I rarely cut and paste. I find it demeaning to the medium of blogs as a whole. In this case however, it couldn’t be helped. I had tried, repeatedly, to sum up my compassion for computer gaming for some time, in hopes that I could convey how much I love the platform even though I’ve been spending a considerable amount of time with the 360 version of Call of Duty lately. Tycho, as always, delivers a far more eloquent description of the situation than I could hope to. I present it, distilled to it’s purest, the reason PC gaming will always be part of my life.
“On a weekly basis, we’ve got apocalyptic news about the PC as a platform interleaved with assertions of a phoenix-like resurgence. The phoenix-like resurgence portion is rarely built on any stable metrics, so it’s impossible to know the vigor of this reconstituted sovereign with any precision. The important takeaway point is that everything is incredible, perpetually so, even while publishers, developers, and many of your own (supposed) friends choose to grip gamepads during their increasingly constrained leisure hours.
I don’t think you can have any perspective on this industry unless you’ve spent time with PCs. You need to know that when Insomniac is talking about how they’re going to have sixty players, and squads, and so forth, that Battlefield 2 had sixty-four players, and squads, and maps for specific playercounts in two-thousand five. In 1999, I played a game of Tribes with a hundred and twenty-eight players over a modem.
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What I’m talking about is perspective. If you want to look into a Goddamned crystal ball, spend some time with a tooled-up personal computer.
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I’ll never be able to divest myself of the intense nostalgia I have for this platform. I can’t be without it. But if a person wants to play videogames in their spare time and not perform mechanical surgery on their equipment, that doesn’t make them an idiot. It makes them a pragmatist.”
Epic.
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