes it takes a misstep to figure out where you should be headed. Each game taught me something.
Each game was both painful and gratifying in its own way. And each game contributed to what came after it. What follows is a largely chronological examination of all the games I produced over my lifetime, from the wildly successful to the completely unheard of. Whether they took a billion lines of code or less than 100, there is one thing every game in this book has in common, they are fundamentally comprised, as all games are, of a series of interesting decisions.
We are surrounded by decisions and, therefore, games in everything we do. Interesting might be subject to personal taste to some degree, but the gift of agency, that is the ability of players to exert free will over their surroundings rather than obediently following a narrative is what sets games apart from other media. Without a player's input, there can be no game. I'm often asked in interviews when I got interested in games, usually, with the implied hope that I'll identify a moment in my childhood when I suddenly knew I was a game designer.
But from my perspective, there was no turning point. I never made the conscious decision to embrace gaming because as far as I can tell, gaming already is the default, straightforward path. Not only does it span a billion hours of history, ancient Sumerians were throwing dice as early as 5,000 BC and cruder games almost certainly go back as far as the Neanderthals, but it's a deeply embedded human instinct.
Everyone starts out life as a gamer, and I was no different. First, I laughed at peekaboo, then I lined up toy soldiers, then I played board games, then I made fun computer programs. To me, it seems like the most logical progression in the world. The question, 'When did you start?' Would be better framed as 'Why didn't you stop?' But even then, I won't have a good answer.
I find it mind-boggling that a life spent dedicated to gaming is the exception rather than the rule. If my gravestone reads, 'Sid Meier, creator of Civilization and nothing else,' I'll be fine with that. It's a good game to be known for, and I'm proud of the positive impact it's had on so many players' lives, but it won't be the whole story. This is the whole story”.
That was an excerpt from the book that I'm going to talk to you about today, which is Sid Meier's Memoir! by the creator of Civilization, A Life in Computer Games and is written by Sid Meier. And this is another example of a book that I would have never found if it wasn't for you guys. This actually was a recommendation from a misfit named Articulating his philosophy that a video game should be a series of interesting decisions" -- which he was just echoing or, I guess, introducing rather, in the introduction, this idea that, that's what he defines a game as, it's a series of interesting decisions and how he thinks that there's a lot of lessons that you learn from games that you're going to apply to life. And none of that to company building.