Playing ‘Civilization 7’ Is Like Being a Ruthless Corporate Consultant

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There’s something about playing Sid Meier’s Civilization 7 that reminds me of management consulting.

The strategy game was released on February 11 and has been consuming my life ever since. If you are unbaptized in the waters of Civ, a quick explanation: The game is part of the 4X genre, which requires you to “explore, expand, exploit, and exterminate” your way through history. In Civ 7 you get to choose to play as one of history’s great leaders, in charge of a budding civilization. The two need not be related. Want to be Benjamin Franklin leading the Romans? It’s possible (and fun). The game is essentially a problem of resource allocation: The key to victory is the efficient use of geographical and cultural advantages and finding play styles that leverage the strength of the civilization you are leading.

The game can quickly grow to a grand scale where you are managing whole cities and conducting elaborate military strategies. In one memorable game, I sacrificed several cavalry units in a glorious charge on an enemy’s line of canons so my infantry could pull off a sneak attack behind them. With a quick click, I sacrificed dozens of soldiers for the greater good.

You can probably guess why it reminds me of consulting—the game of Civilization and the one that firms like McKinsey play in real life aren’t all that different. They, too, are tasked with efficient resource allocation. They, too, will sometimes have to sacrifice many people to achieve victory. The gaming software of choice was Excel, but there isn’t all that much difference between optimizing financial models and optimizing a civilization. I had one friend who, as a 24-year-old strategy consultant, built a spreadsheet that led to 3,000 people losing their jobs. Victory! (It still haunts him to this day.) 

Video games have always been cultural lodestones for tech companies and their leaders. I have been in many a Call of Duty tournament with software sales teams. Elon Musk is addicted to the strategy game Polytopia. Shopify allows its employees to expense a game called Factorio (also about automation and resource allocation). Some of my fondest memories from my single days are of staying at the office late, playing Super Smash Brothers, a fighting game, with the engineers. It is fun to practice pixel manipulation together.

Perhaps the appeal comes from the fact that building startups can feel like a video game. A tweak of a button color here or an adjusted sales email headline there, and suddenly you win money in your bank account. The labor is still on a screen, still optimizing pixels, but rather than imaginary points, you get real dollars. 

So video games, when viewed correctly, have transferable skills and attitudes that can help technologists win. However, I worry that in our embrace of these games, we have accidentally let something darker, meaner, and greedier into our tech culture’s subconsciousness.

The NPC phenomenon

One of the big changes in Civ 7 from its predecessors is that it allows you to pair any leader with any civilization. In Civ 1-6, Napoleon could only lead the French, Caesar the Romans, etc., but now, you can have them leading the Russians. You can also ascribe ideologies to leaders. Want a fascist Harriet Tubman leading Meiji Japan? You got it. The other big new mechanic is that each game is divided into three ages, where the leader stays consistent and you swap in a new civilization for each age. The result is that the game is far more flexible, and the leaders play the most important role. If you want to win, you want to empower your civilization’s CEO.