What this quote means

Sid Meier delivered this sentence in 1989, two years before Civilization existed, when he was still best known for flight simulators. It was a definition he offered almost casually at a conference — and then the entire games industry adopted it as a creed. For four decades it has been quoted in design documents, debated in keynote talks, and printed in textbooks, which is remarkable for a phrase that is only ten words long and, on first reading, sounds almost like a shrug. The reason it stuck is that it is secretly precise: it tells you what a game is, what makes a game good, and what a designer is actually paid to do.

The power is in the word interesting. A series of decisions is just a flowchart; a series of interesting decisions is a game. Not every choice counts. Picking a loadout, choosing a path, deciding when to strike — none of these are interesting in isolation. They become interesting, Meier argues, when they matter: when they are difficult to reverse, when they trade one valuable thing for another, when the player knows that the outcome will be shaped by the choice itself. In Civilization, every turn is a small economy of interesting decisions — build a wonder or an army, expand or consolidate, research the wheel or the pottery — and the game is the accumulated weight of a thousand of them. Strip out the interesting decisions and a game becomes a movie you click through; fill a system with them and it becomes something people play for thirty years.

The deeper claim hiding in the sentence is that a good game respects the player’s intelligence. Meier was making games on computers that could barely render a pixel, at a time when the industry was chasing fast reflexes and bigger explosions. His bet was the opposite: that players wanted to think, that a machine that could present a genuinely hard choice was more exciting than one that could present a vivid one. The line is really a definition of fun — fun is the feeling of being offered a decision that matters and knowing you are the one who gets to make it. That is why his games have outlived every graphical arms race of the last four decades, and why his page is still being read forty years after he said the words.

And it is why the quote escapes the field that produced it. Read it as a comment on life and it becomes almost suspiciously wise: every day is a series of interesting decisions, and the quality of a life is largely the quality of the decisions that constitute it. The trivial choices — which coffee, which route, which notification to answer — fill our hours but decide nothing. The interesting ones — what to build, whom to trust, when to stay and when to leave — are the ones that build a life the way turns build a civilization. Meier built a forty-year career, and a series of games that have sold more than 73 million copies, on the simple discipline of arranging interesting decisions for other people. The question the quote leaves each of us with is quieter: what would it look like to arrange them for ourselves?

About Sid Meier

Sidney K. Meier was born on February 24, 1954, in Sarnia, Ontario, to parents of Dutch and Swiss descent, and grew up in Detroit after his family moved there when he was about three. At the University of Michigan he studied history and computer science, graduating with a bachelor’s degree in computer science in 1975. He spent his first years after college writing cash-register software for department stores — an apprenticeship in mundane programming that, by his own account, taught him how to write reliable code and made him hungry for something more interesting. In 1981 he bought an Atari 800, wrote a handful of games for it, and realized, in the way a person recognizes a door, what computers were actually for.

In 1982 he co-founded MicroProse with his friend Bill Stealey, a former Air Force pilot. The company started with flight simulators — Hellcat Ace, Spitfire Ace, Solo Flight, F-15 Strike Eagle — that Meier designed and programmed almost entirely himself, including the sound and the art. He worked that way for years, until the sheer volume of work persuaded him to accept help. In 1987 the studio released Sid Meier’s Pirates!, the first game to carry his name on the box — a marketing move suggested, improbably, by Robin Williams at a dinner — and by 1992 Computer Gaming World was running poems in praise of his name as “a guarantee they got it right.”

His defining work came in 1991 with Sid Meier’s Civilization, a game he made in about a year with a team of three, inspired by SimCity and Empire. It asked the player to guide a civilization from the dawn of history to the space age, founding cities, researching technologies, waging war and building wonders, and it defined a genre — the 4X strategy game — that did not yet have a name. It has since become one of the best-selling and most influential games ever made; the series has moved more than 73 million copies, is credited with teaching a generation about history, diplomacy and economics, and has been praised by figures from Bill Gates to the British education system, which recommended it as a teaching tool. Meier designed only the first installment, but every sequel since has been built on the same foundation he laid: the player as the author of their own civilization, one interesting decision at a time.

He left MicroProse in the late 1990s, after the company’s merger with Spectrum HoloByte, and in 1997 co-founded Firaxis Games with Jeff Briggs and Brian Reynolds. There he continued to refine the philosophy that made him famous — always emphasizing the “fun parts” of a simulation and discarding the rest, building games by playing them over and over until they were fun. His reputation grew beyond the industry’s usual limits: he was the second person ever inducted into the Academy of Interactive Arts & Sciences Hall of Fame, in 1999; GameSpot ranked him the most influential person in computer gaming of all time, calling him “our Hitchcock, our Spielberg, our Ellington”; IGN placed him second on its list of the greatest game creators ever. In 2020 he published Sid Meier’s Memoir!: A Life in Computer Games, a career retrospective written with the same dry, curious intelligence as his games.

He is still at Firaxis as Director of Creative Development, and he is still playing his own games. In 2026 the Civilization franchise turned 35, and at PAX West in September, Firaxis and 2K announced the series’ future: Arc of Tomorrow, a major free update introducing a fourth Atomic Age era, and Earthrise, the first expansion for Civilization VII, which takes the player from charting the night sky to launching missions across the solar system. The announcement sent his Wikipedia page from a typical few hundred views a day to more than 31,000 in a single day — a forty-fold spike in the space of a week, from people who grew up on his games and people meeting him for the first time. It is a fitting moment to revisit his most famous line, because the announcement proves it: after thirty-five years, the most interesting decision in the genre is still, almost always, one that Sid Meier designed.

Create your own quote graphic with this quote

A quote about interesting decisions deserves a graphic that makes a few of its own. A deep navy-to-gold gradient, a centered italic serif, and a clean restrained layout can turn these ten words into a card people save and share — a reminder that the quality of a day is the quality of the decisions that compose it. If you want to make a quote card from this — or any quote — Quotes Creator gives you the fonts, gradients, backgrounds, and export sizes to do it in minutes, ready for Instagram, Stories, Pinterest, and everywhere else.