Derek W. Wade

At lunch with my wife the other day:

Meg: …sometimes it seems as if everyone on the internet is an idiot.

Me: Well, it used to be that the ‘net was the place for geeks to go and converse with other geeks. Then the web made using the ‘net easy, everyone got on, and now it’s just like the real world.

Meg: Yeah, like all the new settlers moving into the frontier.
Me: I think you can still find some bastions of geekdom though, via media that have higher barriers to entry like a wiki, or IRC.

Meg: So, don’t hang out in the AOL Chatrooms, is what you’re saying.

Me: Not unless it’s the AOL FreeBSD Chatroom… sorry, I couldn’t say that with a straight face.

Warren Spector is my gaming hero. He gets it: games aren’t about the best graphics, or the most gore, or the best level design. Games are about another reality, “a ritual space where people go and explore elements of their culture and come out changed.”

Said another way: it’s not about the list of features, silly, it’s about the experience.

This is what makes games like the first Jedi Knight, Half-Life, and System Shock 1 & 2 so smashing — and what makes shooters and eye-candy like Serious Sam and Jedi Knight 2 such trash.

I’ve known this since 1982 when I first played Zork as a teenager. No graphics, no sound, just text scrolling up on my screen. An interface which had my immersion into this textual world as its sole goal. Lucky for us Spector knows it too. Read all about him at A Spector Haunts Gaming (GameSlice).