{"id":7680,"date":"2025-01-22T11:12:54","date_gmt":"2025-01-22T18:12:54","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.vairtere.com\/spill\/?p=7680"},"modified":"2025-01-22T11:21:40","modified_gmt":"2025-01-22T18:21:40","slug":"my-wife-mrs-columbo","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.vairtere.com\/spill\/2025\/01\/22\/my-wife-mrs-columbo\/","title":{"rendered":"my wife, Mrs. Columbo"},"content":{"rendered":"

I was born in an age without video games. I played Pong in my twenties maybe, and spent too many quarters at arcades, but the first time I ever got down and dirty with a real video game in the modern sense, I was about 35. <\/p>\n

It was called Civilization 2, and as things turned out, it was a pretty good simulator of the real world, in my empire, in my lifetime. <\/p>\n

The Imperial Dilemma of Civilization <\/a><\/p>\n

I know you’re not going to burn two hours on that video essay like I did, but let me just share a list of keywords or topics from it, which I scribbled down while multitasking and listening to it:<\/p>\n

Civilization, of course …
\nImperialism
\nCapitalism
\nColonization (and ‘pioneering’, etc.)
\nNationalism
\nand most importantly of all: <\/p>\n

Progress.<\/p>\n

In the years since 35, I haven’t played many more titles, and most of the ones I have played were variations on the theme of Civ 2. And in fact, the only game I still sometimes play is, arguably, its closest relative. It’s called Alpha Centauri. The single most notable difference between it and its civ-sib is that it doesn’t play out on Earth, but on the first other planet humankind is supposed, in the conceit of the franchise, to have … colonized. In “The Future”. <\/p>\n

The reason I still play that one singular game once in a while is simply that:<\/p>\n

Alpha Centauri is NOT Civilization in space<\/a><\/p>\n

And that, for now,
\nis all I gotta say <\/p>\n

about that. <\/p>\n

\"\"<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

I was born in an age without video games. I played Pong in my twenties maybe, and spent too many quarters at arcades, but the first time I ever got down and dirty with a real video game in the modern sense, I was about 35. It was called Civilization 2, and as things turned […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-7680","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.vairtere.com\/spill\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7680","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.vairtere.com\/spill\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.vairtere.com\/spill\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.vairtere.com\/spill\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.vairtere.com\/spill\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=7680"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/www.vairtere.com\/spill\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7680\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":7683,"href":"https:\/\/www.vairtere.com\/spill\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7680\/revisions\/7683"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.vairtere.com\/spill\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=7680"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.vairtere.com\/spill\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=7680"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.vairtere.com\/spill\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=7680"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}