The Boy Who Chased Rome

This morning, I wasn’t in the mood to write. Instead, I found myself spelunking through an old external drive, hunting for something specific: some old writings from nearly 25 years ago, little fragments of who I used to be.

And then, a folder titled Arena caught my eye. Teenage-me thought calling it “Games” lacked sufficient gravitas. I opened it, and there it was: my collection of favorite games — Age of Empires.

In a flash, I was back there again. I remembered my first encounter with The Rise of Rome, its demo tucked into an issue of Chip magazine¹, the monthly bible for computer geeks like me in the late nineties.

The demo was a hard nut to crack. There was no Save option. Quit, and you had to restart from the beginning. It featured the First Punic War campaign: three missions, Carthage against Rome.

I spent hours wrestling with that campaign in a single stretch. It was then, though I didn’t have the language for it, that I stumbled into a flow state. I didn’t know the term yet, but I knew the feeling.

I can still feel the urgency, the way my pulse quickened as though history itself depended on me.² The music wasn’t just background; it was the pulse of the game³, the rhythm that carried me forward.⁴

We all experience flow in different parts of our lives: that intense focus when we’re deep in a piece of work, the way pages turn themselves late at night, or the quiet, almost automatic shifts of gears on a long drive with music and conversation in the background.

Today, decades later, I slipped back into the game and into that same deep focus, where time stretches and the world shrinks to the size of a screen.

When I finally closed the game, I wondered if we can step into flow at will. Could we slip into that blessed state as easily as opening an application? I doubt it. Most days, we live in the noise, catching only glimpses of that quiet current.

So I returned to the distractions of daily life, grateful for a few hours when time disappeared, when I was that boy again trying to save Carthage one more time.

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