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Focus on Technology
Solitary pursuit or social activity? The technology may be getting
smarter and faster, but these days computer gaming is less about man against machine and more about man-to-man. Ceri Thomas plugs into a different world...
At the end of last year, the world’s first online massacre took place. A group of hackers gained access to the comput- ers that store character details for the multi-player online game Diablo II. And in late December they erased the game’s most powerful characters.
The furore was surprising. For a while gamers were uncertain whether Blizzard Entertainment, the company who run the Diablo
II system, would be
able to fix the prob-
lem. The internet
hummed with mes-
sages bewailing the
loss of valuable
hours spent build-
ing up the charac-
ters (Diablo II’s a
role-playing game
where characters
gain strength and
ability by success-
fully completing
tasks). Even news-
papers and radio
stations picked up
on the story.
Non-gamers
reading accounts of
what happened
must have smiled
quietly to them-
selves. A bunch of
nerds huddled over
computers for hours at a time (one story quoted a player who claimed to have spent 88 days playing his charac- ter). Serve them right, eh?
You can’t help thinking that those smiles must have slipped slightly as they got to the part of the story that dealt with the number of ‘nerds’ who actually play Diablo II...
You see, to date, Diablo II has sold more than 2.5 million copies. Blizzard Entertainment’s online service claims to reach 8.75 million active users who play more than 1 million games per day. And Diablo II is just one of the legion of popular multi-player online games, all of which boast similarly large numbers of players.
Online gaming works like this. First, pick your game. There are first
person combat games like the hugely popular Quake. Strategy games like Command & Conquer. Role-playing adventures like Diablo II. Most of these have built in software allowing for internet connection, but even if they don’t you can usually download special adaptation software off the net allowing you to play most games online.
Second, sort out your connection to the internet. Generally speaking, the
faster the connec- tion, the better the game you’re going to get. And with ever-improving modems, ISDN lines and now ADSL (the ludi- crously speedy Asymmetric Digital Subscriber Line), connection speeds are incredibly fast these days.
Why does this matter? Well, each time you do some- thing within a game you’re sending a signal to a distant server telling it to do something and then said distant server is sending one back to you telling you it’s done
what you’ve asked it to.
If your internet connection is run-
ning slower than everyone else’s you risk having them being able to move quicker and react faster than you. Never handy when you’re trying to hack a sword-toting warrior down to size or blow up an enemy tank.
Third, find yourself a site to go to where you can find other players. Sometimes these sites are run by other gamers, sometimes these are run by the company that developed the game itself.
Take Diablo II developers Blizzard Entertainment’s Battle. Net site. It pro- vides a free arena for Blizzard cus- tomers to chat, challenge opponents and kick off multi-player games. Game characters are created and stored on the system, but events like the “online
massacre” mentioned before are rare and usually dealt with pretty quickly. Blizzard had all the destroyed charac- ters up and running again within a week.
It sounds complicated but it really isn’t. These days, you can be online, playing the game of your choice, within about ten minutes of taking it out of the box and plugging in your PC. When it’s that easy to play a game against other people, why is anyone bothering to just play narrow little games against their own computer?
AhmedF runs the Online gaming network (www.ogaming.com), just one of the dozens of internet gaming news and chat sites on the web: “Multi-player Online Games are the wave of the future. In my own opinion, single-player games are hurtling down the path of oblivion.
“Artificial Intelligence is a lousy substitute,” he says. “There are always holes in the logic behind AI. In sports games, there is always the sweet spot from where you always score. And there is a certain limit to what the AI can learn. Humans make it all real. You are no longer challenging an inanimate object, who does not really care if it loses or wins.”
A message posted on another game site, the Online Gaming League (www.ogl.org) gamer echoes AhmedF’s sentiments: “To be beaten by other humans is more of an insult to one’s skills than losing to a computer con- trolled player, just as beating others is more of a boost to one’s ego than beat- ing the computer.”
These websites run online tourna- ments and players form alliances and
THE GAMES PEOPLE
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