Jared Diamond’s book Guns, Germs, and Steel: The Fate of Human Societies (1997) presents a model of cultural diffusion that encompasses four key factors as to why some civilizations became more historically than others. He summarizes these four factors as geographic differences in wild plants and animal species; how axis orientation affected cultural diffusion and migration (favouring east-west Eurasia over north-south America); how differences between continents affected diffusion; and how geographic differences influenced a civilization's area and total population size (Diamond, 1997: 406-407).

For Diamond, food production was the core technology that made complex societies possible (Diamond, 1997: 286) and its systems evolved by foresight decisions and planning (Diamond, 1997: 107). Effective food production created time to develop societal innovations. “Axis orientations affected the rate of spread of crops and livestock, and possibly also of writing, wheels, and other inventions" (Diamond, 1997: 176), accelerating the growth of Eurasian civilizations over American and Oceanic ones. Intercontinental barriers were surpassed by "writing. . . weapons, microbes, and centralized political organizations." (Diamond, 1997: 215-216). Civilizations that spanned large areas and entire continents had more flexibility to adapt and adopt new technologies. They were "enabled to nourish themselves better and to outbreed, displace, conquer, or kill off societies resisting innovation." (Diamond, 1997: 154).

Civilization III models Diamond's insights through various methods. Your nomadic settlers begin by exploring their surrounding environment and founding early city-states. The number of cities and their food production capacity becomes crucial for geopolitical stability, negotiating diplomatic treaties and for keeping the populace happy. Diamond's kleptocratic solutions to revolutions and uprisings, which include disarming the populace, redistributing tributes, creating a monopoly of force, and constructing a self-justifying ideology (Diamond, 1997: 277, 278) are embedded in the AI responses. Lastly, the opening options for defining world size, land mass, water coverage, climate, and temperature yields many different initial scenarios. These have been extended by player maps and "mods".

Diamond's spectrum of "blueprint copying" (Russia's nuclear-bomb program) and "ideas diffusion" (Sumerian and Mexicans both invented writing) can be found in expanded diplomatic, espionage and trade options (Diamond, 1997: 224-225). He notes the Middle Ages technology flow was Islam to Europe and China's inventiveness (Diamond, 1997: 253). Applying Diamond's observations on the myth of the heroic mode of history (Diamond, 1997: 245) and why technologies are accepted or rejected (Diamond, 1997: 247-249) would make the R&D "technology tree" far more realistic. Diamond's insights could flesh out the contagion effect of plagues, the dangers of food shortages and espionage options for gaining other civilization's technologies. Perhaps computer simulations may also be an invaluable tool for developing predictive capabilities in historical sciences, which "is most feasible on large spatial scales and over long times, when the unique features of millions of small-scale brief events become averaged out." (Diamond, 1997: 424).

M2: The "Dominator/Partnership" Paradigm (Riane Eisler)

Riane Eisler's book The Chalice & The Blade: Our History, Our Future (1987) was a watershed in feminist scholarship and cultural transformation theory. This approach "is nonlinear, focusing on both systems maintenance and transformative change . . . it includes the full span of human history . . ." (Galtung and Inayatullah, 141). Gender relations become the unit of study (Galtung and Inayatullah, 181, 216). Eisler distinguished between Partnership (gylanic) and Dominator (andocratic) paradigms (Abraham, 1994: 141), in which the former were "defined by affiliation rather than by violence-based rankings." (Eisler, 1987: 151). Dominator societies included "the samurai of medieval Japan, Hitler's Germany, the Masai of nineteenth-century East Africa, and Khomeini's Iran . . ." (Galtung and Inayatullah, 142). Partnership societies are beginning to emerge in Scandinavian countries (Galtung and Inayatullah, 143). She sums up this difference in a powerful poetic image: "The power to dominate and destroy through the sharp blade gradually supplants the view of power as the capacity to support and nurture life." (Eisler, 1987: 53).

Eisler's perspective, elaborated in subsequent books, is beyond the scope of my analysis here, so I will limit my discussion to several key contributions. Eisler and her colleagues, notably Ralph Abraham, counterbalance the global problematique with a revitalizing world mystique (Abraham, 1994: 69) influenced by the Minoan Crete civilization. She deploys chaos dynamics (Abraham, 1994: 60-61) and cultural transformation theory (Eisler, 1987: 162) to study how abstract ideas are replicated throughout society and evolve into sociopolitical movements (Eisler, 1987: 170). Her ontological holism (Eisler, 1987: 136) reinerprets the period spanning the demise of classical Rome to the Renaissance (Eisler, 1987: 129, 131) that morphs the Hindu yugas into catastrophe theory (Galtung and Inayatullah, 1997: 184). Lastly, Eisler emphasizes the adaptability of human consciousness (Eisler, 1987: 173) and that our survival depends upon cultural evolution (Eisler, 1987: 196; Abraham, 1994: 68).

Each Civilization game begins in 4000 B.C., Ground Zero for the Dominator paradigm (Abraham, 1994: 141). While cultural, diplomacy and trade strategies have been strengthened in Civilization III, the AI engine usually prompts resource wars when city networks become a geographic meshwork, re-emphasizing the nation-state as a cultural unit (De Landa, 1997: 49-50, Eisler, 1987: 200). Moreover, by assimilating other cities by kulturkampf and warfare, players re-enact how early Partnership civilizations "that were not simply wiped out were now also radically changed." (Eisler, 1987: 53). Civilization III's focus is on the shift from agrarian societies (Galtung and Inayatullah, 145) to the industrial era (Wright, 2000: 190, Galtung and Inayatullah, 147) and eighteenth-century Enlightenment, in which "rational" man and "scientific" doctrines fused to create mass killing and environmental crises (Eisler, 1987: 157, Wright, 2000: 217).