Playing ‘Civilization 7’ Is Like Being a Ruthless Corporate Consultant

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There’s something about playing Sid Meier’s Civilization 7 that reminds me of management consulting.

The strategy game was released on February 11 and has been consuming my life ever since. If you are unbaptized in the waters of Civ, a quick explanation: The game is part of the 4X genre, which requires you to “explore, expand, exploit, and exterminate” your way through history. In Civ 7 you get to choose to play as one of history’s great leaders, in charge of a budding civilization. The two need not be related. Want to be Benjamin Franklin leading the Romans? It’s possible (and fun). The game is essentially a problem of resource allocation: The key to victory is the efficient use of geographical and cultural advantages and finding play styles that leverage the strength of the civilization you are leading.

The game can quickly grow to a grand scale where you are managing whole cities and conducting elaborate military strategies. In one memorable game, I sacrificed several cavalry units in a glorious charge on an enemy’s line of canons so my infantry could pull off a sneak attack behind them. With a quick click, I sacrificed dozens of soldiers for the greater good.

You can probably guess why it reminds me of consulting—the game of Civilization and the one that firms like McKinsey play in real life aren’t all that different. They, too, are tasked with efficient resource allocation. They, too, will sometimes have to sacrifice many people to achieve victory. The gaming software of choice was Excel, but there isn’t all that much difference between optimizing financial models and optimizing a civilization. I had one friend who, as a 24-year-old strategy consultant, built a spreadsheet that led to 3,000 people losing their jobs. Victory! (It still haunts him to this day.) 

Video games have always been cultural lodestones for tech companies and their leaders. I have been in many a Call of Duty tournament with software sales teams. Elon Musk is addicted to the strategy game Polytopia. Shopify allows its employees to expense a game called Factorio (also about automation and resource allocation). Some of my fondest memories from my single days are of staying at the office late, playing Super Smash Brothers, a fighting game, with the engineers. It is fun to practice pixel manipulation together.

Perhaps the appeal comes from the fact that building startups can feel like a video game. A tweak of a button color here or an adjusted sales email headline there, and suddenly you win money in your bank account. The labor is still on a screen, still optimizing pixels, but rather than imaginary points, you get real dollars. 

So video games, when viewed correctly, have transferable skills and attitudes that can help technologists win. However, I worry that in our embrace of these games, we have accidentally let something darker, meaner, and greedier into our tech culture’s subconsciousness.

The NPC phenomenon

One of the big changes in Civ 7 from its predecessors is that it allows you to pair any leader with any civilization. In Civ 1-6, Napoleon could only lead the French, Caesar the Romans, etc., but now, you can have them leading the Russians. You can also ascribe ideologies to leaders. Want a fascist Harriet Tubman leading Meiji Japan? You got it. The other big new mechanic is that each game is divided into three ages, where the leader stays consistent and you swap in a new civilization for each age. The result is that the game is far more flexible, and the leaders play the most important role. If you want to win, you want to empower your civilization’s CEO.

The issue with video games as tech’s shared obsession is that when we are constantly swapping the arena of fictional virtual combat for the real-world arena of digital business, we can lose sight of the fact that we are actually dealing with human beings. Improved labor efficiencies save money—but they also impact people’s lives. It’s 3,000 minimum wage workers in China having to explain to their families that money may be tight for a while.

Said simply: I worry that big tech CEOs view everyone other than themselves as NPCs (non-playable characters). I worry about this because they’ve, like, said it. Just in the last two months, Musk used the term to describe people who were supporting Ukraine and LGBT causes, inappropriately quoting President Trump, and the “media” in general. Sam Altman said he fell into an "npc trap" by not supporting Trump in his second election.

The perspective this term ultimately represents is that in their world, their perspectives—and most importantly, the victory in the games they play—are the only things that matter. Those who disagree or get in the way of that outcome are just NPCs, sacrificial cavalry units, factory workers fired in the name of efficiency. Each of us regular people are just units on the digital board.

Zuckerberg’s hobbies

Civilization happens to be Mark Zuckerberg’s favorite video game series. He has said publicly that he’s put over 1,000 hours into the first six games—with the new release, the total is probably ticking up quickly. He’s been playing it since he was a kid, and for a man seemingly obsessed with world domination, it is hard to think of a more appropriate game. 

Zuckerberg recently completed a layoff of his own. Five percent of his company, or about 3,600 peopleworkers, were let go through "performance terminations" during the week of February 10. He then followed that up 11 days later by approving executive cash compensation increases of up to 200 percent. It can be true that these are necessary corrective actions—executives could be underpaid, and a labor force can grow unwieldy. However, by making it public that those fired were low performers and instituting pay increases for people who made the heads roll, Zuckerberg clearly wants his civilization to listen to the monarch. “Do what I say and be rewarded. Work harder or be on the streets” is the message. There are ways to do this without being cruel, but cruelty can be a winning strategy—and for some, victory is all that matters.

This is a situation of our own making. The resource allocators in our community, venture capitalists, lionize the founder. Many top investors view their role as, to use the words of Keith Rabois of Khosla Ventures, “chasing after the five, ten, 15 people a year that have a nonzero probability of rearranging the planet to their will.”  If the people or organization beneath one of these anointed leaders no longer delivers the desired outcome, it is better to change the entire company than the leader. Which is exactly the same lesson as Civ 7. 

DOGE and America’s Civilization

After staying up way too late, I won my game. My Parisian empire had conquered the known world with a barrage of nuclear weapons. Sweet, sweet victory. However, when I woke up the next day after only five hours of sleep with a pounding headache, dry eyes, and a to-do list a mile long, I wondered what I had done. Sure, I had won, but at great personal cost. 

Perhaps that is the most disturbing thing to me about our current empowerment of founders. None of these CEOs will suffer all that much from their choices. If Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) causes more harm than good, Musk will still be the world’s richest man. If Instagram causes teenagers harm, Zuckerberg won’t notice. But the rest of us will. Even at a smaller scale, it is increasingly common for founders to take what is called “secondary” when they raise a round of venture capital: They’ll secretly sell some of their equity to take in a few million while not offering their existing team members the same opportunity to sell. 

Watching Altman and Musk snipe at each other on social media, I sorta of feel like an NPC in the Civ game for America. Just a pawn for the "great leaders" who are playing to win, no matter what it takes. 

Yet, for all my concerns, I remain cautiously optimistic about the future of tech. For every Zuckerberg or Musk, there are countless founders and leaders who genuinely care about the impact of their work. Most founders I know are committed to doing right by their people. 

The very tools that can dehumanize us also have the potential to connect us in profound ways. AI, if developed responsibly, could solve some of humanity's most pressing challenges.

Perhaps the real lesson from Civilization isn't about domination, but about balance. The most satisfying victories in the game often come not from conquering every rival, but from building a society that thrives culturally, scientifically, and economically. Similarly, the tech leaders who will shape our future for the better are likely to be those who can balance profit with purpose.

As for me, I'm logging off Civ for a while. Instead, I'm going to focus on the real-world civilization around me: my colleagues, my community, and the very real humans impacted by the technology we build. Because at the end of the day, there's no reset button in real life, and the only victory condition that truly matters is leaving the world a little better than we found it.

Evan Armstrong is the lead writer for Every, where he writes the Napkin Math column. You can follow him on X at @itsurboyevan and on LinkedIn, and Every on X at @every and on LinkedIn.

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