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Dr. Wife is visiting a friend this weekend, so I’m dog and koi duty.  It’s a pretty easy duty, so I’ve been playing lots of video games.

It’s rare that I spend extended periods gaming.  When I did have the free time to do so, my pattern was to play a game obsessively for about a week or two, then not touch it (or most other games) for months.  It’s one reason it took me four years to beat the main quest in The Elder Scrolls III: Morrowind (and because I snuck everywhere and spent most of the time exploring outside of the main quest).  Every time exam week would roll around in college, I’d have several days of unlimited, unstructured time, during which I’d play for four-to-six hours at a stretch—then I’d barely touch the game until the next exam week.

It’s a testament to how easy college was that I was able to do that and still graduate magna cum laude (I was a mere three-thousandths of a point away from summa).  I don’t think it’s that I was particularly smart; I just knew how to take notes and study, and my mind for historical minutiae is like a Venus fly trap, absorbing and dissolving the meaty goodness into a nutritious synthesis of knowledge.

But I digress—that gaming pattern has persisted well into adulthood.  Now the time horizons are both more constricted and more expanded.  If I’m way ahead of work and composing and writing, I might play a game a couple of hours at night before bed for one-week period, but sleep deprivation hits hard and fast at forty-one, and I soon mend my ways as my gaming sessions creep beyond 10 PM.  On the other hand, the periods of fallow gaming time grow longer, where I might not touch any game (beyond a time-wasting phone puzzle game or the like) for months and months, other than an occasional round of Civilization VII with my boy Justin.

That’s all a long way of saying that—finally—conditions were ripe for an extended gaming session.  Dr. Wife is living it up in Charleston; the Internet is installed in the new house; packing continues, but we’ve put a huge dent into it; and I’m on Spring Break.  And way back in January I purchased the deep 4X game Old World.

Old World is from one of the guys who worked on Civilization IV, which is considered one of the best installments in the storied franchise (I agree).  The game’s composer is Christopher Tin, the guy who wrote the Grammy-winning “Baba Yetu,” the title music from Civ IV:

“4X” stands for “eXplore, eXpand, eXploit, eXterminate”—the pattern that such games follow.  Players start in a wreathed in darkness, and must explore it.  As promising spots for new cities are found, players expand to them, exploiting the valuable resources of those locations in the process.  Finally, players—either through direct conquest or some other means—must exterminate their opponents (or out-compete them) to achieve victory.  Each “X” builds upon the one that came before.  Explore well, expand well; expand well, exploit well; exploit well, and—well, you get the idea.

Old World follows that pattern, one familiar to legions of Civilization fans, but deepens the experience.  Like my exam week Morrowind adventures, the timeframe of the game is shorter than Civ—it’s just the ancient Near East and Mediterranean, not the entire world from 4000 B.C. to the distant future—but the focus is deeper.  Instead of an immortal leader, the game introduces mortal rulers and complex family dynamics, the likes of which Paradox Interactive games like Crusader Kings III feature prominently.  Instead of all of your cities remaining loyal because you keep the “happiness” at or above zero, cities are ruled by different aristocratic families within your kingdom, with whom you must curry favor.  Even your wife can get made at you, which has direct repercussions on the effectiveness of how you govern (“happy wife, happy life” is now gamified).

There’s way more to it than that, but just from playing through the tutorial—which I highly recommend to new players—I am hooked.  I started a semi-guided “learn by playing” game (a sort of self-guided tutorial after the more on-the-rails, five-part tutorial) as Babylon last night around 9 PM; the next thing I knew it was 2 AM!

Here’s how it all went down.

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