Take-Two Interactive Software

“What do you mean by that?” I asked.

“Look, Percy, you only like ‘Left 4 Dead’ and Nintendo games. ‘Civ V’ is completely different. You won’t like it.”

I dragged our video game editor Michael Yang into the conversation.

“Maybe I will like ‘Civilization,’” I wrote. “‘Pikmin’ was an RTS too, and I enjoyed that game.”

“‘Civ V’ isn’t a real-time strategy game,” Michael responded. “It’s a TBS.”

“What’s a ‘TBS’?” I asked.

“Turn-based strategy.”

“Oh,” I responded. I began to realize that I was in way over my head.

“Sid Meier’s Civilization V” was released last month. The video game also goes by “Civilization V,” “Civ V,” “Civilization” and, most simply, “Civ.” Your goal in the game is to start a civilization from scratch, then build, trade and conquer your way to world domination or something close to it.

My world conquest was going to take more effort than others’. My ambitious goal to play 30 minutes of “Civ V” started before the game had even booted up.

Jesse’s words stuck in my head. I play Wii. I used to own a GameCube, and before that I owned an N64. Nintendo makes platformers and action-adventures and not much else. I’m a Nintendo fanboy. I might always be one. I’d never played a game like “Civ V” before, and it scared me to branch out to other genres. But I wanted to do it before it was too late. I didn’t want to become so comfortable with Nintendo that I’d start to shun other products. Jesse sensed the apprehension and tried his best to give me a primer.

“So they changed the board to hexagons this time.”

“OK. What does that mean? And what do you mean by board?” I asked.

“Well, it’s a game board,” he responded. “And the tiles used to be squares.”

“That means nothing to me.”

Things were only getting murkier. I longed for comfortable Nintendo clarity, but I dove into the demo before my Wii could convince me otherwise.

I hit my first snag at the title screen. It was filled with buttons. “Single Player.” “Multiplayer.” An enigmatic “Other.” For a happy second, I fondly recalled the title screen from “Super Mario Sunshine,” which simply read, “Start.”

The memory faded, and I was back to the mess. “Single Player” was at the top, so I clicked it. The second screen was like the first. “Play Now,” “Set Up Game,” “Load Game.” It meant nothing to me. I hovered my cursor over the different options, wondering where each one would take me. To another option screen? To a game?

I was weighed down by my shameful fanboy-ism. Damn the platformer genre, I wanted to leap into the sandbox and show Jesse and Michael I could play any game I wanted. I wanted to prove to them that I had skills, diverse tastes and non-Nintendo love. “Play Now” was the quickest way to do that, so I clicked it.

I was instantly confused. I had no idea what to do. I dragged my mouse around the screen to get a lay of the land before realizing that most of it was covered in fog. There were arrows pointing this way and that, and tiny, inscrutable icons on every hexagon. A woman in robes yelled at me about something I didn’t really care about, and even though I was the Ancient Egyptian Empire, George Washington was trying to sign a treaty with me.

It was chaos. Eventually, I learned how to farm land and build a standing army, but the farmers didn’t know what to do with their yield, and whoops, I accidentally made my soldiers trespass on every city-state they passed. Washington and Julius Caesar were mad at me. I’m pretty sure I was at the brink of war with Germany when the game froze and mercifully kicked me out of the session, but who knows for sure?

I felt dejected. Banished from “Civ V,” doomed to the sugar-coated life of Nintendo products and merchandise. I didn’t want anyone to know I’d failed at my shot to expand my horizons. But Jesse asked how it went, so I had to answer.

I recapped my experience and wondered if it was normal to leave a game of “Civ” without forming a connection to it. His answer surprised me.

“Yeah, ‘Civ’ is one of those games I play, and when I’m done, I wonder if I even had fun playing it.”

I almost laughed at him. “Sid Meier’s Civilization V,” the fifth incarnation in a celebrated 19-year-old series, wasn’t any fun? Of course it was fun! I had a great time starting that road, building that library and investing in­…chemistry. It dawned on me that I hadn’t had fun at all. I’d found “Civ V” confusing, and worst of all, boring. I had no plans to play it again. “Super Smash Bros.” was calling me, but “Civ V” was dead to me.

“It’s just a way to kill time,” Jesse said.