My seven year old son shows keen interest in world history. He particularly enjoys learning about military history, in broad terms, who fought whom, how many troops, galleys etc, but he is also curious enough about the causes of wars, expansions, imperialism etc, so we also discuss these things as well as I am able (my principle is to give him the best information I have as simply as I am able to articulate it). I was thinking that it might be a good idea to intorduce him to the Civilzation video games (civ iv is the last one I played), so that he can broaden his conceptual tool box a little bit, have him thinking about the impact of geography, the importance of trade, the differences in technology, and of course institutions and other political concepts (he is still at the Great Men of History phase [we will have to have a talk about Ghandi in particular]).
Anyway, my question is, have peope identified paritcular blind spots that civ games have? What kind of corrective will have to be applied in due course?
More can always be said, but we already have some excellent answers from /u/Iphikrates
https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/sd0f30/in_pc_games_like_civilization_technology_is/
And /u/agentdcf
https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/1jttoa/how_historically_accurate_is_the_video_game/
A lot has been written on this topic but, as a Cold War historian, the one that always stands out to me is the impending "end of history" when you get to 20th century technologies.
Put another way, the game has an end and this makes it historically problematic even if every other problem in the game (of which there are many) were fixed.
In your average game of Civ there's a real incentive to drive to war, especially if you're behind culturally or religiously, when you get bomber and nuclear technology. While the difference these technologies make is well reflected in the game, the desire to use them is dramatically overblown.
In real life, history does not have a defined end. Tomorrow is assumed to come and, if we screw it up somehow, that's something we lose rather than something extra we gain.
The result is that nuclear weapons have, historically, tended to suppress major war rather than encourage it. Knowing that a conflict will likely rob us of all of our tomorrows, we've seen nuclear armed nations pull back from their most bellicose positions, at least with respect to each other.
In short, the idea that the game can be won and that it can be won via military conquest is one grounded in a pre-nuclear (and, honestly, probably pre-mechanized) view of war.
There was an iteration of the game that did a better job of this -- I don't recall if it was a Sid Myer sanctioned release -- which allowed the player to construct missile silos and automatically launch in the event of an attack. That still leaves open the problem of the end of history, but it at least gives a better sense of the instability of the Cold War and the tendency towards escalation.
Some years back I wrote a review of Civ VI [here](https://alexwellerstein.com/publications/wellerstein_reviewciv6(endeavour).pdf) which I am fairly happy with — it is what these things get wrong as "simulations" of history from the perspective of a historian of science and technology. The gist of it is that it is a very 19th-century vision of how history works — teleological, guided by a Geist (the player), focused on war and technology as the driving forces of history — blended down into a "balanced" game which introduces some necessary absurdities (because in real life, there is no "balance," but that wouldn't be very fun).
This does not mean that they could not potentially be a way to get a child interested in the things you are hoping these games might get them interested in. Inspiration comes from many sources.
To add on to the great discussion I see here, I want to highlight a fundamental aspect of the Civilization series and others like it (Total War, Paradox Grand Strategy Games, essentially these games that attempt to simulate the development of states throughout history) that seems obvious to point out but nonetheless affects these games' portrayals of history. That is, all of these games built around geography and spaces, i.e. they are played on geographic maps. The majority of the game's mechanics, from resource acquisition to city building to trade routes to military movements to the spread of religions, are based around interactions with distinct units of geography that come together to make a map. In the case of Civilization, this map is randomly generated hexes, while in Paradox games it is hand made provinces that reflect real world territory, but the principle is the same. Rarely you might be in a menu doing diplomacy or tech research. Most of the time you are dealing with a map - these games are often called 'map-staring simulators' for a reason.
This isn't unexpected. When it comes to modern history education, maps are already a fundamental part of the process. I won't pretend to be an expert in history education (I just took the classes), but in most general history courses you are focusing on broad surveys of the world, where maps are a very useful tool to illustrate long term trends and large structures, like the rise and fall of states in a region over a period of centuries. Some history courses in college especially are much more granular and specific, and maps become less focused on, but for the most part maps are a central part of how people are taught the history of the world. They are great to have and I am always excited to see a large map section in a history book I am reading.
Maps, however, are not how humanity has thought of itself for the majority of its history. While maps have existed for millennia, they only really proliferated throughout world society during the past century or so. The top-down, as-the-crow-flies, Google Maps interpretation of space and moving through space is a recent change in human behavior. Most people that have existed did not have this relationship with geography and movement.
Thus, when you're playing a map game about the simulation of history, you are experiencing that history through a lens that most people would not identify with at all. Not the common peoples, and not most of the rulers either. The realm of a German prince in the Middle Ages is not a flat color covering a few hundred square kilometers. It is a strange, amorphous, twisting thing, with scattered cities and farms, shifting populations, centers of control and centers of banditry, complex hierarchies of loyalty (which the Crusader Kings series does get across at least a little bit) and endless, endless, endless land disputes. Seriously, borders are so much more complicated than what a map wants you to think. They are living and ever changing. The idea of static state 'borders' as we understand them today is a completely misleading way to represent how these borders existed, or did not exist, throughout so much of history. A map game where the maps changes sort of simulates this, but not to the same degree.
Nonetheless, geographic maps are such an easy way to convey information and take actions that they seem to be a perfect mechanical fit for games about grand strategy. I do wonder how one could design an engaging and informative grand strategy history game that deemphasized the use of maps. Maybe something like the Diplomacy series, where government interactions are based on interest groups and other factors on a interface that is entirely divorced from a geographic map. I hope that game designers will challenge these paradigms more in the future (I would like to do so myself, in fact).
This is a very complicated and meta subject which I don't think I can fully do justice to in a few paragraphs. I hope at the least this encourages you to challenge some of the preconceptions about history which we all tend to fall into!
Some very interesting responses here. I have two points to consider with the Civ games that I haven't seen mentioned elsewhere and that I think relate to the 'historicity' of the game.
The first is related to the discussions on technology and its inevitable progress butrather than focus on technology I would say that there is a similar issue in the game with the mechanic whereby a civilisation is built through its cities. Many comments have, correctly, pointed out how the progress of technology is ahistorical (with tech trees, linear progress, etc). In the game cities are very similar. You found your capital at the start and then throughout the game you add new cities to expand your civilisation, usually with a settler but sometimes with conquest also. In the game, your first two or three cities are almost always your most productive and best cities and this fact remains true right through to the end of the game. In the mid- to late-game additional cities are built to acquire new resources or for strategic gain but they don't tend to be very good in and of themselves.
In reality cities rise and fall. If you look at some of the earliest cities in history, very few of them retain any regional importance today, let alone international. Many of them no longer exist as cities even as those that have survived and are prominent are exceptions. Damascus, Jerusalem, and Rome come to mind as cities that are incredibly old but still important today but many cities from ancient civilisations, like Babylon, Ur, Nineveh, and so on are ruins. Further, in countries with ancient pasts, like Egypt, their most important cities are often ones built much later in history (like Fustat/Cairo, or even Alexandria, although it was founded a long time ago). Finally, if you think about the most important cities in the world today, about half of them won't even have existed 500 years ago - a lot of them are quite recent historically speaking. The game doesn't have a way of modelling this because it still works on a progressive approach to history and is simplfied in many ways. Take Byzantium/Constantinople/Istanbul for instance. The city has had a varied history, gaining in importance at various points (e.g., when Constantine turned it into the imperial capital of the Roman Empire or today as the biggest city in Turkey), declining at others (with the plague in the mid-500s or after its sack in 1204). The reasons for this vary, but include, for example, access to drinking water, changing patterns of trade in the medieval era, and shifts in geopolitics. This kind of thing doesn't happen in a game like Civ - I can be very confident that my capital, unless captured, will consistently be my most populous and productive city in the game.
There are ways this could change in game. Someone else mentioned the lack of events like plagues for instance. Arguably, events like this and the discovery of new resources should have a greater impact on the relative importance of cities within the game but for whatever reason the designers have never implemented anything like this (at least in Civ IV, V, or VI).
A second point, and this is linked to some interesting discussions that others have touched upon, is to do with the interplay between the environment and how it determines the unique characteristics of Civilisations. In history, and there is a healthy debate on the extent to which this is true, but at least to some degree, the environment determines the culture and character of the people in it. A fairly uncontroversial example might be the Steppe peoples that from the 300s to the 1400s or so moved into regions like Europe and China out of central Asia. The Steppes are flat and grassy on the whole and so it makes sense that the peoples living in them would prize horses and develop societies that make use of them.
In Civilisation you choose to play as a historical civilisation and they come with certain unique buildings and perks. The Romans for example usually have the same unique unit, the Legionary, who is a stronger version of the swordsman that all civilisations can build if they have access to the resource, iron. The issue in Civ is that you chose the civilisation with all its perks and then you are thrown into an environment. You might be lucky, have picked the Romans, and be near some iron, but you might not, and so you won't able to build your unique unit. You could have a similar issue with a Steppe-style civilisation - imagine picking the Mongels only to find your environment being a largely mountainous area with no horses.
One thing that I appreciate about this mechanic is that it does model the influence of resources quite well. The largest civilisations in the Bronze Age were ones that had access to copper which allowed them to produce bronze. Regions that didn't have access to this resource were at a distinct disadvantage. This kind of thing crops up throughout history, ranging from luxury resources, like the accessability of silk, or the ease with which coal could be extracted.
In real life access to resources has determined significant developments within societies and cultures. You couldn't have had the Industrial Revolution in Britain without coal. But whereas the environment has determined these specialisms and unique attributes (Britain again has historically had a strong navy in part out of necessity from it being an island), in Civ you pick the Civilisation and then hope your environment will allow you to take advantage of your unique traits. It is the wrong way round.
What would make more sense is for the game designers to make Civilisations more like religion in the latest two games, where once the religion is founded you can pick the attributes that you want. This way, you could pick Civilisation bonuses that match the environment you find yourself in. This would mean moving away from having historical civilisations towards a more abstract sandbox style game but one that would model how civilisations have developed in reality better.
And this is ultimately the crux of the matter. What kind of game is one trying to create? Lots of people have mentioned Paradox games. They are brilliant and very complicated but are essentially simulations of particular periods of history. The narrative is closely modelled on what happened historically and you are trying to see if you can perform better as the nation or family that you chose (roughly, depending on the game). Civilisation meanwhile is theoretically attempting to model how Civilisations develop over a greater span of time, but with the inclusion of real Civilisations and elements that are true-ish to how those civilisations developed over time. I think they are fun games but I don't think they work as historical sims and if they really wanted to try and model how civilisations develop they ought to eject the historical nods to unique units, technology trees and so on.
Finally, no one has mentioned the Total War series that I could see. If your son is interested in military history, they might be worth checking out. The first few were essentially games of Risk where you fought the battles yourself but in later iterations they became more Civ like in some ways. Like the other games they have their issues historically but the focus is on war (hence the title Total War) and so they give you a taste of historical warfare.
(Disclaimer: I've only played Civ VI, and I do like the game a lot, but I agree with the general sentiment of this comment section).
I think many of the responses have pointed out very interesting historical inaccuracies in the Civ games, but I'd like to point out one more--culture/religion. I think this simplification is the most consequential in shaping your son's view of history compared to other Civ game mechanics; while the other parts, such as military, tech tree, and government style give specific examples (such as the discovery of heliocentricity or rise of democracy) for your son to research and learn more about, the culture aspect is pretty much totally made up. Moreover, since your son is already interested in military history, neglecting culture will reduce crucial exposure to the important context behind social, political, and military movements--exposure which will let him ask thought provoking questions about history and really engage with it beyond knowing the facts.
The Civ games drastically simplify the idea of 'culture' and 'religion,' which are fundamental to developing civilizations, in order to focus on quantifiable expansion in a militaristic, competitive style. Similar to Civ's treatment of technology, Civ VI's treatment of culture/religion as metered, progressive quantities implies that societies may have culture or religion that is 'better' than others, which is a dangerous lens. Furthermore, the way culture is grown in Civ bears no resemblance to how culture works in actual societies. Culture and religion aren't unified within one nation/city state, and do not need to stay within that city state. Rather, traditions, values, and ways of life between socioeconomic classes, ages, religious groups, ethnicities/lineages, and sexes differ--sometimes significantly--and societal movements are driven by these differences. Religion and culture naturally change over time, as well, as new interpretations, traditions, and demographics develop.
'Growing' culture or religion doesn't happen by the government building monuments or increasing tourism, but by the growth of certain demographics and adoption of traditions or values by more people. Although some governents sent missionaries to other regions to expand their religion, this wasn't necessarily done strategically, nor was it necessarily done by a government entity (religion and government are not the same). Not all religions expanded the same way either: the use of missionaries was a mainly European thing, but is applied to all civilizations in Civ VI. The Civ games completely ignore this aspect of history, which makes great gameplay, but offers a fundamentally incomplete picture of the pressures that governments had to face. Additionally, war does come at the cost of losing aspects of culture and religion (art, lifestyles, religion etc), meaning both are a fundamental aspect of military history. Without appreciating these costs, focusing on military history can come across as glorifying war.
I emphasize this because exposure to cultural history alongside military and political history allows a learner to better question assumptions we make in modern, (American) Eurocentric history classes by illuminating different ways of thinking inspired by other cultures. Additionally, it allows one to appreciate the contributions of societies with less military prowess to the greater fabric of human history. It will allow your son to ask questions like "Why did the Latin Church have a strong enough hold on the populace to inspire the crusades?" or "How did women change the course of the Mexican revolution?" and truly engage with the historical facts he learns.
This has been a very interesting discussion, and I want to thank everyone for their time. It is obvious that people engage with these grand strategy games from multiple perspectives and certainly with much sophistication. I think the designers of all these games would be quick to note that their historical modeling is primarily designed to provide a fun time for a large audience, rather than as an educational tool. Yet the temptation to look into them for more is irresistible. As I mention in my OP the last one of these I played is Civ IV, and it is obvious that there have been many more versions, competing designs, and more niche games since then. It also looks like some have tended toward broader representation, while others drill into the details. But my guess is that they iterate on the experience of playing a game rather than learning about history - as they should!
What is most interesting to me is that these games invite a different kind of critique than historical movies or novels. They present both a model of the world and a model of agency. And while looking up mistakes in the world model seems familiar enough, the model of agency is harder to grasp with. I see that some recent games do not put the player in the position of a single (a)historical decision maker, but rather have them handle multiple personages. That is certainly a very interesting elaboration in the design, and it also highlights different historical aspects.
It is fascinating that our generation has found(ed) this kind of practice to engage with history, both as a body of work that is to be explored, and as a thesaurus of factors and constraints on political decisions.
A bit tangential to your question but in elementary school I played a good deal of Age of Mythology. In that game nearly every clickable entity has an encyclopedic description related to it's real life history, from pigs to mythic creatures and heroes. I learned a lot from that game, and even had the chance to apply it in State competitions for Quiz Bowl in middle school. I recommend it as it's cheap, a new edition is coming out soon, and its low key packed with knowledge.