Time & Perspective Quote by Sid Meier

Confidence is doing a lot of work in that opening line: "We think we've got it taken care of now". Meier isn’t bragging so much as staking out a pragmatic ethos that’s defined Civilization since the early 90s - design as an endless negotiation with complexity, not a parade of grand ideas. The subtext is almost disarmingly humble: multiplayer isn’t a feature you bolt on, it’s a structural problem that can expose every weak seam in a systems-heavy game.

He immediately names the real antagonist: time. Turn-based strategy is built around contemplation, optimization, and long-term planning; multiplayer is built around pace, social tolerance, and friction management. Put them together and you get the classic Civ multiplayer story: someone min-maxes for 10 minutes on turn 87 while everyone else alt-tabs into another life. Meier’s phrasing - "hard to do", "especially", "lasts a long time" - reads like a designer translating human impatience into engineering constraints.

Calling out Civilization specifically matters. Civ isn’t a match; it’s a saga. A long-running game magnifies downtime, resentment, and power imbalances. Early advantages snowball; late-game turns bog down; players drop out. So the intent here is partly technical (sync, turn timers, UI, netcode), partly social design (how you keep four people committed to a three-hour arc). The quiet cultural context: by the era when multiplayer became expected, single-player auteurs like Meier had to reconcile their meditative craft with the internet’s demand for immediacy. The line lands because it treats that collision honestly, without pretending it’s "solved" so much as managed.