Gaming Column

The State of Gaming

It seems that computer games have been around for a long time. And I guess in some ways it has been. Rumor has it that Stonehenge was the first video game. Of course the load times took forever! Ha ha, I kid.

But in all seriousness, video games have been around, essentially, for my entire life. So I guess that means I’ve been playing computer games for a long time. In fact, some of my earliest memories are of playing computer games. I used to go to an after school program when I was in elementary school just because I could play Oregon Trail on and Apple IIe.

For those of you who have never had the privilege of playing Oregon Trail, it is extremely simple. Yet it had such a great design that it was tons of fun to play. And all this was only magnified because there really wasn’t much else to play. Let’s face it, there’s nothing like shooting 100 buffalo to feed you family for a few weeks as you travel across the country.

Other early memories involve Asteroids, Missile Command, and Combat, which I played on my Atari 2600. I don’t remember how many dozens of Atari games we had, but I loved them all, and played for hours.

Eventually I graduated to a Nintendo. No Christmas before or since, has been so exciting since the year we got our NES. In fact I was so excited by the NES, I actually subscribed to Nintendo Power just so I could get the free copy of Dragon Warrior.

But my obsession with gaming really took off when I went to college and discovered the world of computer gaming. This was a radically different world because things were so much more complex. Games weren’t always linear in nature, the graphics were better, and the sound was improved a thousand fold. Basically, gaming was just better on a computer than on any other platform.

Computers really maintained their dominance until the second generation of consoles hit. The Xbox’s and Play Stations of the world. This is really where video games entered mass acceptance. And I imagine this is also where a lot of you got your introduction into video games.

And that pretty much brings us up to today. As you can see things have changed a lot since video games initially made their way into our living rooms. Unfortunately not all changes in the industry have been good. In fact, there are two current issues that may change the future of gaming for the worse.

The first is Steam. Steam is the method of online distribution for Half Life 2. It was partially conceived as a way for Valve to make more money (no CD, no publisher). It is also used to ‘prevent piracy’. You see, you need to log onto Steam to play a single player game. However, the problem is that Steam isn’t always working. In fact, just this last week Steam crashed, meaning that people couldn’t play the game because authentication for each copy of HL2 couldn’t be verified. I’m sure we can all imagine the frustration and irritation at having to have an internet connection, but also needing a server to be up and running anytime we want to play.

The other significant trend, although it’s only really been with one company so far, is EA. EA inked an exclusive deal with NFL Players Association. This move effectively seals off competition from using actual football players. And let’s face it, who would really want to play a ‘professional’ football game without the professionals? Some of you may be saying “so what?”. Well, this year ESPN2K5 was a vastly superior game to Madden. EA knew they were in trouble, so instead of trying to improve their product they simply muscled the competition out of the market. The end result is the high likelihood of a worse football game than gamers would have had if Sega was still in the market.

So what’s on the horizon? Well rumor has it that Xbox2 will be out at the end of this year. Before Christmas even. And it will be another 6 months after that for PS3. And what about Nintendo? I’m not sure anyone really knows. They haven’t had a very good launch since the SNES, so I’m not really expecting a change.

So what’s the point of all this? Well I don’t really have one. But I needed an inaugural column, and I figure, why not give a little gaming history. Consider this the State of the Union Gaming Edition. It’s a brief little roundup of gaming history, and by brief, I mean VERY brief. It’s also a preview of some of the topics and themes that this column will touch on in the future. So I hope you stick around.

(Alert readers will also notice that this column is simply labeled “Gaming Column”. I have a few ideas for names, but I thought I’d throw it out to you guys to see what you thought. I’ll take the best suggestion and that’s what we’ll call it.)

Gaming Column will appear the first week of every month, unless there is such an out-pouring in the forums demanding for more. At which point I will demand Craig pay me more money, and no more of these half-eaten Pop-Tarts he likes to send.

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