MicroProse and the flight simulator years
Sid Meier co-founded MicroProse with Bill Stealey in 1982. Stealey was the salesman; Meier was the programmer. Their early games — Hellcat Ace, Spitfire Ace, Solo Flight — were flight simulators aimed at hobbyists who wanted technically accurate recreations of aircraft. Meier wrote them all himself in assembly language, working from aviation manuals and his own interest in the subject. MicroProse found a market in the growing PC gaming community and began to expand.
The flight simulator work established Meier's approach to research: deep investigation of the subject matter before writing a line of code, with accuracy as the baseline and playability as the goal. He was making things he would want to play, simulating systems he found genuinely interesting. The games were technically accomplished because Meier was genuinely interested in what he was simulating, not because someone had told him accuracy would sell.
Pirates! and the discovery of the formula
Pirates! (1987) was the game in which Meier's design philosophy crystallised. The game combined naval combat, sword fighting, trading, exploration, treasure hunting, and historical roleplay in a seamless open-world Caribbean setting. Each activity was a distinct game mode; the combination of modes created a whole that felt like a coherent experience of life as a buccaneer rather than a collection of minigames.
It was during and after Pirates! that Meier articulated the phrase "a game is a series of interesting decisions." The formulation is precise in ways that reward attention. Not challenges — decisions. The emphasis is on agency, on the player being the source of meaningful choice rather than the recipient of external tests. Not just decisions — interesting ones. Trivial decisions, decisions with obvious correct answers, decisions whose outcomes don't matter — these are not what makes a game. The interesting decision is the one where the right answer is unclear, where multiple considerations point in different directions, where the player must apply judgment.
Civilization and the one more turn
Civilization (1991), designed by Meier with Bruce Shelley, is the fullest realisation of the interesting decision philosophy. A game spanning from 4000 BC to the space age, where players built empires through technological research, military expansion, diplomatic negotiation, and economic development — and where every turn presented multiple interesting decisions simultaneously.
The "one more turn" phenomenon — the experience of deciding to play for another hour, then another, then another, until the sun is coming up — is a direct consequence of the interesting decision density. Every turn in Civilization presents decisions about production queues, military positioning, diplomatic relations, research priorities, and expansion timing. None of these decisions has an obvious right answer; all of them have consequences that unfold over many subsequent turns. The player is always in the middle of something, always dealing with the consequences of previous decisions and beginning the consequences of current ones. There is no natural stopping point.
What the philosophy excludes
Meier's interesting decision philosophy is useful precisely because it's specific enough to have implications. It excludes games built around reaction time rather than judgment. It excludes games where the correct answer is always apparent. It excludes busywork — repeating the same decision many times because the game needs to be padded to a certain length.
It also implies something about what games are for. If a game is a series of interesting decisions, then the player is exercising judgment — weighing options, applying knowledge, thinking about the future. This is an active, engaged relationship with the game. It's different from the relationship a player has with a spectacle — something to watch and be impressed by — and different from the relationship with a skill challenge — something to practice until the correct response is automatic. Meier's games are thinking games. The pleasure they offer is the pleasure of thinking well, of choosing correctly, of building something complex out of many small decisions over a long time. That specific pleasure is what forty years of Civilization sequels, spiritual successors, and imitators have been trying to replicate.