Up, Up, Down, Down: Part Four

Gaming cheats like "Up, Up, Down, Down..." are techno-folklore, a universal introduction to people of the gaming era. Other generations told war stories or bragged about their sexual exploits. Gamers trade techniques and other lore -- early experiences, confrontations, conflicts, great exploits, cheats, tricks, myths, and legends. Gaming is moving so quickly that it's time to start building some gaming archives. What, for example, is the most addictive game, now or ever: Asheron's Call? Quake? Final Fantasy 8? Red Alert2? You can testify, brag, reminisce, and otherwise post your own gaming stories and experiences here. (And more below about some surprising new stats on Xmas game sales figures, and gender and gaming)

A new report by PC Data says that 35% of Net users are going to buy console or PC console games this Christmas, and that PC and console gaming is no longer a male-dominated activity. The study found that while men make up 55% of gamers overall, for the first time women comprise a a majority of online gamers -- 50.4%. Women, according to the study, favor online gambling, card gones and quiz and trivia contests.

PC Data says men prefer war - and sports-themed games, and that men are three times as likely as women to participate in first-person shooter games (38% vs. 10%). "Solitaire," "Free Cell" and similiar bundled games are the most frequently played of all online and offline games. The top PC game categories are strategy real-time/turn-based, world building, and flight simulation.

Christmas is perhaps the best indicator of what mainstream America is buying and thinking about. The PC Data survey greatly underscores the idea that gaming has become a mainstream form of culture, if not the single most pervasive form of culture, in America.

Comments

Most addictive...

[sanemind]

Hm. You know, when I was a teenager, I used to covertly berate my friends and somewhat lose respect for them over the quantity of their lives they spent on what I could argue as a significant underutilization of their free time via obsessively playing console games. [It saddened me, I knew someone who would play super mario brothers for over two hours a day, but never got around to reading].

Anyway, I never really understood gaming obsession, although I had [as a youngster] quite enjoyed some infocom offerings, such as starcrossed, infidel [and of -course- zork].

...until one day I had the foolishness to install quake. Oh my.

I became completely immersed in the game; my psyche simplified down to an exclusive focus on the reward and happiness of getting the hard to find ammo units, the special armour, the medi-packs. Nothing else mattered. I would sit in the dark, face up against the screen, all of my emotional energy and self focused entirely into the world of the game. And it intellectually challenging at all. I'm kind of ashamed of myself in retrospect. ;)

I was no better then those I had once used to berate for becoming obsessed with super mario [Which, BTW, has some -strange- symbolism. I did always like the fact that you had to slam your head into brick walls constantly to earn happy money coins. I'm not even going to go into a freudian intrepetation of the mushrooms you had to squash...]

Moderators::Note(humor)


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man sig

Best game for programmers - Carnage Heart

[banda]

Maybe three or four years ago, a Japanaese company named Artdink (famous in Japan for railroad simulators) published a playstation game called "Carnage Heart."

The game was a mixture of simple turn-based strategy and tactical cobat between two teams of competing robots. The robots were the typical "mechs" in several different varieties, two legged, four legged, tank treaded and flying. The innovative part of the game was that instead of controlling a mech, like a FPS, the player coded the software that dictated how the mechs reacted to their environments.

The programming system was simple and brilliant. Starting with a blank "card", the player placed and configured "chips" that created a sort of flowchart. The chips did all sorts of things like checking environmental conditions (presence of enemies, presence of friendlies, presence of ordinance, fuel remaining, weapons remaining), branching the program logic, moving the mech, firing the weapons and communicating with friendlies. The strategic part of the game was setting up factories, building the mechs, putting together squads and directing their movements on the battle maps.

I spent hours and hours of my free time playing the game (which was fascinating to watch, the game, not me playing it), but what's worse, I spent plenty of time away from the console diagramming new software configurations to try out later. Fortunately, my boss at the time was incapable of distinguishing my stacks of graph-paper flow charts from the work I was supposed to be doing.

most addictive: DOOM

[mr.ska]

Yes, it was cheesy, but at the time, playing Doom (or Doom II) on my roommate's scortching fast Pentium 90 was just WICKED. The 4 of us would spend many, many hours in front of that screen in the dark, typing in the cheat codes and trying to make things go "Squish" with the rocket launcher.

At one point in my Doom days, I had been playing it for many hours a day for the past week. Suddenly one night, when I was trying to get to sleep, the instant I closed my eyes all I saw were various Doom levels, either real, made-up, or both, and I was playing them. For days after that point, if I even closed my eyes for a second, I would be in another Doom level, lobbing all sorts of artillery at various heinous creatures coming after me. It wouldn't stop.

Eventually, I stopped playing for a while, and my shut-eye time once again went dark. But Doom was very addictive. It paved the way for Duke Nukem, Quake, and all the billions of other FPS games out there. Hail to the King, baby.

Jon, you need to get out more...

[ConceptJunkie]

> The PC Data survey greatly underscores the idea that gaming has become a mainstream form of culture, if not the single most pervasive form of culture, in America.

Jon, I don't know what your idea of culture is, but you have GOT to get out and see RealLife (TM, Pat. Pend.) just a little bit more.

You've got this bizarre idea that the whole world revolves around computer gaming and the Internet. Believe it or not, some people still watch TV, read books (gasp!) or even go outside and take a walk.

You've got to stop gauging the experience of 270,000,000 Americans on the poorly-spelled comments of a few pimply-faced geeks and those stupid PlayStation 2 commercials.

I am an avid gamer and Internet user, but I still spend more time reading books or playing with my kids than doing either. I'm even so radical as to have conversations with my wife. I guess I'm just a cultural throwback mired in the low-tech past.

Rick

About women gaming online.

[spankenstein]

I'm not really surprised. While I was growing up my Mom and Grandma would play all sorts of board and crad games (backgammon, hearts, canasta, etc.) At holidays it would always be aunts and female cousins that would play the more social games.

Well now it's almost 2001 and even my grandma has cable modem and one of the first things she did was get on the MSN Game Zone to play with my Mom. It's the same as it's always been it's just going over packets now.

I actually think that it's really good that this is happening. It's easier for everyone to at least stay in touch and do the things that they would have done if they were actuall there in person. If my Mom lived more than a few blocks from my grandma I would think that it is even cooler.

This is going back to some of the things brought up during the "Voices from the Hellmouth" series about the net "alienating" youth. It can only alienate you if you want it to. I'm sure that there are people that this does happen to, but I also know a lot of people that have a richer social life from the net, either clubs (LUGs are good), chatting, emailing, or (on topic) online gaming.

Ultima Online got me kicked out of college

[pezpunk]

it was the first mainstream MMORPG, and i can tell you it hooked a HUGE number of people .. half my Guild failed out of college, primarily because we HAD to maintain our grandmaster skills in magery, macefighting, wrestling, and uhm cooking.

it's open-ended games like this, with no story other than the one you make for yourself, that are often the most addictive. how many times can i kill Diablo before i get bored? "Not even death" .. can save me from you, Diablo, yeah yeah, i know. especially since i'll respawn in town and come back to try to kill you again.

but see, in UO, if you were killed, any random newbie or PK wandering by could take from you what it took months of hard labor to accumulate. today's MMORPGs are so wimpy by those standards .. there's no risk, nothing to lose of any real value.

that, among other things, is what made UO so compelling. i don't think a game will ever match that level of sheer EMOTION involved. other UO players will remember hacking trees in the woods, making logs into shields to sell in town, every UO player remembers the SHEER DREAD they felt the first time a PK appeared out of nowhere and began attacking them. or the RAGE at being stabbed in the back by some low life while you were fighting a lich .. standing there screaming "ooOoOOooOoO" in your death shroud as he looted your corpse of everything that was important to you...

nope, today, you lose a little experience, oh well, whatever. off to fetch my stuff off of my corpse. UO players didn't have that luxury .. they're stuff was GONE. today, it's a much safer gaming world, much tamer, more mature. i miss the old days.

i could live a little longer in this prison