I have a lot of unfinished Civilization games. Most of the games I start, actually, I never finish. Often I rationalize this as the tendency of the game to become "boring" when it becomes too easy, when there is no question of victory, only the future tedium of getting there. But I also stop playing when it becomes obvious that I cannot win. I don't think, then, that it's victory or excitement that I'm looking for, but room for optimism. I play the game to work toward some end, sometimes defined, sometimes not, that I will not want to actually materialize when it does. At the beginning of a game so much is possible.One thing that I convince myself bothers me about playing Civilization is the pacing of technologies. Even at Civilization IV's "Marathon" pace, I feel that eras go by far too quickly. Very suddenly it becomes the medieval era and all I've had time to do is build a few cities and explore half the map. I want it all to slow down, to have hundreds of turns before anyone can even build swordsman. I want to get lost in the minutiae of the ancient era before my workers can do much of anything. I want to understand, somehow, what each technology does, how it affects gameplay, and what it makes possible. But if any of that were possible I am sure I really would become bored. Rather than subjected to time going by too fast, if my fleeting attachment were held in a near stand-still, it surely would fade even more easily.
There is another level of optimism, and another level of my wishes regarding time: as much as I tell myself otherwise, I believe that playing Civilization will somehow give rise to some accomplishment outside of the game, and I believe it will temporarily remove me from the stream of time's passage. The problem with the latter is embedded in its semantics: one cannot "temporarily" stop time, as there would be no time to count how long time stops. Eventually it becomes apparent that while I play the game time is "lost" in a way opposite to what I had hoped: the hours of playing really did pass outside the game.
If these optimisms were cruel, however, would I stop playing? Not exactly. Attachments are not continuous, no matter how much I tell myself they are. Periodic dissatisfaction that keeps me coming back for more is how I imagine cruel optimism plays out--in waves. Yet I will go back, even with a cynical attitude, to the escape that is not an escape, wanting to hover around the possibility of victory. Or maybe not even victory.
