Rock, Paper, Shotgun

When we first heard about the Facebook version of Civilization a couple of years back, the prospect was enormously exciting – a persistent online Civ, played from any PC, any time. Of course, back then we perhaps weren’t fully aware of the route Facebook games were broadly taking – the pay/spam friends/wait model popularised by FarmVille. There’s absolutely nothing to say that model can’t be successful and entertaining, but it does mean that Civ World, as the now fully-revealed Facebook Civ has been retitled, is necessarily a very different prospect to Civ itself. In-game footage and dev commentary below…
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Should we be covering more social network-based gaming? Oh, probably – it’s something of a gateway drug for folk who are traditionally non-gamers, which makes it fascinating. It’s also a big Woo! PC! battlecry, a grand statement of how even the most bottom-end machine is a gaming device with something to offer most anyone. No console will ever be that, because they’re always bought as a result of someone wanting a games console. In the PC’s case, people are accidentally becoming gamers as a result of something that’s already in their homes. It’s a big deal. Firaxis/2K have also spotted this.
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