The perils of PC gaming

When the PC game "Guild Wars" from NCSoft launched at 2:00 a.m. last Thursday, NCSoft's director of studio services John Erskine was ready.

"Guild Wars" had been already thoroughly tested.  The in-house hardware compatibility lab had measured the game against a battery of PC configurations and video cards.  Volunteer testers had hammered away at alpha and beta versions documenting how mundane Windows programs like virus scanning software interfered with game play.

Erskine, who is NCSoft's representative to its players, and the 30 additional staff members he had assembled were taking no chances.  "Guild Wars" is a PC game, after all.  There were bound to be a slew of questions from frustrated gamers who couldn't get the game to work for one technical reason or another.

Erskine was philosophical:  "The PC is a piece-by-piece system with every PC just a little bit different from every other one.”

In serious PC gaming a philosophical mind-set is essential because the answer as to whether a particular game will work is rarely yes or no.

Instead, more questions:  Does the PC have an adequate graphics accelerator card?  Are all the display drivers up to date?  What about Direct X?  RAM?  Sound card? 

Unlike the game console business where one PlayStation 2 operates like any another, PC's come in an infinite array of set-ups.  Just look at the results of a survey on player's PC configurations posted recently by Valve Software, the creator of 2004's "Half-Life 2."  The number of possible combinations between graphics cards, processor speed and RAM could make a Talmudic scholar's head spin. 

All those ways for a PC game to not work... all those excuses to say, "forget this" and buy a video game console instead.

The official and unofficial response
"We get it, we live it ourselves," said Dean Lester, general manager for Microsoft's in-house  Windows Graphics and Gaming Technologies Group.  "If we could streamline the experience of playing games on Windows we really could get more people playing.”

Last week, Lester’s group announced several PC game friendly updates to make installing and running games on Windows XP and "Longhorn," XP's successor, less of an ulcer-inducing experience.  

Updates like an easy method to locate and install PC game fixes and patches; an improved architecture -- in "Longhorn" -- that shields gamers from having to worry about display drivers; the ability to use Xbox controllers with PC games; and game console-style easy installation where game files are placed in one games folder and not scattered throughout the operating system.

“Why are we even asked all of these questions,” said Lester about PC gaming's current installation process. “There is no reason why we can’t do the same as a console.”

Why indeed.  PC gaming has many lessons to learn from consoles when it comes to intuitive set-up.  But the PC, by nature, is only so user-friendly.

Koroush Ghazi is a PC gamer and one of the unsung thousands who has made it their mission to make PC gaming easier for the multitudes.  His online gaming technical advice guide Tweakguides.com dispenses tips on everything from optimizing a PC for better performance to troubleshooting common PC gaming problems.

"Given the sheer diversity of computer hardware as well as evolutionary and revolutionary hardware developments games developers will never be able to make their games 100 percent compatible or optimal on all gaming systems," he said.

The PC, unlike the console, is never a finished product.  PC's can be modified with better video cards.  CPUs can be "over-clocked," where the CPU's speed is tweaked to eek out better performance. 

That makes the PC's ability a powerful gaming platform...if the gamer knows what he is doing.  Many of problems in PC gaming, problems like crashes, slowdowns, and slow online play are often the result, according to Ghazi, of gamers changing their PC settings without understanding their relationship to the game.

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