Though one is obviously dwarfed by the comparison, both figures are impressive in their own right. And both speak to the health of their form of multiplayer gaming. For console games like Modern Warfare 2, multiplayer’s meteoric growth is commonly understood. But for LAN parties, still playing games like Counter-Strike, their resilience and persistence are most frequently seen among university-aged gamers on campus.

“If anything, I think it’s growing” says Nathan Etzell, a student at Oregon State University, whose 300-member OSU Gaming organisation has a prewired, 30-person LAN room at the bottom of a dormitory where at least two large parties are held per term. In January, his club will meet the University of Oregon in the second “Civil War LAN”, a gaming tournament named after the schools’ football rivalry.

But there is a sense that the PC LAN party — like all-nighters, streaking, whatever — are something whose time and place comes on a university campus. Out in the cold hard world, PC LAN and direct server support in new titles is dwindling in favour of console multiplayer and proprietary hosting services. Most notably, StarCraft II will not support LAN gaming as it shifts to Blizzard’s Battle.net. And dedicated servers are out under Modern Warfare 2, which is now running multiplayer with a combination of Steam and the recently created IW.net for Modern Warfare 2. Both sequels’ predecessors had a strong history in dedicated servers and LAN gaming, leaving some gamers feeling betrayed, and some LAN enthusiasts feeling marginalised.

LAN gaming is not gone from the off-campus civilian world. But annual convention hall events with big budgets, entry fees, prizes and sponsorships are different creatures from six people linking up to play Warcraft III. While the former will definitely still happen after you graduate, the latter is less likely. Those six-people sessions are most likely made among fellow gamers, who are likely to find each other in a class, or perusing a bulletin board in a student union.

“Their age group usually involves a lot of what PC gamers are,” says Keegan Gormley, whose Big City Gaming in downtown Eugene, Ore. offers constant system-linked gaming and monthly tournaments. “They’re mostly university students who, in their spare time, enjoy playing a game like Counter-Strike, or another game they’ve played for a long time.”

The players in his $US5-an-hour “stadium,” — eight consoles connected to high definition, Major League Gaming–standard panel monitors — are largely high-schoolers, Gormley said. Younger kids are less likely to LAN, he said, because of the accessibility of consoles and the desirability of their most current games.

“There’s much more deep-rooting in PC gaming,” Gormley said. “Someone who gets into a game on the PC can end up playing it for years,” he said. “On consoles, I’ve seen people drop Halo for Call of Duty, then drop Call of Duty for Flashpoint. For PC gamers, mostly, it’s whatever they originally clicked on and killed with.”

And that helps explain the persistence of LAN gaming. The standbys of a LAN party are usually real-time strategy games such as StarCraft, or WarCraft III, then shooters such as Counter-Strike, Team Fortress 2 and Unreal Tournament. TF2 is the most recent of these, releasing in 2007, with others having roots going back to the late 1990s. There’s a reason for this.

“It’s what people are good at,” said Patrick Chinn, one of the University of Oregon organisers for the Civil War LAN, which will be held January 22-23. “One reason people want to play an older game like Counter-Strike is because they’ve played it a long time and they’ve gotten good at it. We’ve done tournaments for games that are brand new, and there’ll be some attendance, but they’re not as well played.”

Plus, by this point, the support histories for the games have either controlled for or patched out of existence most means of cheating. “The tactics in a game like Counter-Strike have become so refined that there’s no real dick move you can pull,” says Dylan Leeds, a senior majoring in digital art at Oregon. And for whatever in-game legislation doesn’t cover, LAN gaming offers another control: being physically in the presence of your opponent. It cuts down on ragequits and unsporting behaviour.

“You’re more likely to respect someone if you know you’re going to see interact with them after the game,” he said.

And that speaks to another quality of LAN gaming that, unlike its numbers, can’t be replicated or really improved: the human contact of it all.

“If you’re playing online by yourself, the hype’s really not there,” said Josh Bothun, an Oregon student majoring in computer science and music technology. “It’s like you have to intentionally create it for yourself, but you get a completely different experience when people are around you.”

LAN parties have an anecdotal culture that just can’t be replicated by solitary multiplayer gaming. Often stretching 24 hours or more, they’re salted with tales of inside jokes and hyper-caffeination. At major tournaments in the civilian world, bragging about casemods and your rig are their own sideshow, similar to a custom-car show.

“It’s more about community,” says Gormley, the game store owner. “It’s being able to shoulder-shove the person you just killed. It’s less about yelling at someone over a mic, and more about actually giving that person the evil eye.

“It gets so elitist online, sometimes,” he continued. “It seems like a lot of people don’t want to play online console games because they don’t get the game in its first week, don’t level up their character in time, and then they feel like they can’t compete.”

It might be easy to assume that anything other than gaming over the Internet, as opposed to a LAN or WAN, is redundant, a relic, or headed for obscurity. But system-linked games bring something to the room that proprietary multiplayer services can’t: One’s friends.

To use an apt college metaphor: “It’s like drinking online versus drinking with friends,” Chinn said. “Drinking a couple of beers and IMing with friends is not nearly as much fun as actually drinking with your friends.”

Nowhere is the realisation of flight grander or more satisfying than in video games. When done right, flying in a game can leave a lasting impression on both players and developers that impacts every game they play or make going forward.

Telltale Games designer Mike Stemmle pointed this out while demoing Tales of Monkey Island Episode 3 for me in September. I asked what gameplay inspirations helped him develop for Monkey Island and after a moment’s pause he said, “Kingdom Hearts.”

“Oh, because it has pirates?” I asked.

“No,” he said. “It’s the flying.” The way the game introduces flying the player — about halfway through its storyline after you’ve been running and jumping on the ground the whole time — was like a revelation in game design for him. “Because once you get [to fly in Never Land], it’s like you knew it was coming. It just felt right.”

There’s a fantasy fulfilment that comes with flying in video games. And even if flying in a game is just another way to get from point A to point B, it’s appealing to a part of your senses that you don’t use very much in everyday gameplay.

“We live in a very X, Y world,” Dark Void Senior Producer Morgan Gray said. A veteran of flight games like X-Wing vs. TIE Fighter and X-Wing Alliance, he knows his Z axis and isn’t afraid to build his games around it. “If you look at … shooters, when they first came out, everything was flat. [There was] a roof over your head and walls on all sides. It was only really when you got to games … where you had enemies [above or below you] where you had to start exploring the Z axis.”

Like Doom players that had to learn to use the mouse to enjoy Quake, your average gamer has to put in effort to master flight. Instead of thinking in only one or two directions, he or she has to think in a 360-degree bubble where enemies can come from any angle. They have to be aware of their character’s (or aircraft’s) physics so that they don’t get lost when trying to execute a turn. Some games make it easier for the player by limiting the range of flight to forward-only like Star Fox or Panzer Dragoon; other games like Dark Void layer on tutorial after tutorial to make absolutely sure you internalise the controls before cutting you loose in the wild blue yonder.

By that same token, developers without Gray’s flight-filled background have to work a lot harder to implement flying. Whereas Gray can look back over both his career and his childhood and see Chuck Yeager’s face mocking him after Gray had crashed and burned in Advanced Flight Training, some developers only have memories of Star Fox or Wing Commander as their flying inspiration. They don’t realise that there’s more to flight than getting off the ground.

“Don’t get me wrong,” says Gray. “[Wing Commander's] level design was great, the ship design was great, progression was great. The actual nuts and bolts of flight? All pretty arcade-y because [it didn't feel] like there was meat to the simulation.”

Developers with traditional level-making experience on shooters or adventure games that have the walls on all sides and the roof overhead have new challenges when making an enjoyable flying sequence or full game. They have to relearn how to organise a level around enemy spawn points in spaces with no walls or roofs.

“You really need to use enemies not only as a way of making a challenge for the player, but as defining space because [players] have to have that frame of reference for ‘where am I in the terrain?’” said Gray. “If you get [the timing right], it really gives the [flight] meaning and puts a plot to the [enemy] encounters. It’s different than ‘And now we walk you in this room and find the blue key,’ because you don’t get blue keys in the air.”

He compared a perfect flight level to a map called De Dust in Counter-Strike. To him, it was obvious that some developer had sat down with a stopwatch and timed how long it would take enemies to reach players when spawning from two different points on the map. That developer knew exactly where the player would be and what they would be doing when the enemy got to them, and they build the level outward around the player from that point.

Flying levels, Gray said, should be built the exact same way.

Nowhere is this clearer than in the upcoming Avatar for the Wii. A flight level with a giant lizard bird was the centrepiece of a demo given to me by creative director Daniel Bisson, and he wasn’t shy about telling me it was the hardest level to design. In early efforts, the enemies spawned too fast and the Wii Balance Board was over-responsive to even the slightest shift in weight, causing the lizard bird to pitch wildly and slam into spawning enemies. As the level developed, they added more environmental boundaries like tunnels and trees to define the flying space and confined 360-degree movements to quick time events.

So what began as a flying level instead turned into an arcade-style on-rails experience. Sure, you’re up in the sky on the back of a bird. But, there’s not much fantasy fulfilment and no raw freedom in having your hand held.

The trick is keeping reality from ruining fantasy. Yes, it’s a lot of work to pilot an X-Wing in the Star Wars: Battlefront games; but if you get to blow up a TIE Fighter as a reward for your patience, you don’t mind sinking effort into learning how to be a pilot. Likewise, War in the upcoming Darksiders would look silly with a pair of wings sprouting from his burly back; but hijacking a gryphon from an angel for a quick joyride through a ruined city appeals to the fantasy of the character and doesn’t last so long that the game needs to bog the player down with real physics.

Above: The lone flying level in Darksiders.

With Crimson Skies and flight sims on side of the spectrum and our Star Foxes and Panzer Dragoons on the other, there are so many ways gamers can fulfil the fantasy of flight. Each new game that introduces a flying segment or builds its entire experience around the thrill of strapping on a jetpack builds on the collective fantasy gamers and developers share of taking to the skies.

The ultimate dream of flight in games, says Gray, is this: “I don’t know where I’m at, but I’m having fun.”

Image Cred — Kingdom Hearts
Title Image: The Fall of Icarus, Peter Paul Rubens, 1636

English Russia reports that:

“it was impossible to put an attention of those hopeless men off. The game was drawing to a close and the ladies were sweating as much as they could, but the eyes of the tough players were nailed to the screens tight.”

In the matchup, the team forZe bested rival Virtus.pro.

I pulled ten pics from English Russia, galleried below. There are tons more at the link.

Hot Gaming [English Russia, thanks to Kevin!]

Having left Valve after saying nothankyou.jpg to the pressures of creating a Counter-Strike sequel, Le now has an office in South Korea, where he and a small team are working on a game called Tactical Intervention.

“I enjoyed Counter-Strike,” Minh told IGN, “but I wanted to have my own game. I was never able to put in all the cool features I wanted because the people who played Counter-Strike would [complain] about all the changes. They liked the game as it is.”

Don’t expect something too different from Counter-Strike. After all, this is another take on a tried and tested formula, not an attempt at something brand new. So again it’s terrorists vs agents, but the twists Le are adding include the presence of civilians throughout levels, and the inclusion of attack dogs, which can be used to stun opponents.

Tactical Intervention is for the PC, and should be out by the end of the year.

The Next Counter-Strike [IGN]

Cherie and Nicky Blair were named directors in February. Nicky Blair, 23, is apparently roommates with Gabriel Moraes, 22, who launched Magnitude Gaming in 2007.

Not one to pass up a chance to attack games AND a politician, the Daily Mail ran the story this morning under the headline: “Cherie Blair and her son join firm linked to violent computer game.”

The game in question? Counter-Strike.

Moreas defended the company, saying:

“Magnitude has never been involved with games containing any kind of street violence. We had one game involving soldiers in military combat but it had a rating of 18-plus and was a team game. We stopped involvement with that game some months ago.”

Cherie Blair and her son join firm linked to violent computer game [Daily Mail]

All standalone Half-Life titles (including Team Fortress Classic) are a whopping 66 per cent off, meaning you can buy all seven of them for just $US17. Or if you want to be selective, Half-Life will cost you $US3.40, Half-Life 2, $US6.80.

Also on sale is the “Valve Complete Pack”, which bundles *deep breath* Counter-Strike, Team Fortress Classic, Day of Defeat, Deathmatch Classic, Half-Life: Opposing Force, Ricochet, Half-Life, Counter-Strike: Condition Zero, Half-Life: Blue Shift, Half-Life 2, Counter-Strike: Source, Half-Life: Source, Day of Defeat: Source, Half-Life 2: Deathmatch, Half-Life 2: Lost Coast, Half-Life Deathmatch: Source, Half-Life 2: Episode One, Portal, Half-Life 2: Episode Two, Team Fortress 2 and Left 4 Dead.

Phew.

You can get that pack for $US90.

Unable to concentrate on school because she was up late at night, she dropped out to focus on her gaming and join Swedish team Pink Zinic full-time. She’s also working as a model “for a friend”.

This seems to be a nascent trend of late with a 16-year-old in Raleigh, N.C., whose parents have let him drop out of school so that he can focus on a professional gaming career via Guitar Hero.

We do wish the both of them the best of luck — wherever their roads take them.

17 year-old Zinic.inzane: "I quit school for CS" [SK Gaming Thanks, Lawrence!]

Apparently on May 19 of last year, the victim was playing CS against his “friend” in an internet cafe when things got nasty. Two separate fistfights broke out between the pair, and when they eventually left, the accused set upon the victim, beating him in the head and torso until he died at the scene.

The boy was found guilty of intention to inflict grievous bodily harm, and sentenced to four years detention in a juvenile prison.

Компьютерные игры закончились смертью [ГЛАВНАЯ СТРАНИЦА, via Planet Half-Life]

In case you missed the news earlier today, German teenager Tim Kretschmer went on a shooting rampage. Killed fifteen people. And already, attempts are being made to link the atrocity to gaming.

The Associated Press report on the shootings – which will be the same one run in countless newspapers/websites across the world – sadly tries to slip in a link between Kretschmer’s playing of Counter-Strike and the murders.

A 17-year-old who would give only his first name, Aki, said he had been studying this year with the shooter at a private business school, and described him as a quiet, reserved person.

Aki said the two played poker together, both in person and online, as well as a multiplayer video game called “Counter-Strike” that involves killing people to complete missions.

“He was good,” Aki said.

They’re not BLAMING the attacks on Counter-Strike. Far from it. But why describe Counter-Strike like that, if not to try and drum up or somehow prey upon people’s ignorance? Really, AP, we’d expect better from the likes of you.

Teen kills 15 in Germany before taking own life [Associated Press, via GamePolitics]

Korean gamers don’t just love playing, but watching others play games, too! Korean network MBC Game has been broadcasting real-time-strategy game StarCraft matches for year. So broadcasting RTS Halo Wars makes sense.

MBC Game also broadcasts Warcraft III, Tekken and Counter-Strike. As game site Siliconera points out, all three home consoles are available in Korea; however, none of them have reached the popularity of PC gaming. Perhaps that guy’s grey vest will help.

Starcraft TV Network Gives Halo Wars Its Own Show [Siliconera]