Why Are There No Empires in Age of Empires? (2019)

Summary

At long last, Relic Entertainment has announced that Age of Empires 4 is coming. Strategy gamers rejoice! I am excited – I played the first one back in ’98 (I may be dating myself here). But the news brought me back to a common problem with many games of this type and with Age of Empires specifically: they don’t actually have any empires in them! And I am sure that some of you are a bit confused by this statement – after all, the games are full of Romans and Mongols and Persians and Assyrians and how can I say these weren’t empires? But there’s the thing – those were peoples who had empires. And it turns out that’s a pretty important distinction. So today, we’re going to talk about what empire is, and (on a very basic level) how they work to see how games of this sort – not just AoE, but also the Civilization series and others – don’t reflect the mechanics of actual empires and why that matters. What Is an Empire? Let’s not bury the lede too far: an empire is a state where the core ruling population exercises control and extracts resources from a periphery which is composed of people other than the core group (linguistically/culturally/ethnically/religiously distinct). So an empire is a state where one set of people (the core) extract resources (typically by force) from another set of people (the periphery). That definition goes back to the root of the word in Latin: imperium, literally meaning a command or control; imperium comes from the Latin verb imperio (lit: ‘to order or command’). Thus imperium was a sphere of command over others. In Roman politics, this could mean an individual had the authority to command an army or to set up courts (consuls, praetors and dictators had this sort of imperium), but the Romans understood their empire as a sort of command exercised by the Senate and People of Rome over non-Roman people, thus they called that too imperium – an imperium of the Roman people (imperium populi Romani), crucially over the non-Roman people; once cannot...