Why I Play “Age of Empires”
In Defense of Losing Your Identity
Gaming has never been my thing. There are two reasons for this:
- I don’t like pouring massive amounts of time into anything that seems so utterly futile. I read once that in the Soviet gulags, they used to make prisoners do menial tasks that didn’t have a point, like repeatedly moving a pile of shoes from one side of the room to the other, to break their spirits. Jig-saw puzzles and video games, to me, have always seemed to serve much the same purpose.
- I really, really stink at video games. The rare occasions I have attempted to play them have usually ended badly — mostly consisting of me getting killed immediately upon spawning by other players as I try to figure out how to not keep walking into a wall.
One (wo)man’s torture is another man’s fun: my husband loves gaming. I knew this long before we got married — long before we were even dating. When I want to unwind, I will usually read a book or watch a movie. When he wants to unwind, he plays video games. Probably because he is preposterously smart, his taste in games tends less towards first-person shooters and more towards complex strategy games like the Total War series and of course, his all-time favorite, Age of Empires.
“I think you would actually like Age of Empires,” he said wistfully, for about the 50th time since we’d been married. I knew this was wishful thinking on his part. I could practically see the scene playing out in his mind: the two of us, side by side, conquering the world in our flannel pajama pants.
“I don’t play video games, honey. You knew this when you married me.”
“If he wanted a gamer chick, he should’ve married a gamer chick,” I added to myself, privately. I was certainly no gamer chick and I had zero intention of becoming one.
It didn’t take very many months of marriage (was it even months?) before the gaming started to get irritating. I just didn’t get how he could spend up to 4 hours staring at a screen, clicking and swiping with his mouse (in keeping with our commitment to being super lame, he is exclusively a PC gamer). I was also beginning to feel slightly neglected. Sure, I could read or something while he was playing his games, but if we were just going to do our own thing and never spend time together, what was the point of even being married?
To put it bluntly: I sulked.
My sulking face is actually the same as my thoughtful face, my amused face, my angry face, and my “I am insane with joy” face, so of course it was completely lost on my oblivious husband.
“Hey babe, I finally drove back the Huns!” he would report gleefully.
“That’s great, honey. It’s really good.”
After a lot longer than it should have taken, I began to realize something very obvious: if we weren’t spending time together, perhaps that was maybe a little bit my fault. Perhaps there was even something I could do about it. I came up with an idea so foreign, so shocking that it seemed positively indecent: what if I let myself try something new — something I would never do if left to myself— for no other reason than that it was a favorite activity of the man that I loved? What if investing in our marriage was more important than protecting that precious component of my identity that I referred to as “not being a gamer chick”?
This is how “Operation: Age of Empires” began.
It was truly touching to see how excited it made my husband. He made a big deal of it — we set aside an evening just for me to learn how to play. This was no small task: not only had I never played AoE before, I had never played any game remotely like it. Unlike first-person “point and shoot” games, AoE involves keeping an eye on up to 200 independent “units” consisting of villagers, who gather resources, and military. Mastering the game involves learning how to balance your economy and your military, so that your economy can support your military while your military protects your economy.
The whole process was intensely annoying.
“Babe, you have an idle villager. You won’t collect resources quickly enough if you let your villagers idle.”
“You need more wood.”
“Get your upgrades or else your military will get slaughtered by the AI.”
“Idle villager.”
“You need to start building military units sooner in the game or you’ll get wiped out.”
“Idle villager.”
I resisted the urge to chuck the keyboard at his head.
“How is this in any way fun?” I thought to myself. “This is not fun. It’s just stressful. It’s work. And it’s work that doesn’t have a point.”
The next night, we actually tried playing a game together: us vs. the AI. I got wiped out within minutes. We started a new game. The only way I could survive was by sending villagers to the safe haven of my husband’s base, which of course he had efficiently walled in earlier in the game than seemed possible.
“I’m just not good at this, honey,” I said. “I don’t even know why you want me to play with you. It’s not like it’s helping you for me to be on your team — all I do is take up space and pilfer your resources. This is just not my thing.”
“You’ll get it.”
I do not like being bad at things. I started playing on my own against the AI, setting the difficulty level where it was just out of my reach. Eventually I was beating the AI maybe 1 out of 3 games, then 2 out of 3. I adjusted the difficulty level higher. I had become officially obsessed. My proudest achievement was the day when my husband had to send his villagers to my base after the AI wiped him out (full disclosure: it hasn’t happened since).
Nowadays, come Saturday morning, as often as not, I’m the one who says, “Hey, when NJ goes down for a nap do you want to play Age of Empires?” (or we just look at each other and simultaneously break into the AoE theme song). I have become an Age of Empires geek in my own right.
I still certainly would not confer the title “Gamer Chick” upon myself. AoE is still the only game I play, and although I can hold my own these days, a true gamer would put me to shame in seconds. But I have gained an appreciation for gaming, and more importantly, I’ve gotten closer to my husband.
In A Severe Mercy, author Sheldon VanAuken describes how he and his wife developed a philosophy based on the dual concepts of embracing “total sharing” and rejecting what they referred to as “creeping separateness” — the danger of two lovers ceasing to love because they live in increasingly separate worlds:
“If one of us likes anything, there must be something to like in it — and the other must find it …That way we shall create a thousand strands, great and small, that will link us together. Then we shall be so close that it would be impossible — unthinkable — for either of us to suppose that we could ever recreate such closeness with anyone else. And our trust in each other will not only be based on love and loyalty but on the fact of a thousand sharings — a thousand strands twisted into something unbreakable.”
Perhaps the fact that my husband loves Age of Empires is reason enough in itself for me to learn to love it, too. Maybe it’s not so pointless after all. Maybe, as silly as it sounds, Age of Empires can be one of a thousand strands that make an unbreakable cord.
Marriage isn’t always romantic dates and poetry and flowers on your birthday. Sometimes it’s giving a little of “me” to get a lot for “us”. And sometimes it’s two people, side by side, conquering the world in their flannel pajama pants.
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