The Year of the Four Emperors mod for Civ IV

This little video records some of the game play in ‘The Year of the Four Emperors’ mod for Civ IV that I’ve used from time to time in my teaching. Things to watch for - the opening shows how to load the mod and get it running; ‘research’ can’t be turned off in the game, but you can make it impossible to carry out (’gunpowder’ for some reason is on the list- but it’ll take ca 2600 turns to do it, by which time the game has ended); the senate takes a vote on declaring one of the contenders Emperor; towns and military units are more or less in their correct historic positions.

Civilization Revolution

It seems that the Civilization franchise is coming to the console market. This can only be a good thing, since I believe that Civilization is one of the greatest gifts the games industry ever gave us historian-folk. Civilization: Revolution is not a straightforward port though of the PC version to the console. There are numerous differences, one of which is that it would seem that new content, scenarios etc will only be available for people with the Xbox Live service. On the plus side, presumably the interesting errors and glitches that exist in the player-created content won’t be there (in my mod, if you look carefully, the Roman Senate looks an awful lot like the modern United Nations building… ). Anyway, an in-depth review is available here.

What I find also quite exciting, is that a port is planned for the Nintendo DS (the dual-screen; you’ve seen them, they look like little PDAs). The Nintendo DS allows multiplayer play when players are sitting together, over a tiny wi-fi link. This port will allow head-to-head competition over that link. From an educational point of view, this is the most valuable part of any commercial game used educationally: the ability for players/students to discuss and think about the playing - the metagame. Hopefully, new content will become available periodically for the DS version too.

Official site: http://civilizationrevolution.com/

Civilization IV World Builder Manual & other needful things

So perhaps you now have a copy of Civilization IV, and you want to begin scenario building or even a larger scale modification to the game’s mechanics. What do you do?

Before you begin, you need to understand how the Worldbuilder works in Civ IV - here’s the manual and a discussion of what’s what - note that you have to add the code ‘chipotle’ to “cheatcode = ” in the Civ IV ini file, to get the full worldbuilder experience.

Now. What do you want to model using this game? A particular war? a battle? a long period of cultural interchange between two peaceful peoples? Answer this question well, and be very clear what it is you hope to accomplish. Let’s say, for interest’s sake, you want to make a scenario focussed on Veii, and you want your student - the player - to understand the urban dynamics of central Italy during the protohistoric period (you’ll want to describe it much more snappily to your students, when the time comes). You’ll need a map then for the playing board. Here’s a google map centred on Veii. (Maybe you’ll want to zoom out a bit). Open it up in your graphics program, clean it up, and save it as a bmp. It doesn’t have to look like a Civ IV map yet; we use another program to do that.

To turn that map into a playing board for the game, use this bmp-to-wbs utility. This will allow you to make the map exactly as you want it, the placing of resources, etc etc. It comes with an excellent tutorial on mapmaking and scenario design. Alternatively, you can try this tool instead.

That’s all you need to get a good scenario up and running; other interesting tools and utilities are available here.

Things you should think about: Civ IV uses XML files to store lots of the information. To really get rolling, you need to delve into the XML and associate these files with your map - you might try this program here. For instance, in our hypothetical Veii scenario, you might alter the XML files so that you have some Etruscan named leaders, some Roman ones, some Sabine onces, etc. You can change the calendar, so that game turns go in days, or weeks, or months. You can limit how long the game will be played. You can add ancillary information to the opening screen or other pop-ups.

Say you don’t like the way the game imagines the progress of technology. You can use this tool here to tweak it to your heart’s content. You might want to make it so that certain technologies are never available to the player. You do this by altering the ‘cost’ of them in time (so that it becomes impossible for a player to get to, say, feudalism, within the confines of your scenario). You can use this tool for that.

The key things to remember always are ‘why am I building this? what teaching goal do I hope to achieve? how does playing this game - even with my neat-o scenario - make that possible?’ Remember, you can’t just leave your students to play the game and expect them to learn something. You have to be there while they play it, you have to talk it out with them. You make the anachronisms and emergence of the game work for you.

In fact, the best way you can make this game a part of your teaching is to get the students to design the scenarios/mods themselves. These tools I’ve collected here will help you enormously (and thanks again to Civfanatics and the great people there!)

ps, I’ll do a similar post for Caesar IV once I figure out how to make the game editor do what I want. One final note: lots of the graphics in both games come as dds files. You need a converter to put your artwork into the game if for instance you want to create an etruscan augur unit - try this program; you can also get similar programs from nVidia’s website

What does Civilization Stand For? Modding Contest from Firaxis!

One last post before the holidays (thanks Jan for bringing this to my attention!), and one which might be of interest to any academic/educational modders out there; nb it’s only for US residents, so my ‘Year of the Four Emperors‘ won’t be in the mix:

What Does Your Civilization Stand For?
Official Rules
Entry Form

The holidays are upon us and we’re certain many of you are wondering what to do while sitting in the comfort of your homes, staying as far away from the nasty weather and shopping crowds as possible. Sure, you could spend time with family, play with the kids, or figure out how to turn on your shiny new iPod. But, we have a better idea. Why not show the world what you can do to customize the greatest strategy game ever made?

And to give you an even bigger incentive Dell has sent us some brand new XPS machines (four desktops and a laptop to be more specific) and we will give them to the winners of this contest. What we are looking for is simple: we want to see your best work, in any of the following four categories:

• Best In-Game Asset (art, including units, buildings and/or wonders)
• Best World-Builder Scenario (just a single .wbs file)
• Best Map Script (just a single .py file)
• Best Educational Mod (only educators and schools can submit entries for this one)

The creator of the winning entry in each category will receive a Dell XPS desktop computer to show off to your friends. In addition, the best over-all mod from the submissions above will receive the grand prize of a Dell XPS laptop. Can you say Happy Holidays?

Here are some things to remember. The prizes are awarded to individuals only, so if your mod is a team effort, the prizes will only be awarded to the designated team leader. You can use existing mods that you’ve already created, or you can create something from scratch using Civ IV or any of its expansions. Finally, please do not submit mods that are not yours. This not only makes our job harder, but also makes children cry.

The contest begins December 23, 2007, and will run through February 18, 2008, so crack your knuckles and crank out something fabulous. As an aside, this contest is U.S. only, and our lawyers have drafted up a lovely set of rules for you to follow, so be sure to check them out before starting. If you have any further questions, send them in, we’re all ears!

 

By the way, The Ancient Mediterranean Mod version 2.01 FINAL has been released for the ‘vanilla’ version of Civilization IV. I know what I’m going to be doing over the holiday!

Vespasian, Civ IV, and Intro to Roman Culture

An article of mine has just been published over on Planet Civilization:

““Vespasian has converted to Judaism!”

The cheery message came as something of a shock. After all, Vespasian and his son Titus together were responsible for the destruction of Jerusalem and the Temple – hardly likely converts to Judaism. But I was play-testing a scenario I had been building in Civilization IV, and so this ‘counter-factual’ brought up an interesting conundrum. I wanted to use the scenario in my teaching for my ‘Intro to Roman Culture Class’ at my university. Did the unlikeliness of the event undermine the utility of my scenario? If I used it, was I going to get papers like the one in this comic?”

<more!>

By the way, in the next session of my Intro to Roman culture course at Robert Welch University (which lasts for six weeks), I have permission from the Dean to offer Civ-related exercises and assessment. If you’re interested, contact RWU, and we’ll come to an arrangement. That’s one of the nice things about RWU - it’s small, so we can be very flexible.

“Great game, but NOT a study guide”

Truer words were never spoken:

…that’s why people like me are around! More Civ-related comics & wisdom

Civilized Education

An article and two sites:

Jan van der Crabben: ‘Civilized Education‘

From Firaxis: ‘Educators’ Exchange‘

and from Kurt Squire, doyen of Civ-for-education: CivWorld

“This is a site for people interested in using Sid Meier’s Civilization for learning academic content, including history, geography, or even game design. We have custom-designed game scenarios, curricula, case studies, and experts on using Civ for learning. Our goal is to help players, students, parents, and even teachers use the game at home, in after school centers and maybe even classrooms.”

I’m in the process of writing up my latest thoughts on using Civ IV in the classroom (and especially, for distance education!). My biggest mistake in my initial foray (link on my publications’ list) was in not thinking carefully enough about assessment and what exactly I was trying to assess. Who knew that university students would balk at playing a game for marks? Watch this space…

History Canada Game: Mod for Civ III

“The History Canada Game is a game based on Canadian history that lets anyone play the past. Based on the award-winning, best-seller Sid Meier’s Civilization III, The History Canada Game is the “What If” game of Canada… and you’re the author. Will you replay our history or rewrite it? The year is 1534… Play the New World

To Iroquois chief Donnacona, whose 500 followers live just down the St. Lawrence, Cartier’s intentions couldn’t be clearer. But these settlers bring with them powerful weapons, advanced technologies, and promises of great partnership to come. All they want is to take Donnacona’s two sons back to France with him.

What would you do? Welcome the French as your newest allies? Or defend your homeland with extreme prejudice, and probably your life?

What’s next? You decide.

The History Canada Game lets you relive, replay and even rewrite Canada’s history. Play as the English to expand your empire. Play as the Huron to defend your homeland. Wage wars, make peace and explore new lands…the future of Canadian history is in your hand.”

Rubric for assessing historical scenario-building for Civilization

One of the things that always amazes me about playing Civilization IV (or indeed, just about any game you’d care to name) is what might be called the ‘metagame’ - the discussions on the forums, the fansites, the user-created mods. It seems to me that this is one of the most important aspects of the educational use of commercial games. On Civfanatics, there is a discussion entitled ‘the Rise and Fall of Rome‘ which I find absolutely fascinating. These folks are not historians, they are not classics students, but in the course of trying to make an historically ‘authentic’ simulation of Roman culture they embrace such difficult concepts as the conditions behind the emergence of the Social War - and then they devise a way to allow for the possibility of a Social War emerging in the game play! (other historical scenarios in Civ IV available here)

That is the kind of discussion I would want to emerge in my classroom, were I to formally assign the creation of a Civ mod or scenario as part of the assessment of the course. The problem that I’m addressing in this post though is how would I assess the scenario, and the metagame? I’ve addressed the problem of assessment when students play a scenario (in my ‘Year of the Four Emperors’ scenario for Civ IV I assigned a ‘game diary’ that asked pointed questions of the students at particular points in the game) but I’ve only started to grapple with the problem of assessing construction recently. How can you be fair and assess two individual students, one who has a good technical grasp of python, xml, and scenario building but is hazy on the history, and one who knows the history but freezes at the sight of the worldbuilder? How do you mark the mass of material that will be produced as a byproduct? How do you manage the paper trail?

I had a similar problem during my dark old days as a high school teacher of technical drawing. The solution there was a rubric, and I think the solution here might also be a rubric. Rubrics have the advantage of boiling everything down to a checklist of various criteria. Your students can see at a glance what you are looking for, and they can see what they have to do to achieve a good grade. As the prof, you save yourself time, energy, and headaches. Below is my proposed rubric for marking the creation of a scenario for Civilization IV:

The first criterion addresses the question: has the student selected a good problem to try to render in a scenario? Civilization has built in assumptions about how history unfolds. Does the proposed scenario play to those assumptions, or does it challenge them?

The second criterion assesses whether the student has assembled the appropriate secondary or primary literature to ensure the ‘authenticity’ of the scenario (and a very good student will explore just what makes for an authentic scenario).

The next two criteria are asking the student to plan out the scenario on paper first. Where will the issues be? What kind of a map? What scale is appropriate both geographically and chronologically? Clear writing = clear thinking = an easier time of building the scenario. My own scenarios at first suffered from woolly design…

The ‘demonstrates understanding’ criterion might be the place to assess whether the student realizes the problems of simulating history…?

The ‘uses forum/wiki’ criterion - I envision having a group forum or wiki for students to talk out their design problems, and to offer help, hints, and suggestions to each other as they design their scenarios. I’m envisioning each student designs their own scenario, but I want the experience to be a social one. This is especially important for my distance education students…

‘Identify design issues’ - I’m not sure whether to keep this or to discard it. It really should be moved up to the ‘design’ part of this rubric. I do want the students to be demonstrate that they are aware of the constraints the Civilization environment imposes.

The last two are performance related. A student who is otherwise a poor historian (and would get low grades in an essay-based course) would here have a chance to pick up some points - and demonstrate their historical knowledge through making.

So, that’s all off the top of my head this morning. I would be interested to know how others have approached (or if they’ve approached) the problem of assessing the use of games in an educational context in this manner. Should the rubric be expanded? Contracted? Is it hitting the right targets?

Civ IV, some high school students, and some statistics - measuring game based learning

Came across a paper today on the educational potential of Civilization IV. I’ve written on this topic before, but my report was anecdotal; Andrew Moshirnia tried it rather more rigorously with some high school students… read his paper here.

From the report:

“…Students in the experimental group showed significant growth after being exposed to the modified video game. This growth was not significantly altered by a pretest effect. Students in the experimental group felt that they had learned more than their test results indicated. Test items were knowledge-level items and students in the game group felt that they could attempt higher-order thinking questions. The growth for all groups was significant, but students who received information from lecture showed a significantly lower rate of knowledge retention than students who learned from the mod. This suggests that modified video games could not only improve comprehension, but also retention of knowledge-level items. Students learned more from information that was delivered through sprites. However, the small sample size of this study prevents generalization of results…”