Top ‘o the world, ma.

I don’t write anymore, save for emails and blog posts. The drive isn’t there. I would like to know where it went, but no one’s talking.

Of course, this leaves me with spare time. Lots of it. And lately that time has been funneled into a brilliant little gem of a game, Civilization IV. Now, the Civilization series has been around a long, long time; the first version came out in 1991, and I remember, during my second or third year of residency, staying up until 2 or 3 in the morning, hooked by the “one more term” hunger like a junkie jonesing for his next fix. The AI is always asking you questions and it’s hard not to answer. What do you want to build in Constantinople? What do you want to do with this pikeman, with that panzer? Your stack of six tanks are at the walls of Moscow. Do you attack, or do you wait for your artillery to arrive next turn? You’ve finished researching Liberalism. Is it time for a revolution? Or would you rather research Fascism, first? Build the pyramids in Paris or use your resources to build an army of swordsmen instead?

One. More. Turn.

One thing I haven't done yet: nuke my enemies into submission

Civ IV has a much different feel to it than the original Civ. Civ III was yet another variation on the theme. Oddly enough, I skipped Civ II altogether, but Civ III consumed me for more hours than I care to recall. Thing about Civ III was that the games were long. Hellish long. Long enough that I finished very few of them. Oh, and then there was Alpha Centauri, the franchise’s science fiction version and one of my favorites because when you conquer a civilization, they don’t just vanish from the screen; no, you get a brief animation of the leader of that civ being “interrogated” (tortured) as a door slams shut much like the end of The Godfather (or The Prisoner). In Alpha Centauri, the game creators had the brilliant idea of giving each leader a unique political philosophy, so that when you conquered Sister Miriam, for example, you weren’t just wiping her smug prissy smile off the planet, you were destroying religious fundamentalism, too. Aah, so satisfying.

One of the improvements of Civ IV is that time flies by rather quickly, such that you’re in the 20th Century before you know it. And if you play a tight game with relatively few cities, say if you’re going for a diplomatic or cultural victory (rather than a military victory), your turns are not time-consuming.

My most recent game, however, was a big one. Large map, and I set out to achieve a domination victory. I had something like 67 cities by the end of it, and I had crushed the Mongols, the Egyptians, the Indians*, the Chinese, and most of the Roman Empire before the rest of the world acknowledged the inevitable. I only remained at peace with Huayna Capac of the Incan Empire.

At the end, you get a number of screens showing your progress in the game you’ve just completed. My previous game took 10 hours. This one seemed a little longer. Had I spent 12 hours at it? Fourteen?

Try forty.

My wife is a Civ IV widow.

But the best part was the animation screen showing my progress relative to the other civs. I played as the most ruthlessly bellicose civilization in human history, the Americans. FDR to be exact. And my color was blue. On the world map, you at first see small blossoms of color: my blue Washington, China’s purple Peking, and so forth. Additional blooms appear as we founded our secondary and tertiary cities. The color spreads like ink stains as our cities extend their cultural boundaries. Soon, each of us had our fair share of the globe.

And then FDR went ballistic. I began nibbling away at the Kublai Khan (muddy brown) and Hatshepsut (yellow), gaining momentum, until my blue wave grew to consume one-third, one-half, finally two-thirds of the screen. Like Pac Man on a binge. Like metastatic melanoma.

I rule.

D.

*Don’t worry, it was Asoka I crushed, not Mahatma Ghandi.

Hey Jake! You’re learning.

Huffington Post reports on a new study demonstrating the learning benefits of video games:

“People that play these fast-paced games have better vision, better attention and better cognition,” said Daphne Bavelier, an assistant professor in the department of brain and cognitive science at the University of Rochester.

That’s the meat of the article. The rest is sprinkled with tired old canards — first from the game-haters,

Gavin McKiernan, the national grassroots director for the Parents Television Council, an advocacy group concerned about sex and violence in the media, said that when it comes to violent video games, any positive effects are outweighed by the negative.

“You are not just passively watching Scarface blow away people,” McKiernan said. “You are actually participating. Doing these things over and over again is going to have an effect.”

and then from Bavelier herself, who turns out to be, um. Well, um . . .

Bavelier said games could be developed that would harness the positive effects of the first-person shooter games without the violence.

“As you know, most of us females just hate those action video games,” she said. “You don’t have to use shooting. You can use, for example, a princess which has a magic wand and whenever she touches something, it turns into a butterfly and sparkles.”

Oh, yeah, that’ll sell.

D.