The Serious Game: Pondering PC gaming
The Serious Game: Pondering PC gaming
By [pic]Dean Takahashi
Red Herring
October 31, 2001
As the hype over video game consoles builds, with Microsoft (Nasdaq: MSFT) and Nintendo launching their long-awaited Xbox and GameCube machines, respectively, in November, I think now is a good time to say that PC games aren't dead.
I can say that confidently because I've been playing Civilization III nonstop on my personal computer for weeks. Developed by Sid Meier's troupe of game designers at Firaxis Games and published by Infogrames (Nasdaq: IFGM), Civ3 is enough to restore faith in the PC.
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Sure, these civilization simulation games can be boring. They also go on forever. It took me 124 years to fight a war against another civilization before I could grind them into the dust. And it felt like 124 years compared to pushing buttons on a console.
But it can also be fun to play games that take a long, long, long time to finish. You can learn things like why it's not such a good idea to start a war that's going to last 124 years. (In Civ3, your population becomes increasingly restless, requiring combinations of martial law crackdowns and entertainment.) You can also compete on scientific or cultural fronts, and pretty much call it quits whenever things become too peaceful.
DESKTOP INNOVATION
For sure, the top talent in game development is finite, and the promise of riches on the consoles has lured many game developers away from the PC. But much of the innovation in gaming today still happens on the PC.
If you don't trust my word, listen to John Carmack, chief programmer at Id Software, which is making the next game in the Doom series for the PC. "The death of the PC has always been exaggerated," he says. "People have been saying that ever since they introduced the PlayStation in 1994."
Online gaming, for example, is still mostly a PC-based activity. And many of the most creative titles were born on the PC: The Sims, a human family life simulator that has sold more than 4 million units; Black & White, in which players act as gods; StarCraft, a fast-action science fiction game; and Shogun: Total War, which lets players fight it out in feudal Japan in lavish 3D scenes.
OK, it's debatable that any first-person shooter since the original Doom can actually be called innovative. But Doom 3 will drive graphics so far that it could very well bring an Xbox to its knees and push next year's PC graphics to run at the optimal speed. The next Doom will make it to the consoles. So will online games, as consoles become connected like computers.
STRATEGY FOR STRATEGY
The one breed of PC games that nobody expects to migrate to the consoles are those focused on strategy, which together with role-playing games account for one-fifth of all game sales, according to the Interactive Digital Software Association. The strategy camp can be divided into real-time and turn-based games.
Real-time strategy games are fast-paced, played as the clock ticks; opponents move simultaneously. Microsoft has wisely chosen not to move its Age of Empires real-time strategy game to the Xbox game console. The newest version, Age of Mythology, will be targeted to the PC. There are so many things happening on the screen in these games that it makes sense to play them up close with a mouse and keyboard. The resolution on TV sets has historically been too poor to play such fine-grained games.
The other breed of strategy games is turn-based, where players take one turn at a time, as in chess. Turn-based games, like Civ3, are where you can do your best thinking. You can take all day to consider the consequences of one move.
PC gamers tend to be older and more cerebral -- that is, fuddy-duddies like myself -- and they are not likely to move to the consoles unless the developers who make their favorites migrate there first. Yet even if strategy games stick with the PC, that doesn't mean the PC isn't in jeopardy as a viable game platform. PC games still crash too much, even with the beta version of Windows XP. If we've learned anything from strategy games like Civ3, it's that the greatest enemy often comes from within.
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