All I wanted to do was install and run Everquest, by no means the most technically demanding game on the market. And even while my PC easily met the minimum stated hardware requirements, the game simply refused to run. After the log-in screen, it would tantalizingly begin to load but, at the last minute, blink the Wintel equivalent of "Fuck you, pal" and unceremoniously crash back to the desktop.

The technical rep's e-mail response to my query for help was prompt, thorough -- and totally infuriating. It was a litany of annoyances, a laundry list of best-guess fixes, patches and workarounds: Reinstall the game; reinstall the 3-D graphics card drivers; go to the graphics card manufacturer's Web site and see if there's a more recent driver to download; turn the sound card off; buy more RAM; buy another graphics card; reinstall Windows system files. And the final one, the true clincher:

"If all else fails, you could take the case off your CPU and point a fan at the graphics card. That may seem crazy, but sometimes it works."

Crazy, indeed -- and one clear reason why change is needed in the PC gaming world, change that only a Microsoft has the power to deliver. As "Erik," senior writer for Old Man Murray, a scabrously funny site for hardcore gamer and industry vets, puts it, "No normal person should have the patience to invest the 12 hours a day it takes to stay on top of making your PC, and especially your games, work. And this is why PC games are a mess. A lot of people I know who like games won't touch a PC. And again, they're not dummies. They're smart enough consumers to sense what a big, shitty headache PC gaming is and give it a wide, wide, wide, wide miss."

The problem, quite simply, is that PCs are impossible to design for.

"Probably something that most gamers don't understand is the difficulty of developing for the PC market," says Ken Levine, general manager at Irrational Games. "A large part of the time spent in testing a product involves endless cycles of figuring out why your character disappears on video card X or the sound crackles on sound card Y." Resolving these conflicts involves clawing through the operating system's guts, and the unique configurations of Compaq, Dell and the myriad other Wintel manufacturers.

Eliminating these migraines costs time and money -- both of which could be better put to use focusing on the developer's main task: a compelling, creative, emotionally engaging game.

"Other than the huge amount of money that can be made," seethes Erik, "I have no idea why anyone bothers writing games for the PC. From an artistic standpoint, it's like making a movie knowing that every projector will be running at a different speed."

By contrast, consoles have a single, consistent configuration, a base from which to build on, eliminating all this strife. But then again, consoles don't have the versatility of a PC -- for one thing, they don't come with hard drives that allow storage of the vast amounts of graphics and animation footage that help game developers tell gripping stories. The Xbox promises to change all that. First, it shares an operating system and hardware, such as a hard drive, with PCs. And it won't be victim to the Dells and Compaqs of the world.

"Creatively," enthuses one game developer who asked not to be named, "the idea of having a hard drive [which the Xbox has] is extremely exciting for console development. The latest buzzword is 'episodic entertainment' [games with narrative story lines that keep the player hooked], and by having a hard drive Xbox is going to be the first console to really do this. You could really make some interesting new titles and business models based off of this."

"Consoles of all kinds pretty much remove all of that combinatorial misery," adds Irrational Games' Levine. "The Xbox, approximating a high-end PC, also will allow us to use familiar development environments and paradigms. So, you betcha, it will be easier."

Geoff Keighley, editor in chief of Gameslice, believes that a creative Arcadia may be at hand in a land dominated by the Xbox: "Developers don't have to worry about appealing to the lowest common denominator when designing a level, whereas with a PC game, even if you are developing on a high-end PC, you have to make sure a level isn't too big or complicated for a low-end system. The structure of knowing the technological specs of the machine will allow developers to create a more consistent experience for the player, and, in turn, perhaps this will result in them taking more risks creatively."

And then there's the question of cold, hard cash. Time and again, I've witnessed that horrific moment of clarity when a PC owner whose "hot box" was state of the art a year ago suddenly realizes he or she is going to have to fork over even more money for more hardware just to play the newest, coolest game.

"A four-year-old PlayStation still runs the latest Sony game perfectly," observes Keighley. "A four-year-old PC won't even allow you to run 95 percent of the PC games that ship today. If you build a PlayStation game, you know there are upward of 50 million machines ready to run your game. That's not the case with a PC product.

"The bottom line is that PC games have had a huge barrier to entry up until now," he adds. "To play a technically superb title like Unreal Tournament, you basically need a $3,000 PC for it to run at any acceptable frame rate. With the Xbox, PC games can easily be ported to this platform, which will cost under $400 for the hardware. It's a win-win situation because PC games will now have a larger potential audience."

So now, instead of gambling millions of dollars on a PC title that must sell tremendously to break even, PC developers have, in the Xbox, entree to a far vaster market. "Console games can sell a whole bunch more copies," says Keighley. "Console games like Mario 64 and Crash Bandicoot have sold about 5, 8, million minimum. The biggest hit PC game will sell maybe 2 million copies. Half-Life is up at that number now. Myst has probably sold a bit short of 4 million copies after more than a half-decade. There's a much larger international base for console games, too."

"Given these dynamics," says Paul Neurath, former managing director at Looking Glass Studios, "many top-notch PC developers are already shifting their sights to console. The availability of the Xbox will likely accelerate this trend as developers and publishers seek more fertile markets."

With access to such a vast user base, computer game designers will finally have a large enough audience to take creative risks and will also enjoy a consistent, full-featured platform to develop for. Microsoft's potential monopolization of the console market would be a boon to designers, a normalization of standards that should have been set long ago but were hampered by the endless frenzy for the latest in 3-D cards and fast CPUs -- a high-velocity version of planned obsolescence that benefits peripheral manufacturers but makes even good games seem hoary in the space of a few months.

The Free Software Project
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