Simulating the Ages of Man: Periodization in Civilization V and Europa Universalis IV
Why this work is in the frame
A frame that forgets how it found something cannot be audited. These are the routes that admitted this work.
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.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 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 it