Digital Pullback

In cinema a pullback, generally achievable through a zoom out or dolly out, expands the field of vision to more or less rapidly add additional visual context to a scene. As a temporal reversal of an establishing shot, a pullback can either be used to create a sense of sudden loneliness

247 flytyer, “the early game is the most fun,” Civ IV General Discussion, Civilization Fanatics Center, August 29, 2006, https://forums.civfanatics.com/threads/the-early-game-is-the-most-fun.184156/

or isolation or to signify the freedom and power of mobility. That both effects can in fact occur simultaneously is made palpable in the (computer generated) pullback shot from the opening scene of Robert Zemeckis’ Contact, in which the visual pullback from Earth is accompanied by audio of famous radio transmissions from years past, only to slowly dissolve into the silence of space near the edge of our local interstellar cloud.²⁴⁸ This might be considered a variation on the famous Earthrise photograph taken by the Apollo 8 mission, often assumed to encourage a heightened

sense of interdependence and ecological awareness.²⁴⁹ Such images enthymematically advance a moral claim: “we are all one!” In a critical mood one might even suggest that the Earthrise perspective glosses over important political divisions and economic realities, which, while invisible from space, are nonetheless very real. In any case, after the initial shock of seeing seemingly solid Earth rendered small and vulnerable, the impact wears off, as there is no sustained engagement, details, or opportunity for further inquiry.

Unlike the scene from Contact or the Earthrise photo, Civ’s digital pullback is implicated in the development of a skill or technique of ongoing inquiry into and management of the planetary topics, both “natural” and man-made. To successfully play a Civ game, the player must develop a facility for scrolling about the visible map, zooming in and out to take into account whatever the salient features and neighboring context of the moment may be.

248 Contact, directed by Robert Zemeckis, (1997; USA: Warner Bros, 1997), DVD.

249 William Anders, “Earthrise.” Photograph taken aboard Apollo 8, December, 1968.

Figure 5: Full Zoom In

Figure 6: Full Zoom Out

Consider the above two screenshots, taken at different levels of zoom during the same turn of my new Mali game. Each screenshot reveals different goals, contingencies, and entanglements.

While I would like to continue, with a laser-like focus, my campaign of beautifying the city of Niani and the surrounding Tenezrouft Basin (note the surrounding World Wonders of Petra, The

Pyramids and the Oracle, in addition to a Holy Site, Suguba, and a particularly culturally productive Theatre Square of which I am very proud), as leader of the Malinese Merchant Republic, I am forced to attend to the encroaching exigencies of the wider world. A volcano has erupted, damaging the Campus district at Jenne, but fortunately sparing the city. To the southeast, unwanted international conflict intrudes into my consciousness. Happily, not only have the invading French forces been beaten back by my defensive troops, but with the help of levied forces from my allied city state Kumasi, I have managed to siege and capture two French cities. Kumasi’s intervention was fortunate, as the narrow mountain pass drastically slowed my ability to shuffle my own troops between the two relevant theatres. Though the might of a newly conquered empire is now a temptation, the formerly friendly Pedro II of Brazil may be starting to look askance upon my growing might and conquest in the region, even though won in a war of self-defense. It might better serve my ambitions of becoming a peaceful trading power to return these cities to the French in return for peace (and modest war reparations for their unprovoked aggression, of course). As my population grows, I must also attend to the amenities of each of my cities, zooming back in to check their relative levels of health and luxury to head off problems before they occur.

Zach Horton has criticized the aesthetics of pullback or zoom in various contexts. For Horton, scalar collapse, or “a meeting of disparate scales that erases their difference and imprints the qualities of one onto the other,”²⁵⁰ enables the representation of multiple scales within the same medium, facilitating ease of access and legibility between scales. There is perhaps a contradiction present in Horton’s work, as it is sometimes unclear whether the problem with scalar collapse is that it is too effective (at facilitating the management of cities, regions, empires) or rather because

250 Zach Horton, “Composing a Cosmic View: Three Alternatives for Thinking Scale in the Anthropocene” in Scale in Literature and Culture, ed. Michael T. Clarke and David Wittenberg (Cham: Springer Nature, 2017), 40.

it is ineffective (ignoring externalities and emergent properties by normalizing everything to the human scale). As a corrective to the error of scalar collapse, Horton proposes forms of writing that call attention to, rather than obscuring the complexities of scalar shifts, such as a book that continually depicts a street, a city, a country, the Earth, etc., at larger and larger scales yet by doing so reduces the prior frame of reference to an unintelligible inkblot.²⁵¹ Yet as I discuss further in section 3.4.4, Horton’s proposed solutions go too far in the other direction, as they merely index the fact of a scalar shift, rather than describing anything about its qualitative changes. What is needed is something between the mere indexing and mere mediation of scale, that captures something of the different characters of each. I argue that Civ’s digital pullback performs such a function. While it mediates scale in order to create the planetary thinking, it also preserves something of the incommensurability that emerges from managing short, medium, and long-term problems simultaneously.

Civ’s digital pullback goes beyond the static Earthrise by instilling a habit of sustained

inquiry into large scale, long term historical and planetary processes. In place of the photo’s one-dimensional declaration of Gaia-esque planetary harmony, it poses a series of questions: how can the existence of a civilization on this planet proceed? But also, more specifically, should I found a city on a flood plain? What fuel should power my future factories, and where will they be located?

How many of my forests should I chop for production, and how many should I preserve? The details of these ongoing questions and the actual decisions they require is significant, as they are what flip the planetary pullback genre from a stock image of mystified and abstract unity, as in Earthrise, to a habit of topicalized inquiry into how the whole fits together.

251 Kees Boeke, Cosmic View: The Universe in 40 Jumps (New York: John Day Co., 1957), quoted in Horton,

“Composing a Cosmic View,” 51-53.

In its effects, Civ’s pullback is not only spatial but also temporal. For instance, as I am tempted to pursue a path towards rapid industrialization with coal-powered factories to increase my productive capacity, I am also already considering the potential planetary and political consequences of future climate change on the terrain and coastline around my cities. Of course, such a unity of sight and intentionality is a historical anachronism for a civilization barely on the cusp of early mercantilism, yet the capability to imagine this historical continuity is the digital pullback’s great contribution. As a rhetorical device, it is the interface equivalent of the “longevity treatments” in Kim Stanley Robinson’s Mars, which allow unified character personae to view the movement of history from a continuous viewpoint, assembling a coherent narrative. As both Robinson, and his onetime mentor Jameson have argued, the ability to form a workable, even if heuristic and flawed, “cognitive mapping” of continuity not only within but also between human generational lifespans is a necessary precondition for both human freedom and collective action, which is currently under attack by both neoliberal precarity and the postmodern preference for the fragmentation of grand narratives. And, against the claims of the narratological critics, this act of mapping can also be a resource for those who would recover and reconstruct lost or aborted alternative, non-Eurocentric futures. In an Afrofuturist vein, game journalist Mike Sholars writes,

“It’s transcendent to start a game to the sounds of folk music sung by South African A Capella group Legato and hear those same songs swell into a full orchestral arrangement as I send Zulu astronauts to a newly-discovered exoplanet.”²⁵² In Civ the potential for the cognitive mapping of

252 Mike Sholars, “The Games That Make Me Feel Free” Kotaku, July 15, 2018. https://kotaku.com/the-games-that-make-me-feel-free-1844392220 Sholars is referencing a feature of the series that I have not discussed: in the more recent iterations of Civ, each culture or civilization begins the game with their own distinct musical theme as background music during play. As you progress through the eras, the music changes, taking on additional layers of complexity, but retaining its core cultural motif.

history is both grand in scope (aided by the pullback) and iterable and contingent (aided by the restart).

The pullback has been identified by critics as a common feature of the more expansive

“god game” genre (typically thought to subsume 4x strategy as well as other related genres), and associated with fantasies of a godlike omniscient gaze and an accompanying megalomania. Yet if that is the case, it is a curiously limited form of godliness. In a game of Civ problems and exigencies continue to announce themselves, always more than there are resources and time to address. The player’s omniscience is limited by how much of the map has been explored, as well as the “fog of war” beyond the sightlines of your cities and units. Thus, it is less the perspective of a god than an immortal but fallible and limited decision-maker, forced to endure the unintended long-term consequences of all of their decisions. In Civ VI, at least, more messages and information come in each turn than anyone can (or would want to, at any rate) grant their full attention to.²⁵³ Thus the fantasy of unlimited sight and pure information that so concerns critics is exploded by the economics of attention involved in actually playing the game. While the critics see an uninterrupted narrative of progressive dominance unfolding as the player expands their control over the map, this is not at all the phenomenology of actual gameplay experience.²⁵⁴ Rather, external inconveniences of planetary features begin to intrude upon even the best laid plans of global domination requiring nuanced response and intervention. This is, of course, what keeps the game interesting, as I elaborate upon in section 3.5.

253 From portions of the map where I have access to an enhanced level of intelligence information because one of my trade routes extends there, I am bombarded with minutiae: “A barbarian pikeman has pillaged a farm near Memphis,”

“a flood has destroyed a farm near Issyk, etc.

254 In fact, some players find the expansion of their knowledge of the goings on everywhere on the world map overwhelming rather than empowering. Civfanatics user Artwork complains that on a huge map, the sheer number of notifications received from far corners of the world verges on painful information overload:

https://forums.civfanatics.com/threads/notification-banners-covering-the-screen.602603/