Mile
Zero

There are three consoles stacked behind our TV. They're the retro platforms: my SuperNES and Dreamcast, and Belle's PS2. I think they're hooked up, but I can't honestly remember, because I rarely turn them on or dig out any of the games that go with them. They just sit back there, collecting dust and gradually turning yellow in the sun, like little boxes of electric guilt. I'm almost starting to hate them.

Most people probably have a media backlog of some kind: books they haven't gotten around to reading, movies they haven't had time to watch, music they can't give the attention it might deserve. But I think gamers have it worst of all, for two reasons. First, the length of the average game, especially older games, is a huge obstacle to completion. Second, there's a lot of hassle involved for anything going back more than a generation.

Belle and I are trying to reduce our physical footprint, so having to keep older consoles around "just in case" grates, but emulation's a mixed bag even when it works. Worse, I have a really difficult time tossing old games that I haven't finished: how could I get rid of Virtual On, Chu Chu Rocket, or Yoshi's Island? Those are classics! I'm also prone to imagine unlikely scenarios during which I'll finish a game or two--my favorite is probably "oh, I'll play that when I get sick one day" as if I were in grade school, a plan that ignores the fact that I'm basically a workaholic. If I'm sick enough to stay home, I'm probably too ill to do anything but lay in bed and moan incoherently.

Having realized that I have a problem, one solution is simply to attack it strategically--if I can only decide what that strategy would be. Should I work backward, from newest to oldest? Or start from the SuperNES and go forward through each platform, gradually qualifying each one for storage? Clearly, the "play at random" approach is not narrowing my collection with any great success.

There is, however, another option, and ultimately it's probably for the better: to simply accept that the backlog is not a moral duty. I don't have to play everything. I think gaming culture is very bad about this: the fact that many gamers grew up with certain titles lends them a nostalgic credibility that they probably don't entirely deserve. And frankly, if the titles I'm considering were that compelling, I wouldn't have to force myself to go back and play them.

I'm hardly the only gamer I know caught between practicality and sentiment. The one plan that would unify both would be digital distribution on a neutral platform--the current XBox and Wii emulations fall far short of this, since they just lock my classic games to a slightly newer console. I'd love to see a kind of "recycling" program, where I could return old cartridges in exchange for discounts on legitimate ports or emulations on a service like Steam or Impulse. After all, even without the trade-in value, I sometimes buy Steam copies of games I already own just because I know they'll then be available to me, forever, without taking up any physical space.

Game publishers probably won't go for that plan. I can hardly blame them: the remake business, just as with the "high-def remaster" film business, is no doubt a profit machine for them. But I don't think it'll last forever. Just as I buy fewer movies these days, since I'd rather stream from Netflix or rent from Amazon Digital, the writing is probably on the wall for buying software in boxes. That won't eliminate the backlog--but it'll certainly clear up the space behind my TV set.

Our cat will be thrilled.

One of Belle's favorite hobbies is to take a personality test (such as the Meyers-Briggs) once every couple of months. She makes me take the same test, and then she reads our results aloud. The description for her type never explicitly says "finds personality test results comforting," but it probably should. I'm skeptical of the whole thing, frankly, but then someone with my personality type would be.

I found myself thinking about profiles after having a conversation with a friend about the appeal of Diablo (or lack thereof). I understand the theory behind the Diablo formula--combining the random reward schedule of an MMO with a sense of punctuated but constant improvement--but games based on this structure (Torchlight, Borderlands) leave me almost entirely unmoved.

For better or worse, game design increasingly leverages psychological trickery to keep players interested. I think Jonathan Blow convincingly argues that this kind of manipulation is ethically suspect, and that it displays a lack of respect for the player as a human being But perhaps it's also an explanation for why Diablo doesn't click for me, but other people obsess over it: we've got different personality profiles.

I think the idea of a Meyers-Briggs profile for game design is kind of a funny idea. So as a thought exercise, here's a quick list I threw together of personality types, focused mainly on psychological exploits common in game design. I figure most people--and most games--have a mix of these, just in larger or smaller proportions. Some of them may even overlap a little.

• Completionist: Enjoys the feeling of finishing all items in a list of goals. Probably has sub-categories, depending on the type of task required (story-related, achievement-based, simple collection).
  Prototypical games: Pokemon, Crackdown, Donkey Kong Country
• Storyteller: Enjoys the creation of emergent stories, particularly in sandbox-type games. These can range from actual narratives, to the construction of Rube Goldberg-like scenarios within the rules and physics of the game world, or simply games that offer "great moments" during regular play.
  Prototypical games: The Sims, Minecraft, Deus Ex
• Audience: Enjoys playing through a linear story. Would, if all else were equal, be just as happy watching a really good movie.
  Prototypical games: JRPGs, Metal Gear Solid, Resident Evil, adventure games
• Explorer: Enjoys finding new locations and entities inside the game world. Prefers expanse and novelty to either realism or deep-but-restricted scenarios.
  Prototypical games: Metroid, Castlevania, Fallout
• Grinder: Enjoys the process of slowly improving an avatar, either by levelling up or obtaining new equipment, or both. Becomes invested in the game as a long-term product of effort, creating an artifact that's a source of pride.
  Prototypical games: World of Warcraft, Diablo, Borderlands
• Mechanic: Enjoys figuring out, then mastering, the underlying gameplay system, even if that limits the overall scope of the game. Prefers rulesets that are predictable, and "levelling the player" over increasing an avatar's stats.
  Prototypical games: Street Fighter, Team Fortress 2, Legend of Zelda
• Munchkin: Like a mechanic, but with an emphasis on learning how to break/exploit the system. Ranges from people who read David Sirlin's "Playing to Win" and loved every word, to people who just like turning on cheat codes in GTA and seeing how far they can get in the tank.
  Prototypical games: sandbox games, broken games, broken sandbox games, Marvel Vs. Capcom
• Competitor: Enjoys being ranked against other players, either AI or human. Likes the interplay of competition and cooperation, and prefers "winning" to simply "finishing."
  Prototypical games: Halo, Geometry Wars, Defcon
• Partier: Enjoys playing with other players, particularly in single-couch co-op. More interested in an enjoyable play session than "winning" the game.
  Prototypical games: Rock Band, Mario Party, Wii Sports
• Thinker: Enjoys making comprehensive strategic decisions, often at a slower pace. Not necessarily a wargamer, but often is.
  Prototypical games: Advance Wars, Defense Grid, Age of Empires
• Buttonmasher: Enjoys reflex-based games that offer a lot of rapid stimulation. Not necessarily a shooter fan, but often is.
  Prototypical games: Ikaruga, Super Mario, Demon's Souls

There's probably a good way to simplify these, or sort them into a series of binaries or groups, if you wanted to make it more like a legitimate personality quiz. Still, looking over this list, I do feel like it's better at describing my own tastes than a simple list of genres. I think I rank high for Audience, Mechanic, and Buttonmasher, and low for Storyteller, Completionist, and Grinder--makes sense for someone who loves story-driven FPS and action-RPGs, but generally dislikes open-world games and dungeon crawlers.

Such a list certainly helps to describe how I approach any given title: concentrating more on getting through the narrative and learning the quirks of the system, less on grabbing all the achievements or experimenting with the environment. I almost wish reviewers ranked themselves on a system like this--it'd make it a lot easier to sort out whether my priorities sync with theirs.

In general, I agree with Blow: the move toward psychological manipulation as a part of game design is at best something to be approached with great caution. At worst, it's actually dangerous--leading to the kinds of con-artistry and unhealthy addiction in Farmville and (to a lesser extent) WoW. I don't think we can eliminate these techniques entirely, because they're part of what makes gaming unique and potentially powerful. But it would probably be a good idea to understand them better, and package them in a way that people can easily learn to be aware of them, similar to the ways that we teach kids about advertising appeals now. After all, as other sectors adopt "gamification," industry-standard psychological manipulation is only going to get more widespread.

I'm thrilled, personally, to see actual actors doing voice and motion work for video games, after years of Resident Evil-style butchery. Not to mention that it's nice to see Sam Witwer (Crashdown from BSG) getting work as the Apprentice in Star Wars: The Force Unleashed, or Kristen Bell (Veronica Mars) taking a bit part for the Assassin's Creed games. But friends, I have to say: the weird, digital versions of these actors used onscreen are freaking me out.

We have truly reached the point of the uncanny valley in terms of real-time 3D, which is kind of impressive if you think about it. Or horrifying, if you try to play these games, and are interrupted at regular intervals by dialog from cartilage-lipped, empty-eyed mannequins. It's actually made worse by the fact that you know how these actors are supposed to look, giving rise to macabre, Lecter-esque theories to explain the discrepancies between their real-life and virtual appearance. Don't get me wrong--I'm glad that we've reached the point that such a high level of technical power is available. I'm just thinking it would be nice to be more selective about how it's used.

The problem reminds me of movie special effects after computer graphics really hit their stride--say, around the time I was in high school, and George Lucas decided to muck around with the look of the original Star Wars trilogy, perhaps concerned that they lacked the shiny, disjointed feel of the prequels. In one scene, for example, he added a computer-generated Jabba the Hutt getting sassed by Han Solo, even though it really added nothing to the film apart from a sense of floaty unreality.

The thing is, there wasn't anything wrong with the original effects in Star Wars. They've held up surprisingly well--better than Lucas's CG replacements. The same goes for films like Star Trek II or Alien or The Thing. Even though the effects aren't exactly what we'd call "realistic," they don't kill the suspension of disbelief--and they're surprisingly charming, in a way that today's effortless CG creations are not. Scale models and people in rubber suits have a weight to them that I, personally, miss greatly (the most recent Indiana Jones movie comes to mind). When the old techniques are used--Tarantino's Death Proof, for example, or Guillermo Del Toro's creaturescapes--the results have an urgency and honesty that's refreshing.

Back in videogameland, it amazes me that no-one looks at their cutscenes during development and asks themselves "is there a better way? Is the newest really the best?" At one point, right when CD-ROM became mainstream, it looked like composite video with real human actors might be the future, a la Wing Commander. Somehow, it didn't happen (fear of Mark Hamil, maybe? Psychological scarring from Sewer Shark?). But when you're watching robot Kristen Bell shudder through a cutscene in Assassin's Creed, it's hard not to wish that you could just watch the real Bell, even through a cheesy green screen.

Or, at the very least, it'd be nice if more developers would try alternatives instead of pushing ahead with a character look that they're just not pulling off. I have had harsh words for Mirror's Edge--I believe I compared it to a flammable kitchen appliance--but the developers' choice to create animated interstitial movies instead of realtime rendering was a bold and interesting choice, particularly since the game actually boasted very well-crafted and animated character models. In-engine cutscenes may have been a great bullet-point when we made the transition to hardware-based 3D, but now that novelty has passed. We've worked for years to get to the uncanny valley: it's time to find a way out.

This was a submission for the 2009 Call for Writers at Gamers With Jobs. It wasn't a good match for them, but I still enjoy parts of it, so I'm posting it here.

The PC has been killed so many times, they put a revolving door on the coffin. It's been declared deceased so often, the death certificate has scorch marks from the copier. The tech community has buried it so deep, Australia's complaining about the tunnelling's environmental damage. And yet, somehow, it's still around. As someone who has long identified with the PC, I find this strangely comforting. When they start writing editorials about the great shape the industry's in, I'll start worrying.

Of course, the constant hum about its mortality masks the traditional role of the PC as a weathervane for gaming elsewhere. For example, Sean Sand's "Don't call it a comeback" points out that big-budget titles may make up a smaller portion of the platform's future library--what's that but XBLA and WiiWare writ large? Likewise, the shift to digital distribution over Steam, Impulse, and other services puts the PC at the forefront of an industry-wide trend away from physical media. It's the open nature of PC development--its generativity, as author Jonathan Zittrain would say--that lets it lead the pack this way.

But in another sense, PC gaming is changing on a more basic, demographic level. The platform itself is evolving, and gaming will have to evolve with it. I'm referring, of course, to the gradual rise of the laptop and netbook as computing platforms. Like it or not, both of these hardware configurations are increasingly common, carry serious implications for developers, and have already begun to influence this corner of the industry.

In 2007, desktop sales dropped by 4%, while laptop sales rose by 21%. The gap has no doubt risen since that time, in part due to the rise of the netbook niche--indeed, laptops outsold desktops in 2008 for the first time, ever. Those kinds of numbers aren't broken out by profession or use, unfortunately, so we don't know how many gamers specifically have moved to portable. But it's not outrageous to assume that it's true for the general gaming population, particularly as we gamers get older and want a computer to pull double-duty for work and play.

When the time came to replace my own aging, hand-built tower PC, I ended up going with a Lenovo Thinkpad. It has a discrete graphics card, putting it roughly in the midrange of portable rendering power between the poor suckers with integrated Intel chips and those city-block-sized, SLI-capable monsters from Asus and Alienware. For a two year-old business notebook, the Thinkpad is pretty good at gaming: it runs Half-Life 2 and Team Fortress 2 acceptably--if not extravagantly--well, which was my priority when I bought it. Fallout 3 also plays well enough that I can't complain about the graphics (the controls, on the other hand...). Not everything fares so well: Crysis was a slideshow (literally: "What I Did On My Summer Vacation--Visited Beautiful North Korea, Fought Aliens, and Choked People With My Terrifying Robot Fetish Suit"). But then, people with small nuclear reactors under their desks had trouble running Crysis when it first came out. I don't let it get me down.

The salient point is not that the hardware's a bit behind the cutting edge. It's that, as a laptop, it's mostly not upgradeable--at least, not in the parts that really count for 3D rendering, like the graphics card. My laptop will never run so-called AAA titles, no matter what I do. This doesn't mean that I've stopped gaming, or buying games. But it does mean that my purchasing dollars tend to go to companies that will support a somewhat more lenient range of hardware when it comes to their software. I end up buying from companies like Stardock or Valve--developers that still target graphics cards from a few generations back. Or I've found a new interest in the indie scene--games like World of Goo or Introversion's back catalog. When all else fails, I'm catching up on older titles I never played, like the original Fallout games. In a way, the laptop hardware lag has been a gift.

The PC gaming industry's become accustomed to being the top performer in the rendering game for a while now, and that will no doubt continue among the niche of hardcore enthusiasts. But anyone who wants to actually be profitable in this space would do well to keep us laptop gamers in mind. You think World of Warcraft's success isn't at least partly due to its generous system requirements? The shift might even be a blessing in disguise: notebooks, while still diverse compared to console hardware, are notably more standardized than desktop systems--a complaint that developers have against the platform for years.

It will be painful for a while, as publishers and developers adjust to the new reality of notebook gaming, but ultimately I think we'll be better for it. From constraint often comes inspiration. That's true in other media, and I think it will be true in gaming as well. So feel free to cheer for the end of PC gaming--after all, it's not going anywhere.

"You are crippled," says Fallout 3.

"Huh," says I. "That seems a little tone-deaf."

When you get shot in the leg, or you fall off a building, or a mole rat eats your hand (or all of the above) in Fallout 3, the damage gets broken out into one of six body zones. Take enough damage, and there's an appropriate penalty (loss of accuracy, slower movement, etc.) as well as an amusing pained expression on your in-game HUD. I'm okay with all that. But the word "crippled" took me aback. I'm not terribly savvy when it comes to persons with disabilities, but it strikes me as a particularly loaded term--I certainly would have avoided it when I was writing for the World Bank.

I'm not trying to cast Bethesda as insensitive bigots. The terminology (used in the classic RPG tradition of Capitalized Status Conditions like Confuse, Sleep, or Haste) appears to be a holdover from the older Fallout titles. They're using it as an adverb, and not as a noun ("You are crippled" instead of "You are a cripple"), which makes some difference. And it's not like they did something outrageously stupid, like putting Africans in grass skirts and wooden masks or something. Still, you'd think that while they were updating everything else about those previous games in the series, putting them on a new engine and everything, they must have thought about the language they were using. I wonder why they thought "crippled" was the best choice.

It's not even, from a writer's perspective, a particularly flavorful word. A thesaurus search finds several alternatives with more punch, including "wrecked," "maimed," and "mangled" ("vitiate" is also amusing, but probably too obscure). Individual terms for specific injuries would be even better: "You are hobbled." "You are concussed." "You are defenestrated." And here I've always taken such good care of my fenestrates.

In any case, it's easier to nitpick someone else's hard work than it is to figure out what it means, and I'm still not sure how I feel about Fallout's status condition. Is it significant? How does it relate to the game's subject, as well as its underlying mechanics? Can it tell us something about portrayals of disability and normality in media? Or is "crippled" just a writing decision that rubs me the wrong way?

Rock Band was actually the reason that we bought the XBox. Belle and I have a soft spot for gimmicky party attractions. Somehow, we forgot that we also have a neurotic, overprotective pit bull mutt. They don't really mix, and we kept putting off our plans. This weekend, we finally bit the bullet, boarded the dog, and brought the noise.

Watching people play for the first time, particularly people who are not A) incredibly extroverted or B) experienced gamers, was interesting. They were usually put on the drums, under the reasonable logic that hitting things is fun, and everyone was pretty much on Easy, because failing a song is not fun (the primacy of fun may be a debated topic in design circles, but when people are drinking it's not really an option). When the song first starts, the newbie would have an expression of utter panic--hitting the pad too late, bewildered by the number of notes coming in, only using one stick--and then, all of a sudden, there'd be this ah-hah! moment and they'd get it.

The speed of that jump between dread to drumming is so quick, in fact, that I've been trying to figure out the cause in the couple of days since. My best guess is that it comes from the realization that you're not just hitting buttons when they cross the bottom of the screen, but that you're playing in time with the music--the onscreen action is actually kind of a miscue. Once new players make that conceptual leap, the rest is a cakewalk. Which begs the question: the "highway o' notes" approach has become so standard that experienced gamers don't question it, but could it be the weakest part of the modern rhythm game? How else could we visualize a musical score without resorting to actual notation?

Once they sat down and got the hang of things, I think people enjoyed themselves. But there's certainly a karaoke factor--nobody wants to be the first to act like an idiot in front of everyone. You have to have a few Judas goats get things started with a couple of songs--the cheesier the better--before people will start to jump in. And even so, I think reports of the game's universal appeal may be a little presumptuous. And that's okay: it's a party, not an enforced Rock Band prison camp.

Not yet, anyway. I'm thinking of training Wallace to be the Fun Enforcer. If he's so set on biting people, we might as well channel it into a useful direction. And snarling madly at the end of a short leash while I shriek "more fun! MORE FUN!" sounds like a good party starter. For me, at least.

John Robb's Brave New War basically confirms a suspicion that I've had for some time now: that so-called "fourth-generation" warfare is really just the military catching up to its nonviolent counterparts. Robb's book serves as a useful summary of 4GW thought, incorporating examples from Iraq and elsewhere. In short, it amounts to the realization that straightforward military conflict--soldiers firing guns directly at other soldiers--is no longer the predominant threat. Instead, Robb says, the goal of "global guerrillas" is to disrupt the enemy economically, psychologically, and logistically. None of this would be a surprise to, say, the Danish under Nazi rule, or Ruhrkampf in 1923, or the organizers of the American civil rights movement. The violence of the methods listed by Robb may be different, but the underlying philosophy is very similar.

This is kind of satisfying as an advocate for nonviolence, but it's also interesting as a gamer. There's a whole genre of shooters and strategy titles that are based around the ideas of third-generation warfare: get better equipment than the other guy, then go beat the crap out of him. I could be wrong, as I'm not an expert on the strategy/RTS genre, but I can't think of a single popular title that isn't firmly rooted in that idea (tower defense games might come the closest).

Not that I'm saying that shooters should necessarily be following up-to-date strategic doctrine. Or that they should be anything near realistic. I like a good me-against-the-world shooter as much as the next guy. But even if you don't believe that gaming can influence cognitive approaches--and I go back and forth on that point--the lack of progress does seem a shame, for two reasons. First, because 4GW is more interesting: it's about finding weak points and undermining legitimacy, the kind of min-max problem that munchkin-style gamers have salivated over for years. Robb says that knocking out 1 percent of high-load nodes would make up to 40% of our electrical grid go dark. Can you imagine the GameFAQs entry for that? Or the feeling of accomplishment when it's figured out?

Second, it's less violent (and more parallelizable). The violence thing is not just me being squeamish. I can't be the only person to have noticed that as consoles and PCs have gotten more powerful, one of the primary uses for that power is to enhance violence: zone-specific injury, ragdoll physics, more on-screen enemies, bloodsprays, etc. It's kind of morbid, frankly. Surely there's more challenge (and gameplay) in modeling the network of relationships between infrastructure and population--and it might be easier to scale that kind of modeling, in a world where concurrency is the new dominant programming paradigm. Easier on the art team, too.

Of course, if you do believe that games are educational experiences, perhaps this is not the education that we want: how to sabotage a developed society? Creepy. But then, if you believe that, you should already be worried about the lessons that third-generation wargames are teaching. The strategies of current military titles are largely generalizable only to other military applications, and they carry the implicit message that coordinated force is a valid solution in international conflict resolution. At the very least, games that address weaknesses in community resilience and redundancy can also be applied to sustainability and our economic situation (at the extremes, the green movement and the paranoid survivalists become strikingly similar), to name just two of the networks that increasingly define our world. More importantly, it's a view of the world that stresses interdependence and complexity over unilateral force. I can't help but see that as a (slight) improvement.

Or: My New Year's Resolutions for Gaming Only, Because I Don't Follow the Other Ones (As If I'm Going To Follow These), 2009:

1. If it bores me early, I'll stop playing it. Like a lot of people, I suspect, I'll keep playing something long after it has become clear that it is a drag with few redeeming features. This has to stop. Life is too short to spend it in virtual drudgery. I don't have this problem with books (see: GEB), I need to bring the same ruthless approach to electronic entertainment. This probably means I'll stop playing Metroid 3 soon.
2. If I didn't stop early, but it's still boring, I'll really stop this time. When I was playing Final Fantasy Tactics A2 recently, it was obvious after not very long that there was just a lot of grinding ahead. But by the point when I began to seriously consider quitting, I had sunk enough time into it (according to the little counter in the save screen) that I kept going, because I didn't want to have that time wasted completely. Result: I spent twice as long playing as I should have, and in retrospect it was all a waste anyway. Plus there was the incredibly annoying final boss, which brings me to...
3. You're not the boss of me now. I only want to beat final bosses if they are A) very easy, or B) ridiculously amusing. After the investment the average game requires, I'm usually just about sick to death of it by the time I get to the last section. The old-school spike in difficulty, a la Ninja Gaiden, just isn't going to cut it any more (see also: Advance Wars: Days of Ruin). I've done my time, now let me feel good about myself and then show me the frakkin' ending.
4. No more console shooters. I'm sick of playing them, and you're sick of reading me gripe about them.
5. Play more indies. I don't spend enough time outside the mainstream comfort zone. And since I'm trying to be more of a PC gamer, it's not like there's a paucity of good, independent titles to try. Also, I feel like I could write more interesting things if I weren't playing the same stale stuff as everyone else.
6. Commit more Sins of a Solar Empire. Sins is a phenomenal game with a great title. Unfortunately, I started a massive, five-solar system session, got 2/3 of the way through it, and then couldn't work up the energy to finish such a daunting task. If I can't finally clear that off my to-do list, I'd like to at least play a few smaller boards before I shelve it under "emergency game stash."
7. Try one MMO. Preferably one of the ones that doesn't require a subscription. I've never played one of these. I'll feel better about mocking them once I've got a tiny bit of experience.
8. Quit trying to beat Rinserepeat's Pacifism score in Geometry Wars 2. Because I'm never going to get past 14,000, no matter how much fun it is to try.

At this time, there have been something like 2,000 reviews of Spore on Amazon. A massive number of them are 1-star reviews complaining about the DRM--partially because it's the standard SecuROM crap, but also because a glitch in the activation servers apparently locked out a number of the early purchasers. The negative comments don't seem to have hurt sales anyway, since it's still one of the top-rated sellers in Amazon's video game category.

Set aside the debate of whether or not this is an appropriate way to use the site's review system--after all, Amazon is notoriously lax about policing the ratings (see also: Jonah Goldberg's ill-advised Liberal Fascism, which is tagged by users with the phrases "ein volk ein reich ein bag von cheetos" and "code pink invaded poland" among others). There are at least a couple of more interesting questions to be raised about the Spore rating debacle: the effectiveness of excess, and the need for more information about DRM.

First, do two thousand reviews actually mean anything? At what point, really, do we trip a kind of mental incredulity barrier, and the entire process starts to work against itself? Clearly, a page with 81 five-star and 2,088 one-star ratings has something going on, and customers who aren't as informed about DRM might find it more than a little odd. It may be that such a strong reaction doesn't so much dissuade buyers so much as it simply causes them to tune out the review system entirely. Hence the strong sales for the title.

I suspect that this has happened, actually. But the DRM-focused reviews are serving another purpose: they provide information about the SecuROM that's otherwise usually hidden from consumers. Normally, if I buy a game, I have to do at least a quick Google search before I know what kind of DRM it might be carrying. I can look at a typical Amazon page and see system requirements and cost, but I won't see what kind of copy protection it has built in. In a roundabout way, that's what these reviews are providing: information that the market failed to produce on its own. Which is fantastic.

For example, when I first got my new laptop, I picked up FEAR so I'd have something to play through on a more powerful video card than my previous system. Obviously the box doesn't say, but FEAR also includes an earlier version of SecuROM. People bag on Vista's UAC feature all the time, usually without understanding it, but it flagged the installation process during the DRM installation stage. Thanks to the warning, I found a crack to disable the DRM, just in case.

Now, that's just me being paranoid. After all, SecuROM's pretty non-invasive as DRM goes. But that's like saying it's only a minor infection--it's still not something I want on my system, particularly given Sony's past behavior with rootkits and shady code (Sony develops SecuROM). And what about games that use StarForce or other, more destructive copy protection? Shouldn't consumers know what they're installing when they install that game, and then be allowed to choose to go ahead?

The optimal path, of course, would be along the lines of the recent Gamers Bill of Rights by Stardock, which specifies no copy protection at all. Failing that, I think retailers should notify customers about the DRM included in the products they sell. And as a final precaution, I've started thinking about creating an open game DRM wiki, so that buyers can easily check in a centralized location before making a purchase.

Because I'm all for markets and market solutions. But I also believe that DRM is a market failure, and another is the lack of information about DRM that's available to the consumer. Until that failure is remedied, the PC gaming situation isn't going to get any better.

Did you hear that PC gaming is dying? You probably have, because nobody seems to be able to shut up about it.

Certainly not the big producers. Crytek blamed poor sales of Crysis on piracy, although the game then apparently sold more than a million copies, beating their expectations. iD's stopped making PC exclusives, as has Epic--they've explicitly blamed piracy and integrated graphics for the problem. And many of the big developers are not making exclusives for PC any more, or they're back-porting their lower-end console versions to the platform, or they're blaming their lower-end console versions for the lack of a PC port (see: Lucasarts and The Force Unleashed). There's a lot of scorn going around for the PC, what with its heterogeneous hardware and its sometimes maddening software stack.

Honestly (and perhaps sadly), I take this a little personally. I grew up with PC gaming--didn't own a console until college. I played Duke3D and Counterstrike in the computer lab during lunch in high school. I remember loading up Strike Commander just to fly around the landscape, and going through a nerve-wracking two weeks as my father and I tried to get the deluxe version of Simcity running in VESA-compatible mode. And writing Joust knockoffs in BASIC was one of the experiences you just can't get anywhere else.

So I've been watching this for a while. And these complaints--it's too unstable! too unpredictable! too expensive!--are kind of funny, because they've been around for years. The PC market has always been dying, it seems. And yet it's still here. It's either dying very slooooooowly... or reports of its demise are greatly exaggerated.

It certainly seems dire when cast in the most extreme terms. You mean some console games won't also come to the PC? Well, that's indeed a shame. But then, you're not seeing much Stalker love on Xbox, are you? Don't Darwinia or Defcon count as exclusives, too? Sam and Max: not available on consoles. And isn't WoW kind of the big elephant in the room here? Even if the other MMO's aren't making quite those kinds of numbers, I don't hear companies like NCSoft complaining, frankly.

But those don't count, because PC gaming is dying. Only generic, big-budget console releases count when we value a platform--because heaven knows that's where the really exciting design takes place. Halo 3, anyone? Another Final Fantasy, maybe?

And then there's one of my favorite new games, Sins of a Solar Empire. Sins is, to put it bluntly, incredibly addictive. There are actually very few games where I lose track of time, but I have had the experience of looking up and realizing that I've spent two hours buried in the Thinkpad. It's a very "PC" type of game--lots of mousing and menus and keyboard shortcuts. It's hard to imagine doing it on a console. The game also scales well--there's no doubt that it looks sharp at full tilt, but you can also run it on a machine that's several years old.

Sins has so far won just about every gaming award available to it, and it's been within the top ten-selling titles on the retail charts for the PC since its release (downloads have also been strong, they say). There's little doubt that it's been extremely profitable for Stardock (a relative upstart in game development), even though it doesn't use any copy protection at all to prevent piracy.

But PC gaming is dying, right? The guy from Epic said so.

Valve, meanwhile, has been making a killing off Steam, apparently. They're big PC guys. My friend Matt sends me an e-mail every now and then to let me know how neglected his Xbox copy of the Orange Box feels after the Steam patches and updates for Team Fortress 2--and I feel for him, but if he played his shooters on a platform with a mouse like a Real American, that wouldn't happen to him. In any case, Valve's support for the PC through Steam is unmistakeable--they make a point of it at product announcements. And here, again, is a company that's not betting the farm on the bleeding edge, and understands their platform. My laptop is pretty top of the line for a business-class notebook, but it's a relatively weak gaming machine. It still runs Half-Life 2 beautifully.

Still, there's no need to pay attention to the claims of one of the world's most consistently high-quality game development houses. They and Blizzard must be crazy to go through all this effort, right? Everyone knows that PC gaming is dying--just look at the NPD numbers (the ones that don't include digital distribution or MMO subscriptions).

It couldn't possibly be the case that Crysis underperformed at first because of release timing issues, not to mention because you need a small render farm to run it properly. It couldn't possibly be true that the PC really does have games that consoles don't have. Digital distribution couldn't really make up that much of the market, and MMOs couldn't really be that successful, right? Because (say it with me now) PC gaming is dying.

Except obviously it's not. What's happening is really pretty simple: consoles finally caught up (mostly) with the average computer for gaming power (also, with its more annoying "features," like having to install the game before you can play it). As such, people have somehow gotten the idea that the platforms are equivalent, and that the PC should be able to substitute for an Xbox or PS3. Unsurprisingly, the strategy of cramming the same expensive, graphic-heavy games that have sold on consoles into the PC has shown a few flaws.

Look, this is not the end of the world. PC gamers (and I count myself as one, even if I spend a lot of time on consoles these days) may not get to play the latest Metal Gear, or whatever it is that apparently sets the standard on any given day. But there are also experiences that are only going to show up on the PC, including the incredibly thriving casual game market (which both hardcore gamers and gaming publications like to pretend doesn't exist). The truth of the matter is that the computer is an odd beast. It costs more than a console, varies wildly in its capabilities, and plays host to a number of genres that practically don't exist anywhere else. To top it all off, it's incredibly widespread. The PC is a market that's simply huge--just not the same market buying GTA IV.

PC gaming isn't dying. You just have the wrong definition of "alive."