The Strong National Museum of Play has revealed the Video Game Hall of Fame class of 2022. This year's quartet of honorees are Ms. The finalists that just missed out on a spot this time are Assassin's Creed, Candy Crush Saga, Minesweeper, NBA Jam, PaRappa the Rapper, Resident Evil, Rogue and Words with Friends. All of those are classics in their own way, but it's hard to argue with any of the four picks. Ocarina of Time made it into the Hall of Fame as a first-time nominee.

Sid Meier is famous for creating the video game Civilization. He's also known for having his name on the box. Meier released Civilization thirty years ago this month, after developing it with Bruce Shelley, a veteran board-game designer. The pair were inspired by the illustrated history books you might find on a middle-school library shelf, and by titles like Seven Cities of Gold (1984), a video game of Spanish conquest created by the designer Danielle Berry. In Civilization, you start with a covered wagon on a map that is largely obscured. You learn metalwork, horse riding, feudalism, democracy, and diplomatic relations. Eventually, the rest of the world is revealed--a patchwork of nations.

We prove that three strategy video games from the Sid Meier's Civilization series: Sid Meier's Civilization: Beyond Earth, Sid Meier's Civilization V, and Sid Meier's Civilization VI, are Turing complete. We achieve this by building three universal Turing machines-one for each game-using only the elements present in the games, and using their internal rules and mechanics as the transition function. The existence of such machines imply that under the assumptions made, the games are undecidable. We show constructions of these machines within a running game session, and we provide a sample execution of an algorithm-the three-state Busy Beaver-with one of our machines.

Sid Meier has one of the most recognizable names in the video game industry. But who is he beyond a name on a box, anyway? A recent thread on Reddit asking the community about the first game they ever played gathered over 45,000 comments, with classic names like Tetris, Super Mario Bros., and Spyro topping the list. It got me thinking about which video games had the biggest impact on me as a kid. These days they're a major part of my life, but it hasn't always been that way.

One billion hours, veteran game designer Sid Meier notes in this light and enjoyable memoir, is an unfathomable length of time. And yet it took just six years for players to spend a billion cumulative hours on the fifth iteration of Meier's engrossing Civilization series, a nation-building game that has seen them shepherding their peoples from the foundation of their first city in 4000BC to an eventual victory through military, cultural or scientific might, millions of times over. What makes the Civilzation games so compelling? The fans are a cut above; I'd know as I am one of them, having racked up 530 hours on Civilization VI since I bought it at the beginning of lockdown. For Meier, good game design comes down, at its core, to a series of "interesting decisions".

Even casual video game fans know Sid Meier's name. They've seen it countless times, printed in sturdy text across every box in the Civilization series for the past 27 years, the most recent one being 2016's Sid Meier's Civilization VI. It's come to the point where most gamers can't hear "Civilization" without immediately thinking, "Sid Meier," and vice versa. "People know who Sid Meier is because his name's on the front," indie developer Ben Wander said on the busy Tulsa Pop Culture XPO show floor. He was showing off his first game as independent developer The Wandering Ben, a noir murder mystery called A Cast of Distrust.