The 4x Model Game and the Archaeology of Movement, Migration and Settler Colonialism

Summary

This is an abstract from the session entitled "Making Waves through Play: A Historical Archaeological Examination of Archaeogaming and the Global Impact of Video Games on the Field of Archaeology", at the 2023 annual meeting of the Society for Historical Archaeology.

Reaching mainstream popularity in the 1990s, the 4X model of video game involves building a colonial empire through turn-based or real-time strategy. The 4X genre stands for eXplore, eXpand, eXploit, and eXterminate.

A number of examples of this genre, such as Sid Meier’s Civilization (1991, 1996, 2001, 2006, 2010, 2016), Colonization (1994), Imperialism (1997, 1999), Age of Empires (1997, 1999, 2005, 2021), Rise of Nations (2003), Oriental Empires (2017), Old World (2021), Humankind (2021), etc. allow analysis of in-game representations of history and archaeology, and exploration of issues of migration and settler colonialism. This paper will seek to explore the underlying principles and dynamics of this model, how games of this type can be used to study migration and settler colonialism, and how new games are, and can, reimagine this model to reflect historical context and the consequences of the ongoing processes of migration and settler colonialism more accurately.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Making Waves through Play: A Historical Archaeological Examination of Archaeogaming and the Global Impact of Video Games on the Field of Archaeology   •
• Society for Historical Archaeology 2023

Keywords

Individual & Institutional Roles

Contact(s): Nicole Haddow