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T A B L E__T A L K

Microsoft vs. the feds -- who'll come out on top in this clash of the titans? Place your bets in Table Talk's Digital Culture area.

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R E C E N T L Y

Upgraded memories
By Jack Mingo
Inside UC-Berkeley's treasure-trove of historical photos
(12/16/97)

Survival of the chicest
By Thomas Lewis
A review of Steven Pinker's "How the Mind Works"
(12/15/97)

21st briefing
By Scott Rosenberg
Feds 1, Microsoft 0 -- but the game's only started
(12/12/97)

License to code
By Greg Lindsay
Universities experiment with ways to cash in on software research
(12/12/97)

Let's Get This Straight
By Scott Rosenberg
Drudge falls for Yahoo hackers' nonsense
(12/11/97)

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BROWSE THE
21ST ARCHIVES

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Ever since I read Lord Byron's "The Destruction of Sennacherib" in a high school "Brit Lit" class, the specter of those Assyrian cohorts -- poised to rain death down upon Jerusalem -- has lingered in my imagination. I had always been an ancient history geek, a card-carrying Junior Classical League member who studied Latin and preferred the unabridged version of Edward Gibbon's "Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire." But nothing captured the stark and awesome power of bygone imperial legends quite so vividly as did Byron's grandiose poetry.

Nothing, that is, until Microsoft's "Age of Empires," a new computer game bound to stir the dreams of despot wannabes everywhere. Hear the war elephants trumpet as they trample across enemy fortifications! See the trireme galleys fire their catapults! Marvel at the chariot steeds stamping their hooves!

I knew, when I first saw my cohort of Assyrian chariot archers line themselves into a crescent and start firing flaming arrows at a Hittite guard tower, that I was hooked. Knowingly or not, the "Age of Empires" designers had plugged directly into my Byronic vision. If Cecil B. DeMille could have created a computer game, it would have looked something like this.

But graphics alone do not a good game make. Indeed, an emphasis on memory-hogging graphical fireworks at the expense of gripping game play has been a game-industry bugaboo for years. What makes "Age of Empires" work is the decisions it forces and choices it permits as it puts you in charge of baby civilizations and asks you to shepherd them to imperial grandeur. How many villagers does one allocate to gold mining instead of wood-cutting? When's the best time to train a priest or invent the wheel? Shall I be a Minoan sea power or an Egyptian pharaoh? A builder of Parthenons or Temples to Confucius? One can emulate Alexander the Great -- or eschew military escapades altogether.

"Age of Empires," for example, offers players a choice among 12 cultures (ranging from familiar old Greeks and Persians to the more exotic Shang of China and Yamato of Japan) that can be nurtured from Stone Age hunter-gatherers to mighty Iron Age civilizations. Each culture has different attributes and different capabilities: The Egyptians can't build catapults; the Yamato are distinctly lacking in war elephant technology.

N E X T_P A G E | Playing God