Why Game? 1 - TextFiles.com

So, where are we now?
Starcraft’s slickness and shininess have
kept it high on the sales charts for years after
its release. If you want to play it today, well, it’s
still on shelves, and it will run on any hardware
you throw at it – its code has been as meticu-
lously engineered as the “balance” in the game
itself. Starcraft has survived: a major overhaul
of the Windows operating system, hell-if-I-
know-how-many generations of new video
cards, and processors that are fifteen or twenty
times faster than what was top-of-the-line at its
release.
But even if you don’t want to play Star-
craft, you’re probably still playing Starcraft.
Computer games are about computer games,
now. Multiplayer, formerly a sort of interesting
afterthought, took off with Starcraft as players
spread across battle.net, Blizzard’s proprietary,
very well-made online game matchmaking ser-
vice (first used for Diablo.) Similar services have
cropped up like weeds. Billy is taking over the
world.
* * *
Before Starcraft, I had shareware.
My father had found a disc filled with it at
an office store. It contained “99 GAMES ON ONE
CD-ROM.” You used to see these discs every-
where, back then, because even though all the
games there were freely-available online, this
was 1998, and the Internet, while exploding,
hadn’t blown completely open yet. There were
still unwired people around. I was one of them.
I still have this CD-ROM. It is special to me,
absurd as it seems, because there was a lot of
inventive stuff there. I had Raptor, Commander
Keen, Cosmo’s Cosmic Adventure, Jazz Jackrab-
bit, One Must Fall 2097, Mystic Towers, Flying
Tigers, Zone 66, even Pong Kombat – all in all,
a complete education in early-nineties computer
games.
I get emotional when I think about some
of these games. Flying Tigers, for example, was
a simple vertical shooter, but it had soul. There
was feeling within its 500k or so total of data.
The music was low-quality MIDI written by a
guy who probably knew nothing about music
composition. Because of that, maybe, every
note sounded clear and perfect, like a distinct
and beautiful thing all on its own. Flying Tigers’
README file listed the actual home address of
its author. He said that if I liked the game, I
should send him a postcard. He liked postcards.
It was because of things like this that I once
spent entire afternoons going through README
files.
Something about the aura surrounding
those shareware games touched me. They
were all experimental to some extent, because
their authors were nearly all hobbyists noodling
around in their spare time. Their games were
their noodles, in digitized form, pressed onto
compact discs, delivered to me and converted in
my mind into pure inspiration.
It was because of those shareware games
that I taught myself QBASIC; I’d wanted to
create something and share it with people and
maybe get a postcard in the process. I may
have spent the majority of my free time for two
years of my life trying to write games this way.
I was never very good at it. Then, when my
family plugged into the Internet, I poked around
and found that the shareware community had
vanished years before; that my disc was really
a freshly-packaged fossil; that there were no
games like this around anymore at all.
They’d been usurped by Starcraft, the first
big summer blockbuster computer game. Star-
craft, the game you get when a dedicated-but-
dry group of people analyze older games and try
to incorporate the best of them into a massive
edifice of Game That Is A Game. Starcraft, what
happens when you take a set of ideas and pol-
ish them and polish them and polish them until
there’s nothing left but polish. Starcraft, a very
well made piece of trash that has redefined the
PC gaming landscape.
There are efforts to outdo Starcraft every-
where, now; to force players into the bond-
age-and-discipline thing, to oversimplify in silly
A Calculated Assault on Starcraft and All it Stands For: Why I am Not a Gamer 41