Super Nerd Sundays Presents: The Way We Play!

Of late I’ve had some technical difficulties. It’s only fair to let you know that the only reason there isn’t an essay coming up about Red Faction: Guerilla, a game I’ve been struggling to keep from purchasing on the console for some time now is that my gaming PC, which has been bricking and unbricking itself for almost two months now, finally shit the big one and lost its motherboard. I’m waiting for the good people at ASUS to send me a replacement board right now, but in the mean time I’m playing console games and seeing what does and doesn’t run on my old media machine, which has spent an embarrassingly large amount of time gathering dust.

But I’ve had some issues on that PC now as well, with Nvidia’s drivers moving in and out of fuckery with no apparent design or pattern. And, at the risk of sounding spoiled by my glorious, hand crafted machine, my old PC is a lot slower and playing on it is a bit of a chore. Sure, I still like the games I play, but loading them takes minutes and I’m horrified to even try running Far Cry 2 on this machine. But this recent PC gaming experience has made me think about something that can delay, if not replace, the inevitable Red Faction essay to come: the way we play games.

Back in the 90s, when I was just starting to realize how awesome games were, the PC wasn’t that great a platform from a young person’s perspective. It was clumsy and the graphics were meh at best. Why play on a PC you had to share with your dad, after all, when you could rock out on an NES or a Genesis? And once the SNES entered my household, forget about it.

Back then consoles were rock solid machines that did one thing and one thing only: play games. But as I grew older the strength and complexity of the PC’s library of titles drew me in. Games like The Secret of Monkey Island, X-Wing, Dark Forces and Mechwarrior 2 all necessitated beefing up that 486 with an entire 16 megs of RAM. Sure, consoles had great titles too. I’d be lying if I didn’t say that most of my modern gaming life has been spent finding close analogs to Shining Force and Chrono Trigger. But the PC was the place to be for a hardcore nerd brought up on science fiction film and irreverent comedy. Unfortunately, playing on the PC brought with it a new set of problems.

PC gaming has always been about reaching the proper equilibrium of technology, drivers and settings so that you can get the relevant games to look and run just right. It’s a sort of meta-game unto itself, one I find myself fighting tooth and nail now. Oddly enough, however, it’s an affliction which seems to strike primarily at the hardest of the hard-line enthusiasts, and it doesn’t really take a break. I’ve been grappling with my computers for as long as I can remember to get it to run games. I had to install a modem to play UO, an early 3d accelerator to get Everquest to run, and had to purchase a whole new computer to play Warcraft 3.

These aren’t problems afflicting the moms playing Peggle or the kids using their computers for word processing. They’re problems facing gamers, almost exclusively, who are perpetually pressed into an arms race against the entertainment medium they love. How, then, do these people come to be if our lives are so fraught with trouble? If our means of escaping from daily tedium asks so much of us why do we ever get in the habit of relying on them?

For me personally it came from having a computer in the house. My father went on sabbatical early in my life and I found myself in Cape Town, South Africa without my Sega or NES. The only things that even remotely resembled those wonderful devices were the choose your own adventure books I consumed at an alarming pace and the bleeding edge 486 sitting in our spider infested attic.

That South Africa is not a nerd-friendly country certainly helped with this, but a large part of it was that there were remarkable stories being told on my home computer without my parent’s express consent. They could use this machine for business or communication or whatever but I’d be there frittering away hours with Oregon Trail, Monkey Island and some math submarine game I’ve long since forgotten the title of. I don’t mean to imply that my interest was piqued because I perceived gaming as something illicit, just that my parents already had the computer there and that it was much easier to sell them on the (at the time) $20 games than it was to talk them into buying a $150 console. It was, for me, all about access.

And after experiencing the amazing quality of PC games circa 1991, with their more mature mindset and focus on storytelling and character over the majority of concurrent console titles, it was tough to go back. Sure, Chrono Trigger could get me to sit in front of my TV for an entire weekend, drawing my attention so firmly that I skipped meals, but it was the exception which proved the rule. There’s no way I’d hop around as Sonic when I could jump jet my Marauder IIC on top of a Dire Wolf assault mech for a death-from-above kill. And as fun as Donkey Kong Country and its sequels were, they couldn’t hold a candle to the humor offered up by Monkey Island and Full Throttle, the latter of which wasn’t even that funny.

I still kept my consoles around, but they lost a lot of their cache through their competition. I had to choose between a Playstation 2 and a Dreamcast, but I never had to worry about my parents buying a current generation PC so they could run the latest version of Netscape Navigator. The PC was always there.

Perhaps that’s less true now that consoles are trying to become home entertainment centers. An X-Box 360 can largely eliminate the chore of driving to a store to rent movies and, by the way, it play games. And Playstation Home seeks to deprive your children of even the hint of normal social interaction by forcing them into a twisted digital ghetto where they’re can contend with the worst members of society in order to experience such invigorating activities as bowling and waiting in line. What a brave new world Sony has offered us!

I should also emphasize that consoles bred my enthusiasm for gaming at an early age. The first time I played Shining Force I knew I was a lost cause, and A Link to the Past occupied my thoughts for huge swaths of adolescence. But when I started to self-identify as a gamer it was through the PC. I played shooters and MMOs and strategy games, games which couldn’t exist on consoles. Sure, consoles were great for fighters or RPGs, but why would I clumsily wander around the levels of Doom on an N64 when I could do it with better graphics and smoother controls on my PC? Why buy a platform specific modem attachment when I could use a cable modem which my parents were easily sold upon. They could see as well as I could that faster access to the internet could only be a good thing, but there’s no way I could have convinced them of the merits of hooking my Genesis up to a phone line and nerding out.

It’s this sort of platform utility which makes me ignore statements about the PC’s upcoming demise. The PC has been an enduring platform for videogames longer than anything else out there. Even if we’re looking at generations of consoles not a one can match up, although Nintendo does come very close. And the PC endures because it is a versatile device that people use for other things. It’s already in their home, they already have to upgrade and update it in order to take advantage of software (although certainly less so now than when I was coming of age). Why not use it to play games?

As the console market grows people seem to be convinced that the market for PC gamers has to shrink to accommodate it, especially in a recession. But as time goes on we see that that simply isn’t true. PC gaming is shifting and refining the things it does best while consoles grow and try to branch into new kinds of play. The TPS-RPG, for example, is a genre dear to my heart which could only emerge from console gaming history. But this, like most games, ends up on the PC because designers and publishers know that it’s going to be worth the cost of a port.

I was in a discussion on the Quarter to Three forums some time ago about this very subject and indie darling Jonathan Blow weighed in on the matter. Naturally I’m inclined to give his opinion more weight than my own, but when he talked about sales of Braid on the PC making up only a tenth of the total sales for the game something didn’t gel for me. Not the numbers, certainly. Braid is a game I would never consider playing on the PC. Platformers are best with a controller in hand, everyone and their NES knows that.

But if Braid sold so poorly, and if it was such a telegraphed outcome, why did they put it out on PC in the first place? Exclusively developed side scrolling platformers for the PC perform incredibly poorly, even when they build off of esteemed properties like Half Life. So why waste your resources as an indie developer making a port you knew fewer people would see?

Perhaps because that ten percent remains a significant portion, enough to recoup the cost of their inclusion. And perhaps because that ten percent represents an audience outside of or tangential to the core gaming audience, people who can justify their tricked out computer but can’t buy a console. Perhaps Braid reached an audience on the PC who never would’ve seen it on the X-Box, hidden behind the veil of Live’s store.

While I’m not foolhardy enough to close this piece by claiming that the PC is a platform for everyone I do want to point out that it’s an accessible platform. It’s diverse, durable, and useful for things other than playing video games, a key selling point for anyone above or below a certain age who still has to contend with a strong authority figure a la parents or a significant other. So I’ll put it this way: it’s a gateway platform. It’s socially acceptable to have a computer in your house and to have it hooked up to the internet. It might even have some games on the desktop. Hey, what’s that one with the kid with goggles all about? Psychonauts? A psychic summer camp? Torching squirrels and saving brains? Seriously? Let’s fire that mother fucker up.