While I still don't have a lot of gaming time, I did take a few hours the other night to play some Civ IV. I've been a fan of the Civilization series sine Civ II. I recall to many hazy nights of hitting enter until the wee hours of the morning in the dimly lit internet cafe after hours (it was owned by friends). My friends and I whiled away many hours figuring out the quickest way to elephants (which could still take down tanks in the late game). I didn't actually 'win' many games, as I would get too caught up in individual pursuits to look at the big picture.

I still do this in Civ IV. While there are some easier win conditions in Civ IV than Civ II for a pacifist like me (cultural victories for the win), I still found myself whiling away the time. Rather than looking at the game as a win/lose scenario and trying to figure out the best way to 'score', I tend to just build every building, research the tech and improve my surrounding countryside. I will go to war to get someone out of the way of my expansion or to stop bothering me, but I won't cutthroatly go to war and I'm in favor of peace treaties. I don't expand as much as I should or as soon as I should. I don't research only necessary technologies, I try to research them all. It is a valid way to play, but a game ends up taking a total of several hour play times over the course of days instead of a single sit down or only two. I know that there are ways to optimize winning and I find that I just don't care. I play Civ to hit the 'one more turn button' rather than to really win. This hampers my ability to play on the harder difficulty levels and prevents me from doing well in multiplayer games.

There are other games I care about winning. I worked hard on Geometry Wars and studied YouTube videos to get to my respectable high score (over 600,000 iirc). It isn't nearly as high as some people I know (my boyfriend has a high of 3 million plus), but it is still enough to garner respect amongst my friends. The only point of Geo Wars is to get that high score. I play RTS games (Starcraft, Warcraft III, Company of Heroes) and there I will figure out optimal build orders down to the second to gain an advantage. But for whatever reason, I don't treat Civilization in that way. I treat it almost more like an RPG, where I'm just running around and expericing the world.

I never finished Oblivion because I (seriously) got too caught up playing with the herbs and alchemy profession to bother to advance the main storyline. I tend to wander a lot in Zelda games, not because I want to find all the secrets or to explore all the zones, but because I just enough moving around in the world. I won't finish a RPG quickly, if I finish it at all.

I don't know what it is about Civ that pulls me in this way. It isn't a story thing. There isn't really one and I certainly don't tell myself the story of the Great and Powerful Dawn. And the world is familiar as it is history & earth, more or less. But I always would prefer to have 'just one more turn' instead of winning.

Anyone else like this out there? Are the other games that people savor instead of playing to win than the standard open world ones? And, related, I wonder why it is that I'll have a blast doing Civ or Oblivion but I'm not into the open world games like GTA.