Rossignol - This Gaming Life

Page i Page ii Page iii

TRAVELS IN THREE CITIES

Jim Rossignol

The University of Michigan Press and
The University of Michigan Library
Ann Arbor

Page iv Copyright by Jim Rossignol 2008
All rights reserved
Published in the United States of America by
The University of Michigan Press
Manufactured in the United States of America
Printed on acid-free paper

2011 2010 2009 2008 4 3 2 1

No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, or otherwise, without the written permission of the publisher.

A CIP catalog record for this book is available from the British Library.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Rossignol, Jim, 1978
This gaming life : travels in three cities / Jim Rossignol.
p. cm.
ISBN-13: 978-0-472-11635-5 (cloth : alk. paper)
ISBN-10: 0-472-11635-5 (cloth : alk. paper)
1. Video gamesSocial aspects. 2. Video gamesPsychological aspects. I. Title.

GV1469.34.S52R67 2008
794.8dc22

2007052485

ISBN13 978-0-472-03397-3 (paper)
ISBN13 978-0-472-02314-1 (electronic)

Page v

Nobody leads a life of quiet desperation nowadays. The mass of men was quietly desperate a million years ago because the infernal computers inside their skulls were incapable of restraint or idleness; were forever demanding more challenging problems which life could not provide.

KURT VONNEGUT, Galpagos, 1985

My friend Trevor is over at my house with his nephew Donny. We're playing Wario Ware on the GameCube, but Donny's not really interested. When it came time to make a man jump on a banana, he pronounced it gay and put the controller down. So now it's down to me as a dancing cat and Trevor as some kind of alien in sunglasses and a cape. Donny's reading the manual for Manhunt. He's pretty psyched that you can kill someone with a plastic bag.

TOM CHICK, Saving Private Donny, 2004 Page vi

Page vii

1. 
   
   
   
   

Page viii Page 1 Page 2 Page 3

In May 2000 I was fired from my job as a reporter on a finance newsletter because of an obsession with a video game. It was the best thing that ever happened to me.

The job had two parts. The first part was desperately dull but easy enough for me to bumble through. Each morning I drove out to a farmhouse office complex located deep in the English countryside and sat on a Herman Miller chair in front of a large curvilinear desk. There I processed articles about how to format corporate curricula vitae or occasionally attempted to make sense of the information I had gathered in the second part of my job. Most of the time, however, I spent clicking through a series of online forums where people discussed the ups and downs of recently released video games. Anything would do.

The second part of the job took place in London. Rising at dawn, I traveled up to Charing Cross in the old slam-door train carriages and watched in silent despair as the City drew ever closer. The country office might have been unapologetically quiet and slow, but the City was numbingly, Page 4 achingly boring. I longed for someone to talk to, someone who was even remotely inclined to escape the world of banking. Inevitably I would find myself isolated in a seminar that focused on the workings of debit systems and direct payment pipelines. I would stand up, say my name and that of my employer, and then attempt to avoid speaking for the next four or five hours. I carefully filled my notepads with poorly understood jottings. As a graduate, I had assumed that I wanted to be a journalist of some kind, but I clearly wasn't coping with this. What should have been tight, insightful reporting ended up being vague, impressionistic, often unusable information. The world of finance remained a forbidding mystery, and the stack of John Kenneth Galbraith books by my bedside wasn't doing much to kindle my enthusiasm for economics either.

But there was something else going on in my life that ran parallelalmost contraryto my suit-and-tie day job: a kind of double life. During my spare moments, I was submerged in a different activity, one in which I was completely at home. It was a video game called Quake III Arena. Gaming was a daily release, a few hours of energy and color to counterbalance my career in corporate tedium. With a cup of tea and late-1990s soundtrack (Britpop with a smattering of electronica), I launched myself into evenings of gleeful acrobatics. A torrent of explosions and power-ups vigorously erased the memories of boredom.

The Quake games are the direct descendants of that most notorious of modern video games, Doom. They are combat games set in a first-person perspective and filled with the latest in spectacular graphic effects. You control your character directly, seeing things from his or her perspective, shooting when you hit the trigger button, and picking up weapons and ammunition as you move. These games seem straightforward and approachable, since they Page 5 are so close to how we experience things in real lifeyou run around, see things from the character's point of view, and so on. Yet the experience of Quake and its kin can be baffling for anyone who hasn't already sunk hours into mastering them. Beginners find themselves in a state of confusion, unable to avoid looking at the floor or the ceiling for extended periods. Bumping into walls, unable to aim, or finding yourself obliterated by your enemiesthe list of frustrations grows by the second. And they are all due to a dastardly control system that expects you to maneuver a keyboard and mouse in unison (or two thumbsticks when playing on a gamepad)no small feat for any novice. Then there's all the arcane rites involved in using a desktop PC to play games: install the patches, update the drivers, tweak the gizmometer. This kind of gaming doesn't make itself easy, and it's tough to get yourself up to speed. Of course, anyone could, theoretically, pick up and play these games; yet, like riding a bike or driving a car, they'll need a guiding hand to get out on the road. At weekends and during spare evenings, I was such a guiding hand.

Quake III has the capacity to connect to hosted games on the Internet. This means that a dozen or so people can connect to a server and fight each other remotely from the comfort of attics, offices, and bedrooms across the world. They can make up ad hoc teams or simply run amok, blasting each other with rocket launchers and lightning guns. I played on these online servers for countless hours, chatting away, fighting, learning new techniques. In fact, the days and weeks I poured into playing this single game meant that I had become unnervingly precise. I soon played at a level that combined detailed knowledge of the game's workings with acute learned reflexes. To those who had just started playing, this kind of play seemed almost superhuman. The experienced few used weapon physics to fly up walls or Page 6 demonstrated innate spatial awareness that defied tactical expectations of less experienced players. Landing a missile right on top of an enemy without having seen him for several minutes, just because you