> Meier said Firaxis has adopted a "rule of thirds" for new Civilization entries: "one-third traditional gameplay, one-third is improved from the last version, and one-third is brand new." But the team also has to be careful with everything they add. "We're now at the point where for every new feature we put in we have to take something out, because it's very easy to overwhelm the player with complexity or detail or things like that."
I am currently attempting to build in Farthest Frontier early access - and My village starves to death quite quickly.
The complexity granularity of control resources (down to managing soil quality for fields yield) management appears to be deep in this game, but I cant live long enough to find out yet.
Sid deserves one of the top seats in the Video Game Hall of Fame. Carmack, Sid, Garriott, and (press) F for others.
Video games built my career, and then in my career I helped several of these studios build out so they could build more!
Video games are the fabric of modern computing's woven tapestry history. (A tapestry by the old wire weavers would be amazing)
When "Masters of Orion" came out in the early 90s - and advanced... I had gotten the latest version of the time and lost interest quickly - and a friend asked why I didnt like it - and i replied "I don't like playing a spreadsheet"
So there was an article back a few years ago, there was an article about a guy who lived in the mission in SF and he was basically the accountant to a guild on EVE and he did NOT play the game - he made 100K $USD Real IRL money being paid to manage the finances of some huge Eve guild's in game assets....
He said all he does all day is build spread sheets.
Wait until someone make the GPT assistant or agents for these games.
Jarvis and "Computer" will be real soon for in game massive fleet management.
--
Wait until we connect a game to IRL infra - and you can design an workflow with a factorio-like interface powered by a GPT mortar to managing the actual execution and api connects.
As to your last comment. Factory design, at the cutting edge, still seem very complex, with surprisingly many parameters. The designs I have been involved with (not that many) have a depth of complexity at the minute detail, that something like Factorio does not reflect. Everything is assumed to be interchangeable parts, but IRL they aren’t and often a lot of effort has to be spent just sourcing the right components, which then aren’t available and you get alternate components with slightly different specs. Fun!
Exactly why a GPT Agent could properly handle such abstractions whereby the human input is intended outcome via this workflow and the Agent will handle the minutia, dependency checks etc.
This is coming to a greater extent than it hasn't already. Imagine training all every robotic arm movement ever made in a factory based on the logs, learning from the yield results and being able to fine-tune based on that.
I've managed the installation of medical lab robots/test lines - but only to the Layer 3 to ensure physically placed, powered, connected then hand off for commissioning and testing...
Nothing large scale though.
Factory automation is one of the ones where I wish I would have, if I were to have taken one of the many career tangents that was presented to me in my 20s..,
I feel like he honestly tries to be humble about everything, but with everything he's done it's awfully difficult.
One thing about the book, it's very much "a life in computer games" as the title says, and not a full autobiography. Events outside of the games don't come up much. I think he meets his wife and gets married within the space of a paragraph.
Given that billions of people have not put out anything remotely close to Sid Meier's oeuvre, what makes him different is of great interest to me. Was he just born that way? Did he go to elementary school and get hit in the head with board games until computer games came out? After the success of the first few games, why not just rest on his laurels and pump out Civilization 16 with barely any changes since Civ II? Was his wife the one to support them financially so he could work on video games before he was so immensely successful? The history of the games themselves are less interesting to me because I played them. What made them happen, where his personal life plays a component, might be of interest to fans of his, at least more than a paragraph saying oh yeah he got married at some point.
It's like saying a book is obviously best because it's been handed down for generations, or a song is great because everyone knows it.
There will always be a best selling version of something, and you may not need anything special about it other than a coincidence of luck, skill, and inspiration, of which only luck accelerates the first success so that the subsequent ones have the opportunity to succeed.
In this respect, the ancillary factors are always quite boring because they don't influence the making of great games - they don't slow anything down. Others may have had a sick day at the wrong time or a hopeless addiction to reading the paper in the morning, or mild depression, or a vibrant social life that distracted them, or something equally mundane.
If the book avoids personal details, it's probably because they weren't differential factors, and we'll never know about the second or third best version of him because games (and life) are not a double blind process. Success breeds opportunities.
Definitely a very humble and nice guy. I was friends with his son when we were kids back in the 90s. He drove some cheap sedan and lived in modest digs in the suburbs of a Baltimore. Went out of his way and meet and autograph something for my older cousin who idolized him.
It's 4 episodes long (episodes 23-26). It's an overview of Sid's career, and so it's very similar to his autobiography, but I enjoyed listening to Sid talk about it in a different way than I enjoyed reading the book.
Seconded. There are also great interviews with Bruce Shelley and Bryan Reynolds there. The most recent episode with Jake Solomon involves a lot of Firaxis stories as well.
Thanks for the podcast suggestion. I look forward to listening to the interviews. Looks like there are quite some other interesting interviews there as well.
It's a great read. Sid is one of the all time best. In the end, after all those years, he summarizes his philosophy as: find the fun.
He likens it to the opposite of "I picture the statue and removed the bits that didn't look like it". He has no idea, maybe a gut feeling. Playtesting is the only way. He goes in great detail describing a game like civ with dinosaurs that sounds fun on paper, but he was never able to make it fun.
As a huge fan of Prince of Persia, I enjoyed the book, but it did sour me on Mechner's views at the time. He comes across as entitled and dismissive. He makes the game and expects millions, but really doesn't care about shipping or even the company he's working with. He's meant to make great movies and this game is just a stepping stone. He comes off as a scattered young adult. It's fine, and I appreciate Mechner for the honesty and vulnerability. It did change my view of this mad genius who coded everything and did rotoscoping and bit shifting and made a game through sheer will. Interesting read.
Sid's a very interesting game designer, he's phenomenal at making fun games - in any genre - but his games are fundamentally simple ones. If you take Civ 2-4, or SMAC, the strategic depth largely comes from the likes of Brian Reynolds and Soren Johnson. The mechanics they've designed are more complex than what Sid does, but Sid started it with his genius intuition for what makes a game fun.
For those so inclined, CivRev, the game that was basically "civ on consoles" is an actual Sid Meier and an interesting window into how he would have continued the series (the latest Designer Notes podcast goes into some length on this). CivRev is simpler, faster paced and dispenses with most of the detail of the PC games, but can be fun, even if not deep.
> Meier said Firaxis has adopted a "rule of thirds" for new Civilization entries: "one-third traditional gameplay, one-third is improved from the last version, and one-third is brand new." But the team also has to be careful with everything they add. "We're now at the point where for every new feature we put in we have to take something out, because it's very easy to overwhelm the player with complexity or detail or things like that."