Chances are, you thought of Charles Darwin. Problem is, the word evolution was never used in the first edition of On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection, or the Preservation of Favoured Races in the Struggle for Life. Darwin only began employing the term in the sixth edition, published thirteen years after the original (in 1859), precisely because it was already commonly known. And the person most responsible for the popularity of the term was a British philosopher named Herbert Spencer.

“Evolution as progress” became the bedrock of early social anthropology. The eighteenth century “savage” became the nineteenth century “primitive”, no longer something altogether different but instead just backward. “We” (whoever that is) were once like them, but “we” had evolved, whereas “they” had not. Or to put it another way, social evolutionism transformed a spatial difference (people who live in different parts of the globe do things differently) into a temporal difference (“they” do as “we” once did, but “we” have progressed and they have not).

Spencer believed that progress was a cosmic phenomenon where all things advanced from simplicity to complexity. From geology to society, the entire universe was on a single trajectory of ever greater differentiation. And so evolution emerged as two different concepts under the same name: for Darwin it was adaptation, how species changed to suit their environment through the process of natural selection. For Spencer it was progress.

Now you don’t need me to tell you that the 4X genre is problematic (the four Xs stand for explore, expand, exploit, exterminate, after all). And I’d hazard to guess that most 4X developers take a systemic approach to game design which treats theme as a largely secondary issue (Sid Meier has repeated Bruce Shelley’s joke that they do their research in the kid’s section of the library [48 minutes into the linked recording]). But games are an artifact produced within a given social context and as such reproduce aspects of their worldview, particularly those aspects that are seen as being natural.

And what do we find in most historical 4X games? A largely uniform tech tree that all factions will progress through in a unilateral direction. Even non-historical 4X games feature uniform tech trees, they just use the present as a starting point and not an endpoint. But what is progress in an historical 4X game? To be blunt, it’s the elimination of difference. The closer you are to “us”, the more you have progressed. All Civ games begin with a settler unit, and your first choice is where to settle, to become sedentary. The first city being built you start transforming the surrounding environment, researching technologies and expanding until, by the end, you achieve hegemony over the world. Or rather, until you quit the game because you’re bored.

As Civ 5 dev Jon Shafer has noted, nobody finishes Civ games. Now I don’t believe there is one single reason for this, but I would argue that this evolutionary worldview is a reason. Games are supposedly a series of interesting decisions, but one of the dirty tricks of social evolution is to obfuscate political decisions under the guise of progress. Effectively your only decisions are how to advance through a predetermined trajectory culminating with “us”, "the US”. This is easier to perceive in tech trees, but it’s also true of those two other Xs: expand, exterminate. Make the world homogenous, make the world boring. Those early turns players like put them into contact with difference. The rest of the game sees them destroy it.

So hopefully it’s clear why it’s so heinously offensive to present day indigenous populations such as the Poundmaker Cree to be featured in games like Civilization. The implicit argument, even if unintentional, is that “we” are all playing the same game, you just sucked at it. Or look at Crusader Kings II that had a whole expansion (Sunset invasion) premised on the notion of the Aztec Empire invading and colonizing Europe.