COVER -> MEMOIRS OF THE INFORMATION AGE
"I'm the neighborhood bully!"----Bob Dylan
| I'd left myself exposed, my window open, my fly unzipped----a critical error in this digital age. I was multi-tasking at my PC at the good ol' cube farm, and for some reason I'd left my The Zone.com multi-player gaming window open (though I was most certainly not playing Microsoft's "Age of Empires: The Conquerer's" at the office. If only because our company firewall makes that impossible). Maybe I was trying to keep up on my e-mail, too, when the phone rang. It was my wife, and I listened to her lovely sweet voice distractedly as the Zone Messenger window popped up. It was a message from Real_Prince.
"Hey asshole," it said. "You suck." |
With the latest expansion disc released this fall, "Age of Empires: The Conquerers," such new races or "civs" as Aztecs, Huns, Mayans and Spaniards have been introduced to appeal to the worldwide marketplace of online gamers. Other new features, such as villagers with better artificial intelligence (AI) capabilities when working for their masters, have been added to make this autocratic autopia seem more fluid and viscerally engaging.
Such forces can be commanded by a fast-clicking community of online kings, who are locked into their PC screens as feudal fiends, looking from a top-down point of view as they order their miniature units to gather resources, raise armies and explore all kinds of terrain to search out their enemies----before their enemies find them first.
You can learn a lot by building such empires. It's a true realm of myth, magic and mystery. Indeed, we all might wonder what so many people are training for. In Orson Scott Card's science-fiction novel, Ender's Game, a group of kids playing video games discover they are actually being used by the military to fight real wars.
But that's absolutely ridiculous. What's actually happening is this: Video games are being trained by kids to fight wars.
I'd left myself exposed, my window open, my fly unzipped----a critical error in this digital age. I was multi-tasking at my PC at the good ol' cube farm, and for some reason I'd left my The Zone.com multi-player gaming window open (though I was most certainly not playing Microsoft's "Age of Empires: The Conquerer's" at the office. If only because our company firewall makes that impossible). Maybe I was trying to keep up on my e-mail, too, when the phone rang. It was my wife, and I listened to her lovely sweet voice distractedly as the Zone Messenger window popped up. It was a message from Real_Prince.
"Hey asshole," it said. "You suck."
I was delighted, disoriented and quite surprised. I hadn't realized that I was still logged in at the Zone. "Hey Real, how's it --- "
But before I was able to type my response to the Prince's hail, Real sent another message box, then another, then another. There was something strange going on. Box upon box appeared on my screen, and within each message field a flurry of what appeared to be coded instructions appeared. I clicked on the corner to close each box as they came up, but I was loosing ground.
"Umm --- ," I told my wife. "I need to get back to you. I've got some kind of problem here."
I was under attack! What appeared to be a denial-of-service-style flood of discordant data was streaming into my "ZM." I clicked and closed, clicked and closed each box, but then my display screen, then the computer crashed.
I looked into my dead dark green display, in shock.
Real_Prince? Real_Prince? I searched my memory for my virtual encounter with him in the dim Black Forest of last weekend. Then, I remembered ---
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Commuters in a subway will sublimate themselves to the directive, and even the most gregarious of us, within such a redundant system as a well-run subway, will sit stoic as a bag of grain on a railcar. If we are in an office space with no walls, we will chat, converse and ideas flow freely. In a cube farm, we keep to ourselves.
If we are collected by talent scouts, whose needs are based on our unique differences, then placed on an island to compete amongst ourselves before a television audience----as outside manipulators play mind games with strange activities as we vie for a $1 million prize----we will become cutthroat boobs of decreasing sincerity, and, increasing guile. We will, of course, become bereft of loyalty.
Think of the Zone's "Age of Empires" online gaming community, usually consisting of between 4,000 to 5,000 multiplayer gamers dialed in from around the world at any particular time of day, as a virtual domain of obsessed, emotionally distorted wannabe warlords. Koreans fighting Italians, Americans whacking Canadians, young punks, old geeks----a digitized society for mutually destructive anachronism. Think of last summer's "Survivor" phenomena, of the value of feudal-style partnership deals.
Think of architecture, again, and now throw in any memory you might have about the knights of yore. Think of the total emotional absorption rate, due to the speed and necessities of having to react to an entire battle, consisting of as many as 1,600 knights, swordsmen and busy-body villagers. Think of how they might conduct their business before your eyes. At your Lordly discretion.
It's good to be king.
The concentration has to be near-total. Voices from the outside----your wife, your child, your personal Jesus----will fail to penetrate your skull's firewall. You look down from above the bloodied field, using the mouse to grab more troops as you toss them into the foray. You conduct multiple clicks within seconds to develop metallurgy and ballistics, train and upgrade troops, trade for more gold, raise a priest, or send a message to your clan-mate in an eight-player feud: "Help! I'm under attack! I need gold!"
Now consider what G21.net MOIA list member Len Bullard said recently about why such games are so addictive: "As IBM showed in studies, when response times go under two seconds, the lock-in to the behavior is near 100 percent," he stated for a G21 MOIA. "This is a part of mammalian signal processing and can be shown in other games. Rapid frame rate and quick interfaces are key."
Think of the unique architecture for a community of atavistic persons, where identity is hidden behind such menacing pseudonyms as TrickyDicky or DeathStar2000.
Naming oneself is an act of creative belligerence.
In the Age of Kings game rooms and chat interfaces, you run into the likes of "The Impaler," "the Silencer," "Mr. Testes 99." On this field of play, mean is the adapted norm. When waiting for the game to launch, field generals are road-raging braggarts, anxious as junkies at the door of the crack house. Some will demand the scenario setup to be changed, others will belittle those who make mistakes logging in.
Such discussions are territorial, juvenile, bullying. If the host is slow to launch, the worst of the bunch spew profanity and complain when sides chosen aren't to their liking. Imagine third-grade truckers gone tribal in the digital realm. Think of a feudal state of mind that melts into a combative architecture of taunts and totalitarianism.
And all this is going on before the actual fighting begins.
An Age of Empires computer game is chess in the virtual flesh, a dream come true for those of us who grew up playing tiny plastic knights and castles. Like chess, individual units work best as a mutually supporting team of pikemen, archers, mounted knights, priests and devastating siege weapons such as onagers----flame throwing catapults, basically----lay the foe to waste.
Like the childhood game known as "Rock, Paper, Scissors," each unit has a strength and a weakness: Pikemen are basic grunts with long spears that are great against mounted knights or war elephants, vulnerable to archers, which are vulnerable to heavy cavalry --- and so on. Meanwhile you evolve your civilization of Celts, Saracens or Teutons and others (the Conqueror's update adds Korean, Spanish, Aztecs to the mix) in a way that's similar to SimCity. You develop, by building marketplaces and iron forges and eventually universities, pushing early civilizations through the ages, first gathering food, wood, stone and gold, then advancing from primitive ages to become a great empire. If you last that long.
But unlike SimCity games, everything is at the service of conflict, even the priests who heal wounded units or convert the enemy to kill in thy own name (such as "Mr. Testes 99"). The emphasis is placed on developing ballistic technology and trades routes to allies, or more like, cutting them off.
It's positively medieval.
So there I was, home alone on some sunny summer day, fighting the 11-year-old Persian Prince with my menacing array of Chinese Arabalists (archers), and loads of priests, needed whenever Persians come around.
The game took forever as I continued a slow retreat as waves of War Elephants melted my numerous walls, a sort of labyrinth defensive system I'd learned after downloading a tactical manual for the U.S. Army. The point of all the priests is they can convert elephants to the other side. Then I'd take them and point them right back against their former master. A time-honored tactic going back, at least, to animal tossing scenes in "Monty Python and the Holy Grail."
It was a fart in Real_Prince's general direction.
Actually, I was keeping in character as an Oriental feudalist. Which is why, I think, Real_Prince got so mad. My usual strategy, as one continually in retreat and on my heels, was to mimic the classic technique made famous by guerilla campaigners going back, at least, to the Swamp Fox of the American Revolution. Playing the computer instead of the real human, the strategy works real well, since the game's AI fails to recognize the logic of placing so many bases ("cells," if I was a member of the communist party) in hidden corners of the map.
Experienced multi-players, used to such desperation, will hunt you down and find you. Real_Prince, at age 11, could hardly be called experienced in anything, and I'm quite certain he didn't understand my Ho Chi Minh tactic. That's at least high school level stuff. In fact, it's my guess you'd have to go to some pinko Eastern Seaboard liberal arts school to learn about that kind of thing.
So Real_Prince got real mad as the war of attrition reduced us both into a stalmate. We mustered our peasants to harvest resources to mount new, but insignificant assaults. It went on for hours. At some point, he asked me how old I was. I gave no answer, since I was way to old be wasting my precious off hours this way. He kept asking. I kept ordering pikemen-at-a-penny into small forays, weakening any economy he happened to muster.
Then, he started cursing in the chat field. Like a sailor. I have an ex-wife that didn't cuss like that. I finally chatted back, "Young man, you shouldn't act that way."
That only made him madder. "You asshole. You ffn.....xoaiodiu!" And so on. Lenny Bruce would blush. And this kid wasn't old enough to be Lenny Bruce's grandchild.
Finally, I found his cluster of farm fields surrounding a mill, burned it all down, and he was done. More curses. More threats. Then he pulled the plug.
Ho Chi Minh had won, again. Will the 11-year-old Imperialist dogs ever learn?
You just don't take on an opponent in a land war whose cultural database is four-times older than your own.
"I have trouble running away successfully. Usually I end up like Sir Lancelot's squire----mortally wounded," says one player who chose his name, "BraveSirRobinZK" from the Monty Python Arthurian spoof.
"Oh yeah," I respond. "That's a frequent strategy for me. Run away! Run away!"
Then we grouse a bit about more expert players who have learned to "cattle rush" hordes of men very quickly to destroy you before even getting started. They are hackers, basically, since it's a flaw in the game to allow such victories to be "hacked," based on pure "ping" power and click speed.
"I play the online version primarily because I like the human element, to chat with other players and for the teamwork aspects," he says. "ðI really enjoy the teamwork aspects actually to share resources and to figure out tactics in finding and attacking the other team...I rarely find players who are equal online----they're usually far better. But the computer can be as enjoyable and it keeps the phone line open."
Indeed, a great number of players are so good, you wonder how they find the time to exist in real space. In the game rooms where you earn ratings points, the competition can reduce someone like myself, who has put dog years into learning the game, into a loser in 10 minutes or less. There's a subculture of clan-mates, who operate independent AOE fan pages, who load customized scenarios that are intended to turn uninitiated victims into quick points. The rules can be quite bizarre.
One such game, what I call "Roach Motel," left me feeling queasy inside, like I'd been attacked in some blind dark alley by a sado-masochistic ghoul. He liked the points, sure, but liked watching me fry like an ant beneath a magnifying glass a lot more.
The "Conquerers" upgrade includes a set of Spanish versus Aztec scenarios, a recreation of history that I refuse to run on my machine (in deference to my general preference to oppose the forces of subjugation and genocide. Plus, I figure the Aztecs don't have a chance).
Even as modern wars got more and more hideous throughout history, Microsoft game designers will no doubt keep moving up the ladder of civilization with possible future upgrades. I can envision them working now on Age of Nations ("too much ideology"), Age of "Isms" ("the Rothschild banking icon gets confusing"), and Age of Multi-National Corporate Wars ("Cheats OK, but if you don't like Ho Chi Mihn rules, get the hell outta here").
Military-Nintendo Complex
Each year the Connections Conference, hosted by the U.S. government, invites anyone wargame designers and developers for a smooze.
"Attendees include personnel of the Defense Intelligence Agency and game companies like GT Interactive," writes author best-selling "Megatrends" author John Naisbitt in his most recent book, "High Tech, High Touch," (Broadway Books, New York).
"Conference agendas have included such topics as 'Wargaming Design Fundamentals' and 'Department of Defense Wargaming 101.' "
HYPERLINK "http://www.hightechhightouch.com"
Naisbitt's take on things isn't entirely original. Australian cyberculture theorist McKenzie Wark once proposed that President Dwight D. Eisenhower's definition, the "Military-Industrial Complex," had been entirely usurped by the "Military-Entertainment Complex." HYPERLINK http://www.mcs.mq.edu.au/Staff/mwark/warchive/21*C/21c-cyberwar.html
What I could never get an answer for from the ESRB (www.esrb.com) was why Delta-Force, a first-person shooter, gets a "Teen" rating for shooting Asians, Columbians and Arabs, but Quake III gets a "Mature" rating for equally grotesque entertainment.
This cover story by Access (HYPERLINK "http://195.7.48.75/release/mag/access/041600/f-acc.htm" in April, on the anniversary of the Columbine tragedy, beat by six months the recent----and----politically expedient report by the FTC on video violence.
Interesting how it took the FTC a million bucks to reach the same conclusion that we discovered after handing my 14-year-old son a few 20-spots to buy games at retail outlets that the ESRB says he shouldn't buy.
Game designers have frequently received funding and other assistance from the Pentagon to create and promote such entertainment.
Since turning the shareware game Doom into Marine Doom for its training purposes, the Marine Corps Combat and Development Command in Quantico, Va., has "evaluated more than 20 commercially available electronic games for their potential use as training tools for marines." In the 1980s, Atari made a game for the U.S. military, called BattleZone, which was used as a training simulator for the Bradley Fighting Vehicle, one of the best anti-personnel devices in the U.S. arsenal. MAK Technologies in Cambridge, Mass., won a contract in 1997 from the Department of Defense to create Marine Exed Unit 2000, an amphibious assault game intended for both the military and commercial markets. Interactive Magic, maker of a flight simulation game called Carrier Strike Fighter, was given permission to roam the aircraft carrier U.S.S. Abraham Lincoln to film videos to ensure accurate visuals and a realistic feel.
Raven Software and Activision recently released Soldier of Fortune, a first-person shooter that, according to Wired News, "stands out for its unmatched level of violence."
If stimulating dormant aggressive DNA is the goal of id Software, the company should have received a lifetime achievement award by now. The company is promising a follow up to Doom and another recent release, Wolfenstein 3-D, has been clinically tested for increasing "aggressive tendencies."
FAQs for such companies are always entertaining, too. A bio for a game designer such as this Zombie VR Studios team, which came up with such virtual wargames as Special Ops II, is a typical example of the easy slide from military to commercial applications. Co-founder Joanna Alexander's resume reads like an introduction to a conquering hero about to speak at a Veteran's Day Brunch.
Fortunately, if mankind is pathologically prone to violence, he can descend into tribes harmlessly in cyberspace. And there are valuable lessons for the novice clan-mate. Job opportunities, too, for anyone interested in the one-click wars to come.
For example, I found this in a General Accounting Office report to the Chairman Subcommittee on Defense, Committee on Appropriations, House of Representatives, July 2000: "The 4th Infantry Division is scheduled to become the Army's first digitized division through the fielding of 16 high-priority systems to the division by December 2000. These high-priority systems --- can be generally described as command, control, and communications systems that support decision-making by commanders located in tactical operations centers."
It may be good to be king, until you start to watch your villagers mowed down in the green fields of yore. And it will certainly be better to be in the command and control nodule until, I suppose, the evil Real_Prince starts flooding your chat box with cyberwar countermeasures.
In terms of what's wrong with the game's AI, I'd have to say that units are way too inclined to engage the enemy. They are downright suicidal, since then are drawn to any local foe as if they were magnetized. I think this is something the real Digital Divisions in the Army should consider. It's a very human fact that can overpower the mouse commands of any overseer, at any level. If you download a U.S. Army field manual, look it up under "suppression." However, King Arthur in "Monty Python and the Holy Grail" gave the order best when those nasty French persons catapulted a cow over the castle wall.
"Run away! Run away!"
You learn a lot about history by playing the game. It accurately reflects the Middle Ages, described in the book A Distant Mirror: The Calamitous 14th Century by the late historian Barbara Tuchman, as a period when "... Private wars were fought by knights with furious gusto and a single strategy, which consisted of maiming as many --- [of the opponents'] peasants and destroying as many crops, vineyards, tools, barns, and other possessions as possible, thereby reducing his sources of revenue."
Real_Prince was real young, and when he hosted a game launched for a Black Forest scenario, the game's ping was so slow a third player typed in a few expletives into the message field. Then he quit. Just not enough speed. But before he left, Real_Prince revealed something about himself: "Hey, take it easy," he said in response to the profanity. "I'm only 11 years old."
Real_Prince was real young, and when he hosted a game launched for a Black Forest scenario, the game's ping was so slow a third player typed in a few expletives into the message field. Then he quit. Just not enough speed. But before he left, Real_Prince revealed something about himself: "Hey, take it easy," he said in response to the profanity. "I'm only 11 years old."
There are chivalric sorts, too. People with a knowledge of history and such literature as Sun Tzu's businessman's gameplan, "The Art of War." There's no greater joy than finding somebody, such as a college professor with a name like "Constantine," who likes to play the Byzantines and tries to live within the lore. Or talking to someone in a game room chat who waxes philosophic about his personal strategy.
Age of Empires games are all about annihilation. Ultimately, there comes a point when you have to wipe out the busy-body male and female villagers to end the race of Celts, or Goths or Franks, etc. Indeed, the final digital cleansing is very, very satisfying, or sad, depending on which side of the end game you click from. Still, it gets a "T" rating for "teen" by the ESRB, even though its standards watch for unseemly violence. Even though, hey, Byzantines are people, too!
Video Violence
Hyperlink Arcade
In the age of digital violence, what gets a spy hanged for espionage will only get a video game designer's name on the military's mailing list for upcoming events.
Wark's World of War
Douglas McDaniel of Access Internet Magazine on the ESRB ratings system
Ping All That You Can Ping
Software's Soldiers of Fortune
One health warning about "Age of Empires," as well as a criticism. Even a few hours after you have logged off from a long game, chances are you'll still see the ghosted pixels of enemy knights passing before your eyes. Just remain calm. It eventually passes. Don't go to the local pawn shop and buy a sword. There's a mandatory 48-hour waiting period, anyway, before you make a purchase in steel.
Douglas McDaniel is senior editor at Access Internet Magazine . He can be reached at dmcdaniel@accessmagazine.com.