Return Fire

Brett Todd doesn’t have any gamer friends, probably because he lives in some remote wilderness called Canada where I’ve heard there’s nothing to do but shoot moose. Down here in Los Angeles, I’ve got plenty of gamer friends. Of course, I also have regular friends who don’t know the first thing about games. And never the twain shall meet. I’m not going to hold my breath in anticipation of when worlds collide.

All this silly talk about games being mainstream is causing frustration for people like Brett, who wants to discuss games around a water cooler the same way he talks about the California gubernatorial race, how good Seabiscuit was, and who was on Leno last night. But this is our hobby. It’s weird. It’s a niche. We can’t expect people to understand it any more than we’d understand needlepoint or fly-fishing.

About five years ago, I was on an airplane, chatting with some friendly guy in the seat next to me. In the course of exchanging pleasantries, he asked where I was going. I was on my way to visit some game company, so we started talking about computer games. He’d heard of Doom and Myst and even tried to played Warcraft a couple of time. He asked me to tell him about some good games.

When I mentioned Total Annihilation, he threw back his head and burst out laughing. It took me a second to figure out he was laughing at the name of the game. Which, I then realized, is really stupid. Chris Taylor may be a genius of game design (this was before Dungeon Siege), but he can’t name a game to save his life. In fact, even Dungeon Siege is a pretty stupid name. Why would someone lay siege to a dungeon? And did this actually happen in the game? I can’t say for sure. Although I did play all the way through Dungeon Siege, I was taking a nap during the last two thirds. Maybe my characters and their mule besieged a dungeon while I dozed.

The point is that we might as well be talking Greek when we’re discussing games with someone who’s not into them. This is a whole other world and it doesn’t matter how many Tomb Raider movies they make; unless you’re part of it, it’s going to sound alien with all the references to fragging, MOOs, Civs, nVidia drivers, Eff Pee Esses, and Are Tee Esses.