Only people of certain pedigree should start their articles with such a title, and that pedigree should be provable. Your friend and author of this article has done the following, and, therefore, thinks that he is of that pedigree.
- Played all the games that came ‘pre-installed’ with a Windows 95 machine back in the mid-90s.
- Completed at least one game (10 levels) of said game with only the keyboard (cntrl for shooting, the directional keys for aiming, space for jumping and later on, shift for crouching).
- Completed at least one full game on their own. (Max Payne, WCW, Quake, Commando 3).
- Spent more than 5000 rupees on the gaming habit (a clump of Milestone games worth 499 apiece, an NVIDIA GeForce graphics card every couple of years, a PS3 when they were all grown up).
- Has at least once tut-tuted when they first saw the MMO and then played it anyway (Unreal, Quake Arena, Counter Strike).
- Has spent at least one 12 hour stint playing a game. (Grand Theft Auto 4, WWE 12, 13).
- Bought a sequel to an award winning game and instantly disliked it (Postal 2, Soldier of Fortune 2).
When gaming first made a foray in India, it was more of a sideline than the gully rap in 2012. The elder generation wasn’t very sure about it, only children of a certain background could access it, and parents made rules to their whims and fancies about access to it. That was a solid decade of good gaming for Indians. Once a company called Milestone started selling legal copies of games, a small but active gaming community started out. What actually drove Indian gamers to games is the fresh content, something that wasn’t available on the TV or in our films. And of course, there was this concept of the player controlling the character. That age of gaming was full of single player games that had the gamer lose themselves in the story, the characters and look in awe at the sheer amount of technology that went into the game. All that changed when a little known, addition to Half Life, Counter Strike, made its way into the world. Counter Strike was an MMO, a Massively Multiplayer Online game, where players could – and had to shoot each other – to win the game.
All of a sudden, gaming was Counter Strike. The amusing part is that when CS became so popular, it had to be ‘procured’ and players played it on a LAN. I doubt if anyone ever bought a legal copy of Counter Strike when the game was popular. It was similar to the Game of Thrones spectacle. Before Game of Thrones was available legally, every Indian in a media house seemed to have seen it. It was amusing to see how CEO level guys in the media industry would harp on what happened on a particular episode of Game of Thrones, little knowing that there was next to no way they could have seen it legally in India – they were basically confessing to a crime.
Coming back to CS, it became massively famous in cybercafes, where teenagers would spend hours and hours shooting each other. The cyber cafe owners soon realised that the adrenaline rushed teenagers and the concept of shooting and killing in closed, dimly lit environs wasn’t a good idea. In a while, some cyber cafes became game only cafes and others stopped allowing customers to play CS.
PUBG is today what CS was back then. Everyone knows it, almost everyone has played it and yet, very few have paid for it. Some PUBG players won’t even know that the PC version of the game is available for a 1000 bucks, or that a PC version exists.
This might be an infamous thought, but MMO gaming is everything that traditional gaming isn’t, and has actually brought down the quality of game-story telling. Game creators are taking the easy way out, of bigger guns, more violent killings, more brutal action, instead of deeper gameplay, imaginative characters and astounding action sequences. These three aspects were what enamour an actual gamer. And these three aspects of a game were the reasons parents ‘allowed’ their children to play games – at least those who understood what a computer game was. An MMO (Counter Strike before it, and PUBG now), does nothing to the creative juices of the player. Both these games were mindless, trigger-happy pseudo warfare that hamper more than add. The biggest reason for this is that the MMO model takes away the ‘reason’ behind the killing. the FPS games, as we call them, have a reason behind the countless deaths. It’s sometimes one person against many, sometimes it’s the world at stake, and yet some times, it’s a corrupted world that needs cleansing. Taking lives is never the best logic, but at least with FPS gaming, there was a ‘rationale’ behind the killing. The MMO model doesn’t need that, because its cater to the baser, unethical mindset – kill, or be killed.
And it wasn’t like Counter Strike wasn’t the reason of ruckuses. One of the biggest media houses in the country banned their employees from staying back after work because of a raucous, spirited, cuss-full session of CS – all when the CEO was in his dainty little office. People have come to blows outside cybercafes because someone didn’t play or someone did play very well.
I would say, someone should just ban all MMOs, so I can get back to completing my Sims game. You don’t know what that is, do you, PUBG winner?