Why Gaming? Why
Multiplayer?
As I alluded to in my first post, my passion is multiplayer games.
Don’t get me wrong; I love single-player games and gaming in general, but for
me multiplayer is what I truly enjoy (even if it might seem otherwise WHILE I’m
playing). I’ll default to the standard
response for why I enjoy gaming in general: I use it as an escape from reality.
If I’m playing a game I don’t have to deal with the real world. It’s a
fantastic relaxation, procrastination and isolation tool.
There are many more reasons why I love multiplayer:
·
The adrenaline rush of knowing you just beat another
living person instead of a computer. Competition.
·
The feel-good effect from pulling off an epic play and
having someone see it (or better, acknowledging it)
·
Having a good excuse for raging and letting off steam
·
But most of all it’s having fun and laughing with good
friends.
For me, multiplayer is my social interaction. I’m awkward as
fuck and a complete social retard, so internet anonymity is fantastic. I can
type whatever I want on a blog like this and not give two shits what someone reading
it might think. My friends might read this, but they all know I don’t two shits
about what they think either. Likewise not a single fuck is given if anyone
ever reads this*. I’d like to think that sometime in the future I’ll write
posts waxing nostalgic about all the games I mention below, but chances are I’ll
get sidetracked.
*Actually I do care if people read this blog. Not because of
long-winded stuff like this, but because I want to share the content I’ve
created – videos, KSP ships, etc.
Please take
care when traversing slope
Halo on the original Xbox was what properly pushed me into multiplayer.
It started with renting an Xbox for a birthday after hearing how much fun it
was for my high-school friends at their party. That weekend of 4-player
split-screen on a tiny TV started me down a slippery slope. From then on any
excuse to hire out Halo was used. Birthday party? Halo. Public holiday? Halo. Going
to stay at friend’s place who had an Xbox? Halo.
It’s hard to remember every being more ecstatic about a
Christmas present than when my brothers and I unwrapped an Xbox of our own. The
morning the stores opened after that Christmas we bought Halo and 2 extra
controllers. Before long I was organising LAN parties in the local scout hall.
I bought a 10Mb Ethernet hub and invited my brothers along so we could use
their tiny 14” TV for the other 4 players. Many an 8-player Halo marathon was
had throughout my high school years. Halo, Halo 2, and moving on the Halo 3 and
Xbox360. We played other stuff sure, but Halo was what I remember. Mainly
because I was less bad at it than other games. To this day I won’t play racing
games because I’m terribad at them.
Somewhere amongst the junk food-fuelled Halo LANs, and after my first limited experience in EVE Online, I got into World of Warcraft. It’s a horrible,
casual, soul-sucking force of evil, but by jebus does it hook people in. I
persuaded my parents into helping me buy a stonking big Dell Inspiron laptop
under the guise of eventually using it for uni. Halo marathons turned into WoW
marathons if someone could persuade their parents to let us have a LAN party at
their place (broadband was still only just becoming widely available in NZ). If
we couldn’t run LAN parties with internet, I still organised joint
Warhammer40K/LAN events at the scout hall and we played C&C Generals, or
Civ4 instead.
I still have a soft-spot of Generals. Whenever I get talking
with my highschool friend the same old stories always re-surface. Like the game
that went for 2h of laggy build-up and super weapon cold-war between four
players ended suddenly when one player’s computer crashed. Or another game
where each of the 4 players has 20 super weapons ready to fire but we’re all in
cold-war again. Until one misplaced elite unit results in a garbled string of “NuclearLaunchDetectedNuclearLaunchDetectedIonCannonFiredNuclearLaunchDetected”.
I don’t even remember who won, but the build-up to that moment was so fun I’ll
never forget it.
Broadband
baby!
Highschool ended and university began. WoW swallowed another
massive chunk of my life as I finally obtained free access to broadband
internet and got into raiding. I was pegged as lead huntard in the guild but
holidays back home with 56k dial-up interrupted. In hindsight this was DEFINITELY
for the best. When my guild fractured a few months after this I started
distancing myself from the game. At uni I made friends with other gamers who
had one of the best gaming/multimedia set-ups I know of to this day. Their
house became a second-home to me as I packed up my laptop, walked out of the
dorm and went about playing unhealthy amounts of LAN games. Diablo 2, Supreme
Commander (at half-speed because that game is so lag-tastic), AoE2 (I had only
ever played single-player previously), and Counterstrike.
In my second year of
uni a game called Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare was released. I still played
WoW casually but a CoD4 server hosted by my friends became my newest addiction.
Because we could police hackers and abusing the advantage of 20ms ping, the
server became known locally as being one of the best private servers there was.
A couple times I would be talking to a random at uni and they would mention this
“cool local server with some really good players on it”.
In second year I moved into a flat that would come to be
known as “The Nerd Flat”. Our lounge-room was a sea of computers. We blew the
fuse to the powerpoints on a regular basis and I’m pretty sure the landlord is
still trying to remove the layer of Doritos dust from the carpet. Consoles took
a backseat for me at uni, excluding the odd drunken Guitar Hero showboating.
Now I was a fully converted PC fanatic. The laptop upgraded into a rig, and
more CoD4 and World at War was played.
The Rage
Years
My later years at uni were subsumed by rage. Modern Warfare 2
was released and the downfall of the CoD series had begun in earnest.
Unbalanced gameplay mired in a stinking slimy scum of achievements and
killstreaks, non-dedicated servers and a playerbase of clones using the Witch
build*. Our gaggle of nerds also discovered DotA (WC3 map) and subsequently Heroes
of Newerth during this time. The ultra-competitive nature of MOBAs introduced
me to another group of friends I still play with years later. The MOBA genre is
both one of the best, and simultaneously worst, multiplayer genres out there. Piling
hormonal teenager and hardcore gamers into 5v5 teams that are inherently
reliant on teamwork , co-ordination and not-fucking-up is a recipe for the most
toxic communities on the internet and some of the most fun gameplay. I.e. it
results in “teh epic plays” and thus a bigger dopamine release. It’s a funny
thing when you become self-aware of being a cunt. I know I still rage, but I’d
like to think I’m not as bad as I used to be, at least to my friends. Minecraft
was a good, calming antithesis to rage towards the end of uni.
*Tactical knife, fast run/mantle, extra lunge, fast knife.
Think of the Witch from Left4Dead. It was like a fucking Halo 3 sword lunge but
3 times as quick and no chance to counter with a shotgun because of
host-induced lag. Seriously, my second game I randomly get assigned as host I
managed a nuke. Fuck Call of Duty. Ok enough. Enough. Call of Duty rant in a
different post...
Fuck growing
up
I’ve graduated from uni, have a full time job, changed
countries and I’m still a gamer, with the same group of friends. Vent/TS3/Mumble
is magic, I swear. I’ve upgraded the rig twice, bought a brand new one, bought
a new gaming laptop and far too many other toys with sudden disposable income,
and continued to play MOBAs and Minecraft. Battlefield 3 came along at some
point to very competently fill the FPS hole left by CoD4. Old Republic and EVE tumors
developed in my MMO gland. Old Republic was malignant and has since been excised
successfully. The EVE growth appears to be benign.
Like any true addict I can blissfully ignore that I might
have a problem. I’d like to think I’m a high-functioning gamer – It’s not
affecting anyone but me. Until real-life stages a proper intervention I’ll
continue to be passionate about multiplayer gaming.
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