the ageless empires

I found my age of empires 3 DVD while clearing away some papers and popped it in again - it's been at least five years since I played the game. I was struck anew by the gorgeous graphics - just the way the tree sways when a woodcutter takes the axe to it - the way the fish leap over each other in the rippling water, and even the way the dogs scratch their ears. The background score is lovely, and the gameplay is pretty exciting - training cossacks and infantrymen, and building frontier outposts and mortars to protect your camp.
But I couldn't help feeling slightly uncomfortable.

I couldn't remember ever feeling that the game was slightly un-PC when I last played it... i suppose when you're a kid, you're able to carefully segregate the world of video games from reality. you kill germans, monsters from mars, stormtroopers, sacrifice your peaceful peasants so that your knights have time to recharge their batteries without giving it a second thought.
it's only when you're a bit older you start thinking about and "reinforcing stereotypes"...
and then i thought, whatever, i love this game.

so, i was talking to my sister the next day on chat, and tried explaining the game - the conversation:


me: anyway so thats my little incident for the day

i have also rediscovered age of empires

akhila: what is thta?

me: its a computer game where you are one of the colonial powers taking over

8:08 PM parts of 16th cent america

finishing off the native americans and so on

ultra un-PC but amazing fun

akhila: that's pretty awful

me: lol i said that for effect - you actually befriend the native americans

8:09 PM but its so patronising you may as well just kill them off

akhila: right

to be pc-right?

me: exactly

akhila: bogus bullcrap

me: and there's an expansion pack (not sure if yr familiar with that?) called asian something

8:10 PM and u get to be a young british officer, who is so sick of the east india company's atrocities that he gathers the local indians and rebels against the british

i dont think they realise how patronising that is!

white man saves black men from white men etc.

8:11 PM

akhila: awful

me: but it's a great game!

akhila: hey i want to talk about this in my postcolonial class

8:12 PM fucking awful

me: hey you should

you can look up their website

hang on

akhila: ok

me: http://www.ageofempires3.com/

this has all the stories and that

you wont have to play the game!

8:13 PM but youll have to admit - its a remarkably elegant website

8:15 PM akhila: dude it's nuts

which about sums it up, really - it IS nuts. but i'm still playing it!
i wonder if it's better to just play something like grand theft auto, which doesn't attempt to be politically correct at all. i think that's better cos, the maker is saying - it's all wrong, but just go nuts anyway, rather than having this warped sense of right and wrong.

OR we could follow charlie brooker's ideas for a really thrilling video game. My favourite is:

"Magic Agreement Party This is simply a game in which you sit at a dinner party table espousing your viewpoints on any subject under the sun, while everyone else slowly comes to agree with everything you're saying."

I'd rather play that than age of empires, definitely.