Simulating the Ages of Man: Periodization in Civilization V and Europa Universalis IV
Bibliographic record
Abstract
In recent years historians have increasingly turned their attention to video games, encouraging a passionate debate about whether or not history can be produced through video games. Rather than directly intervene in this discussion, this article seeks to explore how historical arguments (whether they constitute “history” or not) are made through video games. Through an investigation of two popular historical strategy games, Civilization V and Europa Univeralis IV, this article demonstrates how a familiar historical concept, periodization (the division of time into distinct “ages”), is constructed through video game play. This investigation is valuable, not just in terms of understanding popular consumption of historical concepts, but in understanding the production of history more generally. As a relatively novel of medium for the production of history, video games heighten an awareness of the role of the medium in shaping history. This awareness can be folded back into a re-examination of the familiar and, after centuries of use, invisible determinative structures of textual history.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.002 | 0.007 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.004 | 0.004 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.005 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".