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Games Entertainment

3D First-Person Games, So Far 373

Posted by timothy from the run-duck-shoot dept.
Gernot Ziegler writes: "One of my professors (Stefan Gustavsson) has written a good summary that explains the history & technical background/innovations that Doom, Quake & Unreal brought with them when they were released. Check it out." It's a pdf file. Gustavsson ends with a list of hopeful questions about where such games can go, after nearly a decade of running and violence. What I'd really like to see is a goal-free 3D world like the Snowcrash Metaverse, but it will take games to get there ;)
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3D First-Person Games, So Far More

3D First-Person Games, So Far

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  • He Claims there were no multiplayer games which let several players interact across a network...

    Pretty much true - most multiuplayer games were 2 player only since most games were designed to be connected head to head with a Null Modem cable...

    But Midi Maze IIRC allowed up to 16 players connected via midi cables to run around a maze and shoot each other, in the days before doom was even a twinkle in John Carmack's Eye.....
  • It isn't a game without some sort of goal.
  • that would certainly be a step backwards in realism!

    nah what'd be the point?
  • they are not playable as a game but you can walk thru some of the most incredible buildings, both real and development.

  • What about Ball Blazer in 1983?! (Score:3, Informative)

    by BrookHarty ( 9119 ) on Monday August 13, 2001 @07:20PM (#2114911) Journal
    Castle Wolfenstien came out in 1992, Ball Blazer came out in 1983 for the Atari 8bit computer. Ball blazer had the feel and motion of a FPS shooter, but was based more on sports. I couldnt find an original screenshot, but here is one from the atari 5200. [atariage.com]
    As 3D maps go, Video games such as Bards Tale [fortunecity.com] used 3D type maps for moving around a city. Not true 3D but boxes, but then, these are older games. Even thinking, I think there were some older C64/Apple demos that used Wolf type 3D maps, but I cant think of any at the moment.

    Wolfenstien 3D wasnt the first, but was the most popular. People were building upto realastic games for quite some time.
    Some games I think they forgot about, Heretic, Hexen, Duke Nukem 3D, SkyNet, Blood Series, SIN, Solider of Fortune, KingPin, Shadow Warrior, RedNeck Rampage, and TRIBES! Hell, even new titles like Max Payne and upcoming DN4E are leaps above Q3A.
    A real history on FPS games, should include 8bit computers and consoles. I think it would be cool for a list of games, dates, and engines they used. Even a quick blurb on what the developers/programmers were thinking when they came out with the games.

    Ahh, I'm too old... I remember playing Ball Blazer!

  • Goal Free Universe? (Score:4, Funny)

    by KarmaBlackballed ( 222917 ) on Monday August 13, 2001 @02:09PM (#2115087) Homepage Journal
    What I'd really like to see is a goal-free 3D world like the Snowcrash

    Real life is already goal-free. Part of the allure of games is that they have goals. A goal-free virtual universe would at best be a novelty and a fad for a few moments.
    • Real life is already goal-free. Part of the allure of games is that they have goals. A goal-free virtual universe would at best be a novelty and a fad for a few moments.

      Man you can really tell when someone has (a) no imagination and/or (b) never read a book (such as Snow Crash) that is detailed enough to supply them with a temporary imagination!

      Let's see... a goal-free 3D world would be at best a novelty? A fad for a few moments? Is that also what you think of this goal-free 2D world we call the World Wide Web?

      If you think that's a stretch, consider Snow Crash's "Metaverse":

      - A virtual space that spans the global network of computers.

      - Anyone can create their own personal space in the metaverse

      - Anyone can write their own special programming used in the Metaverse to do cool things

      - Those people that are better at design/programming create cooler and more useful spaces in the metaverse

      - The metaverse is a great place to meet new people, encounter new ideas, and perform research

      Now replace 'metaverse' with 'internet' and see if you can really call it a novelty or fad...

      A goal-free 3D world GAME would suck, true. But a goal-free 3D world not controlled by any one company, expandable by anyone with the talent, would be unbelievably cool AND useful.
  • Active worlds gets a mention but hasn't taken off because it has no use. I have helped write a Snowcrash universe (Cyberterm for those who care and remember), commercialised it with dotcom funding and tried marketting and selling it. The simple problem is that as nice as the idea is, there is no commercial use for it yet. Our world had autonomous AI, avatars, persistance, dispersed over multiple servers etc. etc. but we have been unable to find a commercial use. It is just like the Snowcrash or Neuromancer world (without the jacks) but what use is it really? Come on guys, karma this up, I want to know what use such a world has!!!
  • This is neither goal free nor 3-D, but this is both interesting and a response to a question posed by many people.

    Also, we're already linking to random university professor's random pages.

    The Geology Explorer is an educational game intended to teach the concepts and principles of Physical Geology. [nodak.edu]

  • 3d engine design. (Score:2, Interesting)

    by codetalker ( 245862 )
    The major goal of any 3d engine is to limit the the number of polygons drawn per frame in order to maintain a high framerate. As your world gets larger the potential number of visible polygons grows and grows until you are left with somthing that will take a long time to render. This of course, is unnaceptable. The solution is to develop algorithms that can effectively restrict the visible set allowing all the data to filtered depending on what is visible. The binary space partion tree (BSP) works by determing where in space the camera is and narrowing down the list of polygons to a manageable number. Of course this means that for each leaf in the tree (read: concave subspace) a list of all the polygons is kept with 1 bit per poly. 1 is visible, 0 is not. This works great for mid sized data sets, but If you were to get a online virtual world ala snowcrash, the sheer size of the data set would be an encumberance, and a BSP tree would be even more ridiculous since it actually adds more polygons by splitting polygons that intersect the planes it uses to build subspaces. A bsp won't stream either, since you need the entire data set to render something.

    Portals on the other hand are much better for this lofty goal. The way a portal works is rather simple. Take to concave subspaces (say two cubes) that share a face. That shared face is a portal from one subspace to the other. Now from within one cube, all you have to draw are the 6 faces. if you notice that the portal face is visible then you know you have to draw the subspace that the portal is connected too. This is great because you don't need a full data set to start drawing. you only need to know which cell you are in to begin with. moving from one cell to the next is simply a matter of going through the portal. To stream this, you start in your home cell and every time you hit a portal that you don't have a cell for, your computer can download the geometry of the new cell as well as the web addresses of any portals that it points to.

    The only problem I can see with portals right now is how to build the cells properly. Right now lots of games use BSP trees to build a whole bunch of concave subspaces (the cells) and use the tree to determine what face of each cell is touching another. Another problem is that as your data set gets bigger, your cell's volume drops to the point where you have more cells than polys to begin with and you're stuck with large data set again.

    You can't use an infite data set to build a bsp and it would take several ages of the universe to build an optimized one. If someone can come up with a method of building cells easily while making them contain a decent amount of detail(ie make them large and just ignore detail geometry inside of them), we'd have snowcrash in no time. That and 3d interfaces aren't that fast. Imagine walking from slashdot to google!

    • Imagine walking from slashdot to google!
      Give me a reason why this is more convenient than clicking my mouse on a link and I might.

      The "cyberspace" idea wasn't born from CS, it was born from certain sci-fi writers' ignorance of the way networks actually work. (William Gibson did not even write Neuromancer on a computer, and he is reportedly rather computer-illiterate to this day). It's just much more efficient and intuitive to get the information that most of us want in a document format instead of than in an environmental format.

      maybe one of these days this idea will have a point, but other than the coolness factor it's really nothing to dream of right now. I mean, would you rather Code Red attacked a machine, or your brain? Why walk up to a bookshelf and pull a "virtual" book from it when you can click, type a few things, and it's just as fast without all the overhead?

  • Operation Flashpoint (Score:2, Interesting)

    by rfolstad ( 310738 )
    Definetly the most amazing game i have played!
    When i was a little kid i remember thinking the coolest game would be one where u could be playing a kind of flight sim game where u blow away some choppers take a few hits, eject and now find yourself a foot soldier. Operation flashpoint has made that dream a reality. I find games today focus toooo much on graphics and not enough on game play. Flashpoint doesn't have the best graphics but the game play is soo realistic and the engine supports the biggest maps i have seen. I don't want matrix moves and i could care less if the hallway im walking down has fog all around. I want realistic game play with large out door maps. I thought tribes 2 was going to make this a reality but like most games these days the 3d engine has sooo much potential but no good mods. Anyways i was suprised to see flashpoint not mentioned in the article. That game has more innovation from standard 3rd person shooters than any i have seen and it doesn't make sense for it to not be mentioned in this article.

  • his history is completely fskd (Score:4, Informative)

    by dutky ( 20510 ) on Monday August 13, 2001 @03:22PM (#2123536) Homepage Journal
    The first 3D, first person, multi-player games that I recall were both on the Mac, back in the 1989-1991 time frame.
    1. There was a simple maze/combat game, whose name I don't quite recall (I'm thinking it was MazeWars) which offered a first-person perspective mode. Web searches turn up references to games of similar description on Sun workstations and Xerox Altos, which suggests an eaven earlier date than 1989.
    2. Spectre, which was released a few years later for the PC under the name Spectre VR, was a wire-frame tank simulation, but you played it from the first-person perspective: as if you were sitting in the tank itself. The Mac version was released in late 1991 or early 1992.
    While DOOM may have popularized the FPS genre, it was nowhere near originating it.

    I will say, however, the DOOM, and Wolfenstein before it, were the first games to produce anything like a sense of real motion on non-workstation class hardware (I'd seen nausea inducing games on SGI workstations back in 1991, but most PCs and Macs couldn't render quickly, or smoothly, enough to fool the eye). I'm still impressed with what DOOM could do on a lowly 40MHz 386.

    • Spectre, which was released a few years later for the PC under the name Spectre VR, was a wire-frame tank simulation, but you played it from the first-person perspective: as if you were sitting in the tank itself. The Mac version was released in late 1991 or early 1992.

      Does nobody else remember Battlezone? 3D wireframe tank game, first-person perspective. I think it's from the early 1980s.

      There were probably others too... I've heard of old arcade games that used vector-based graphics to do wire-frame 3D, with a special CRT that had a programmable electron gun instead of the common raster/scanning one. Maybe the battlezone I played was a C64 port of an arcade version?

      In any event, the wire-frame games impressed me at the time. I had written optimized asm line-drawing code and could see that those capabilities for just drawing all the lines for a 3D wire-frame scene in real-time were barely within the reach of a 1MHz CPU. The fact that they could do that, plus the 3d perspective calculations and gameworld stuffs, was really quite something.

  • Actually, the first 3D game was for the TRS-80... (Score:3, Interesting)

    by KelsoLundeen ( 454249 ) on Monday August 13, 2001 @02:20PM (#2124162)
    ... or, at least, the first 3D game I remember playing over and over and over again: Death Maze 5000 for the TRS-80 Model I. I believe this was around 1980-82.

    (I'll bet there were 3D-like games even before the TRS-80.)

    There was also Asylum I and II -- both 3D (they weren't actually 3D, but the hallways had a 3D perspective). All the games were (more or less) real-time, too: you move through the maze using the arrow keys. Every time you moved, your perspective changed. You could pretty quickly locate doors and stretches of long hallways.

    Remember, too, that the TRS-80 Model I's had really, really limited graphics: black and white and (IIRC) approximately 127 by 48. Later, you were able to buy a high-res upgrade (not sure if it was available for the Model I, but I remember the Model III/IV had the option).

    And here I'll veer off-topic slightly, but I think it's interesting to mention that these early games (and I remember a 3D maze game for the Commodore Pet, too) were amazingly addictive despite limited graphics. I wouldn't be surprised if the Timex Sinclair had some sort of 3D game. I'm sure the Apple II had 'em -- as did the Atari 400/800 and the TI 99/4a.

    What I distinctly remember -- and this was a long, long time ago -- was sitting with my buddies playing Asylum and wishing for better graphics and colors. We all thought it would never happen. (We were maybe 14, 15, at the time.) We figured games like Death Maze and Asylum were flukes. That they'd never catch on. We also figured the Infocom games -- Zork I and Deadline and Suspect -- would be the games that, over time, would last.

    Really, really off-topic, but I remember this, too: does anyone recall the old-time Infocom game packaging? How they'd include all sorts of neat floor plans, maps, keychains, buttons and badges. Those old Infocom games were really a trip: each package was different and had all kinds of cool stuff.

    *sigh*

    Anyway, flash forward twenty years. Quake 3, Tribes 2, Counterstrike.

    Little did we know ...

    • We figured games like Death Maze and Asylum were flukes. That they'd never catch on. We also figured the Infocom games -- Zork I and Deadline and Suspect -- would be the games that, over time, would last.

      They were. I don't see any entire communities [xyzzynews.com] dedicated to keeping Death Maze and Asylum alive.

      The good stuff endures. Unfortunately, it's been years since there was any "good stuff" available commercially in the interactive-fiction world.

      At some point, that's likely to change.

  • Errors. (Score:5, Informative)

    by John Carmack ( 101025 ) on Monday August 13, 2001 @02:31PM (#2124628)
    >It (DOOM) was designed by talented people with good skills and academic degrees in
    >computer science.

    None of us had degrees in computer science. Romero, Adrian, and I don't have any degrees at all, and Kevin's is in political science.

    >It even had a simple but multithreaded "operating system" of its own to handle asynchronous
    >updates of graphics and playing sound while performing the game simulation.

    No. We made the startup sequence busy and techie in a sort of imitation of the NeXT workstations we were using at the time, but there was no multithreading going on. The sound was done with interrupt driven processing, which doesn't qualify.

    With the source code open for years, this should have been easy to check.

    >a resolution of only 320x240

    320x200

    I would take issue with some of the other vague statements made later on, but they aren't pointed enough to debate.

    John Carmack
    • We made the startup sequence busy and techie in a sort of imitation of the NeXT workstations we were using at the time...

      Now, if we could just get Linux programmers to stop doing that, and instead to throw a pretty splash screen over the dirty background stuff, Linuxusership would increase exponentially.

      But no...hackers love their scrolling gibberish...

    • LOL (Score:2, Funny)

      by wrinkledshirt ( 228541 )
      With the source code open for years, this should have been easy to check.

      Easy for you to say. Some of us still get the intellectual equivalent of a slurpee brain freeze trying to get all the way through Abrash's Black Book.

      Jeez, who does this guy think he is? John Romero or something?

    • Re:Errors. (Score:3, Interesting)

      by denshi ( 173594 )
      > >It (DOOM) was designed by talented people with
      > >good skills and academic degrees in computer science.

      > None of us had degrees in computer science. Romero, Adrian, and I don't have any degrees at all,
      > and Kevin's is in political science.

      Do you see a lot of these kinds of assumptions? The rest of the article doesn't show this bias, but I assumed this kind of mistake, coming from a CS prof, is the ivory tower trying to claim validity on a subject they have ignored.

    • I remeber games for mac SE that were networked via apple-talk . Net Trek was one and this maze game with a shoe was another... Long before doom and the 1990s..

      /Aram

    • Re:Errors. (Score:3, Interesting)

      by dmorin ( 25609 )
      On that resolution of 320x200..? For years I've been under the impression that DOOM was one of the first games to use "Mode X" (made famous by Michael Abrash) which is what enabled the killer frame rate at a time when 320x200 plain VGA gave you really inefficient 1byte/pixel linear buffers. Mode X also gave you funky increased resolution like 320x340.

      • Re:Errors. (Score:3, Informative)

        by drivers ( 45076 )
        "Mode X" was 320x240 (square pixels). But you could also go into the equivalent mode in 320x200, which is is the same resolution as standard "Mode 13h" linerar frame buffer. Whether you were in 320x240 or 320x200 mode X (or several other "undocumented" tweaked modes) you still have a buffer where the next byte in the buffer is the next 4th pixel on the screen. One cool part was that you could use the hardware in the card itself to copy data between buffers as long as the copy was aligned on the same x-pixel (modulo 4). Mode X also let you do page flipping. The linear frame buffer would only let you access 64KB of video memory in mode 13h, so you couldn't do page flipping. ModeX gave you access to the full 256KB available on VGA and up, but you lost the programming simplicity of a linear frame buffer. You would have to do an "OUT" to a port to select which set of pixels you wanted to work with, like set 0 would be column 0, 4, 8, etc.
  • It was a very thin history, like you'd see on a gaming news site run by someone in high school. He took a simple, superficial look at a certain type of game, but ignored everything else, especially the flight simulators (which date back to 1980 or so on the Apple II, speaking simply in terms of home computer hardware).

    I'm starting to get annoyed by the movement of academics into the game "field." Now they can state the obvious, but it carries more weight because they're professors.
  • Hasn't DirectX 7 and 8 surpassed the abilities of OpenGL? I was fairly sure the only way to get some of the features offered with hardware T&L was through vendor specific extensions, and even then some of the abilities to manage the swapping of textures to and from card memory were not available.

    I know OpenGL is a nice cross platform API and may even be simpler, but I think DirectX is keeping pace with hardware a lot better than OpenGL.

    (braces for flames but hopes for constructive criticism)...
  • Want something to do with 3D technology? How about a half decent map of, say, Washington D.C.'s monuments -- then let a classroom full of elementary school kids stage a scavenger hunt or something. Would be something, especially for kids who will likely never see it. Repeat for the various wonders of the world.

    I once started sketching out a simulation of a solar car racing game. You had to know enough about the science behind it to put together a working car, then race it, then collect money and buy more parts, etc... Just like many racing games, but with a huge educational element.

  • R6, Homeworld, Spacsim and others missing. (Score:3, Informative)

    by Chris Y Taylor ( 455585 ) on Monday August 13, 2001 @03:12PM (#2129902) Homepage
    This discussion seems to leave out a lot of interesting or important games and focus on just some popular 1st person shooters. There are many multiplayer 3d flying or space simulation games from the early Spasim ( http://www.geocities.com/jim_bowery/spasim.html ) through to today's Air War and World War 2 Online efforts. Shouldn't many real time strategy games be considered 3d multiplayer games, Homeworld for example. None of the 3d multiplayer role-playing games are discussed, even though they have much of the "different modes of interaction than firing big guns at everything" that the article wishes for (hacking everything with a sword, for example).

    Even in the 1st person shooter area, it fails to discuss my favorites Rainbow 6 and Rogue Spear. Playing these is not at all like playing Quake with a different colored shirt, as the article suggests. The feel is very different; it is more like a hunting game, where you are both the predator and the prey (I won my most tense and exciting game by firing one (1) well placed shot) with no health packs or body armour that you can pick up to fix yourself.

    The article is an interesting discussion of how id software has sold a lot of hardware upgrades; but it seems short on discussing new or different directions for 3d multiplayer games.

    I think some form violence will be the main mode of interaction in most 3d multiplayer games for some time to come. Otherwise, why do you need the graphics? I can play an economic game like Railroad Tychoon in 2d just as easily as 3d. As for creating some sense of community; why do you need to generate complex 3d graphics for that when you have something better: language. Imagine how confusing and bandwidth intensive Slashdot would be if it were a 3d multiplayer non-goal oriented environment.

  • World War II Online (Score:5, Informative)

    by Mittermeyer ( 195358 ) on Monday August 13, 2001 @02:07PM (#2130167) Homepage
    The good folks who did Warbirds have been developing World War II Online ( http://www.wwiionline.com ).

    There will be goals in the sense of successfully performing missions, being able to control campaigns by being able to post missions for others, etc. but you can pretty much wander around and drive/fly continuously from west France to Belgium- until the Me109s find you....

    If you try this game please note the stringent hardware requirements and that it's a bit buggy/laggy due to the absolutely breathtaking scope of what they're doing.
    • The concept is great but execution is far from perfect.
      I have been playing infantry soldier for the last couple of weeks and I had 2, possibly 3 encounters with enemy infantry.
      The whole game is dominated by tanks, hardly any infantry in sight. If they don't fix that then this will end up being cheap tank simulator ...

  • Did this guy do any research? Or did he just start rattling whatever popped into his head that he remembered from the good ol' days as a grad student? Why ignore flight simulators - they had simplistic graphics, sure, but they first-person perspective and did 3D graphics. What about 3D first-person space sims, like Elite? And, of course, Wolf3D, which he completely omits.

    This guy is a complete moron when it comes to the history of 3D FPS games. What's his PhD in, geology?

  • Already here. (Score:5, Interesting)

    by jsonic ( 458317 ) on Monday August 13, 2001 @02:04PM (#2131032)
    What I'd really like to see is a goal-free 3D world like the Snowcrash Metaverse, but it will take games to get there ;)

    Its been around for at least 4-5 years already. [activeworlds.com]

    • Snowcrash + Gaming + Metaverse: I'm instantly reminded of an article [gamespy.com] that CRT [slashdot.org] -- the RocketArena dude -- wrote for gamespy a few weeks before his RA3 mod was to be released (which everyone hoped would validate Quake3: The Engine).

      For those too lazy to read the whole thing, here's the funny part, where he tries to guess where all this virtual reality whizbang-stuff is headed in the future...

      2052. Epilogue
      Fifty years after the first Metagame, almost no one can remember a world without them. Direct neural interfaces have removed the virtual nature of the Metagame. Now, when you are "jacked in," everything you see, feel, or do is a reflection of the Metagame. Advances in food sciences have removed the need for large-scale farming. The nutritional needs of the world are met through daily supplements that can be administered while the user is in the Metagame. People still eat for recreation of course, but only in the Metagame, where it tastes just as real won't affect your body. Nearly every occupation in the world now revolves directly around the Metagame -- its administration, policing (the first Metagame murder happened many years previous), growth, and design.

      As people's lives have become more automated, they have more time for recreation. The standard workweek is two hours a day, three days a week (and usually completely within the Metagame). Because creating objects in the Metagame is a one-time task (after which it can be duplicated with no cost) there is an unlimited selection of games and other forms of entertainment available for virtually nothing.

      For many years pundits decried the decline in real-life interaction and socialization caused by the Metagame, but they have long since realized that the socialization between people in the Metagame is far more valuable and can take on many more forms than was ever possible in the real world. There are still technophobes that refuse to jack in, but they live to suffer less meaningful lives in a world that has moved beyond the real, and into the Metaverse.

      That's a lot of time sitting on your ass. I can only hope we've solved the swampbutt problem by then. :-)

    • Its been around for at least 4-5 years already.

      Right you are. And ActiveWorlds demonstrates that making your software "goal-free" reduces your "game" to a glorified chat room.

      It's funny how writers like Stephenson and Greg Egan manage to grossly underestimate the difficultly of modeling physical reality. The best supercomputers in existence have to strain to model relatively simple events. You may balk at my referring to an atomic explosion as a "simple event", but it pales in comparison to the problem of determining the meteorological impact of that famous Chinese buttefly [skyeklad.com]. Even if we take shortcuts (Stepenson suggests ignoring the inability two objects to occupy that same space), it will be a fair number of Moore cycles before we have a serious implementation of the Metaverse.

      William Gibson got it right in Neuromancer when he assumed that the human ability to fill in the details would be a necessary part of an VR application.

    • Re:Already here. (Score:3, Insightful)

      by zpengo ( 99887 )
      The difference between ActiveWorlds (and similar) sites is that they are little more than avatar chatrooms with flashier graphics. The emphasis is still on talking rather than taking action.

      I think that the ideal goal-free 3d world would be developed *without* and emphasis on talking, which would force the designers to making the world itself an interesting place to act and interact.

      I've been working on a project that combines a variety of social/physical simulations into one MMP world, which can have a variety of interfaces (graphical, text, web-based, etc.) People are born, grow up, work, play, have relationships, have offspring, etc.; The focus is on the world itself, rather than on having a pretty place to chat.

      • I've been working on a project that combines a variety of social/physical simulations into one MMP world, which can have a variety of interfaces (graphical, text, web-based, etc.) People are born, grow up, work, play, have relationships, have offspring, etc.; The focus is on the world itself, rather than on having a pretty place to chat.
        Ugh! I'm already doing those things, IRL. Can't my avatar in your world sit around and drink beer and play the Sims all day or something? Maybe camp Slashdot, so I could get one of those cool First Posts?

        Escapism is the whole reason to play, isn't it?

    • or, if you want it faster. Here's what I do:
      1) Open my front door
      2) Walk outside

    • Re:Already here. (Score:2, Interesting)

      by The Larch ( 115962 )
      Well, Active Worlds is certainly goal-less -- when I tried it out a year ago or so, there was absolutely nothing to do but wander around and watch the blocky software textures slowly creeping down your modem to materialize into abunch of kids cursing and making passes at each other.

      But then Active Worlds is not a game, it's a "social environment", and while it's prettier or at least more colorful than IRC, it doesn't actually offer any improved functionality over it. In fact, I imagine trying to hold a conference would be much easier on IRC than in one of the "virtual conference centers", where everyone's avatar must fit in the constraints of a "room" and offer a line of sight to whoever they're trying to "listen" or "talk" to. And when you're the speaker and want to take questions from the audience, they all spew overlapping text on the screen at once. Yes, you can also communicate directly with particular users on Active Worlds with a simple text-based interface component which defeats the purpose of having a 3D environment at all and is also far inferior to any IRC client.

      What I'd really like to see is a good captivating 3D first-person adventure game, such as Ultima Underworld was (and Ultima IX wasn't). But I'd be just as happy with a good captivating 2D adventure or role playing game, such as the Curse of Monkey Island or Ultima IV.

      It was a common complaint in reviews in computer game magazines some fifteen years ago how games now had beautiful graphics and amazing sound, and absolutely no depth or interest. Plus ca change..

    • Re:Already here. (Score:4, Funny)

      by CaseyB ( 1105 ) on Monday August 13, 2001 @02:17PM (#2145780)
      Its been around for at least 4-5 years already.

      Uh, yeah, look out Neal Stephenson, the metaverse has arrived [activeworlds.com].

    • Re:Already here. (Score:4, Informative)

      by Emil Brink ( 69213 ) on Monday August 13, 2001 @02:17PM (#2146220) Homepage
      Or, if you're into this free software thing, you might want to check out Verse [sourceforge.net]. It's not quite there yet, but we do have a nice trick or two that ActiveWorlds can't match... If you have a DiVX-codec and bandwidth to burn, check out our showreel [sourceforge.net]. It's pretty nifty.

      • Re:Already here. (Score:3, Informative)

        by RottenDeadite ( 137213 )
        I predict Verse will make it before anyone else. It features noodity [sourceforge.net] :P

        • Re: noodity (Score:2, Funny)

          by po8 ( 187055 )

          I find the prominent Adam's Apple on that ``woman [sourceforge.net]'' rather, er, disturbing...

          • Heh. That's probably just an artifact introduced by the rather interesting border between neck and upper chest. I'd have Eskil, my colleague who actually did the modelling (as well as pretty much designed Verse) answer that himself, but he's in LA for SIGGRAPH [siggraph.org] 2001 [siggraph.org], so he can't. ;^)

        • Re:Already here. (Score:3, Interesting)

          by Emil Brink ( 69213 )

          It does, indeed. You wouldn't believe the amount of trouble the fact that our default object happens to be a nude girl has caused. In January, we did a thing with Swedish national television (SVT [www.svt.se]) at the NATPE [natpe.org] expo in Vegas. For that, we had to dress her up in a nice business suit, since otherwise (we were told) the American television people would die out of shock or something. Of course, at the actual expo floor, various rather adult shows were being sold with some rather explicit imagery. Not to mention the live models in some booths. ;^)

          I guess one of the actual reasons for the object being what it is is that human models, in general and female such in particular, are excellent for showing off our nifty subdivision surface technology. The renderer in the shot you link to is very simple and doesn't do subdivs, but we have one that does. It's very, very, impressive stuff, and can actually compete with present (and future) game engines. No joke.

  • I thought we were boycotting Adobe!
  • There is an Open GL Version of Doom available, it is called "Doom Legacy" and available here [newdoom.com].
    It has impressive features like Chase cam (you see your player from behind) along with split-screen to deathmatch with a friend on the same computer.

  • 3D WWW? (Score:4, Informative)

    by bartle ( 447377 ) on Monday August 13, 2001 @02:12PM (#2137081) Homepage

    What I'd really like to see is a goal-free 3D world like the Snowcrash Metaverse, but it will take games to get there

    This is definately one thing that has never been, "build it and they will come." Multiple people have tried building 3D worlds and they end up sucking. The main problem is that if a game is goal free, what's the point of being there? The coolness factor wears off in time, and users go back to communicating to people using a single window rather than a full screen environment.

    The most likely way something anywhere near the Metaverse will originate will be through the current massive online games. As these game companies expand their product lines, multiple games are going to join into a single multipurpose game engine. The games themselves will only become a part of the social experience you're buying, you'll be able to wander around the "waiting rooms" with your avatar and talk to people. Exciting.

    So in conclusing, the beginnings of the Metaverse are already here. Sign up for your EQ account today and get in on the ground floor, I suspect Verant will be providing what you're looking for in 5 years.

    • As these game companies expand their product lines, multiple games are going to join into a single multipurpose game engine. The games themselves will only become a part of the social experience you're buying, you'll be able to wander around the "waiting rooms" with your avatar and talk to people. Exciting.

      This sounds a lot like MUDs... It's amazing how much "social" things mean; even with muds that are not specifically chat-oriented, the main attraction really appears to be the community. (and having been a mud-admin for 10 years I have seen it... even though have been semi-retired for past 3 years or so).

      However, MUDs never developed to fully interconnected 'mega-games', nor did most succesful worlds 'kill' others. Probably because it was and is very easy to set up your own mud. Then again, companies might have more interest in getting multiple games interconnected, bundled, syndicated if you will.

    • The games themselves will only become a part of the social experience you're buying, you'll be able to wander around the "waiting rooms" with your avatar and talk to people. Exciting.

      Let's see ... is the cool part of the internet being able to use IRC, or being able to create your own, personal piece of cyberspace with which others around the world can interact?

      THAT is the cool part about the Snow Crash metaverse. As soon as that feature is available in one of these goal-free universes, you'll see something much more exciting than people chatting.

      • Let's see ... is the cool part of the internet being able to use IRC, or being able to create your own, personal piece of cyberspace with which others around the world can interact?

        That would indeed be pretty cool and might start pulling people in but it won't happen until a impressive 3D toolset becomes available. Most of the Internet community can't build their own web page, they'll be absolutely clueless when it comes to building their own 3D virtual residence. Not only would the backend 3D stuff need to be powerful enough that the elite architects can build their metaphysical wonders, but there needs to be an easy way for people to simply draw out what they want things to look like. When creating virtual worlds becomes an easy thing to do (and in my opinion, it's one of the hardest things to do currently), enough people will be doing it that the population can begin to grow.

        Interestingly enough, the trigger point of growth in Stephenson's Metaverse was the development of facial recognition software. When the technology grew to the point that you could communicate almost as effectively in cyberspace as F2F, the Metaverse became a serious business. I suspect there is more than a little truth to this idea, a 3D environment would grow if people had some real reason to be there. But I suspect most people who are working on this sort of thing would burn their code rather than let someone program a virtual fashion boutique.

    • Re:3D WWW? (Score:4, Informative)

      by Animats ( 122034 ) on Monday August 13, 2001 @03:10PM (#2145373) Homepage
      Metaverse...

      Somebody did that, in the heyday of VRML, around 1997-1998. You could buy real estate. They even had the monorail. The world filled up with giant monuments full of advertising, the first 3D spam.

      Try CyberTown [cybertown.com], which is about as good as VRML gets today.

    • >The main problem is that if a game is goal free, what's the point of being there?

      So why do people play sim-style or MMPRGP games then? Both really don't have "goals" aside from the ones the players impose on themselves (collect phat loot, maximize my city income & size, level up, etc)

      i.e You don't / can't win these style of games, because they intentional don't have any conditions to "win"

      Any examples of games with absolutely 100% no goals?

  • Future of FPSs? (Score:2, Insightful)

    by Frizzled ( 123910 )
    it seems like the "run from room to room" and "shoot stuff" motif has been done to death. a successful FPS needs a good nitch that it alone holds (until it's copied to death in the following months).

    Max Payne [3drealms.com] is a great example: simple controls, basic story, but Bullet-Time kicks butt.

    maybe we need new concepts instead of new technology?

    _f
  • Surely Thief, by the defunct Looking Glass Studios, was worth a mention in the single-player experience. It's extremely tightly-driven by the story and extraordinarily immersive -- a phenomenon due much more to its amazing sound engine than to its mediocre renderer. Not only is it beside the point to kill the enemies, but depending on the difficulty setting you're actually not allowed to in most cases. Which is just as well because Garrett, the viewpoint character, is not very handy with a sword and can't afford all that much ammunition for his bow. Thief has no multiplayer capability at all, so the fan mission builders not only have to be adept at design but must be skilled storytellers too. For all that, there have been fan missions built that rival the quality of those in the original story. If you haven't played this game yet, you must check it out -- an its sequel too.

  • Metauniverses (Score:2, Informative)

    by Wire Tap ( 61370 )
    What I'd really like to see is a goal-free 3D world like the Snowcrash Metaverse

    There are several goal free "worlds" out there already. Some of the best are:
    EverQuest - Http://www.everquest.com
    Asheron's Call - http://www.http://www.microsoft.com/games/zone/ash eronscall/default.asp
    Ultima Online - http://www.uo.com

    And many, many more . . .
    Of course, Ultima Oline is only pseudo-3D as I speak, and I am very dissatisfied with what has happened to that game over the years. Goal-less metauniverses are interesting, not only from a gaming point of view, but from an anthropologic standpoint as well. People in the games tend to exemplify the same characteristics as "real" human masses do. Even the sensless crimes are reflected in our games. You name the character trait, and I am willing to bet that it has a reflection in a persistant-state game (what was formerly called a metauniverse).

  • The thing that makes the FPS games annoyingly unrealistic to me is the general impossibility of damaging the game field. Except for special walls, if you shoot a rocket in Doom or Quake, nothing happens to the wall, or stairs or whatever. Where does this leave these games for representing real tactical assaults? As games. You can't lay a grenade next to any old wall and blast a whole in it, as would be SOP in an urban environment. Bummer, man. I don't care about the progressively more realistic lighting and shadows possible, I want to blow stuff up!

    Let's face that enabling wholesale environmental damage is a massive pain to the geometry. You'd need failure models with some randomization, and you'd need to recalculate things on the fly that map preparation tools now do off-line because things don't change. However, I think there are cheats possible to reduce the numbers somewhat- precompute a few failures in the the vicinity, throw some dust, and compute more while the dust is settling and the weapons recycle, perhaps. At some point near stasis is reached, and you can just fractalize the remaining rock and debris.

    I want to be able to take a rocket launcher and reduce a building to rubble in Doom3/Quake4. I want a scored frag when the roof goes in on a sniper. Screw the personal combat and call in the firepower. Small arms are for people who can't afford artillery or CAS. Flatten trees and flora for fun, oh yeah.

    -dB

  • It's already massivly flawed by Para 2: Doom? (Score:3, Informative)

    by Bobo the Space Chimp ( 304349 ) on Monday August 13, 2001 @02:02PM (#2144931) Homepage
    Doom, the beginning?

    Ehhhh, that isn't the first FPS, or even the first wildly popular FPS. There's a little game called Wolf 3D, see? It wasn't some archaic thing, every nerd at that time got it and played it.

    • Actually, all it says is that Doom was the beginning of multiplayer FPSs. But you're right, some of his information is incorrect. At one point he says that Doom was created by people with academic degrees, but IIRC, I once heard one of the people at id say that only one of the original team had a degree(this could be totally wrong, can anyone verify this?). He also states that no players could leave a network game once it was started. This I know is wrong from personal experience. When someones leaves a network game of Doom their player stays in the world until it is killed, and their scores also stay on the scoreboard when the map ends. The in-game player exists without anything controlling it. I never had a problem playing Doom over a modem, but apparently this guy did, he says it was choppy sometimes unplayable (and in a peer-to-peer model it seems to me that lag is irrelevant unless it reaches such extremes as to desync the games, so I don't know how he came to that conclusion. Maybe he was thinking of Quake.) Later he champions the internet play of Quake over a modem. I found Quake nearly unplayable over a modem before QuakeWorld was released. I suppose he groups these two programs as the same thing.

      I'm writing this as I read, and finding several more mistakes, but it seems to get more accurate as the chronology progresses.

    • Also (and this is backed up by Blizzard's Bill Roper in that one Gamespy Top 50 [gamespy.com] that was posted here [slashdot.org]) Wing Commander also sold a huge number of the then-current 386 systems.

      This article is barely academic, it's more of a mishmash "here are some games that were important or I think are cool." The text he throws to justify including The Sims and Black and White show that. ("It isn't really a multiplayer game..." etc.)

      It reminds me of the paper I wrote for an A-life class, http://www.alienbill.com/vgames/alife.html [alienbill.com], where I use the flimsiest excuse to argue why 2600 Battlezone is batter than Robot Tank. I then tried to show Classic Video Games as containing simple examples of A-life, which was pushing it. (I think that paper brought me from a solid A to a B+)
    • Hey, I had a "first person 3D" game for a 16K RAM TRS-80 Color Computer way back in the early 80s. Of course it didn't live up to Wolf 3D's graphics, but Wolf isn't nearly as good as Doom, either. BTW, the secret to killing whatever big nasty that lay at the end of Dungeons of Daggorath was to drop everything you were carrying except your sword and then flail away it the monster. They monsters would put picking up things on the ground ahead of fighting on their priority list.

    • historical revisionism (Score:4, Flamebait)

      by kaisyain ( 15013 ) on Monday August 13, 2001 @02:20PM (#2139827)
      Ultima Underworld was out a month before Wolfensteinstein 3D.

      Although he left out System Shock, I was pleased to see he at least mentioned Descent (but what does he mean by "the gaming environment was even more restricted than that of Doom"?) which offered true 3D environments ages before Quake claimed to be the first to do so.

      Tomb Raider was the hardware "killer application", not Quake.

      System Shock, Duke Nukem 3D, Magic Carpet, and Dark Forces were single player hits before Unreal and Half-Life hit the market.

      Starsiege: Tribes was multiplayer only and came out six months before Unreal Tournament or Quake 3 Arena.

      Rainbow Six beat Counter-strike to the punch for coop play and realism.

      But other than that the article was pretty much factually correct.
      • Tribes based on the "Red Baron Flight Engine" had larger maps than most FPS games. Being outdoor based, (But also included indoor maps) opened the feel of freedom in 3D games.

        Reminds me of an oldergame, Autoduel which had extremely large maps, and had freedom of movement.

      • I was pleased to see he at least mentioned Descent (but what does he mean by "the gaming environment was even more restricted than that of Doom"?) which offered true 3D environments ages before Quake claimed to be the first to do so.

        Descent did offer true 3D environments, but I think it's mistaken to argue that it's in Quake's technology class. My understanding is that Descent was heavily dependent on "1 room with tunnels" architecture, which was the limitation they were able to exploit to make 3D possible on a very low-end system. Quake was the first engine that offered true 3D with relatively few geometry limitations (obviously, certain geometry worked better than other geometry).

        I think it's arguable whether DOOM or Descent was more limiting. Descent was true 3D, but you couldn't do "real" architecture. Doom could do relatively real places, but was limited to 2.5D maps (i.e., you had height, but no room-over-rooms) and 2D sprites.

        This is not to knock on Descent, by the way, which was and is a great game and a solid technological achievement.

        Tomb Raider was the hardware "killer application", not Quake.

        I have to disagree, although it depends on how you define "killer application". Tomb Raider might have reached more people, but Quake has driven hardware development since day 1. Tomb Raider has never been about pushing the boundaries of hardware acceleration (they want mass-market appeal), but Quake engines have consistently pushed it.

        • True, Descent's architecture was sort of a "one room with tunnels" approach, which meant you couldn't go outside. The way they did it was with cube-ish structures which could have walls on none, some, or all sides (but the outside needs to have walls). So, if you wanted to place a floating cube in the middle of a room, all you'd have to do is border it with 8 blank cubes.

          Interestingly enough, the engine never checked for overlaps, so third party developers did some interesting things in the name of the fourth dimension ;-)

    • Well, as long as we're talking about the origins of first person 3d games, there was a hit game for the Mac around 1988 or so, called The Colony [macworld.com]

      Sure, its graphics were primitive. And the low frame rate forced it to focus on puzzle-solving and plot rather than combat and reflexes. But that wasn't necessarily a bad thing; its plot was (and is) still better than almost anything else I've ever seen.

      It remembered its roots, too; the plot borrowed heavily from Aliens and from 2001, and sure enough, there's a replica of Bave Bowman's suite, with a monolith inside, and many of the puzzles involve moving things around with a forklift that looked (and sounded) like the one Ripley used in Aliens. And the game contained a mini-clone of Battlezone (of course, the granddaddy of them all.)

      Sadly, I think it'd be classified as abandonware now; I don't think Mindscape still exists. Does anyone have this game lying around? Particularly the color version, released soon after the Mac II came out? (Yep, it's that old...) I'd love to fire up a Mac emulator and play this again, with a decent framerate this time.

    • This is the key phrase:

      However, it [Doom] was done in an immersive first-person perspective. Doom was not the first game to do this, but it was the first game to do it well.

      Wolf 3D was not Id's first attempt at 3D shooters. If you look at some of their earlier games, you can see the technological progression. But Doom truly was the first game to really do it well enough to be called "immersive". Wolf was still pretty crude.

  • Goal Free Universe (Score:3, Insightful)

    by jerw134 ( 409531 ) on Monday August 13, 2001 @02:02PM (#2144935)
    I agree, a goal free universe would rock. But the thing is, people are so used to violence in games that it would take a MAJOR company releasing a MAJOR kick ass game to even get people to take a second look at it. IMHO.
    • Or a company with enough smarts and the right people to market to people who *aren't* 15 year old boys and the like.

      If the women go there, the rest of the world will follow. Market a non-goal 3d virtual world to people who aren't playing Quake, not to the people who are.

      • If the women go there, the rest of the world will follow.

        Right... make it a dating universe :-)

    • Re:Goal Free Universe (Score:2, Interesting)

      by NickV ( 30252 )
      There was this game a long time ago by Bethesda called Daggerfall [dircon.co.uk], that had a very large universe that had no real goals what-so-ever. The world was incredibly large (we're talking about wandering outdoors for hours between towns, and none was randomly generated!) The NPCs and town members were all created in such a detailed manner (with agendas and what not) and it still had the best "real-world" type experience I have ever seen. It was online, without being online.

      I still remember being branded a criminal, riding on my horse to a town which ports it's fort gates up at night. I remember getting off my horse, looking around, scaling the wall... listening for guards, sneaking up behind them, knocking them out, and then climbing down into the town from the fort walls, and breaking into a house to find a bed to sleep at night. Now that was incredible.

      It's a shame the 3D engine sucked... but they are making a new [gamespot.com] one with a new engine, that is going to be incredible. Daggerfall took over three years to make, and this one seems to be taking longer! I can't wait!

  • Google cache (text) ... (Score:5, Informative)

    by Lumpish Scholar ( 17107 ) on Monday August 13, 2001 @02:06PM (#2144937) Homepage Journal
    ... here [google.com]. (Boy, that was slashdotted fast.)
    • Don't click that link! It goes to goatse.cx!

    • Untrue (Score:2)

      by at-b ( 31918 )
      WARNING:

      The above comment is wrong, the site is NOT slashdotted [yet]. Thanks for providing the Google text link, though - thereby relieving the server of serving the .pdf file. However, if you want to print or save the article, go for the .pdf file, it's a much better option.

      Now back to our regularly scheduled karmawhoring activities :-)

      Alex T-B
      St Andrews
  • 1. The article states that DOOM was the first 3D first-person shooter.

    No, Id's previous work, Wolfenstein 3D, was the first real 3D "you may get motion sickness playing this game" shooter. Also, he ignores games in non-FPS genres that really pushed the 3D envelope from that period, such as Falcon 3.0.

    2. "[DOOM] was designed by talented people with good skills and academic degrees in computer science."

    John Carmack has a CS degree? News to me -- I thought he dropped out of college.

    3. "It was the first 3D game to have textures on everything on the screen, and that made a huge difference for the atmosphere and the mood of the game."

    See Wolfenstein 3D.

    Well, there's probably more, but that's what I see in the first section. Anyone spot others?

    This paper would have benefitted from some sort of peer review...

  • Other uses for engines (Score:4, Interesting)

    by dschuetz ( 10924 ) <david&dasnet,org> on Monday August 13, 2001 @02:53PM (#2145966)
    What I'd like to see is an easier way to make use of the 3-D engines for things like office/home walkthroughs and the like. I've looked into this in the past, but never found anything that was all that easy to use. We're currently building a home (well, a builder is) (well, they haven't finished the sewers yet, so they're not actually *building* our house yet, anyway), and the 3-D home design software we bought to help us visualize the interior of the home is, well, cumbersome. And the walkthroughs are horrible.

    Why can't I find a quake/doom/whatever engine with a simple Visio-like front-end, so I can program in a whole house? Or office building? Or my neighborhood? (that'd look great on the web page...)
    • Ken Silverman's build engine (used in duke nukem 3d) was fairly easy to create maps for. You draw the room outlines in a 2d, overhead view, then go into a 3d view (almost as if you're in the game) and give the room height & textures.

      IIRC, the keyboard commands are a bit cryptic, but once you get used to that (or print them out) it's pretty easy to use.
    • You've hit upon a cumbersome problem in computer software. Computer screens and user interfaces are (almost) all designed for 2 dimensions. It's incredibly difficult to add a third dimension. Some good engines have been around for a while to draw 3-d and move around it. But creating a user interface to allow you to modify the world is tricky. For now all 3-d design must be done with a 2-d interface (even a 3-d input device is rendered 2-d on the screen). The best example is CAD software. Traditionally you draw in 2-d, then render into 3. But that's cumbersome software with a decent learning curve. I have yet to see a *good* user interface for drawing a 3-d world that's relatively simple to use. If anyone knows of any, I'd love to see them...

  • Early networked games (Score:2, Interesting)

    by vrmlguy ( 120854 )
    Ten years ago, no consumer-level computer game would allow several players to interact over a network, mainly because computers with a network connection were not very common ten years ago.
    Allow me to differ! Way back in 1988, an outfit called Artifical Horizons had a commercial game called Aviator that did exactly this. Needless to say, it was a flight simulator, not a FPS, but you could play against your friends. Unfortunatly, the hardware requirements probably killed the game. It only ran on Sun SPARCstations with high-end graphics cards and used broadcast UDP for communications with the other players, so you needed one expensive Unix box per player. You also needed an Ethernet, but anyplace with multiple workstations already had that.
  • I remember eons ago when we were first starting to see people do things like network up a bunch of Amigas and get them all playing Mechwarrior or some variant. I saw a quote in a magazine where one of the organizers of the game was asked why it was so violent. He replied "At this stage it's a very expensive game, and people will need to pay a high price for a relatively short game. Therefore we need to get their adrenaline going as soon as we can, and keep it there so they get their money's worth. The best way to do that is have someone shoot at them."

    Of course, an alternate theory is that we, at heart, are a destructive bunch. The goal of Diablo wasn't to kill your fellow players, yet it happened nonetheless.

    Lastly, as someone once said "The reason movies don't depict realistic situations is because people don't go to the movies to see what they could see outside their window every day." Same applies to games, I would think -- I don't want to play a game where I have to go to work and make money to feed my family. :)

  • This term's assignment (Score:5, Funny)

    by Rupert ( 28001 ) on Monday August 13, 2001 @02:16PM (#2146664) Homepage Journal
    is to see who can drive the most traffic to a random PDF on the professor's website.

    A+ for a slashdotting.

  • Current state of gaming (Score:4, Insightful)

    by SirSlud ( 67381 ) on Monday August 13, 2001 @03:45PM (#2153870) Homepage
    Quick thought, definately not air tight:

    I thought it was interesting hearing him compare the current Q3 and UT type games as being basically the same. He says "the current state of 3D gaming is like a world where no one invented anything but football, and the only difference is what color jersey you wear [paraphrase]"

    That maybe so, but football has been around for ages, and people still play it. Everyone knows the rules, and has a general idea of how to play with other people, etc ...

    Nobody wants to learn a Whole New Game or Whole New Sport (especially after dropping 70 bucks for it), so I liken the online deathmatch community to the sports world .. if we can invent any kind of ball, on any kind of field, with any kind of rules, why don't we see new sports being invented weekly? Certainly that would be more interesting? I say no; I think Q3 and UT are the 'equipment and vanue' to play Deathmatch (or arena, or ctf, or what have you). Sure, other games are sure to come along with their own unique and new concepts, but these online games are only as good as their popularity, community, and support (read: variety in competition), so it's likewise important that we dont try and re-invent the sport with every new game lest we drive off the community into more fractions that it already is. (And I should know .. I stuck around Quake 1 TF for 4 years, simply because nobody could 'copy' the game well enough using the current crop of games.) I think it's time to admit that videogames can easily have a playability of over 5 years .. while many people switch and update for the eyecandy, the real gamers value the subtle details like the physics and gameplay, and arn't neccessarily drooling for a whole new way of playing.
  • I think that the article author is speaking of a more open-ended 3D FPS environment as opposed to one that is truly goal-less. However, considering the possibilities it may not be a totally useless goal.

    The open-ended environment model has been tried in terms of cyber-haunts for people to run around in avatars and chat it up. Yet, there is the whole Snow Crash possibility of a true 3D internet multiverse model that could make gaming, interacting and trading files very interesting and with the spread of larger bandwidth options might actually breath some life into the wheezing sickness of the new economy.

    Still, I believe the first step will have to be to establish open ended story driven 3D FPS style games like an expanded version of Half-Life with a professional writing staff from perhaps a traditional playwright or script writing background.

    The immersive qualities of the FPS have been overshadowed by the twitch driven instant gratification qualities of the arena environment that has dominated its base. The story has a good point. They could be so much more.

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