This article investigates the ways in which the history of technology has been modeled in “4X strategy” games, especially in a series called Civilization (which comprises six games and expansions introduced from 1991 to 2016). Although there have been various studies interrogating the ideological biases in strategy games’ modeling of civilization and society, to date there has only been partial exploration of the ideological biases within their models of technological and scientific development involving “technology trees.” Moving from discrete analysis of individual instances of technology trees within strategy games, the aim of this article is to demonstrate not only the fundamental issues behind the notion of these trees in all of the Civilization games, but also to demonstrate ways in which they can reveal particular historicized perceptions of technologies over the period they were developed. This investigation furthermore reveals that many players of the games may bring assumptions embedded in their sense of the history of technology, and that these present a particular problem for those who might uncritically accept the games’ underlying axioms.

中文翻译：

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用科技玩游戏：

本文调查了在“4X 战略”游戏中对技术历史进行建模的方式，特别是在名为《文明》的系列（包括 1991 年至 2016 年推出的六款游戏和扩展包）中。尽管已经有各种研究质疑战略游戏在文明和社会建模中的意识形态偏见，但迄今为止，仅对涉及“技术树”的技术和科学发展模型中的意识形态偏见进行了部分探索。从对策略游戏中技术树的个别实例的离散分析出发，本文的目的不仅是展示所有文明游戏中这些树概念背后的基本问题，同时也展示了它们可以揭示在它们被开发的时期内对技术的特定历史化看法的方式。这项调查进一步表明，许多游戏玩家可能会在他们的技术历史意识中提出假设，而这些假设对于那些可能不加批判地接受游戏基本公理的人来说是一个特殊的问题。