From the moment I'm introduced to Ensemble Studios' Bruce Shelley, I can tell my bumbling, "Is that pinata gay?" style of gaming journalism just isn't going to fly. A gruff but pleasant bear of a man, he carries upon his broad shoulders the impenetrable gravitas of a Kentucky tobacconist, or a man who feels very passionately about bottle caps, or any other aficionado of a passion the appeal of which completely eludes me.

In this case, that passion is RTS games. The game he's about to show me in Leipzig? Age of Empires 3: The Warchiefs, the upcoming expansion pack to the critically-acclaimed but, by me, completely ignored RTS title Age of Empires 3. I don't know anything about Warchiefs. And I don't really know anything about the Age of Empires series except that I can't stand the entire genre.

"I don't really know how familiar you are with my games," Shelley says to me as he loads up The Warchiefs on his laptop.

"Um...." I stall, looking to be politic. "Just a little, really. I'm not a big RTS gamer. Frankly, I find them unplayable."

The room goes quiet. Shelley just stares at me, his face an emotionless pall. Michael Wolf, Microsoft's Games for Windows dude, begins to visibly twitch in social discomfort. Panicking, I ramble on:

"I mean, the flesh is willing. God it's willing! But the jelly of the mind is weak, Bruce. it's so weak..." I shake my head back and forth while googling my eyes around, to emphasize the fact that, as a fetus, my capacity for RTS appreciation was permanently crippled by the high vodka proof of the fluid in my mother's amniotic sack.

"I often think that I would really love the genre if someone... Logitech maybe... came out with some sort of cyberoptic cable that I could just insert into the jelly of my eye and that would directly interface with my brain. Because that's the only way I'm ever going to be able to play one of these games, Bruce. With current technology, it's just a constant exercise in fighting the interface for me."

The silence is interrupted only by the sound of my arrhythmic heart pounding in nervousness through my sunken chest. Did I really just start-off a one-on-one session with one of RTS gaming's design gods that I hated his games? After he'd rushed back from an autograph session to pander to me, a mere doofus? My bladder surges in nervousness.

Finally, Shelley emits a ponderous sigh.

"Well, you know, we try to make our games keeping guys like you in mind," Bruce kindly says. "In our single player games, you can pause anytime to get your bearings and issue orders. A lot of guys didn't want that feature at Ensemble, but I made them put it in. So it's almost turn-based. We try to make them as accessible as possible to as many players as possible."

Silence again. I have no idea what to say. Everyone in the room is conscious of the fact that I'm an idiot. I am relieved when a stern looking German girl in a Microsoft t-shirt comes into the room; she sternly commands me to have a Diet Coke.

"I don't want a Diet Coke," I respond.

She seems outraged. "What? You don't want a Diet Coke? But you're American!" It's as if I just told her I didn't breathe oxygen.

"Irish, actually. A regular Coke would be fine."

The fury of her eyes clears to a Euro-conspiriatorial glimmer. "Ah, yes! That explains it!" she says, gives the rest of the room a deeply distrustful look, then wanders out of the room to get me a Coke.

(Later on, this same dollsome serving wench will confess to me over a steam tray of goulash that "These Americans will order an entire hog for lunch, but then wash it down only with a Diet Coke." The food service at Microsoft's GC06 booth is apparently an incredible cultural conflict for all involved; Microsoft's Michael Wolf will later admit to me that for the first few days of the conference, the German hostesses who had been hired to serve them completely denied access to any Americans attempting to enter the booth's kitchen, and that these same Germans' incessant efforts to bring Diet Cokes to the Americans in the various show rooms was a mysterious recent development about which all Microsoft employees had become deeply suspicious.)

"Anyway, let's show you Warchiefs..." Shelley continues. He boots up the program: I see an opening screen with some attractive polygonal Indians dancing around a fire. There's also some teepees. I write "teepees" down in my notebook.

"Okay, so in this expansion, there's three new Native-American tribes you can play as. You can play as the Iroquois, the Sioux, and the Aztecs... they are good at economics."

"What was the middle one again?" I ask.

"The Sioux."

"How do you spell that?"

"Ess. Eye. Oh. You. Ex. They're very famous," Shelley explains.

I immediately feel like an idiot. "Ohhhh... the Sioux," I say weakly. "You know what it is? It's one of those words I'm always reading but never hear pronounced." Like phallus, I think, but I can't use that example, because I don't know how to pronounce it.

Shelley kindly passes over the non-sequitur, while I write Sioux down in my notebook, put a few exclamation points next to it, then triple underline it. I fumble in my mind for a question to ask that does not betray me as a gibbering fool. Finally, I happen upon one.

"Let me ask you a question. Obviously, when you're dealing with a game in which you take actual races and cultures than then start giving them character traits, bonuses and weaknesses, the spectre of political correctness is going to raise its head. How do you work around that?"

Shelley goes contemplative, "Well, Microsoft has a team that makes sure that nothing we do is going to offend anyone. But we sometimes run into problems. For example, in one of our games, we had the China Sea. Except the Koreans don't like that, so we had to call it the East Sea. But for the Japanese, it's the Sea of Japan. So for each of these countries, we had to have a different localization."

I find this aspect of game design absolutely fascinating, and want to ask him follow-up questions like So would you be prevented from making, say, the Jews in a game good with economics by Microsoft's sensitivity department? but Shelley is already fiddling around with stuff on screen. I decide I should pay better attention.

But my eyes immediately glaze over. The game is absolutely beautiful looking, full of neat little flourishes and technologies, but none of that can change the fact that I am watching someone play a game which, by its very genre, I will never be able to enjoy.

The test map is set in a beautiful, impressionistic painted desert, glowing with violet and peach hues. Shelley starts showing me cool things, one following another in rapid staccato succession. Under the watchful eyes of any old RTS hand, or someone with a genuine enthusiasm for the Age of Empires series, these moments would be reacted to with deeply rooted observational understanding, peals of delight. But to me? My only response is pedestrian word flatulence.

Bruce Shelley shows me...

Warchief's Treaty Mode, in which the players agree for the first twenty minutes of a multiplayer match to be a time of peace, where warring on the other side is not possible. My earnest response: "That seems useful!"

How the Indians Can Get Ninja Units. "The Native Americans had ninjas? Huh."

A really cool Civil War era ironclad boat. "My great great grandpa helped build one of those!"

The petards, which are bomb carrying demo men. "Hoisted, if you will!" Everyone looks embarrassed.

The new saloon structure, where a player can recruit mercenaries, such as pirates. "And zombies, I hope!"

The European Civs' new 'Revolution' option, which turns all citizens into militia but does not allow them to gather resources anymore. "Didn't that happen in the Revolutionary War?"

A Native American War Chief, which is sort of a hero unit that lends bonuses to all units around it. While Shelley is playing with it, it gets shot and lies writhing on the ground. Shelley tells me that the cry it makes literally translates to, "Every moment I live is agony!" "Wow! Just like Sartre!"

And so it goes. After awhile, Shelley pretty much forgets that I'm even in the room, which is a big relief. I start twiddling my thumbs and watching him play, occasionally writing down observations of importance in my notebook. "Big blue thing" one such note informs me. "Europeans have Native American embassy as a building," another more helpfully describes.

But I'm not into it. And at this point, Shelley isn't even pretending to be demonstrating the game to me — he's just sitting there, a big smile beaming on his face, playing the game he's created with genuine fondness.

For a while, I sit there in his presence, honestly charmed. That one man can have such childlike passion for his own games fills me with the feeling that all is right in the world.

But after awhile, I begin to twitch, grow uncomfortable. Exactly how long am I supposed to sit here, watching him play his game? I've already been there forty minutes, yet he shows no sign of calling an end to the session, or excusing himself for another interview. Am I supposed to sit there for forty minutes? Fifty? An hour? Will I simply wither away, my only moisture supplied by an incessant German-supplied IV drip of Diet Coke? What is the expectation here? I'm not a games journalist. I'm just a fucking blogger. Do these sessions just roll on interminably until one or the other of you passes out? Bruce! For the love of god! STOP PLAYING YOUR GAME ALREADY!

"Ummmmm..." I eventually hazard. "Looks great! But I think I've seen enough." For a brief second, I worry that he might burst into tears. But Shelley sighs, apparently in relief: it's what he's been waiting for since the second I walked in the door.

"Oh, okay! Great! Well, thanks for stopping by!" And with that, he folds my tiny hand into his own gigantic mitt, like a bear cradling a fragile little bird.

But if you like RTSes, which I don't, Age of Empires 3: The Warchiefs looks totally great. Florian Eckhardt