The Civilization games are full of historical information, but it's mixed together and cut with fantastical contrivances that make it fun to play—which is how I recently went toe-to-toe with Harriet Tubman as Han Dynasty emperor Niccolò Machiavelli when I played Civilization 7 for this month's PC Gamer cover feature. The games aren't history tutors, but Firaxis senior historian Dr. Andrew Johnson, who's also an associate professor at Stockholm University's Department of Social Anthropology, hopes the studio's passion for history inspires some of us to pick up a book. It's the whole reason he does the job.
"I teach undergraduates in my other life, and my God, man, they don't read," Johnson told me on a call in November. "And trying to get them interested in history—if somebody plays Machiavelli, they might get really kind of interested. Machiavelli maybe has enough name recognition already, but like Amina [Queen of Zazzau], or, 'OK, so this is the Ming Dynasty, how is that different from the Han Dynasty?' If that can provoke somebody into an interest in history, that is what's important here. This is not the textbook. This is the gateway drug into the textbook. If textbooks were drugs."
