Last week I dropped the bomb that video games are a novelty item and then discussed the video game crash of 1983. I also promised that I was going to apply my thesis to MMORPGs this week. Well.... I lied....
We still have a little ways to go on this journey. I had originally intended for this to be in three parts, but that number has multiplied into five. This week I'm going to talk about PC games, next week I'm going to talk about MMORPGs, the week after that I'm going to discuss those anomalies that transcend novelty, and then I'm going to wrap it all up with some predictions. Whew! That's a lot more work that I had in mind when I started this. Anyway, on to the PC games!
When we last left off, PC gaming as we know it didn't really exist yet. The aforementioned crash happened long before the PC and Mac took over the home computer market. In fact, there were more home computer brands than I care to list right this moment. Suffice it to say that PC gaming didn't really start until the early '90s. Since I was a “hardcore” PC gamer for much of that decade, I'm going to relate this section through the filter of my own experiences.
I bought my first PC at Radio Shack in 1994. It was a 486DX 33MHZ with 16 Megs of RAM and a 256 Meg hard drive. It had no CD drive or sound card. I bought it with the excuse that it was going to help me with college. To drive home the fact that this was an excuse, I flunked out of college that same year. But damn there was some good gaming to be had during that period of unemployment and $400 a month checks from my GI Bill.
Between 1994 and 1996, I upgraded that system constantly. Fist I installed a sound card and CD drive. Then I bought more memory. Then I bought an overdrive chip that made it function like a 75MHZ Pentium. Then I bought an external 14.4 modem that later got swapped for an internal 28.8. I played Doom, Master of Magic, Civ2, Warcraft, Duke Nukem, Quake, Mechwarrior 2, etc. and ad nauseum. I used programs to play games online such as Mplayer, Kali, and TEN. At one point, God help me, I subscribed to AOL just so I could play Harpoon Online. It's funny how you can be barely employed and still afford all this stuff when you live in your parents attic....
By 1997 it was time to move out of the house and get a new computer. With a new full-time job, that paid slightly more than minimum wage, I was able to rent an efficiency apartment and build a completely new computer from off the shelf parts that I ordered through a local computer repair shop. It really wasn't much of a life. I worked 60 hours a week much of the time only to come home to a single room furnished with a futon, bookshelf and a cheap computer desk complimented by a plastic lawn chair. For the first year, I didn't even have a TV. I didn't really need a TV though, I HAD THE INTERNET!! In all of it's 56K dial-up glory. With an ammo crate full of games and access to infinite porn, what more do you possibly need? I should also mention that I eventually owned a Playstation ($100 from a pawnshop) and a Nintendo 64 ($80 also from a pawnshop). Between 1997 and 2000, I bought so many games that the wall-to-wall bookshelf above my bed (futon) was stuffed with PSX and computer games. Most of which, I never completed.
You also shouldn't think for even a second that I stopped upgrading. In those three years I overhauled my machine twice and went through about four graphics cards. Yeah, I was working a lot of overtime back then. I vaguely remember one day (I worked 3rd shift) where I had just gotten off a 72 hour week and the landlord came over because I was behind about three months on my rent. I just handed him a gangsta roll of twenties to cover it and had him write me out a receipt. It was a crazy time in my life, and looking back I realize that I was working just to play games. I had no other life. Work, go home, play games, sleep, wake up and do it all over again. It's hard to really track the series of games and upgrades since I just wasn't in any physical or emotional shape to pay much attention. It all must have gotten to me though since I took off one weekend at random and met the woman that I would later marry. That last bit changed quite a bit of my gaming life.
At this point I want to discuss just how it got so out of hand. I decided to step up to PC gaming because I was tired of games that were marketed to ten year olds. At the time, games like Under a Killing Moon and Civ2 offered themes and thoughtful play that just wasn't meant to appeal to anyone under the age of 19. I had also always been fascinated by military flight simulators and the PC had those in droves back in '95. Let's also not forget that Doom had just come out the year before and there was nothing like it to be found on the Genesis or SNES. So it had the novelty of “mature” content. Although most of the time the “mature” label meant that it had titties and bloodspray, not that it dealt with subjects and references that kids wouldn't get or couldn't enjoy. It's kind of the difference between Fight Club and Hollywood Chainsaw Hookers. Both were violent, sexual and surreal, but a 12 year old could understand and enjoy HCH while being confused and frustrated by Fight Club.
Another Novelty that hooked me was the graphics. PCs have always been at least one generation ahead of consoles in the graphics department and I'm no more immune to it than anyone else. The shiny factor was the biggest draw to it. Yeah, my first PC cost me $1000 and the second one came close to $700, with subsequent upgrades clocking in at about $500 year, but it seemed worth it just to keep within the specification of the newer PC games coming to market. Speaking of the PC game market, it was larger than it is today by an order of magnitude. If you get worked up over one or two PC games coming out next year, imagine being that worked up over four or five titles a month! Every six months the new graphics cards came out and every month a new game was announced that took advantage of the rumored features of those new cards. I don't think we'll ever see another time like that in PC gaming.... And that's kind of sad...
Back on track and still looking back, the largest amount of my free time was spent playing FPS and RTS games online. The online multiplayer thing was another big, big novelty. While I could play Street Fighter or Tekken against another person in my living room, the PC allowed me to play against 8 to 32 other people at all hours of the day!! Counter-Strike, Team Fortress Classic, Rainbow Six, Starcraft, Red Alert, Starsiege: Tribes, I played all of those games religiously. I found a sense of achievement and self worth in being good at something. More to the point, I found validation in being better than someone else. I'll admit that's really, really sick, but I worked endless hours doing manual labor for shit pay. You take your ego boosts where ever you can find them in that situation. Eventually voice chat would come along and ruin this for me. Hearing the cracking adolescent voices issuing out of TeamSpeak has a tendency to reduce your victory to the level of beating a toddler at a game of Tic-Tac-Toe. There were other factors that made online play less than desirable, but I wouldn't notice those until a little bit later.
Related to the online gaming was the novelty of exclusive genres. FPS, RTS, and MMORPGs were all exclusive to the PC and couldn't really be done anywhere else. Even single player RPGs felt entirely different from their console counterparts. The problem here is that the market became flooded with “me too” games in these genres. Sin, Dark Reign, Kingpin and Warzone 2100 are just a few examples of games that did the bare minimum to be included in their respective genres but were unremarkable in every other way. At the height of the RTS genre, there were around 35 titles on the shelves and most of them looked and felt like Starcraft. I don't even want to consider the number of FPS games that were out at that same time. Buried under mountains of crap titles, it became very easy to get burned out. The result was players buying the one or two standout games in their preferred genre and then just playing whatever mods that were available.
And that leads us into the novelty of modding games. The PC let you try your hand at being a real-life game developer! While there were, and still are, thousands of players that produced mods of varying quality, most gamers only had enough discipline and interest to make one or two maps and call it a day. While I did dabble in modding, I never attempted to make a total conversion or any scripting that would take me longer than an afternoon or so. I still kind of wish I hadn't trashed my UT Triple-M mod (Triple-M stood for Midget Madness Mod). There was something to be said about fighting off hordes of makeshift midgets armed with chainsaws. Anyway, this phenomenon allowed me to play UT, Half-Life, and all the Quake games for several years without ever needing to buy another FPS. Of course, I still bought other FPS games.... I just didn't need to and didn't care that I didn't need to. As a side note, RTS games didn't get modded that much. Aside from Total Annihilation and Warcraft 3, I can't really think of any RTS games that got major overhauls from the community. At any rate, mods kept me glued to my desk chair long after I had completed the single player game and gotten bored with the online play. Even that wears off though. You eventually realize that you're just playing the same game with a different skin.
And that's really it as far as PC gaming “hooks” go. Those five things are what kept me going strong in PC gaming for just a little over five years. All good things come to an end though, and by 2000 I had experienced all that the PC had to offer. It was all just beginning to get stale. I think that 2000 was a turning point for the entire game industry. The death of ideas was becoming readily apparent and many other PC gamers were beginning to notice that next quarter's games were quite a bit like last quarter's games only prettier. FPS games were also moving onto consoles, with Quake 2 appearing on the PSOne and both Quake 3 and Unreal Tournament getting online enabled ports to the Dreamcast. Hell, even Starcraft was being ported to the N64!! The next generation of consoles was set to deliver the exact same things as the PC and suddenly spending $500+ every year just to play the same tired genres just didn't seem worth it. I didn't really get it yet, but something was about to happen that would force me to accept this.
That something was being laid off from a job that I had held for three years. At the beginning of 2000, I was laid off and was unable to find work for six whole months. When I finally found another job, it paid less and provided less hours than I needed considering that had about six months of back rent due. My land lord didn't know I was unemployed and just figured I'd pay in full when I got around to it. Three months later I would get fired from that job (telemarketing) when I got sarcastic with one of our ever unwilling “customers.” Not long after that, I was evicted. Faced with low funds and forced to move, my “hardcore” days were officially over.
It wasn't all bad though. I made some friends at my new job and discovered life away from the computer. One of the closest friends I had at the time lived with his mom in a household of five where he was the only one that worked. He got sick and was terminated before me, so eventually no one in his household worked. It was strangely surreal how I adjusted to finding entertainment without dropping $50 bucks a week on games. While I was a telemarketer, I picked up a Dreamcast on the cheap ($100) and I still play the damn thing. I would go over to Grevan's house and we would watch movies, play N64 games like Gauntlet or Mario Tennis, sing welfare carols, and just generally hang out and bullshit. This made me see through several myths about gaming that I otherwise wouldn't have recognized. In summary:
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Gameplay first, Graphics second – And I don't just mean technical achievement in graphics either. I played Mario Tennis, Powerstone, Chu Chu Rocket, etc. because they were good games. Most “hardcore” players won't touch these games because of the presentation. Their loss really.....
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Storyline gets in the way of the game – The best games that I played during this time had practically no storyline at all. Why? Because they were games and not interactive movies. Because they were games, they were also mostly multiplayer affairs as well.
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Online gaming is over-rated – Playing Offline over a LAN or on a console with people you know is considerably more fun than playing online. Why? No dropped games. No cheating (you can see what the other player is doing at all times), Playful shit talk rather than hateful insults. NO LAG!! Online play is more of a last resort that you take when you there isn't anyone around to play with and the bots bore you on their hardest levels. I think that Danni Bunten said it best: “No one ever said on their deathbed, Gee, I wish I had spent more time alone with my computer.”
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Games are a past-time not a lifestyle – All things in moderation. Spending time doing other things makes the games that I play that much more interesting. The best games don't demand endless hours of your life, they give you entertainment in what ever time you decide to spend with them. Terms like “hardcore” and “gamer” are just marketing tools to make you spend your hard earned lifeblood on something that should really just take a backseat to the business of living.
The major problems with the industry actually started on PC games that emphasized the very things that detract, overshadow, or just don't add anything to the gaming experience. Because of this, the driving force behind the industry, novelty, is growing stale and many of the “hardcore” and “elite” are losing interest.... Fast!
Next week I'll discuss MMORPGs and why they may be the key to something bigger but are still held back by the single-player design mentality. Later days.
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