4 HN users recommended this talk5 months2017–2021score 6
Years with an HN recommendation, 2007–2026
HN recommends it as a great account of how Civilization was made and as a source on perceived fairness in game design.
A 2017 GDC postmortem in which Sid Meier and Bruce Shelley tell how Civilization came together from board game design and sim game experience. They cover its development history and design decisions, including fairness and luck.
“Check out this great GDC talk by Sid and Bruce on the history of the development of the game.” (HN, 2021)
Ordered. Funnily enough I recently came across this GDC presentation by Sid and Bruce Shelley on the development of the original Civilization[0]. Highly recommended. The influence of Empire as one of the inspirations of the game was obvious to anyone familiar with it. If you're interested there's an excellent updated implementation of Empire on the App Store[1]. I'd love to be able to get a version of Civ 2 on mobile. It's still by far my favourite iteration of Civ. Or Pirates! [0] [this video] [1] [link]
Check out this great GDC talk by Sid and Bruce on the history of the development of the game. [this video] They mention Empire as an influence, and there's a really nice modern implementation of Empire available for Windows and iOS. [link] [link]
History of Civilization's development from Sid Meier and Bruce Shelley
> I made a chatbot that rolled dice, and it was constantly criticized for being "broken" because four 3's would come up in a row. > These accusations would come up even though they (all being computer science majors) know it's possible (although unlikely) for these events to happen. They just don't trust the black box. This reminds me of a talk [1] given at Game Developer's Conference (GDC) about the game Civilization, in which the Sid Meyer -- creator of said game -- spent a bit of the time talking about the difference between fairness and perceived fairness. The talk is only an hour long and worth watching. [1]: [this video]
Sid Meier on fairness versus perceived fairness in games
Here are videos of two GDC 2017 talks about Civilization that I enjoyed: Classic Game Postmortem: Sid Meier's Civilization (with Civilization creators Sid Meier and Bruce Shelley): [this video] Absolutely No Pressure: Continuing a Successful Game Series with Civilization VI (with Civilization VI lead designer Ed Beach): [link]
GDC postmortem with Civilization creators Sid Meier and Bruce Shelley
> The anecdote about Sid Meier hard-coding a guaranteed "win on the third attempt" for a battle with a 1/3 victory probability was very interesting. You might enjoy these videos as well: [this video] [link]
Video list and Hacker News comment labels from HackerTube (prompted by @karpathy), released under ODC-By 1.0, built on the open-index/hacker-news archive. Hacker News data is provided by Y Combinator; comments remain the work of their authors. Video titles, channel names and thumbnails belong to their creators and are shown via YouTube. HackerTube Watch is an unofficial edition. Data export of 2026-10-31.
Plays via YouTube's privacy-enhanced embed
5 Hacker News comments
From the HN archive; up to 20 kept per video, favoring different commenters. Recommendations first.
Read more