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Gamers That Became Pioneers

Posted by Zonk on from the not-always-a-good-thing dept.

1up has a feature up looking at videogamers that have become pioneers. They profile several folks who have made an impact on gaming as a hobby, and the view of gaming in the world at large. The piece includes people like Patrick Wildenborg (the Hot Coffee whistleblower), Minh "Gooseman" Le and Jess Cliffe (makers of Counter-Strike), Gabe and Tycho of Penny Arcade, and (most infamously) Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold. From a more upbeat part of the piece, on Counter-Strike: "[CS] is one of the most ubiquitous and popular games ever made, period -- Valve's Steam distribution service calculates that nearly 120 million man hours are lost to various versions of Counter-Strike monthly. Such a statistic is even more mind-boggling considering the humble roots of the game -- both Cliffe and Gooseman were college students at the time of the project's inception. They had some amateur experience in the disciplines they brought to the mod; Cliffe had previously mastered several gaming websites, and Gooseman had done programming and modeling work on other fairly popular mods like Navy SEALs and Action Quake 2."

32 comments

  1. Grammar Nazi mode: engaged! by NeutronCowboy · · Score: 0, Troll

    The title should read "Gamers who became pioneers". "That" refers to objects. "Who" refers to people. Sheesh. For some reason, this has become my #1 grammar pet peeve.

    --
    Those who can, do. Those who can't, sue.
    1. Re:Grammar Nazi mode: engaged! by cptgrudge · · Score: 3, Funny

      I'm pretty partial to their, there, and they're myself.

      You, of course, assume that gamers actually are people. 24 hour Starcraft sessions? Playing games until all energy is depleted and the host shuts down? I present you with this. Halo 2 Legendary in an afternoon?! Humans do not do this. Call them meat bags, if you must, but I doubt that they are people.

      --
      Qualitas edurus commercium, nullus penitus net rimor, nullus deus beneficium
    2. Re:Grammar Nazi mode: engaged! by mr_mischief · · Score: 1

      In some cases, meatbags with aimbots. I'd hardly call that "people" at all.

      Oh, and in reference to your sig, Windows XP does still need to be rebooted more than it should. So much less than previous versions it's hilarious, but still more than it should need.

    3. Re:Grammar Nazi mode: engaged! by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      >>Halo 2 Legendary in an afternoon?! Humans do not do this

      Dude- to make Mr. Miller seem even LESS human- he didn't die ONCE! The article you linked left that minor detail out. Certainly worthy of a Guiness, and more than the $250 prize he originally received for doing so...

      Cowardly anonymous Halo Fanboy

  2. Oregon Trail? by gEvil+(beta) · · Score: 2, Funny

    Yeah, I was a big fan of Oregon Trail back in the day, too...

    --
    This guy's the limit!
    1. Re:Oregon Trail? by michael_allison · · Score: 1

      the best was when your family members died off, one by one and then you were given the ability to write a name on a gravestone that could be viewed by future players of the game...whoever thought it was a good idea to let elementary school students anonymously write things for others to see was a far thinker...i learned so many new deragatory terms for people from reading those gravestones... damn the man...save the empire!

  3. Klebold and Harris Pioneers? by Skynet · · Score: 1, Insightful

    Of what? Killing innocent people and fueling the media frenzy that violent games create killers?

    --
    Execute? [Y/N] _
    1. Re:Klebold and Harris Pioneers? by nido · · Score: 1
      They're simply the most successful victims of the government schools. The majority of students hate school, Klebold and Harris did something about it. Not a very productive "something", but something none the less. Every so often I see a report of some poor kid plotting to "pull a columbine" on his/her fellow inmates, so they've obviously been an inspiration to some of the more disgruntled of the lot.

      The real shame in the Klebold and Harris event is that only a few got the message. They blame the videogames (look - ontopic! :), or the culture, but never the compulsory school institution itself.

      America Is Massified

      Older American forms of schooling would never have been equal to the responsibility coal, steam, steel, and machinery laid upon them. As late as 1890, the duration of the average school year was twelve to twenty weeks. Even with that, school attendance hovered between 26 and 42 percent nationwide with the higher figure only in a few places like Salem, Massachusetts.

      Yet America had to be massified, and quickly. Since the end of the nineteenth century, American government and big business had been fully committed, without public fanfare, to creating and maintaining a mass society. Mass society demands tight administration, close management to an extreme degree. Humanity becomes undependable, dangerous, childlike, and suicidal under such discipline. Holding this contradiction stable requires managers of systematic schooling to withdraw trust, to regard their clientele as hospital managers might think of potentially homicidal patients. Students, men under military discipline, and employees in post offices, hospitals, and other large systems are forced into a condition of less than complete sanity. They are dangerous,[4] as history has shown again and again.

      There are three indisputable triumphs of mass society we need to acknowledge to understand its strength: first, mass production offers relative physical comfort to almost all--even the poor have food, shelter, television as a story-teller to raise the illusion of community; second, as a byproduct of intense personal surveillance in mass society (to provide a steady stream of data to the producing and regulating classes) a large measure of personal security is available; third, mass society offers a predictable world, one with few surprises--anxieties of uncertainty are replaced in mass society with a rise in ennui and indifference.

      [4] When I first began to write this section, another of the long stream of post office massacres of recent years had just taken place in New Jersey. Vengeance by a disgruntled employee. In the same state a hospital attendant has been charged with murdering as many as a hundred of his patients by lethal injection, also a more common occurrence than we want to imagine, and two rich boys at Columbine High School in Littleton, Colorado, the site of a much-boasted-of scientific management revolution in 1994, had shot and killed thirteen of their classmates before taking their own lives. Human variation cannot be pent up for long in enormous synthetic systems without striving to somehow assert the "I" of things. Massified populations cannot exercise self-control very well since they depend on constant oversight to behave as required. When external controls are removed, anything becomes possible.

      -Underground History of American Education, ch8 (emphasis added)


      --
      Learn the rules so you know how to break them properly.
      www.teslabox.com
    2. Re:Klebold and Harris Pioneers? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0
      They're simply the most successful victims of the government schools. The majority of students hate school, Klebold and Harris did something about it.

      It wasn't school they hated it was "the stupid people." It was a sociopathic sense of superiority, and not only towards jocks, "YOU KNOW WHAT I HATE!!!? STAR WARS FANS!!! GET A FaaaaaaRIGIN LIFE YOU BORING GEEEEEKS!"

      As for schools, do you think that kids enjoyed chopping wood, milking cows, cleaning the barn? School replaced agrariran work responsibilities with industrial training responsibilities. Of course kids hate school, most people hate to work, but it's a necessary part of survival.
    3. Re:Klebold and Harris Pioneers? by MMaestro · · Score: 2, Insightful
      School replaced agrariran work responsibilities with industrial training responsibilities. Of course kids hate school, most people hate to work, but it's a necessary part of survival.

      Except for the fact that with work you can at least SEE the end result. If you don't chop wood in the morning, you're gonna freeze your ass in the evening. If you don't plow the land, you aren't getting dinner. If you don't get the fence up, your livestock are gonna run off or get eaten by wild animals.

      With school, if you fail a test you don't find out about it... usually for several days. If you are doing badly in a class and your teacher doesn't tell you about it, you only find out about it later... at the end of the quarter/semester. If you don't do your homework, you get a homework grade... which you can usually make up by doing really well on tests and exams.

      Hell you can say the same about work as an adult. You don't want to work? Fine, you don't get paid. You don't want to go to school? Fine, you don't get a piece of paper that does not necessarily guarantee you a well paying job in the future in the first place.

    4. Re:Klebold and Harris Pioneers? by servognome · · Score: 1

      I think the biggest impact is the seperation of children from their parents.
      Children on the farm were directly responsible to their parent, don't clean the barn and pa would beat you. There were daily checks on whether the kids were doing what they were supposed to. If parents aren't involved in their child's education (not just looking at grades at the end each quarter), then the child isn't really held accountable.

      --
      D6 63 0D 70 89 81 BB 8E 7B 7C 5F 5D 54 EA AB 73
    5. Re:Klebold and Harris Pioneers? by sesshomaru · · Score: 1
      Going Postal by Mark Ames is also worth reading on this subject.

      Oh, and the Millenium Season 2 episode, "A Room with No View," heh...

      --
      "MIT betrayed all of its basic principles."
  4. ftw by Chaffar · · Score: 2, Insightful
    Valve's Steam distribution service calculates that nearly 120 million man hours are lost to various versions of Counter-Strike monthly.
    I wouldn't call an hour spent playing CS a "loss"... and I'm pretty sure I'm not the only CS addict here :)
    1. Re:ftw by Brothernone · · Score: 1

      Your one of those people who spam "You take the point!" aren't you?

      --
      He whom you called four-eyes yesterday, you call Sir tomorrow.
  5. Deja vu - Oh, no. Wait. We have been here before.. by cmonkey_1973 · · Score: 0, Offtopic
    It must be a slow day when you resort to ripping off 2 month old MTV Online editorials:


    Playa Rater: The 10 Most Influential Video Gamers Of All Time

  6. Heere's Johnny... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    The title of this story sounds like the punchline of a Johnny Carson bit.

  7. The most dubious recognition you can get by elrous0 · · Score: 4, Funny
    And now, let us pay tribute to Tim Johnson, the obsessive Halo 2 player who first discovered the giant soccer ball on the rooftop. Tim was born in Des Moines Iowa in 1980. Little did his parents, Bob and Sheila, know then the greatness that lie within him...

    -Eric

    --
    SJW: Someone who has run out of real oppression, and has to fake it.
  8. Goosman's Guns kicked butt by Rifter13 · · Score: 1

    I remember playing with Goosman's guns, back in the Q1 or Q2 days (I don't remember which one). Our LAN group played that game for so many hours... We never really got into CS.

  9. Hey... That's Me! by Gertlex · · Score: 1

    Indeed... I played games from a tender age. And I became a Pioneer at Pioneer High School...

    Oregon Trail 2 was also mandatory: in elementary school, it brainwashed us into accepting such a lame mascot.

    1. Re:Hey... That's Me! by Ninwa · · Score: 1

      Hopefully not Pioneer, Ann Arbor. I'm afraid as a lawful Huron River Rat I must spit at you in disgust.

  10. Steve Polge by El_Muerte_TDS · · Score: 4, Informative

    How about Steve Polge, probably unknown to many. He created the Reaper Bot for Quake which got lead him to a job at Epic Games working on the A.I. for Unreal at the basics for Botmatch which in the end resulted in Unreal Tournament.

    Clearly a gamer that became a pioneer, but yet remained fairly unknown to many.

    1. Re:Steve Polge by Rifter13 · · Score: 1

      True, I had forgotten about Steve Polge. Also, the guy that made the really popular level editor for Quake 1... Jeeze, pathetic, no name of program, or programmer... but I know he went on to another game company to build the level editor for their products.

    2. Re:Steve Polge by Osty · · Score: 3, Insightful

      How about Steve Polge, probably unknown to many. He created the Reaper Bot for Quake which got lead him to a job at Epic Games working on the A.I. for Unreal at the basics for Botmatch which in the end resulted in Unreal Tournament.

      Or David "Zoid" Kirsch, who built the first CTF mod for Quake, which lead to his efforts on the Linux ports of Quake 1 and 2 and eventually landed him with Retro working on the Metroid Prime series.

      Quake was a revolutionary time period in the history of games. It marked the first time enthusiasts could really create full-on games (Doom modding was pretty limited) based on a commercial engine, for free. As mentioned, the ubiquitous CTF game mode you find in everything these days was created by an individual modder. Squad-based strategy was pioneered by the guys who wrote TeamFortress. You could find just about anything, from racing games to flying games to future or fantasy games and just about anything in between. The modern FPS landscape owes its very existence to those original modders, and yet we barely even remember their names. How sad.

    3. Re:Steve Polge by Das+Modell · · Score: 1

      You must mean Worldcraft, which was purchased by Valve for use with Half-Life. It's now known as Valve Hammer Editor.

    4. Re:Steve Polge by Das+Modell · · Score: 1

      CTF should have definitely been mentioned, and you're right about the fact that Quake modding seems to have been forgotten. The modding culture of Half-Life and other games is nothing but a continuation of what was done with Quake. Even Gamespy and its seemingly infinite network of Planet sites (as well as Fileplanet) are here because of Quake. The whole thing started as a small server browsing tool called QSpy. I guess Quake also pioneered machinima. Quake established so many things that it isn't even funny.

      Teamfortress was the same as Counter-Strike, but on a smaller scale. The original mod (which itself was modded into things like MegaTF) for Quake became very popular, and eventually it was purchased by Valve, who turned it into Teamfortress Classic and now Teamfortress 2. I think Robin Walker (one of the masterminds of TF) still works for Valve. TF spawned tons of clones as well, but clearly tactical shooters became more popular. The idea of having character classes in multiplayer FPS was most likely invented by TF, but I don't know for sure.

    5. Re:Steve Polge by Rifter13 · · Score: 1

      THAT is it. Thanks. :-) I was thinking it was Half-Life that picked it up, but I was not sure.

  11. Putting the Columbine idiots along with people who by kinglink · · Score: 4, Insightful

    actually did something to benefit the industry? I can live with the hot coffee "whistleblower". He at least found something unique, but the people who pulled out guns and killed innocent people are on the list for what? For Doom mods? If you could use a computer and write a simple line of code you could mod Doom, it wasn't just a simple game to mod it was beyond easy.

    It's not like they did anything to really change the world, they just played videogames so the MEDIA actually blamed videogames, they don't appear to have actually changed video games in any particular way except to give it huge media attention (attributed to that moron Clinton claiming how Doom and Mortal kombat (1) were hurting our kids and shouldn't be sold... 5 years after their release. If it wasn't for the media using the story for everything then we wouldn't have gave a shit about two idiots and we wouldn't have even realized they played games, they would just be known as too idiots with guns.

    I mean you have a list of influencial gamers, Penny arcade, the hackers on Ms. Pacman, the guys who did Counterstrike, the single most popular mod ever, and yet somehow you diminish them all by putting these two guys who just snapped and tried to kill people. Exactly how does that make them pioneers?

  12. But it is a loss of man hours by Travoltus · · Score: 1

    Not quite as much a loss of man hours as going to the movies, eating, vacations, etc.

    Haven't you heard, America is all about productivity and anything short of productive behavior is a loss of man hours.

    --
    --- Grow a pair, liberals... stop letting the Republicans bully you!
  13. CS Payoff? by BTWR · · Score: 2, Interesting
    What kind of financial state are Minh "Gooseman" Le and Jess Cliffe in today, after making the most popular internet game of all time? I'm all for Vavle making millions from CS, but I hope these guys got a %, instead of an up-front $10,000 purchase and that was it.

    Anyone know?

  14. Lost man hours? by NexFlamma · · Score: 1

    Isn't that kind of a skewed way to look at it?

    Sure, people may have been playing that many hours, but that doesn't mean they were doing it to the exclusion of work or school at the time.

    Maybe these people actually play CS in their leisure time! *gasp*

  15. Hey, Joe Keiser... by DrunkenTerror · · Score: 0

    Fuck you, buddy. Kliebold and Harris were fucking psychopaths. Way to go, you fuckwit moron. This is the most ridiculous piece of garbage I've heard about since Rummy's speech this week. Fuck you, Joe Keiser. Fuck you.