First Person

I suck at Starcraft.

This would no doubt win me no friends in Korea, but it has to be said. I just don't click with management games, building games, God games. Starcraft, SimCity, Civilization. Any of 'em.

It's not that I dislike them. I can quite understand why people play them. But their and my game+player lego simply doesn't click. And trust me, I've tried. This goes back to SimCity on the C64 nearly twenty years ago. I've given them a fair shot. It's just not working out for us.

For a few years, I was on the organizing committee for the SIGGRAPH conference. Almost to a man, my colleagues on the committee all loved Starcraft.They excelled in managing resources, organizing little virtual people, they'd get together in the evenings to have laptop gatherings and organize each other into the ground.  I preferred rocket launchers.

In retrospect, that should have been a clue as to why they enjoyed the whole big-conference resource-organization thing and why I found it painful and would wish to retreat to my BFGs and berserker leaps into a whirling morass of bullets. That I am almost certain to be slaughtered, I care not a jot. If there was ever an apt image for my gameplaying it would be a character tearing down a hill towards a sea of enemies, screaming in apoplectic rage, wearing nothing except blue warpaint and a chain gun.

Ah, Unreal Tournament, how well ye know me.

(This is not solely a computer-game-only characteristic of mine. When I play pool in real life, I am a distinctly average and unremarkable player, but only if I am able to restrain myself from my natural "hit it as hard as possible just to see if the rebound effect does something interesting" tendency.)

I've never clicked with MMORPG games, either. I haven't spent a single second on World of Warcraft. Spent a good few hours trying out Lord of the Rings Online earlier this year: carefully chose and built my character, killed a metric buttload of boar, completed a whole slew of quests. Even squelched my loner characteristics enough to team up with a bunch of other players to complete Team Quests. Other players were helpful and charitable to the n00b that I was.

And tried not to keep thinking what this game really needs is more rocket launchers.