PC gaming makes you egocentric
Friday, May 22, 2009
PC gaming conjures up a weird image: that of the loner-geek, sitting in his mom’s basement playing World of Warcraft for hours on end- well, that used to be me. Except it was a shed. A really nice shed. But it was still my mom’s shed. Or maybe it was just a dragon. Er… nevermind.
The point is, as suggested in the friendly neighborhood headline above this, that PC gaming makes you egocentric. I’ve learned this from first-hand experience and my empirical evidence is only what I’ve witnessed first-hand. Which I guess makes it not empirical. Or evidence really.
Digressions aside, when you play a PC game, the viewpoint is always all about you. You have your own screen all to yourself and you control it and look wherever you want and go whereve you want. Case in point is World of Warcraft, where you pan the camera however you wish, all game feedback is restricted to only your character, and all messages are sent to you. So eventually, you get to thinking: “Hey, maybe it is all about me.”
Second case is an FPS (first-person shooter) where the camera is stationed where your head would be and you look out through that character model’s eyes. Everywhere you turn, you’re already pointing your gun, and you can only see what you’re directly facing. Stuff goes on all around, bu you won’t know unless you’re actually looking at it. And egocentrically the game sort of takes you over, as you’re only concerned with what you can percieve and kill. After a few hundred hours in this simulation you begin to not really notice or care what other people do, but you keep historic records of your own kills, deaths, and goals you’ve achieved, all through your eyes. It’s almost like you’re playing a single player game at that point, because the teamwork the game “revolves” around is essentially moot.
The third case is an RTS (real-time strategy game), where you are in control of an entire army in addition to multiple bases. You look down on your units and command them all simultaneously through keystrokes, all of them willing to die for you at a moment’s click. You can see everything through your mini-map and by panning the camera around. At points it feels deity-like because of the amount of control and absolute vision you have. You begin to forget that other players you’re playing against have the same scope and ability to rage and ruin.
Now, into the fray: enter the lowly gaming console. Four controllers. One screen. Around 12 buttons per controller as opposed to standard U.S. 108-key keyboards. Seems a little pathetic doesn’t it? That’s because it is. Four players playing simultaneously on one screen, and four PC gamers trying to figure out which one is them. Our assumption: all of them belong to us. Just because the targeting reticles have different colors doesn’t seem to help; periodically we get confused who is who and mistake one guy doing well for our guy shooting widly at a wall or crashing his axe maliciously into the wind. Clearly the player doing the best belongs to each of us. Clearly.
It’s amazing to come from a world where everything on your screen belongs to you and you alone- save in WoW, where you can look at other players, but all the feedback is yours. In console games, we often mistake any feedback of damage or gain as belonging to us.
Because we’re so used to being the star. It’s hard to shift into this odd world of sharing and split-screening, and all of us sitting side-by-side. I need the roar of my 5.1 surround system and the airplane-like hum of my 13-fan gaming rig. Where my screen is my own and everything happening on it belongs to me, is about me, or is me- and no one else.
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