Violence is intrinsic to many, many games. Even as abstract a game as chess can be seen as a form of military conflict.

When I was a kid, “gaming” meant the mass-market boardgame industry and a small hobby-game appendage that together grossed perhaps a few hundred million dollars at retail. Today, it includes computer, console and arcade gaming and is a $7 billion industry in the U.S. alone — the second largest entertainment industry in the world, after film and television.

As McLuhan would have it, every medium has a message. If violence is intrinsic to gaming, and if gaming is an increasingly predominant form of entertainment, is the likely consequence to our society an increase in violence?

Are the critics who attack gaming in the wake of the Littleton massacre correct on the fundamentals? Should Congress ask the surgeon general to prepare a report on how video games spur youth violence, as it is considering? Do games stoke our violent instincts — or sublimate them? Is there such a thing as “good violence” and “bad violence” in games?

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Let’s step back a moment. What is a game?

A game is an interactive structure that requires players to struggle toward a goal.

If there’s no interaction, it isn’t a game; it’s a puzzle. If there’s no goal, then the players have no reason to choose one option over another, to undertake one task instead of something else; there’s no structure. If achieving the goal isn’t a struggle, if winning is easy, the game is dull; winning’s no thrill.

Struggle implies conflict. Just as conflict is at the core of every story, conflict is at the core of every game. That doesn’t mean all conflict must be violent; in a story, the central conflict can be the protagonist’s own feelings of inadequacy, or the obduracy of her in-laws, or the inequities of society. But violent conflict has its uses; otherwise, we wouldn’t have horror stories and mysteries and thrillers. Not to mention “Hamlet” and “Henry V.”

There are as many ways to create conflict in a game as in a story. Adventure games like Myst use puzzles. Games like Diplomacy require negotiation. Builder games like Civilization require you to overcome economic and technological obstacles.

But there’s no way to avoid conflict entirely. No conflict, no struggle. No struggle, no obstacles. No obstacles, no work. No work, no fun.

Where does violence come into the picture? Violence is an easy out. It’s the simplest, most obvious way to make a game a struggle. If achieving your goal requires you to get through a horde of ravenous, flesh-eating monsters, the conflict is clear — and the way to win is equally clear. You kill them.

Obstacles-of-violence, to coin a term, are compelling; the kill-or-be-killed instinct is wired into our hind-brain, part of our vertebrate heritage. Games like Quake II trigger a visceral, edge-of-the-seat response. Precisely because you can be killed at any moment by strange and nasty creatures, because only quick reactions can defeat them, Quake is a compelling experience.

Quake uses violence well. By that, I mean that it achieves precisely the effect its designers wished to achieve, and succeeds in delivering a compelling, stimulating, entertaining, intense experience to the player. It is a fine game.

But still: Violence is not the only way to achieve struggle in games. It is merely the easiest, the simplest, the most obvious tool in the game designer’s armamentarium.

So — are games fundamentally violent and therefore bad? No. Chadwick was wrong; games are not about violence. Games are about struggle. Because violence is the easiest way to create struggle, many games are violent — but far from all.

But perhaps a more sophisticated argument still holds water? Perhaps game designers have insouciantly awoken the beast, cavalierly creating entertainment so violently compelling that it teaches violence, desensitizes us, spurs increased violence in our society?

There is a lot of violence in computer gaming. Some of it is very ugly. The two most popular categories in computer games at present are the first-person shooter (Quake, Unreal, Half-Life) and the real-time strategy game ( StarCraft, Myth, Total Annihilation). Both categories are “games of violence,” if you will.

The computer gaming industry is a monoculture: It consists almost entirely of white, suburban males in their 20s. We’re talking the demographic that reads Maxim magazine. They’re heavily into computer games, almost completely ignorant of games from other media and almost equally ignorant of computer games published longer than five years ago. Visiting a game development firm is like walking into a strangely 1950s version of 1990s America; if any women are on the premises, they’re artists or marketing people. You may see some Asians, you might see a programmer from India, but certainly nobody darker.

Developers play the same games, they see the same movies, they fraternize with people like themselves and they develop some pretty weird mind-sets. Violence is perceived as cool — no, not real violence, but violence in games.

Consider Postal, published two years ago. It’s a shooter in which you play a deranged, psychotic loser. You wander around shooting completely innocent people at random.

It’s hard to imagine why anyone thought this was a good idea. For one thing, innocent people do not make good obstacles: They’re unlikely to shoot back. They’re not particularly threatening. Never mind the moral considerations; this makes for a dull game.

And the moral considerations should certainly have made Postal’s developers (a company called Running With Scissors) think twice. No doubt, they assumed that the “edgy” nature of the project would get them a lot of press and boost its sales. They did get a lot of press, almost all of it negative, and no doubt that did spur some sales to the kind of people who actually think “Beavis & Butthead” is funny.

But you know what? Postal failed. It didn’t achieve anywhere near expected sales. The reviews were almost uniformly negative. It failed because it was a bad game.

Consider the “bathtub of blood” ad (for the game Blood, developed by Monolith for GT Interactive). It ran in computer gaming magazines in 1997 (for example, the front gatefold of Computer Gaming World, May 97). The dominant image of the advertisement was, literally, a bathtub filled with blood.

It’s hard to imagine why anyone thought this was effective advertising. What it said was: Our game is violent. Our sense of humor is crass. It didn’t actually do what an advertisement must do — explain why the product will be fun or useful, establish a compelling value proposition for the consumer.

Only computer game developers could ever have thought this was a good idea.

In March, another advertisement, for an online games retailer, appeared in the computer gaming press (for instance, Computer Gaming World, March 99, page 89). Its dominant image is that of the naked torso of a woman, lying on an operating table, the rest of her body outside the frame. In the foreground are surgically-gloved hands, holding a scalpel. In the woman’s bare flesh are incised the lines of a tic-tac-toe game.

I buy a lot of computer games. I generally buy them online. But the image of someone cutting a woman’s flesh in order to play the most patently brain-dead game imaginable did not make me want to patronize this company’s services. God only knows why they thought it would motivate anyone else.

Certainly, it is an arresting image. Arresting enough to make the gorge rise. Only the computer gaming culture could possibly view any of this as effective, appropriate or funny.

So perhaps the critics are correct, at least to this degree: The coolness of violence, as portrayed in computer games, has persuaded computer game developers, if no one else, that nauseating depictions of violence, whether or not effective, are cool.

In the gaming field, the response to post-Littleton attacks has been self-righteously defensive. It’s just a game. It doesn’t hurt you any more than TV (never mind the damage television has done to our political system, our propensity to read, and our sense of social solidarity). Games Are Cool.

That’s understandable. Computer gaming people have virtually no defense other than self-righteousness. They’re guilty of many of the sins ascribed to them.

But consider this: The excesses fail. Postal failed. Those ads do not deliver. Violence alone doesn’t do the trick. Violence is, and should be, part of a designer’s toolkit; but it is neither necessary nor sufficient.

Every year, Brian Moriarty gives a speech at the Game Developers Conference, one of the industry’s main trade shows. Every year, it is the best-received speech at the conference. Moriarty is a brilliant speaker, but more than that, he is one of the industry’s eminences grises — one of the original Infocom crew, creator of Loom and Beyond Zork, now in charge of development at MPlayer (one of the biggest of the online-game communities).

Last year, Moriarty’s speech was on the subject of violence in games. As he spoke, two short clips appeared on a screen behind him, repeating hypnotically. One was a clip from “The Great Train Robbery,” a silent film historians call the first real movie hit, showing a mustachioed Westerner shooting a gun directly toward the camera; the other, a short sequence from Quake, showed a guard being shot.

Compelling images both — and compelling in that both show that violence has been a important part of two very different media, virtually from their inceptions.

The speech itself was a meditation on two issues: first, the nature of violence in gaming; and second, the idea of “rhythm of play.” Moriarty says that, if you observe people playing a game — observe them, not the game itself — you find that they engage in repeated cycles of activity. And this repetition, the rhythm created, is one of the strongest draws for people to interactive entertainment. It’s hypnotic. It’s involving.

Violence, he says, creates dissonance. It breaks the rhythm. Dissonance is not bad in itself; dissonance, consciously and creatively used, can be an extremely effective technique, in gaming as in music.

“If you want to include violence in your games,” says Moriarty, “do it, and put your heart and soul into it, do it with awareness — not because violence is easy, or because it shocks, but because you need dissonance, and you know how and why it strengthens your game.”

To paraphrase: Violence used artistically is effective; violence used crudely is vile.

It’s a lesson most computer-game developers have yet to learn — and if one of the upshots of Littleton is that they begin to think more clearly about the issue, that will be to the good.

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First-person shooters are violent games. Yet they are not depictions of endless, orgasmic mayhem; in their solo-play mode, they are mainly about exploration and puzzle-solving, with opposition provided in the form of monsters you shoot. Though violence, and the edge-of-the-seat tension it builds, is a key part of the game’s aesthetic, impressive 3D technology and art and clever “level design” (where exploration and puzzle-solving come in) are at least as important.

The “violence” is against monsters, defined as such, who are clearly attempting to kill you; the back story, such as it is, presents them as some kind of horrible, Lovecraftian intrusion into the real world. Hence they are, in a sense, totally depersonalized opponents. But the notion that this kind of thing therefore “desensitizes” people to violence and makes them more willing to commit it seems dubious. Shooters are really about the “booga-booga” fright instinct: A scary monster appears out of nowhere and roars at you; you have to turn quickly and blow it away.

And of course, you die frequently yourself. The feeling engendered is not “I’m an immortal Rambo, I’m so cool I can kill anything” — rather, it’s more like, “God, that was a hard level, those spider things with the cannon launchers are really tough, I’m glad I finally got through it.”

Interestingly, the multiplayer online version is very different. You shoot not monsters but other players, who are running around trying to kill you. And they aren’t depersonalized; they look just like you, you can chat with them (but rarely do because the game is too fast-paced), and so forth. This has been portrayed as something new and frightening — but frankly, it’s no different from paintball and not much different from tag.

The press has reported Lt. Col. David Grossman’s claim that games like Quake are good training for murder, because they teach you to “clear a room” by moving quickly from target to target and aiming for the head. They teach you to avoid the novice hunter or soldier’s mistake of shooting repeatedly at the same target until the target drops, and instead to use only a single shot.

On the basis of this, I have to doubt that Grossman has ever actually played Quake. No monster in Quake can be killed with a single shot; at least two hits are required. It is impossible to make a “head-shot”; Quake makes no distinction between shots that strike at different locations on a target’s body. And if you stay still long enough to pick your targets and get off head-shots, you’re dead. You must keep moving to evade enemy fire. You snap off shots when you can.

In short, Quake doesn’t teach the lessons that the critics claim it teaches.

The development of shooting games over time has not been toward more and more megaviolence; rather, it’s been toward prettier and more-impressive 3D rendering (Unreal) and toward more compelling story-lines, interwoven more effectively with the game (Half-Life).

Yes, these are violent games — but as is usually the case when the media latches onto something, they have been caricatured. Violence is only a part of their appeal.

The idea that film or television or books make people violent has been debunked again and again. (For one thing, if it were true, Japan would, judging by its popular culture, surely be filled with violent pederasts instead of the civilized world’s most peaceful and orderly population.)

But perhaps computer games are different — so uniquely compelling that violence in games does breed violent behavior?

Some 25 years ago, I read through the Whole Earth Catalog. One section of the book was devoted to the war games published by Simulations Publications Inc. — and I was then an avid war gamer (and later employed by that company) so I, naturally, read it carefully. The Whole Earth Catalog was written during the Vietnam War, a period when schools shied away from any discussion of warfare or military history as too hot a topic to consider. But, as the publication said, war has been part of human nature since time immemorial. War is worthy of study, if only so that we can avoid it by understanding it more fully. And, perhaps, war games are our best hope of avoiding future wars. Perhaps the things we find attractive about war, perhaps the impulses that lead us to war, can be satisfied through simulation.

Violence, and the attraction of violence, is a fundamental part of human nature. It is particularly appealing to young adolescent males, for it is a clean break with the rules-bound environment in which they have lived, a rejection of parental order. In every society, violence is most common among young men.

It is foolish to try to change human nature; it is immutable, or mutable only through the slow process of evolution. What can be changed is society. Society can develop institutions and mechanisms to channel antisocial impulses to pro-social purposes. That’s one reason for armies, of course; they institutionalize violence in a mechanism designed to protect rather than damage society.

And games of violence? They allow players to be violent, to act out their violent impulses, to hunt and shoot and kill — in a way that harms no one.

Listen to the boastfulness of Quake players on TEN. They’ll kill your pussy ass. They’ll blow you up so good your spleen will land in Chicago and your liver in Des Moines. They’re profane and obnoxious, and violently so.

They’re blowing up pixels. They’re killing bitmaps. They’re shooting at software subroutines.

They’re not a threat to public order, for chrissakes. What they’re doing makes them less likely to be a threat to public order. They’re getting their jones — they’re satisfying their antisocial impulses in a completely harmless way.

Violent computer games don’t spur violence; violent computer games channel antisocial impulses in societally acceptable ways.

Games are good.

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For those of us who’ve been involved in gaming for a long time, the whole hysteria over Littleton brings forth a strong sense of deja vu.

We’ve been through this before. Fifteen years ago, Dungeons & Dragons was the culprit. Every time some kid killed himself and a copy of D&D was found amid the stuff in his room, the papers would run a story about how those vile fantasy role-playing games made him do it. The fundamentalists latched onto it, too; Dungeons & Dragons involved magic and spells, and to fundamentalists of a certain stripe, that means it must be inherently demonic and evil.

Poor Sandy Petersen is the man I sympathized with most. He designed Call of Cthulhu, a role-playing game based on the horror stories of H.P. Lovecraft. He’s a devout Mormon. His game was repeatedly attacked, and he along with it, as one of the most demonic and evil of the lot: After all, it deals explicitly with demons from other dimensions. He found himself on panels at gaming conventions, trying to explain to gamers that all Christians were not vile, censoring, irrational scum — and I have no doubt he found himself trying to explain to his co-religionists why all gamers weren’t evil Satanic monsters.

If I feel a sense of deja vu, how much worse it must be for him. Sandy co-designed Doom II and Quake.

It’s not just Dungeons & Dragons. We went through this when the Internet first came to prominence, and was blamed for sex crimes and pederasty. We went through it in the ’50s, when comic books were attacked as perverting our youth, leading to the death of EC Comics and the establishment of the Comics Code Authority. We went through it in the ’30s, when LaGuardia took his hatchet to pinball machines across New York.

Hell, we went through it with rock ‘n’ roll.

Young people are the ones most open to novelty. Consequently, they lead the way in the adoption of any new entertainment medium. Parent/teenager relationships being what they are, parents invariably view the new medium as threatening. The nature of our journalism-industrial complex being what it is, some pundits seize on the fear as a means of achieving an audience. The most threatening aspects of the medium are puffed up into a major threat to civilization. Kids find their medium under attack, and respond, naturally, by embracing the aspects under attack most wholeheartedly.

Sometimes, as with Dungeons & Dragons, the attack ultimately dissipates under the weight of its own ludicrous contradictions. Sometimes, as with EC Comics, congressional hearings and an abject surrender by the industry result.

But these attacks, all of them, have nothing to do with reality. They’re about fear. They’re about the fear of the new — the fear of parents who see their children doing something they don’t understand and worry about the consequences.

The attack is an argument from ignorance. It has no rational basis. It is made by people who don’t understand what they attack, and find its indicia frightening. And to the degree that they have any credibility at all, it’s because ugly and repulsive violence does exist within computer gaming. And if the industry has the brains God gave a biscuit, it will respond — not by imposing censorship or another inane rating scheme, but by avoiding the kind of repulsive, exploitative violence that any idiot ought to see is not going to work anyway.

If you are concerned about violence in gaming, I have one piece of advice: Go buy a copy of Quake II. Install it on your machine. Download a walkthrough, so you won’t fear humiliation when you play. And give it a try.

I think you’ll find that it’s not so frightening. You may even have a good time.

You might even find yourself — like me — shopping for a home networking kit and running cable, so you can play games with your kids.

The success is called Battle.net. A free service run by Blizzard Entertainment, the developers of StarCraft and Diablo, Battle.net allows StarCraft and Diablo purchasers to play online. StarCraft, not incidentally, was the number one bestselling PC game of 1998, according to the PC Data list — and has sold 1.6 million copies to date.

Battle.net claims 2.3 million active users. The MSN Gaming Zone claims more — 4 million — but the numbers are not directly comparable; according to Battle.net, “active” users are those who have actually played a game on their service within the past 90 days. The MSN Zone’s figure presumably includes every account ever created on their (free) service, including ones that have never been used since they were created.

A better measure, anyway, is the number of simultaneous users at peak periods: Battle.net boasts more than 50,000, while the Zone reaches a bit over 30,000. Battle.net is clearly, by most measures, the single most-used game service on the Internet.

Battle.net’s integration with Blizzard’s games is tight: If you want to play StarCraft online, for instance, you just fire up the game, click on “Multiplayer” and then “Battle.net,” and there you are, in a waiting room, looking at a list of open games and chatting with other waiting players. Join a game, and when the necessary number of players have joined, you’re playing. As simple as that.

But more than this is going on behind the scenes. When a game starts, Battle.net looks at the players’ computers and chooses one of them to act as the “game server” — it’ll choose the one with the lowest latency (delay) and the fastest processor. And then Battle.net goes away. The players’ machines talk to each other, over the Internet, for the duration of the game. If the game server loses its connection, somehow, one of the other players’ machines takes over smoothly, so the game is never “lost.” The players never connect back to Battle.net itself until the game is over — at which point, Battle.net takes the results of the game and integrates them into its “leaderboard,” which lists the top players and player rankings.

The clever thing here is that Battle.net’s servers don’t shoulder much of the burden. Battle.net provides chat rooms and player matching and rankings, and that’s about it. All actual game processing occurs on the players’ machines, and Battle.net doesn’t handle any of that traffic. The result is that Blizzard can run the service very cheaply; at peak times, Battle.net takes about 10 servers to operate. By contrast, a game like Ultima Online, which demands continuous traffic between Origin’s servers and players’ machines, requires dozens of servers to satisfy peak demand.

To be sure, Battle.net’s approach is nothing new: If you play Quake on TEN, say, it works the same way. In fact, this is how online play of most Net-capable CD-ROM games works. The “aggregators” — companies like TEN and MPath and Heat.net — were all founded as services to provide this kind of player-matching.

In other words, if you’re a game publisher, and you want to offer online play, you have two options: You can make a deal with one of the aggregators, or you can, like Blizzard, implement your own service.

There are advantages to both approaches. If you make a deal with MPath, say, you don’t have to pay to implement the server-side software and maintain the service. And that’s not an inconsiderable concern; this is a technically demanding kind of operation.

But there are some strong advantages to doing it yourself, too. One is control over technology; when a problem arises, you can fix it yourself, rather than calling a third party, which has its own priorities and may choose to fix a problem with some other publisher’s game first. Another is differentiation: All services on MPath, say, look pretty much alike, because when MPath implements a new feature, it spreads it across all the products it offers, not just yours, so there’s nothing you can do to make your product stand out.

Perhaps most important, when you run your own service you have a direct connection to your customers. You see what they’re doing and how they play; you hear their complaints and their praise; you learn how to serve them better; and you can reach them immediately when you’ve got a patch or a new game to offer. And of course, if the operation is profitable, you keep all the income yourself.

Blizzard isn’t the only company to have done this; Sierra offers its games through Won.net, and Bungie through Bungie.net. But Battle.net is, far and away, the most successful such operation.

It helps if you have a game that sells 1.6 million copies as a basis, of course.

If Battle.net lets people play for free, how does it make money? The answer is simple: advertising. Players waiting for a game-start, or chatting on Battle.net, are exposed to ad impressions as they do. “We’re serving millions of ad impressions every month — 30 million last month,” says Paul Sams, Blizzard’s vice president of business development (last month being March 1999). Moreover, according to Sams, Blizzard supports higher rates for its ads than most other Internet sites because their click-through is substantially higher than average — “around 4 percent in a good month, and at least 2.5 percent in a bad one.”

Although Sams says Blizzard originally accepted that Battle.net would lose money, the service has operated in the black since the third quarter of 1997 (it was launched in December 1996) — purely on the basis of advertising revenue. In other words, it has more than covered its operating expenses since then, without including a proportion of boxed game sales or any other revenue as attributable to Battle.net’s existence.

Blizzard says it thinks sales of StarCraft were 10 to 15 percent higher than they would have been if the game hadn’t offered free online play. Sams cautions that the number is a guess, not based on any hard research.

From where I sit, that number looks far, far too low. In the last 90 days, 2.3 million people have played on Battle.net. Seventy percent or more of them were playing StarCraft or StarCraft: Brood Wars, an expansion. That’s 1.6 million separate IDs in play — and only 1.6 million copies of StarCraft have been sold (and about a half million copies of Brood Wars, but almost every purchaser of Brood Wars will have previously bought StarCraft). Even assuming that some players have multiple IDs, and that some are playing with pirated copies of StarCraft, a very, very high proportion of StarCraft purchasers are clearly playing online. This should be no surprise; StarCraft is faster, more engaging and more challenging when played online than when played solo.

In a way, that’s good news for other online game providers: 1.6 million people are being conditioned to enjoy online play. But in another way, it’s bad news: Battle.net’s success implies that the traditional retail channel for games sales is winning. So much for the long-awaited online gaming revolution.

According to industry wisdom, more than 90 percent of all computer games published lose money. At a typical development cost of $2 million, a game needs to sell 100,000 units to break even. Fewer than 100 of the 1,500 titles published annually do so.

A typical software store has 40 slots for computer games. So many releases never see much retail exposure, and many sit on shelves for a few scant weeks before being removed to make room for new products. It’s a very difficult retail environment for computer game publishers.

The reason gaming is a big business is that the few real hits each year can make a lot of money. StarCraft retails for around $50; typically, half of that goes to retailers or distributors, meaning Blizzard makes about $25 for each copy sold. 1.6 million copies times $25 is a nice profit.

But the business operates in ways that fundamentally make no sense. What the game industry does is take a lot of bytes, copy them to a metal disk that’s encased in plastic, stick the plastic disk in a plastic jewel box, shrink-wrap it, put it in a bigger cardboard box and ship it in a pollution-spewing truck to a retail shelf — where you find it, pick it up, take it home, insert it in your CD-ROM drive and copy the bytes to your machine.

As it happens, you already have a wire, coming into your home, down which you can receive bytes — in fact, to read this article, you did so.

Why not cut out the plastic, the trucks, the retailers? Why funnel your product down this expensive, narrow, screwed up distribution channel, when you can do it over the Net?

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“Doom was a watershed event on a par with the Atari 2600 because it changed the way video games circulate and reproduce … Doom gave video games a way to proliferate in cyberspace … Down the line, you can see a point where video games will be sold in electronic form and jettison their bodies entirely. Doom points the way. Doom is a fulcrum.”
— J.C. Herz, “Joystick Nation”

That was 1993. Fifteen million copies of the Doom demo were downloaded worldwide; id, Doom’s publisher, sold more than 150,000 copies directly to consumers. Retail was the icing on the cake.

But then came the CD-ROM revolution, and software bloated. Computer games went from a few megabytes to a few hundred megs of data. At typical modem speeds, it takes forever to transmit that many bytes. No one’s going to download 600 megs over the Internet.

So the success of StarCraft — and of similar Net-capable CD-ROM games, like Age of Empires and Myth II — is making online game people very nervous. They had hoped that online gaming was a way to break the tyranny and cruelty of the retail channel. After all, if you’re playing online, why not get your software online too?

But StarCraft seems to say: The future of online is the future of retail. The future of online is retail sale plus free online play. This is the business model that works. Forget about charging for play, or by the month; that’s a niche market at best, because the retail channel can move 1.6 million units. No online-only game reaches anything like those numbers.

And if that’s true, all those analysts’ reports saying that online gaming would one day be a $1 billion-plus market were wrong, not only about when it would happen, but about the very fact of it happening — because online gaming is never going to be something different from PC gaming. It’ll just be another way to play CD-ROM games — and you’ll pay the same way you always have, by handing a credit-card to an obnoxious sales clerk down at a mall store.

And the business models of Kesmai, Simutronics, MPath, the MSN Gaming Zone and Sony’s The Station — indeed, the business models of any online game operations that isn’t counting on the retail channel — are broken. They’ll never fly.

This is the analysis that the game industry’s pooh-bahs are just beginning to digest. Should they be afraid? Personally, I think there are some big holes in the argument.

First of all, the retail channel has a lot of experience promoting and marketing products; online-only operators are just starting to figure out how to reach potential customers, and are only gradually waking up to the fact that they have to start thinking like magazines rather than packaged-good companies. (Magazines are typically willing to spend an entire year’s revenues from a customer to get a new customer, on the grounds that some portion will resubscribe, and they’ll start making money in the second year.)

And second, online-only operators have a potentially compelling value proposition for consumers: Instead of spending $50 on an untried game that you may shelve within an hour, you spend nothing for a free trial and a modest amount by the month — meaning you won’t pay anything like $50 unless you decide you really, really like this game.

Those points suggest that the tide might turn once more in the future, and that online gaming isn’t entirely doomed. But right now, the “retail sale plus free online play” model is unquestionably king. And anyone in online gaming has to think about the implications.

For journalists outside the field, it may have seemed as if Myst were some kind of startlingly original eruption. Actually, if it was innovative at all, it was merely in using the multimedia capacities of CD-ROM. Myst was beautiful. It was not original.

The adventure game as a category happens, at present, to be somewhat out of style. It’s far easier to get development funding for real-time strategy games, like Myth and Total Annihilation and StarCraft — or for first-person shooters like Quake and Unreal — than for adventure games. But that doesn’t mean that adventure games are dead. Categories go through cycles in computer gaming: down today, up tomorrow.

Last year, for instance, everyone and his brother announced that they were developing “massively multiplayer virtual worlds” — another example of loathsome hype. What they meant was graphical MUDs (Multi-User Dungeons). MUDs have been around for years; they’re text-based role-playing games played over a network, with many people online and in the same “world” at the same time. They’re fun, and they allow people to socialize online in a more engaging way than straightforward chat. Most traditional MUDs were nonprofit, for-fun operations run on academic computers — although a few, like Simutronic’s Gemstone, were fee-based. The sole insight of the “massively multiplayer virtual world” crowd was that if you added graphics and sound, you could probably get people to pay actual money to play a MUD.

That’s what Ultima Online was — not a staggeringly original departure, but a MUD with pretty pitchers. And a poorly designed one, too. As a result of Ultima Online’s well-reported problems, most of the other projects in this direction have been quietly dropped. The graphical MUD was last year’s flavor of the year; this year, its name is mud.

Lindsay’s claim that adventure gaming is dead is supported by reference to four games: Riven, The Last Express, Obisidian and The Curse of Monkey Island. Let’s look at those titles.

Riven, the sequel to Myst, has not been a sales disappointment; its sales to date actually exceed the analysts’ predictions. True, it’s sold far less well than Myst. That’s because Myst was a staggering sales phenomenon never seen before or since — more than 4 million copies sold at last count. People still debate why Myst did so enormously well — I have my own pet theory — but it’s almost irrelevant. Of course Riven was not going to sell as well. Sequels never do, and the market conditions that spawned such a monster hit in Myst no longer pertain.

Incidentally, Riven was the bestselling computer game of 1997, despite the fact that it shipped only in the fourth quarter of the year and therefore was only on sale for a few months of the year. Titanic, another adventure game, was also in the top 10 for 1997. I guess that means the category is dead, right?

Let’s look at the Last Express, which reportedly took $6 million to develop. If so, it’s hard to see where the $6 million went. First, the graphics basically suck. Conversations and interactions with characters involve slow transitions from one static image to another; no video, no animation. The look itself is almost rotoscoped; it feels clumsy and second-rate by contrast to almost every other game on the market at present. And the adventure itself is poorly designed: I defy you to play Last Express for more than 10 minutes without dying — unless you download some hints from the Internet before you play. Personally, I’d be ashamed to ship a game this weak with a development budget of $1 million, let alone six.

Obsidian? A better effort, here. It is at least visually interesting, and the surreal story is more engaging. But it has severe flaws, too. For one thing, the graphics are so dark it’s very difficult to see almost anything in the game — a fundamental problem for graphics designed on the Mac and transported to the PC, which always displays things more darkly. For another, the surreal nature of the game makes it difficult to keep your bearings — and harder to solve the puzzles, since “logic” doesn’t always apply. Never mind the fact that it was one of the few products Rocket Science shipped before it went under — and that Rocket Science was notorious in the field for poor project management and throwing too much money around.

The game cost $3 million and sold 80,000 copies — nowhere near enough to earn a return. But consider the context: Somewhere upwards of 2,000 interactive entertainment titles are published annually; typically, around 100 achieve sales of 100,000 or more. Given the game’s severe flaws, 80,000 in sales is quite respectable.

The problem with Obsidian isn’t that adventure gaming is dead; the problem was that the developer threw too much money at a second-rate product.

The Curse of Monkey Island was also a sales disappointment, despite being (in my opinion) one of the best games of 1997. But that alone doesn’t support the argument. Bob Bates, of Legend Entertainment, one of the most accomplished designers of adventure games, said at the Computer Game Developers Conference this year that his company typically sells 100,000-150,000 copies of the adventure games they release, with overseas sales basically doubling the total number sold. These are perfectly respectable numbers; they’re not enough to set the world on fire, but they are enough to keep this category chugging along very nicely, assuming you’re not stupid enough to throw a $6 million development budget at an adventure game. (Most computer game titles have budgets in the $1 million-$2 million range.) And it helps, to be sure, that adventure games tend to do rather better overseas than many other gaming styles.

If adventure gaming is dead, the publishers don’t seem to be aware of it. This year promises a number of high-profile, big-budget releases, including the much awaited Grim Fandango from LucasArts and Gabriel Knight 3 from Sierra Studios.

The simple fact is that people have been predicting the imminent demise of the adventure game at least since 1986, when Infocom fell on hard times and was taken over by Activision. The adventure game is not dead. It will not be dead anytime soon. It has a coterie of avid fans, and while it is not the flavor of the month today, it survives. And fashions change. Who knows but next year the pundits will cry in amazement at its revival.

The problem was never that adventure gaming is dying; the problem is that people had unrealistic expectations for adventure games based on Myst’s unreproducible success.

Enough for adventure games. What of online?

According to Lindsay, the future of gaming lies in competitive online play of real-time strategy (RTS) games. He likes Bungie’s Myth — a fine game, to be sure. And RTS is the flavor of the month at the moment. Titles like StarCraft and Total Annihilation have done extremely well — although plenty of other RTS games have sold miserably. That’s absolutely normal in computer gaming; according to received wisdom, 94 percent of all computer games lose money. (I have no idea where that figure comes from, but it’s been quoted all over the place — and it’s reasonable, given that 2,000 titles are published annually and maybe 100 top 100,000 units in sales.)

But let’s take a closer look at online gaming. Last year, all of the business analysts who follow computer gaming announced that online was the wave of the future. Jupiter Communications claimed it would be a $1.6 billion industry by 2000. Forrester Research claimed $1.6 billion by 2001. Kagan, with amazing precision, claimed $742.8 million by 2000.

The actual results for 1997: Online gaming grossed $97 million. By comparison, the market for boxed computer gaming product was $1.8 billion domestically in 1997.

That alone should nail home the pointlessness of Lindsay’s argument. The boxed game industry is big. Online is penny-ante stuff.

What is online gaming, exactly? First we have the old-line online game companies — Kesmai, which runs Gamestorm, and Simutronics, which runs Play.Net. They got their start running titles for the old proprietary online services — CompuServe and GEnie. They designed text-based product that relied on a share of connect-time revenues — and they were both profitable. They both hit big problems when the Internet ballooned to its current monstrous size, when all the online services except for AOL bit the dust and when AOL went to a flat monthly fee.

Why is that a problem? Here you’ve designed a game that encourages people to stay online as much as possible, because you earn money for every hour they stay online. Then suddenly, AOL doesn’t want to pay you by the hour, because it isn’t getting paid by the hour. Instead, it wants to discourage service usage, because it gets the same $10 a month regardless of how long people stay online. Gaming stops being a big source of revenue for AOL and becomes a cost sink.

Kesmai and Simutronics have both made the transition to the Web, and run their own gaming services now. Kesmai is still bleeding money, but it’s owned by News Corp. and has deep pockets. Simutronics claims to be running in the black, but it doesn’t have anywhere near the capital it needs to turn itself into the kind of huge operation the analysts’ numbers predict. It’s an $8 million a year firm, and growing pretty fast, but that’s not going to get us to a $1.6 billion industry any time soon.

Then we have the low-latency mafia: MPath, TEN, DWANGO, HEAT.NET and the like. These companies got capital by claiming they had “solved the fundamental problem of online gaming.” The fundamental problem, supposedly, was latency — the fact that it takes a while to get information over the Net. Your computer draws data off your hard drive in microseconds, but it can be a fraction of a second, or even a few seconds, before you get data from one computer on the public Internet to another.

If you’re trying to play a fast-action game like Quake or Myth over the Internet, latency is a big problem. So these services all began with the notion that they’d offer a premium service — low-latency connections — and charge by the hour for it. They wouldn’t develop original games; they’d let the boxed game publishers do games with Net-play capability, and then people would sign up for TEN or MPath to get a better gaming experience.

The problem is that the business model all these companies relied on just doesn’t work. Low-latency matching has become a commodity. For one thing, companies like Bungie have set up their own systems. Bungie.net matches Myth players for free, so why would you pay someone? Few people will pay for this anymore: They’ve laid out their $50 for a boxed product, they don’t want to pay an additional fee to play online, and they don’t have to, because too many people offer the service for free.

All of the low-latency companies are scrambling for a different model. MPath is going for advertising support; others are trying a flat monthly fee; others are developing proprietary games. On Monday, DWANGO closed all its U.S. operations, although DWANGO Japan, chosen by Sega as the online carrier for Internet play using its forthcoming Dreamcast console, will continue operations. This is the first of the major low-latency carriers to bite the dust, but it won’t be the last.

And then you have companies like Microsoft and Sony — large technology companies trying to build “destination” sites for gamers like the MSN Gaming Zone or The Station@Sony.Com. They offer simple games for free (Hearts and Spades and game matching on the Zone, Wheel of Fortune Online and Jeopardy Online for the Station). They sell ad space for the free area. And then they have a fee-based area for games specifically designed for online play — not, as with Myth, solo-play games with a Net-play version bolted on.

They aren’t making any money, either.

And finally, you have the massively multiplayer virtual world crowd: Meridian 59, and Ultima Online and the forthcoming Everquest and Asheron’s Call. Ultima Online claims to be operating in the black now, despite its well-publicized problems. Maybe so, but I’d be surprised if the overall project is profitable at this stage. And no one else has made this work.

But where does Myth fit in this picture?

For the boxed game manufacturers, online play has become a marketing point, another box to check off, another thing to add to your sales spiel when you call on the buyer for CompUSA. Real time, yup. 3-D, yup. Online play, yup. But the boxed game manufacturers earn no revenue from online play. They get about 50 percent of the $50 you lay out when you buy the game, and that’s all the sugar they’ll ever see. Yes, they want you to play the game online, and decide it’s hot, and tell all your friends so they’ll go out and buy the game, too — but it costs money to support everyone who’s playing the game online. Server farms and T1 lines don’t come free.

So for the boxopoly, online play is an expense — unless they unload the cost of supporting it on someone else, like MPath or the MSN Gaming Zone, as many do. Bungie.net is a nice service — free support for Myth players — but it’s not making Bungie money. Quite the reverse.

This is no model for building an online games industry. It’s a model, ultimately, for companies discouraging their customers from playing online, because supporting them costs bucks and there’s no continuing revenue stream. Myth is not the harbinger of the future; rather, it’s illustrative of why online gaming is screwed, and why it’s not going to be that glorious $1.6 billion industry in the near future.

Nor will online-play of real-time strategy games be the mainstay of the online games industry when it does become big. The strength of online gaming is in communication — something Lindsay recognized when he called chat “the killer app” of online. But RTS, like first-person shooters, is a fast-paced genre — so fast that in-game chat and negotiation is virtually impossible. Pause to engage in a discussion with another player for a minute or two, and you’ll find yourself hard-pressed to continue with the war. RTS as a genre was developed initially for solitaire play at home, and it is best suited to play in that mode. It can be shoehorned into Internet play, but it is not ideally suited to it. Myth and Age of Empires — the two RTS titles best suited for Internet gaming — are still, fundamentally, solitaire games with wires welded on. Internet gaming, when it does explode, will be based around approaches that are specifically designed to take advantage of the medium’s greatest strength — communication — rather than compensate for its disadvantages of latency and bandwidth.

So what’s the online games industry? It’s the old-line online firms, holding on by the skin of their teeth. The low-latency start ups, running short of venture capital and thrashing about looking for a business model that works. The graphical MUDs, either marginally profitable or losing money. And the boxopoly, doing what it’s always done, selling expensive boxes with plastic disks in them, becoming more sophisticated about their multiplayer versions, but still looking at online play mainly as a way of avoiding having to program expensive artificial-intelligence opponents — and as yet another cost of marketing and support.

What it isn’t is a booming industry. It’s a struggling one — a thousand business plans chasing venture capitalists who placed their bets on the low-latency firms, have been burned and are now a lot more interested in technology plays than entertainment.

1998 won’t be the year that online gaming takes off. Nor 1999. Indeed, just as Brazil is the country of the future, and has been for more than a century, it may be that online gaming is the wave of the future — and always will be.

Meanwhile, the much maligned adventure game — a brief novelette’s worth of story, a slim Dover paperback of puzzles and a million dollars of computer graphics — chugs slowly along, not the main driver of the gaming industry but a nice little auxiliary engine. It’s responsible for two of the top-selling games of 1997, in a list otherwise notable for the presence of huntin’-and-fishin’ games and computerized versions of classic board games. Not so shabby, all things considered.

So which one’s dead and which one’s booming? Neither. The adventure game is puffing when it runs upstairs and worrying about its gut. And online’s in the incubator, while the doctors confer in worried tones about its low birth weight. The one has years to go and miles to travel before the grave — and the other has a lot to learn before it’s a brawling adolescent.

There’s only one thing that stands between us and gaming immortality: a million and a half in development funding.

That’s why we’re here, to play the industry’s favorite game: Groveling for Dollars.

I’ll take Microsoft Foundation Classes for $400, Alex.

- – - – - – - – - – - -

We check in, get settled. Derek’s head swivels at every pair of legs, which has me worried. The bar is already filled with boisterous Brits; Denny is itching to join them, which worries me more. We have a meal that reminds me why I try to avoid hotel restaurants. Damon and I go upstairs to set up the box.

There’s some kind of problem with the machine. It was running fine when we left home. Something went haywire in transit. At 2100 hours — 0000 back home — I leave Damon to get some sleep. He’s still brooding over the software. The demo keeps crashing, coming up bluescreen. This is not good.

- – - – - – - – - – - -

Friday, 0700 PST: I go see what’s up with Damon. He has the case open and is poking at things with a voltage probe, eyes drooping with weariness. This is definitely not good. I hop in the car, go down to CompUSA, max out my Visa to buy a new box. We have the demo on CD-ROM. God willing, all will be well for our 11 o’clock.

I have breakfast sent up and pour a couple of quarts of coffee into Damon. He’s past his warranty date, but he has to get this thing running. The demo starts up fine, then bam — the video doesn’t play. The game-play part works fine, but so much for our cool intro cut-scene. Damon curses and starts checking out the video drivers. The box has some damn video card he’s never seen before. Hey, DirectX makes the hardware level invisible to the software, right? What a boon to developers. Damon curses Microsoft, hardware manufacturers and third-party software vendors indiscriminately.

Friday, 1100 PST: Marty Caparula of Passivision is prompt, more’s the pity. Damon is still whacking away at the keyboard, a phone receiver cradled between head and shoulder as he talks to the video card support people at $1.95 a minute, plus whatever the hotel is going to surcharge us. Derek kills some time sweet-talking Caparula; they go way back. They’re talking about punch-card days. Denny is getting visibly annoyed at this; we aren’t going to position ourselves as hip and hot by talking about ancient history. Pre-Pong might as well be prehistoric.

Finally, Derek is talked out, and we have to go ahead with the demo, cut scene or no. Damon sighs, starting it up. Caparula notices the flicker when the video starts and immediately cuts out; we have to explain. He’s visibly impressed with our technical prowess. No doubt this vastly increases his eagerness to throw seven figures our way; we can’t even get Video for Windows to work. We’re a bunch of fucking dweebs, that’s what we are.

So I show off the game, such as it is — only two commands do anything. There’s a little proof of concept here, but not a hell of a lot else. But hey, it’s concept we’re flogging, not technology.

“Combat Golf”! Eighteen levels. Eighteen holes. Eighteen ways to die. Get it? Think of the marketing. First-person shooter meets the favorite sport of people rich enough to afford PCs.

Backstory? The future is hell. Half the population are mutant zombies dying for a chance to feast on human flesh. The other half would like nothing better than to bushwack you on your supposed day off. The world is a sewer.
But there’s always golf. If you can survive long enough to sink that putt … There are scads of stupid monsters you have to whack while trying to tee off or get out of the sand trap. You can use your clubs. Or you can just shoot your ball to drive it down the fairway — one shot, one stroke. But you don’t have much control with the BFG.

Caparula is polite. Hey, why not? He and Derek go way back. He takes the paper, comments positively on the full-color cover (a big hulking cyborg with those stupid golfing pants, a bag of golf clubs over one shoulder and a BFG in the other hand). He’ll get back to us.

“I think that went pretty well,” says Derek.

Denny and I tell him he’s a moron. Caparula was polite. Polite! It’s the kiss of death.

- – - – - – - – - – - -

Damon’s figured out the problem. He’s going to have to go back into the code. Luckily, we brought the source with us. Denny tells him to get some sleep, he can work on it later, when he’s fresh. Well, fresher. Another all-nighter for our boy is in the cards.

We don’t have another meeting today, so I actually go out to the conference to catch a few seminars, maybe see some people I know. I catch a speech from Dani Bunten. She begins by asking people to raise their hands: “How many of you are on the programming side?” A forest goes up. “How many on the art side?” Another forest. “How many on the money side?” Whoa. I make a quick scan about the room. Nary a hand. Oh, there are money men in the audience, all right; they just know better than to identify themselves to this audience of vultures. They’d have people six deep around them, begging for cash if they did. I’d be among them.

- – - – - – - – - – - -

Saturday, 0900 PST: Damon is passed out on the bed, surrounded by Twinkie wrappers and empty cans of Jolt, the detritus of a long night’s coding. 0 Errors, 0 Warnings says the debugger, so I set the demo going. Mirabile dictu, the fucker runs. Now we’re cooking with gas. Doesn’t look half bad, either.

I have to roust Damon; we have a meeting in an hour, and the room needs cleaning up. I send him up to my room to crash.

We have high hopes for the 10 o’clock. It’s Gerald Flanders, exec VP of Product Development for Selectric Smarts. High enough to green-light development without someone second-guessing him. Derek has spent hours courting Flanders.

Derek’s visibly antsy as the time approaches, pacing up and down the room, rebrushing his hair, straightening his tie. Ten comes, then 10:15, then 10:30. Finally, there’s a knock at the door.

I open it. A woman is there, dress suit, Ann Taylor, sensible shoes. I look up and down the hall for Flanders. He’s not there. She’s Betsy something, assistant whatsis, Flanders apologizes, he couldn’t make it.

The bastard has blown us off.

It’s a complete waste of time, of course; unless she goes back absolutely raving about what geniuses we are, we won’t get a hearing, and maybe not even then. She’s too damn junior. But we show her our stuff, she’s perky, she’s nice, she asks questions that indicate she knows something about marketing and nothing about the technology, but at least she’s not a complete bozo. We stuff her with paper and a demo disk, and she promises to pass it on to Flanders.

When she leaves, Derek collapses into an armchair like a broken toy. “I need a drink,” Denny says menacingly. I threaten to have him shipped back to Britain if he touches a drop between now and our 6 o’clock. He’s my boss, you understand.

I go and wander forlornly about the convention center. It’s clear what’s going on here. These cretinous bastards are too philistine to comprehend works of genius, that’s what it is. They’re going to fund more first-person shooters and “Command and Conquer” clones, more of the same old same old instead of a truly original and striking piece of creative imagination like “Combat Golf.” It’s pearls before swine, that’s what it is.

A friend of mine tells me how happy he is at some goddamn developer in Alabama or some godforsaken place. He hasn’t had a game published in five years, he’s watched three employers go down with all hands, but he’s grinning, the bastard. I paste on a transparent smile, realizing with relief that he’s just doing the same.

- – - – - – - – - – - -

Saturday, 1700 PST: I find Denny in the bar, swilling a Cosmo and chatting with a bunch of other Brits, who laugh inanely. I hop up and down, rather red-faced, mouthing things incoherently in Denny’s direction. He grins, claps me on the back, tells me to buck up and wanders unsteadily up to his room to freshen up for our 6 o’clock.

I head for the elevators myself, to go check on the room where the computer’s set up. As I get to the elevators, I see Derek, our CEO, getting into the elevator ahead of me with something in a Betsey Johnson dress and stiletto heels. I moan and scrabble at the elevator buttons.

Five minutes to 6, Derek calls and tells us he has “another meeting” that “may produce something fruitful.” He has complete faith in our ability to handle the meeting with Ascendant International.

Derek is off on his horizontal meeting. Damon is barely awake enough to comprehend what’s going on. Denny is stagerringly drunk. That leaves — me.

Irascible, unpleasant me. I take deep breaths.

The time comes. Ascendant (formerly Crush U Cwik Marketing) has sent a duo, one in his 40s, the other a 20-something acolyte. Both of them sport brushed-back blond hair, health club-toned bodies, Hawaiian shirts, Dockers. The San Jose notion of hip. We do the handshake thing, the pass-the-cards thing, the pretend you’re Japanese and say kamichiwa and bump your forehead painfully on the other guy’s thing. Everybody grins apologetically, rubbing their foreheads, and Damon starts the demo.

They like it. They like everything. They say “cool” a lot (they still say “cool” in San Jose, apparently). The cut scene is cool. The concept is cool. They ask me if we play golf.

No, none of us plays golf, not even Denny, who by virtue of national origin should have an advantage. Small creases appear on the brows of the duo. I explain to them that we all have complete contempt for the game of golf, which, when you think about it, is about as stupid a sport as you can get. And indeed, we all have complete contempt for first-person shooters. Therefore, we are the development team perfectly suited to create a golf first-person shooter; after all, the whole thrust of the industry in recent years has been toward games devoid of any intellectual or emotional merit that are designed with complete contempt for the potential audience. I mean, look at Postal.

While I make this speech, Denny turns an interesting mauve; his fingers twitch, his eyes go to the ice bucket, but I have taken all the beer up to my room for safe-keeping, and he doesn’t fancy a Jolt.

The Ascendant boys explain how I’ve entirely assuaged their concerns, and what an interesting idea this is. They take the paper and such and depart.

It’s Damon’s turn to say, “I thought that went rather well.” Denny explains to him that those guys are Hollywood, meaning they never say anything negative ever, because today’s petitioner may be tomorrow’s boss. We actually have no idea where we stand with them, except that after (according to Denny) my idiotic spiel on how the very idea for the game was contemptible, it was obvious we hadn’t the chance of a pint of Guinness in hell. Speaking of which.

I flee to the bathroom to find my Xanax, regretting that I haven’t brought my straight razor. What if I want to slash my wrists? Ah, no worries, I think, there’s always the box cutter.

I calm gradually down as the Xanax kicks in. After all, if worse comes to worse, I can always go back to technical writing.

- – - – - – - – - – - -

Saturday, 2100 PST: I wander the hotel forlornly, hitting the parties. They suck. Microsoft wants you to sign a non-disclosure to get a beer. Now, people in publishing know how to throw a party. I wish I were back at ABA. We’ve got one last meeting scheduled, noon tomorrow. Obi-wan, you’re our only hope.

- – - – - – - – - – - -

Sunday, 1200 PST: The guy from QT Interactive even looks like Alec Guinness; well, if Alec Guinness had a paunch. Not a Brit, though, thank God. Suit and tie, almost looks like a businessman.

We’re all on edge, both Damon and Derek look like they haven’t slept, Denny is obviously hungover, I’m twitching. The demo runs, we talk about the concept, everything is going smoothly. Obi-wan asks intelligent, interested questions, although his voice seems a little strangled at times.

After 15 minutes or so, he bursts out laughing. He can’t hold it in any more. We stare aghast. He’s shaking with mirth. He can’t stop. “You guys aren’t really serious about this, are you?” he gasps.

There’s a bit of chaos. I don’t really remember what happened. I accidentally sliced his tie in half with the box cutter, I remember that.

Derek runs down the hall after Obi-wan with the proposal and a demo disk while Denny sits on me and Damon pries the box-cutter from my hand.

- – - – - – - – - – - -

Sunday, 2300 PST: The plane drones through the night. No contract, no company. I contemplate my future career writing manuals for large financial transaction systems.