I was reading Nathan J. Robinson’s short article about Age of Empires the other day with more than a bit of nostalgia. Robinson enjoyed revisiting Age of Empires after 20 years. But he took us to task as a society for our obsession with conquest games over cooperative ones.
Robinson draws all the obvious connections between Age of Empires (or Risk, or a million other games) and mindless war. No, players don’t really do anything constructive in these games. They even do destructive things.
Nevertheless, I’ll admit once again that I don’t really need my cultural consumption or choices to line up with my politics. For the most part, I think it doesn’t matter. Sometimes, I think it’s fine to just enjoy something.
Perhaps this is a long-winded way of pointing out that I remember many years of enjoying Age of Empires with my friends. And, more recently, I started playing a game called O A.D. While it’s superficially different enough to have a different title, it’s basically an AoE knockoff. And you can play it for free.
