My Gaming History

If I'm going to blog about gaming, I think a good place to start would be my personal history of gaming.

I owned a Nintendo, of course, and later an N64 (I had a friend with a Playstation, best of both worlds!), but I wouldn't consider my initial experience with consoles to be what made me fall in love with gaming. I am, first and foremost, a PC gamer. There are a multitude of reasons for this, but I'll leave that to another post.

It is important to note that this isn't anywhere near a full history. For every game mentioned, dozens were beaten, this is merely a viewing of particular landmarks. Like most PC gamers, I got my feet wet on the old Oregon Trail and similar simple text adventures, but the first true-blue "modern" PC game I ever fell in love with was Civilization. There is something intoxicating about the control a game like Civ grants you. Few people in real life can claim any sort of real power, but in a game world you can move armies, build cities, and create a culture. Ever since that moment that I became so engrossed in Civilization, my life as an avid gamer has not ceased. As a rule, games that I can "beat" are to be pursued in quick fashion until beaten, while games with consistent replayability (like RTS games), unending challenges (like, say, ARPGs) or multiplayer (MMOs, most modern FPS games) I try to stick to a few key titles at a time. There simply aren't enough hours in the day to become an active player in too many longterm games at once. The difference between a longterm and shortterm game is another thing worth exploring in another post, but I digress.

If we model our behaviors after our rolemodels, we probably garner our taste in games from those we know as well. It was my uncle who introduced me to Starcraft and a whole new world of real-time interactivity. Starcraft had the rush-inducing sense of power that Civilization offered, but without the "hit the enter key and see what happens" of the turn based world. Certainly, it was less strategic, but it was far more tactical. And it was beautiful. Every well-made game is beautiful in its own time, somehow, but the simplicity of the graphics in Starcraft don't fade as much as some other games.

I'd seen Diablo on the shelves, and was vaguely aware that the same people that made the (so awesome!) StarCraft had made it, but I wasn't truly aware of how different it would be. When a friend finally convinced me to pick it up, I quickly found a entirely new level of fun. I'd played some Final Fantasy games, but the difference here was customization. I love customization. it can be fun to play the story of another character, but my enjoyment comes more from making that character my own. Again, fun is found in control, but this time in a different sense. Choices on a personal scale, to generate a story all your own.

Diablo 2 was in many ways a step forward as well as a step back. As much as I relished the updates and the fact that Blizzard chose to keep the essential formula intact, I felt something was lost in the transition to more hard-set classes as opposed to malleable archetypes. As much as developers may strive to offer choice in classes, the end result is usually that there are too few classes to cover choices, and that the choices within the classes themselves are usually more black-and-white than a whole scale of options (you can use a spear well, you can use a bow well, or you can be bad at using both, but what if I want to use a great maul with the bow class?).

It is at this point that I must mention Unweb. Unweb is a story of innovation in the days before browser gaming become absolutely massive. Unweb was unique, it was fun, it was catchy, and I am sad it isn't still around. Basically, you entered in a URL, and www.Iamunweb.com parsed the HTML (and a few other statistics?) of the site, and generated a monster (and loot!) that you then entered into text-based combat with as your character. Unweb is just one of the many innovative little titles that have caught my eye over the years, but it stands out always as the one that didn't drive me away in the end, it simply ceased being. You can read a postmortem here if you're more interested.

It would be early in the new century when I was introduced to the game that I would continue playing for a decade. EverQuest, the first "big" 3D MMORPG. My views on EQ can (and will) fill many a post. MMOs seem to be taking over the modern market, and with good reason. They're cash cows, for one, a game studio used to have to continually produce content to produce revenue, but with an MMO you're getting people to pay simply for the priveledge of playing your game. On the player side of things, they're fun. True persistence in a gameworld means that few hours of playing has a much larger significance than your simple satisfaction. You can literally spend thousands of hours and at the end of it all, see a result. The way I play EQ has changed over the years, and like anyone else I've had my cycles of burnout and rediscovering the magic, but EverQuest has always remained a strong and fun title for all the years I've played it.

Thats not to say I haven't dabbled in other MMOs, of course. I tried SWG, I tried Pirates of the Burning Sea, I tried EQ2, LotRO (very briefly), Age of Conan (again, didn't own it myself), EVE Online, and more recently Aion and Fallen Earth. Every one of these titles bring something unique, but most of them feel essentially similar to EQ. The major exception EVE, the only MMO that I've tried that has truly done their best to be what I guess you could consider an entirely different genre. The others are good, but until someone can successfully improve on the EQ formula instead of giving it a different skin and a spin (topless women, eyepatches, ninjas, wings, what have you). The snowball of innovation rolls over it all, of course, trying to pick up the best of each game and move onward, but I can't help but feel some of the more intriguing features of MMOs have been lost in the drive to make things more and more accessible, achievable in a shorter timeframe, more easy to metagame, and what have you (another post in itself).

I haven't *just* played MMOs since they've come about, of course. I get my dose of the essential gaming nutrients by keeping up with single-player RPGs when I can. I much prefer the westernized RPGs (most of Obsidian, Bioware, and Bethesda's portfolios, as well as the now-defunct studios like Black Isle). I've been known to get cheap thrills off of the Grand Theft Auto franchise. For puzzle games, Puzzle Quest enraptured me by tying some persistent progression to mindless puzzling (something that many puzzlers are missing in their straight line of "a bit harder than the last level" challenges). I don't eschew First Person Shooters, although I certainly wouldn't consider myself a hardcore FPS fan. I enjoy a good multiplayer match, and appreciate that modern matchmaking technology (usually) means I won't get utterly destroyed out there (I've got some bad memories of being "the newb" at a Counterstrike LAN party). My enjoyment of strategic games has never stopped either. I thoroughly enjoyed WC3, as well as the spin that DotA put on the game, once again incorporating character building. If you're noticing a trend, I believe character building can improve almost every genre, if implemented properly (this isn't permission to shoehorn it where it doesn't belong). The "Total War" collection mixed civilization-building and fast-paced combat very well, but the aging leaders left me feeling like I was treading water to keep at the same level. Again, not a condemnation of the feature, but it isn't my cup of tea.

So what am I currently looking forward to? Few PC gamers could claim they don't have something exciting coming down the pipe for them as we enter 2010, and I'm no different. Diablo 3 and Starcraft 2 are well-anticipated, of course, despite some doubts on my part that Blizzard will get them out any time before the world ends in 2012. Mass Effect 2 can already be pre-ordered on Steam, so I'm pretty confident I'll be getting to play that one soon enough. Lets hope ME2 lives up to the first title in the franchise which has that BioWare (KotOR1, Jade Empire) charm of forcing me along someone else's railroad while giving me just enough choice to make the story my own and keep me playing.

I've got nothing but high hopes for the future of gaming. Maybe gaming as a whole will swing more towards the casual easy-is-fun crowd of fans, but I'm confident that there will always be a niche market for the complex, massive, and deep games that hardcore fans can't get enough of. This is particularly true as more and more people who've grown up on modern gaming become developers, and pursue their own dreams of "the ultimate game".