conquest (n.)

When I was seven, eight, nine years old, I sort of imagined my dad had always worked with computers. How else could he know so many of their secrets, the arcane formulae that exposed their innermost parts: command prompts; BIOS settings; control + alt+ delete; disk defragmentation—magic spells that held my wonder and hovered just beyond my comprehension.

Among my most cherished childhood memories is when he would sometimes take me (and sometimes my little sister as well) to the dark, empty, gray-cubicle-maze where he worked in northwest Arkansas—Walmart country—where some kind of overtime needed doing: a ritual performed under cover of night, away from prying eyes. His office, strewn, as I remember it, with PC entrails: chips, cables, a mélange of silicone and aluminum producing a slightly burnt smell, incense-like, was home base to my wandering. When my sister came along, she and I played hide and seek. When I was alone, I explored the office, most of it dark, as if it were an alien world, blissfully ignorant of its truly eldritch powers over the workers in whose salaried footsteps I then walked.

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When my dad was done with whatever server-wide update he had conjured while I snuck around in the dark and crawled under the conference tables (enormous, draconic altars, they seemed to me), he would, if I was lucky, call me back into the IT room for a game of Age of Empires II over local area network.

Age of Empires II was my first real-time strategy (RTS) game. Others passed into and out of my awareness during these years, what you (if you were me) might call the Golden Age of the RTS. None quite measured up to my experience with AoE2. Homeworld was cold and abstruse, at once too slow and too fast, a game I’d prefer to watch than to play. Star Trek: Armada was clunky and repetitive (to be fair, are there any good Star Trek games?). Star Wars: Force Commander was awful both to look at and to control as it chugged on our scraggly home PC, its only saving grace being Peter McConnell’s soundtrack. Empire Earth was only fun once you got to the modern era, a victim of its own uninspiring 3D graphics. Star Wars: Galactic Battlegrounds was an oversaturated and unimaginative Age of Empires clone, plodding and abrasive, like chewing sand. Stronghold: Crusader, though stylish, was too slow and limited in scope for my tastes. Rise of Nations was, I thought at the time, the first RTS to look good in 3D but, like Empire Earth, only gets fun when you reach the modern era. Red Alert was punky, plucky, and quick (like all Command and Conquer games), but ultimately too cheesy and narrative-driven for my tastes). Starcraft remains eminently attractive and compelling on its own merits, but in those years was also an alien experience, a singularity all its own.

Age of Empires II always succeeded for me where its peers fell short. Sharp, evocative sprites move convincingly, confidently, across its lush yet informationally thorough isometric environment. Structurally, though Age of Empires II offers narrative campaigns, the meat and potatoes of the game is the “random map” play mode: choose from a dozen parameters, AI players, and map styles, and just start in a random spot on a randomly generated map with your Town Center, Villagers, and Scout. Equal playing field. The story emerges from simply playing the game.¹

As a kid, I don’t think I ever stopped to think critically about what the game was “saying,” how its mechanics, its structure, and stylization work on a person, to say nothing of what its narrative might mean. I didn’t experience a game narrative that stopped me in its tracks until I played The Longest Journey in my teens; and I didn’t yet approach games as emergent storytellers when they didn’t come out and say (as AoE does not) that it was explicitly telling me a story. But Age of Empires II is, of course, a readable text despite itself. Perhaps unsurprisingly for something I’ve regarded fairly nostalgically for years, it becomes fascinatingly fetid upon closer inspection.

Part of me feels silly to look back at Age of Empires II with a critical eye. Its structural leanness conjures the abstraction of an esport, not the rich, complicated texts of more intentionally narrative or poetic games. However, I think there’s something in Age of Empires II, and beyond it in the RTS genre itself, that speaks to the frenetic and vicious times in which we live. I find myself casting my mind back to the games I grew playing, not just because I’ve been listening to My Perfect Console. It seems natural to find oneself reaching for the past when times are dire and the future looks bleak.

Age of Empires II—if we take it and its setting seriously—assumes that culture, indeed civilization in the broadest sense, if it is worth paying attention to at all, is ultimately militaristic. Bracketing the idea of the political, Age of Empires II conjures a game world in which every last element of a polity exists in some way to support the violence of the state, the eradication of its rivals. The game could have been set on the isolated battlefield, busying itself only with the maneuverings and micro-narratives of troops on the field—something the Total War games soon came to own as a franchise—but instead Age of Empires II (along with the other entries in the franchise) revolves around the Town Center and the Villager, thus making a battlefield out of the the entire sweep of society. Perhaps in that regard the design is brutally honest: Where there is war, it is everywhere.

While Age of Empires II includes a variety of possible victory conditions in its standard, “random map,” head-to-head game mode—collect and hold all the relics, capture and hold a central structure, race to build and defend an expensive Wonder—the victory condition typical of the game and standard in most professional play, Conquest, requires destroying all your rivals. Specifically, as the manual states (because games still had manuals in 1999), “To defeat a player, you must destroy all units and buildings,” with some exceptions that on first glance don’t make much sense taken together—walls, towers, gates, fishing ships, farms, etc. A post in a Steam forum on the topic is more explicit in their explanation: “A conquest victory condition will require you to destroy all enemy units that are, or have direct potential to create, military.” The Conquest game mode demands absolute genocide to win. If all that remains of the enemy is a single Villager, they are still not technically defeated. All Villagers must die since they have the capacity through their labor to potentially generate a military to threaten you, which makes them legitimate targets, already guilty, Minority Report-style.

Perhaps the most interesting observation one could make about Age of Empires II’s system, its insistence on representing the civil society as an irreducibly militaristic one, is that it includes no mechanic for internal societal friction. There is no scenario in a game of Age of Empires II in which your Villagers become dissatisfied with and revolt against the eternal warfare into which you have subjected them. Contrast this with something like the Civilization franchise, a very different game in some ways, in which the player as autocrat is at least formally accountable to the population one commands. Even if the mechanics for societal dissatisfaction and revolt can be criticized for their realism, at least they exist! Civilizations in Age of Empires II—though they may differ in their tech trees and special units, share one thing in common: the absolute submission and compliance of their populations to the military, nay, the mind of the autocrat—the user.

What I find interesting thinking about it now is that, as a kid, I don’t think any of this went against the grain of the worldview my family or the fundamentalist church of which we were fervent members birthed me into. Wasn’t “this World” a violent, Hobbesian place, and hadn’t it always been since Cain’s primordial murder of Abel? Among the Bible stories I was perennially read growing up was that of Israel conquering its promised land, commanded by God to literally annihilate its inhabitants. The moral I was to take from this story was that the strife biblical Israel experienced, its incorrigible national unfaithfulness and its eventual defeat and exile could be traced to the choice to leave survivors, who corrupted the nation’s spirit, subverted its culture, and left it weak against its enemies. When the modern state of Israel waged its genocidal-colonial wars against Palestinians on TV, I was to read it as a sort of echo of this interpretation of scripture. In our dear, sweet, “apolitical” hearts, we sided with evil while praying for [apocalyptic] peace. In Age of Empires II, I rehearsed (not consciously, I think) the biblical virtue play of organized annihilationist conquest. But of course I didn’t think about that at all when I was playing with my dad—not least of all because, since he wasn’t looking to stay in the office all night, he would pit us against the maximum number of AI opponents on the hardest difficulty, making us more often the victims of the game system rather than victors. What did I feel in those moments, clicking to guide my lone surviving Villager to a dark corner of the map in the vain hope of rebuilding my Town Center where the overwhelming AI wouldn’t find me? I remember those moments as thrilling because my dad was there too, laughing, losing along with me. In my memory, I wasn’t play-acting the historical movement of societal murder; I was hanging out with my dad.

The “real time” of real-time strategy is important to my memories playing in this genre. There is too much information, too high of a demand on your attention, to consider the ramifications of what you’re doing. RTS games are about process optimization and flow. This may be partly why I left the genre behind eventually. I was often frustrated that I couldn’t even enjoy the brutal spectacle of the battles the game staged for me. If I stopped to stare, the backlog of all the clicks required to win in the long haul would immediately mount. Because the game is moving relentlessly, because play is enacted through elaborate menus, success means learning the hotkeys for navigating the game’s user interface without having to move your mouse, minimizing wasted movement and extraneous attention on anything other than the process that the game forces you to follow to survive. There’s no time to think about what any of it means when to stop and think goes against the inherent pressures of the system that’s got you in its grip. Mastery of that system on its own terms, it should be noted, doesn’t give you a way out of it.

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1  Other RTS games have offered narrative campaigns with lesser or greater emphasis—Starcraft lives and dies by its narrative campaigns, as far as I’m concerned; the Red Alert games as well—but Age of Empires’ campaigns are lackluster, hardly a distraction from the core random map gameplay.