Civilization 4 Mentioned on the Colbert Report

[Dis]

I love history myself, I'm constantly learning more. But I forget just as much as I learn. I just don't have what some might call a photographic memory. I've never been good at rote memorization (those 2 words might be redundant together ). But I love learning.

And I tend to focus more on history of the past 500 years. So I admit, I'm not up on Charlemagne

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Keep on Civin'

Originally posted by Jaguar
That's a rather typical response from a 30-year-old without kids. Just because you grew up without video games doesn't mean young kids can't pick them up really quickly.

To adults, learning the rules of an entirely new world is somewhat difficult. It takes a 35-year-old longer to master Mario Kart than it takes an 8-year-old. To kids, it's second nature to learn the rules of new worlds. They're still learning the rules of the first one. So in the same way I learned that one must wash hands after going to the bathroom, I learned that Chivalry was unnecessary if you weren't planning a war, because it was a dead-end tech which only led to a single unit.

I was looking at your profile to see how old you were, and I noticed you're a chess player. Did you play when you were young at any competitive events? Did you meet those kids who are seven or younger but better than players twice their age?

While adults have much more life experience, it's not necessarily relevant in games. Knowing the course of history doesn't actually help you in Civilization. I can recall asking my mother whether there were Ironclads in 1310, because I had gotten an ironclad then. A little kid can't be expected to know the course of history. He can, however, learn to create roads around his cities to increase the number of orange and yellow arrows. And that's all he needs.

I was playing Civ1 in 1993 at the age of five. My sister was 10, and we learned the game together.

qft -- i started playing at the age of five, too. In 1992. Civin' before you learnt to read in your native language

One line that was a real kicker said something to the effect that if video games had come out first and then books were invented later in mankind's history, there's no doubt that society would look down on books as "unchallenging" or "shallow" or "dumbed-down entertainment".

I consider this obvious -- games can be, and usually are, much more intellectually challenging than books.