On Populating

On Populating

I

When is the last time you played a game that gave you a feeling of “full control”?

Honestly, if a game were that easy, you would win every time. There would be no point in playing. Even games like blackjack have a known algorithm you can follow, counting the cards, but oftentimes you’ll get asked to leave whatever establishment you’ve decided to employ this strategy in.

A chemist friend of mine loves video games. He especially loves the Elder Scrolls series, and his favorite place to exist is inside the MMO variant, where he can interact with other people.¹

His explanation for this is simple astonishment: the amount of data transfer that must occur for him to play the game. He observes the screen, makes a decision, uses his fingers to press a button and create an input signal, and his character takes a step forward.

But it doesn’t stop there.

The change he applied to his character must also be reflected in the game for every other person playing. The signal he input is sent over the internet to a server, where it is cataloged and reflected back to the other players. Whether they “see” it or not, the move happened, and the server responds.

I know of no closer picture of how realities can be superimposed over one another regardless of sensory input at any given moment. Every move enters a shared sum and is reflected back to all of us, present whether witnessed or not.²

Each player sees that world through one screen. The server keeps every screen at once. That’s how I see our own world, too: each of us takes in one corner of it, and reality is everybody’s corner held together, with yours in front.

Honestly, I’m not a huge fan of games where I have to play with people I don’t know, but I love playing cooperative games with my friends. This is probably why my social circle is so small. It speaks volumes to how I “play the game of life.”

II

I think back to when I was a teenager. One of my favorite games was a game called Populous. I started playing it when I was still studying things like the Bible. I didn’t really make any correlation between the two at the time, but the relationship between them is astounding.

Let me explain.

In Populous, you start with a few people… who in time become a few more. Then they make more people, and you build your “kingdom” with the people generated.³

Unbeknownst to you (unless you’ve played the tutorial), on the other side of the map exists another “player,” controlled by the computer, who is doing the same thing.

The goal is to expand your population, control territory, and eventually consume the entire map for “global domination.”

This is not achieved by “moving” the people around the board, like you would think. In this game, you control the environment by recreating “divine intervention” through natural miracles and disasters. The things you do cause the people to divide, expand, conquer, and regrow.

This type of game has always fascinated me, but the idea of “playing God” was a little far-fetched for a teenager holding a controller.

Let’s fast-forward all the way to the release of Sid Meier’s Civilization. This is a game I didn’t get into until the release of the third version, but I played each one all the way to the most recent.⁴ This game became a staple of learning and understanding from my late teens into adulthood. The core concepts were directly tied to reality, and you didn’t “control the populace” through divine intervention; you made the decisions for your country as if you were a human being, a prestigious or nefarious leader.

The concept was still the same. Divide, conquer, expand, repeat.

Even so, look at the technology tree, and nothing on it arrives alone. In the first game, Gunpowder waits on Invention and Iron Working, and Invention waits on Engineering and Literacy.⁵ Every advance is older ideas tied into something new. That’s what I mean by a binding third, and I also use the phrase for the middle term between two people, the one that holds them together while each stays who they are. Same shape, two sizes.

III

The interesting thing about Civilization is the number of functions they have added that divide a nation from the others. Religion. Government type. Military. Economy. Culture. These are the types of things that stand in the way of harmony between you and your opponents.

Despite the fact that this is a video game, I want you to hold this truth close to the front of your mind as I continue.

There is no “perfect” way to unify a divided world in a game like Civilization. But when the game starts, there are no enemies. Everyone is working toward the same goal.

Life.

As each country develops over time, the foundational beliefs (like how the country should be run and which supreme being should be worshipped) become the dividing lines placed in the way of unification.

You can “see” the lines on the map as the various empires bump up against one another. But they actually don’t exist. They’re imaginary lines.

This truth holds over to reality, and the current standing with planet Earth.

IV

I think about this sometimes: the various places on Earth where you can stand in one place and be in multiple places at the same time.

Let’s break that sentence down. Have you ever been to the Four Corners Monument? It exists at the imaginary intersection of Arizona, New Mexico, Utah, and Colorado. You can stand in one place, and your body exists in four states at one time.

But is it truly “at one time”? Physics has been telling us for more than a century that there is no universal now laid over the whole universe: whether two separated events count as simultaneous depends on who is asking and how they are moving.⁶ The four states are an imaginary line drawn on the ground. “At the same time” turns out to be an imaginary line drawn through the clock.

Make sense? No? Think about that next time the conversation about the importance of daylight saving time comes up. We don’t have an accurate representation of how time moves, because it’s relative to whatever you’re talking about. Next time the conversation of time comes up in general, I want you to ask yourself what the most accurate representation of its measurement is.

A small part of me believes Stonehenge is far superior to an expensive watch that uses electricity to generate a response in a piece of quartz. Most expensive watches skipped that design and kept their springs and gears, but in reality I still feel like “Earth versus Sun” is going to be the unarguable truth here, even though the official second has belonged to the caesium atom since 1967.

I digress.

V

Over the course of history, mankind has been divided by these imaginary borders. The Bible calls the story the Tower of Babel. It’s only told once in scripture, but I can see the quantum side of the story reflected in how many times humanity has been divided throughout history.⁷

No matter the reason (gold, knowledge, religion, power), the imaginary borders of humanity have been constructed over time to divide us into sections. Every one of those lines carries somebody’s Intent: which way they were facing when they picked up the pen. Within those sections, we fractalize our conscious thought into smaller sections, and so on, and so forth.

Keep dividing anything far enough and you reach a place where the explanations begin to thin out. Push past every border we can name and eventually you arrive at a question no map accounts for. A select few have always answered that question with the same two words: divine intervention. I theorize they might be closer to the truth than we tend to give them credit for. At the very edge of explanation, mystery is the most honest thing still standing.⁸

Remember, this is a philosophy piece, not a scientific explanation. I’m only thinking about life. While I’m still alive. The literal, out-of-context definition of philosophy.

VI

This type of fractalization can be reflected in the release of the Civilization games I spoke on. When the fifth arrived, a lot of the fanbase came to think this was the “perfect version.” It seemingly included everything.

When the sixth arrived, it actually departed in a noticeable way: a brighter, more cartoonish look, and cities built out of districts. Most people liked it; plenty of loyalists to the fifth felt it had wandered off. But to me it always felt like another reflection of the same idea, dressed differently. And when the seventh hit the market, people were frustrated with the new directions the studio tried to take the game, because they didn’t make sense to them.

Life doesn’t make sense.

The game had everything it needed; anything past the point of explaining that was only going to make it more complicated.

Zoom out.

Life has everything you need; trying to explain it past that is only going to make it more complicated.

Zoom in.

I’ve recently started playing the seventh again. I bought it when it came out, but like many other players, found it dull and non-canonical to the series. The irony of a game about human growth and expansion being non-canonical is not lost on me.

VII

I want to close this piece with what I perceived to be the successful move in the studio’s design.

They listened to the players.

In May of 2026 they released an update, “Test of Time,” that let you carry one civilization across an entire game again, the way the older entries always had. By their own account that was “by far the most-requested addition.”⁹ They unified the idea that the game had been more aligned with perfection in its previous versions. They added complexity and beauty to those existing frameworks, and reinvented the seventh as yet another mirror of the fifth and the sixth.

Every system drifts from where it began; that drift is just fractalization wearing another name. The only failure would have been mistaking the drift for the destination. Coming home to the original framework, and loving it enough to modernize it, is the same move I keep asking us to make with one another.

A very small group of people began to complain again: just another repeat.

Not me. I found the new unity to the original framework simply beautiful. Not only did the game finally adhere to the things that made it enjoyable to play to begin with, but it was given a facelift. It was a modernized version of a world once loved, lost in design.

Maybe that says something about life. Maybe we need to stop trying to overcomplicate the design, and just start playing the game together. Maybe we need to bring a modernized version of love for one another.

Realign the fractalization.¹⁰

Revitalize a version of a world once loved, but somehow lost in design.

Maybe I’m crazy. Maybe I just like video games. But I’ll tell you this much: if I were the one in full control of this game being played around us, I wouldn’t consider it a loss if the borders disappeared and every human won, held together in love for one another.

There is no loss in coherence. There is no pain in unity.¹¹

Notes

1. ZeniMax Online Studios, Elder Scrolls Online, the series’ massively multiplayer entry.

2. In the framework’s notation, that shared sum is Ψ, the gathering. Journal Three sets the functional out in canonical form, in five lines: Ψ(τ) = Σⱼ αⱼ(τ) · e^iφⱼ(τ); Ξ(τ) = Σⱼ αⱼ(τ); L(τ) = Ψ(τ) ⁄ Ξ(τ); Θᵢ(τ) = arg L(τ) − φᵢ(τ); aᵢ(τ) = |L(τ)| · cos Θᵢ(τ). It calls Ψ “the superposition of co-present perspectives,” each “carried at an intensity αⱼ and turned to a facing φⱼ.” Johnson, Frequency, Resonance, and the Architecture of Reality, “The Mathematical Architecture of Oscillation.” Each α is a weight, never negative; each φ is a facing, Intent in a single letter; Ξ is all the weight present, added up; L is the gathering held in proportion; Θᵢ is how far one perspective is turned from the whole, and aᵢ is the reading that perspective lives. Contributions add or cancel depending on how their facings stand to one another. The sums run over Ω, everyone present when a reading is taken, and, on the framework’s own reading, any Trace met in that moment by whoever is doing the reading (a Trace is what a lived moment leaves behind, in a word or a song or a deed, for someone else to take up). The server is only an image of that set, everybody logged in at once. The lines themselves are a lens borrowed from the mathematics of waves; they measure nothing and predict nothing.

3. Bullfrog Productions, Populous. The original, designed by a Bullfrog team led by Peter Molyneux and released in 1989, is generally credited as the first of the “god games”; the author played it on the Super Nintendo, where Acclaim brought it out in North America in 1991.

4. MicroProse, Sid Meier’s Civilization; Firaxis Games, Sid Meier’s Civilization III. The first game appeared in 1991, the third in 2001.

5. In the 1991 game, Gunpowder requires Invention and Iron Working, Invention requires Engineering and Literacy, and Iron Working requires Bronze Working. MicroProse, Sid Meier’s Civilization. Both uses of binding third, for the invention and for the middle term, are mine.

6. The relativity of simultaneity: whether two events separated in space count as simultaneous depends on the observer’s frame of reference. Einstein, “Elektrodynamik bewegter Körper”; Taylor and Wheeler, Spacetime Physics. It does not reach the two sides of one body standing at the Four Corners. Two halves of one body are at rest relative to each other and share a frame, and the relativistic and gravitational differences at that scale, though real, are far too small for anyone standing there to feel. What it does reach is the larger claim: no universal now is stretched over the whole universe, so “at the same time,” said of distant events, is a convention and not a fact of the world.

7. Genesis 11:1–9: one people with one language is scattered over the face of the earth, and the city is left unbuilt. The name plays on the Hebrew balal, to confuse. Reading that scattering as the long division of humanity into bordered sections is mine.

8. To call mystery the most honest thing standing at the edge of explanation is not to say that mystery explains anything, and it is no argument from ignorance. It marks where an honest speaker stops.

9. Update 1.4.0, released May 19, 2026. The announcement called it “a direct result of your passion, feedback, and patience.” “Civilization VII’s Test of Time Update Coming May 19!”; “Civilization VII: Patch Notes – May 19, 2026”; Firaxis Games, Sid Meier’s Civilization VII.

10. To realign is to turn perspectives toward a shared facing, so that each one’s angle to the whole, Θᵢ(τ) = arg L(τ) − φᵢ(τ), closes toward zero and their contributions add instead of cancel. Facing counts only relatively: turn every facing in the room by the same amount and the room swings around with them, and nobody’s angle to it, or anybody’s reading, changes. Weight counts too. Each perspective’s share of the gathering is αᵢ ⁄ Ξ, so one weight raised alone can move L (unless everyone already faces the same way), and a share thins as others arrive; only multiplying all the weights by one common number leaves L untouched.

11. |L|, the size of L, says how sharp the shared world is. It reaches one when all the facings agree, never goes past one, and sinks as facings scatter, toward a small typical floor that is not a hard bound. Coherence in this sense leaves difference in place: every perspective keeps its own intensity, and what realigning changes is how they are turned. The arithmetic sees facings only against one another, so it cannot tell a room held together by care from one held together by harm. What sets them apart is the charge, and only words can name it; the coherence these last lines mean is the one the line just before them names, love for one another.

Bibliography

Bullfrog Productions. Populous. Acclaim Entertainment, 1991. Super Nintendo Entertainment System.

“Civilization VII: Patch Notes – May 19, 2026.” Firaxis Games and 2K, updated May 19, 2026. https://support.civilization.com/hc/en-us/articles/51685242291219-Civilization-VII-Patch-Notes-May-19-2026.

“Civilization VII’s Test of Time Update Coming May 19!” Civilization VII. 2K. https://civilization.2k.com/civ-vii/news/test-of-time-update/.

Einstein, Albert. “Zur Elektrodynamik bewegter Körper.” Annalen der Physik 17, no. 10 (1905). https://doi.org/10.1002/andp.19053221004.

Firaxis Games. Sid Meier’s Civilization III. Infogrames, 2001. Windows.

Firaxis Games. Sid Meier’s Civilization VII. 2K, 2025. Windows.

Johnson, Jamison Todd. Frequency, Resonance, and the Architecture of Reality: A Theoretical Framework Measured by Science and Mathematics. Toward a Theory of Coherent Existence, Journal Three. Legible Traces, 2026. https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.20522506.

MicroProse. Sid Meier’s Civilization. MicroProse, 1991. MS-DOS.

Taylor, Edwin F., and John Archibald Wheeler. Spacetime Physics: Introduction to Special Relativity. 2nd ed. W. H. Freeman, 1992.

ZeniMax Online Studios. The Elder Scrolls Online. Bethesda Softworks, 2014. Windows.

CC BY 4.0 · ORCID 0009-0009-8618-398X · DOIs MINTED ON DEPOSIT

© 2026 JAMISON TODD JOHNSON · LEGIBLE TRACES LLC