It’s embarrassing. Last week, I upgraded my computer for no other purpose than playing a game. And it may not even be a game I play much.
The real point of MMORPGs is multiplayer. Sure, you can trot around solo if that’s what curdles your cream, but then you may as well play a game designed for solo play, where the developers needn’t worry, for example, about what impolite players may do to exploit a potentially entertaining device. Although I’ve got a character that joins groups ad hoc, he still spends much of his time soloing, and both forms of play are beginning to pall. So we’re going to try playing a dedicated group – that’s a group of characters used only for that purpose, not a group of enthusiastic players. Eileene, her sister, and I will create alts for a three-man group and play at once.
Since Eileene will, of course, use her computer for this, I have to use my own, and it wasn’t really up to the task. Oh, the program ran, but memory shortages created all kinds of weird blips across the screen as I moved, and the sky flashed with bizarre colors. Worse, lag, the pause between a function’s execution on the server and its display on a player’s screen, was deadly; I could be slaughtered by a monster before it appeared on my monitor. So off my computer went for a memory upgrade.
I felt like I was compromising my principles. The massive spiral of memory requirements is in large part to the importance of eye candy to the market. Computer games live or die on the quality of their graphics and sound. A game can enjoy good sales legs with mediocre play and bitchin’ explosions, but a drab game with otherwise top-notch design is, at best, an also-ran, destined for the bargain bins, no matter how many review magazines appreciate its ingenuity or balance. So I plant my flag in the sand next to classic games, playing them until I squeeze out every drop of juice. Zork and Imperialism and SimCity 2000 are still great, with or without all the bells and whistles. The freedom from frequent upgrades is a happy side effect of my policy, rather than the purpose, but I get used to feeling like a purist. Running out of memory feels like selling out to mere video games.