Today’s New York Times had their annual “upcoming art season” section – a listing of movie releases, theater productions and television programs for this fall and winter. It’s a good way to start the fall, in my opinion. I can’t bother to keep up with all the new movies coming out, and it’s not like there is a lot of reliable preview coverage of the Broadway season in the Washington Post.

And there it was. On page 92. Seth Seischel had a preview of games of note that will be released in the next few months.

Usually relegated to a technology or even business section of newspapers, it was nice to see games being given at least some credibility as an entertainment media form. I never liked games being in the late lamented “Circuits” section; it assumed games were accessories to hardware.

Yes, it was a brief list with all the usual suspects and no real surprises. Very mainstream tastes. A full page, though, with some fairly good descriptions of what the games are about.

This is a small victory for the normalcy of gaming. It’s not as controversial as yet another story on the value of gaming, or as navel gazing as a story on who gamers are as a subculture. Games are simply regarded as yet another source of popular entertainment with some big titles coming out this season. When the story of games and the media is written 25 years from now, this sort of minor step will be missed. But I appreciate it.

Granted, almost every online gaming forum is dominated by men – the ratio is greater than 9:1 on most. And granted that this online presence is not necessarily reflective of the actual gamer population. But where are the female wargamers and strategy gamers?

They have to be out there, right? Lots of people who write about gender and gaming say that there is no such thing as a “girl game” – only good games and bad games. The relative prominence of female gamers on Sims forums or RPG forums or adventure forums supposedly says nothing about genetic predisposition in gaming.

Yet, some wargaming/strategy gaming communities are so confidently male that they can have entire threads devoted to cheesecake photos. (Try that at Neverwinter Connections and see what happens.) I don’t condemn this in any way – the communties all seem to be men, they like pretty women, and no one seems to be put off by it. It does speak to a recognition that the strategy/wargaming world is a boy’s club.

I know one serious female strategy gamer through IRC. She’s not as heavy into wargames, but historical strategy games seem to be her bread and butter. And, I am assuming that all of those Korean gamers who still play Starcraft are not entirely male.

And it’s not like strategy games do much to offend female gamers. There is no real equivalent of the buxom lass in bikini chain mail, and the god game nature of most titles renders the gender of the protagonist moot. Well, Stainless Steel’s Cleopatra is ludicrously dressed. But you rarely see women up close in these games.

Military culture is very masculine – most military historians are male, too. I have found more female gamers interested in city building strategy games than RTS games, which either suggests a natural female bias to building over destruction or a socialization against resolving problems through conflict. But you find many more women willing to blow a guy’s head off in Counterstrike or smite a foozle with Melf’s Acid Arrow than to drop a load of blockbusters on Karakorum.

Theories, insights and female conquerors welcome in the comments.

Matt Gallant has already made the joke about rushing production, but the early launch for Civilization IV is great news. It means that I have to wait a few less weeks for a new gaming fix, and if my earlier hands-on time with Civ IV means anything, I may not need another game for a while.

The pre-order special includes a tech tree map and a spiral bound manual for no extra cost – further encouragement for me to get my money down early once the retailers get up to speed on this offer. I think every game should come with a spiral manual, and tech trees where necessary. Better interfaces and in game help are increasingly making both manuals and fold out guides unnecessary, but I still like them. I’m a little old-fashioned that way.

This recent article at Joystiq raises the problem of reviewing multiplayer games. Vladimir Cole says that the disparity between the critical opinion of Starcraft, among other games, was significantly different from the user opinion, largely because reviewers couldn’t predict how enthusiastically the multiplayer universe would respond to it. “Starcraft earned an 88 rating on Metacritic but a 9.5 rating from users,” Cole writes.

His numbers are a little misleading. If you use Gamerankings, the disparity is reversed – 93 per cent from critics, but only 88 from users. Computer Games Magazine, Computer Gaming World, Gamespot, PC Gamer and GamePro all gave it scores of ninety or higher, so any “multiplayer gap” is completely illusory in this situation.

This arguable piece of evidence shouldn’t obscure Cole’s basic point – how can you review a game in multiplayer if there is no multiplayer community? I doubt that it is “systematic”, whatever he means by that, but it is an issue.

Take my early impressions of Age of Empires III based on the demo. Some people are looking at it and saying that they can see evidence of how great this game is going to be in MP. Based on what, I’m not sure. I couldn’t make that leap. And considering how important the MP community is to the continuing sales success of Age of Kings, this is something that any review of the final game will have to consider.

I’ve only reviewed multiplayer games after the release date, so it’s not too hard to see if MP gamers are rallying around a title. But the failure of online gamers to take a game to heart is not the same as the game being bad. You can probably accept that a very popular multiplayer game is a good multiplayer game, but the inverse is not true. Age of Mythology is an amazing game in all respects, but is a relative failure in the multiplayer community, especially when compared to its predecessors.

So what’s a reviewer to do when there is not a large virtual community to get beaten repeatedly in? I’ve sometimes been fortunate to find colleagues and friends who were early adopters of a title, so I play against them. They can help point out things that they are experiencing, and there is generally time to debrief afterwards. We don’t all have great LAN setups to put a game through its paces, and I would argue that my encounters with friends and colleagues is more similar to the average gaming experience.

The single player experience is still the core of PC gaming. Most people who’ve bought Age of Empires never play multiplayer for long, and many of the best selling games have no multiplayer component at all. Sims and Grand Theft Auto’s success came in a world of growing broadband penetration and the growth of multiplayer. The 4 million World of Warcraft subscribers and increase in MP on consoles means that the tide is probably turning.

When that finally happens, reviewers may have to reorganize their thinking.

Is that all there is?

The Age of Empires III demo was released yesterday, and I gave it a thorough play through. Three or four skirmish missions, the campaign scenarios, the “deck-building”. And through it all, I was only mildly amused.

Ensemble’s goal to make the best looking RTS ever seems to have been relaxed to “a RTS a little prettier than Empire Earth II. The water effects are nice, and even on my marginal video card, the game looked a lot more photorealistic than Age of Empires II. But there is more to art design than photo-realism. I liked the ships in the Cossacks series better.

The demo didn’t give me any sense that I was settling a new world, and the deck-building mini-game was not very interesting; I assume that it is better suited to multi-player. The combat and resource gathering is nothing that I haven’t seen before, and I got a general feeling that Ensemble is resting on its gameplay laurels while making things prettier. Even the much ballyhooed Home City concept turned out to be little more than a time-release supply depot.

Part of the disappointment is rooted in my expectations of Ensemble. They are still the kings of RTS, and have made three amazing games in a row. All of the previous Age games played differently and had major innovations from one to the next. The demo shows me little evidence of this.

Compare this to the demo of Rise of Nations a few years ago. That demo infused me with a zeal and excitement that made the first title from Big Huge Games rocket up my gift list. Though I will still pick up Age of Empires III, it’s no longer the urgent matter it once was.

The Inquirer says that Paradox’s version of the boardgame classic Diplomacy will be released in less a month – October 4.

This is great news for strategy gamers like me who eagerly await each new Paradox game, from the great (like Europa Universalis) to the near-great (like Crusader Kings) to the passable (like Victoria). We’ll leave aside the dregs of the company (like Two Thrones).

Diplomacy poses a great challenge for the computer game developer. The board game depends entirely on player interaction. There are no dice, no spinners, no cards. Everything relies on making deals, carrying them out and knowing when to stab an ally in the back. To win, you have expand without provoking a counter-reaction from everyone else. Stalemates are common.

Designing an AI that can approximate human behavior is such an absurd ideal that to even try invites ridicule. No strategy game has ever created a truly dynamic diplomatic AI that can assess its position and its interests reliably from one situation to the next. Paradox plans to ship a variety of AIs with Diplomacy in order to give the player a greater number of player types to wage war against.

There have two other Diplomacy games for the PC and both were failures. Translating Diplomacy to the electronic world may be impossible – especially beyond the multiplayer world. People play Diplomacy over email all the time, so any decent MP interface can make it work online. Yes, Europa Universalis was originally a board game, but it was a marginal one at best. It was long, complicated and mostly unknown so Paradox could mess it up a little in the interests of the computer gaming community. Diplomacy is a classic; to mess with its rules in order to make it a more playable computer game is a great risk.

We should see the results soon.