For the past week or so I’ve had my personal computer hooked up to my roommate’s 40″ HDTV in the living room. Mainly for the purpose of watching a few streaming movies comfortably from the couch together, but mostly because such an act is goddamn awesome. When you’re a massive geek the first order of business for something like this is re-experiencing all the stuff you encounter in your everyday life. For example, Facebook is no different on a big TV than on a tiny monitor (other than being barely legible), but for some reason it’s a thousand times cooler to view it that way. Same with YouTube or any thing else. And, of course, eventually I gave the shout of “I need to play some computer games on this thing!”

Then I realized that I don’t have any computer games.

See, PC gaming and I have a bit of a history. Alongside the NES, it was my first real platform. Sierra and Lucasarts adventure games were a staple of my childhood, something that I can probably blame my bizarre problem solving skills on (and I’m sure Leisure Suit Larry caused complications for some other developmental skills that I won’t mention). These games were interesting, unique worlds that I couldn’t experience anywhere else. They also ran off of floppy disks, so you just had to pop it in and type ‘a: run.exe’ and you’d be set.

Then things started changing. CD-ROMs slowly replaced disks and brought with them the dreaded mandatory install. As my family couldn’t afford to upgrade our poor old Tandy 1000, I began to get my gaming fix almost exclusively from consoles (which, when compared to computer components, were dirt cheap). At some point I studied in Doom II, the Seventh Guest and Myst, but the details of those encounters are blurred by memories of Mario and Sonic. I learned that there was a lot of interesting stuff I could do on a computer that wasn’t related to gaming, and it became easier to segregate the electronic devicesin my life. Besides, when available hard disk space is measured in megabytes deleting funny GIFs and fake bomb recipes to make room for a new game install just doesn’t seem worth it.

So then now: I can count my recent computer gaming experiences on one hand.

HalfLife 2, which I was pumped for, was the first PC game I had purchased in years. I was disappointed to learn that it required some ridiculous (and now commonplace) remote authorization. In order to play the single player game, I needed an internet connection… something that, in my college days, was an extravagant luxury. Some of my friends hauled their gaming rigs to the house of that one kid who had DSL… I just waited a few weeks and downloaded a crack from the school’s computer lab. I was a strange feeling to be using illegal means to enable the use of something I owned. I imagine many PC gamers feel this way in the present.

A couple years later, I was at Target buying towels or something when a certain title called to me from an endcap. ‘Star Wars: Empire At War.’ Oh, how sweet it sounds. The back of the box informed me that it was a real time strategy game, but it was also Star Wars. It had land battles and space battles. Controlling fleets of AT-ATs, arranging X-wings in various attack formations, even using the Death Star to wipe out entire planets… I had to have it. I bought it, went home, blew off all my plans for the night and locked myself in my bedroom, all the while concocting elaborate schemes to rule the galaxy with a doctrine of fear. After a lengthy install, I eagerly click the launcher on the desktop and… my computer powers down. I restart, and at the Windows loading screen it shuts off again. I repeat this activity many times. I can boot into safe mode, but that’s it. I uninstall Empire at War and it still won’t start. So I go out and get drunk, deathly afraid that all my schoolwork has been corrupted by an unnatural pursuit of leisure.

The next weekday I call LucasArts (er, Lucasfilm Games) tech support line to figure out what’s going on. They walk me through a bunch of different stuff and deduce that there’s a conflict between my sound-card drivers and the copy protection software that’s secretly running in the background at any given moment. Their solution? Uninstall my sound-card if I want to play the game. The sound-card I use to record audio and mix my music, the sound-card that otherwise enables me to create things. I think I just hung up the phone, amazed that this was considered a solution. That was the last time I purchased a boxed PC game.

Since then, I’ve had torrid love affairs with freeware titles such as Knytt Stories and in browser games like Peggle. I play a fair amount of interactive fiction, if only because each piece is an extension loaded by a single client of your choice (an interpreter). These are unintrusive entities that can coexist with the important functions of the computer. I can have an indie game minimized with the sound off, then play a few rounds while I’m waiting for an audio mixdown or a video render. Doing such a thing with a traditional PC game would likely result in a massive CPU fire.

People make a big stink about casual games, but I don’t think that label is appropriate. It’s more like transparent games. Games that don’t interfere. The reason games like Rocket Mania and Bejeweled took off isn’t because of some gameplay mechanic that reach a previously untapped market; they became successful because the games became accessible with minimal effort. That audience has always wanted to play games, they just didn’t have the means. They weren’t going to go out and buy a console and they didn’t want to dedicate hard drive space and system resources to the big boxed titles. These are the same people who played the shit out of Minesweeper in Windows 3.1 while on a conference call at work. Technology has advanced to a point where any developer can manufacture a good game in a short amount of time and actually find an audience. My father actually told me about Peggle long before the ‘hardcore’ crowd discovered it. As soon as one Minesweeper player found out that there were these web portals out there featuring games that don’t completely blow (and I firmly believe Minesweeper is a terrible, terrible game) it probably spread through the whole office like lightning. From there, the world!

Mainly, I think it’s interesting to see what computer gaming has become. I find myself more attracted to games such as 9:05 than any big-budget blockbuster. I’m sure I’m missing out on a few key experiences, but a large portion of those titles can be found on a home console, and the rest (in my opinion) aren’t worth the effort.

Wait, what was this entry supposed to be about again? Sorry, I get thrown off topic easily. Anyway… internet porn looks crazy on a 40″ TV.