A
Anticitizen
Guest
I signed up a few days ago, after watching the forums for a couple of weeks. I'm not really a gamer (not even a casual one) and I didn't know much about the Half-Life game series when it came to light, apart from obvious details: has a huge following, a plot involving some horrid experiments at a large, private research facility that screwed up, a scientist named Gordon Freeman, and aliens from another dimension. Then I saw 2003's E3 videos early this year. I found the gameplay and the technology behind it unbelievable (the Striders sequence!)... mostly because I wasn't around when first-person shooters made the transition from mindless point-and-click action to something with more style, substance and immersion. And plot!
The games that were in circulation when I used to play had no plots. John Carmack, the game-programmer who co-founded id software and provided most of the brains behind the Doom series, summed this approach up when he said about the story behind a game: "You expect it to be there, but it's really not that important". All of that has changed.
So, yeah... HL rekindled my interest in games, in terms of actual playing as well as in technical and philosophical ways (I'm a coder like many here, by the way). If I had to pick the single most important factor in drawing me to the game, it'd be the plot... and the way the technology came together to support it. People in the industry believe these games are the next big art-form, because of how they create worlds for people to escape into and explore other 'realities', and I dig that. Still not really a gamer, though... always trying to watch my time. Playing HL2 also made me realise how crappy my machine is (a Dell... enough said). I had virtually no up-to-date understanding of how hardware and the hardware market works, until I did something with my machine that actually pushed it to its limits. Now planning to build one from scratch.
Nice to meet y'all (I did earlier, technically... but it wasn't mutual, I was lurking) :E
The games that were in circulation when I used to play had no plots. John Carmack, the game-programmer who co-founded id software and provided most of the brains behind the Doom series, summed this approach up when he said about the story behind a game: "You expect it to be there, but it's really not that important". All of that has changed.
So, yeah... HL rekindled my interest in games, in terms of actual playing as well as in technical and philosophical ways (I'm a coder like many here, by the way). If I had to pick the single most important factor in drawing me to the game, it'd be the plot... and the way the technology came together to support it. People in the industry believe these games are the next big art-form, because of how they create worlds for people to escape into and explore other 'realities', and I dig that. Still not really a gamer, though... always trying to watch my time. Playing HL2 also made me realise how crappy my machine is (a Dell... enough said). I had virtually no up-to-date understanding of how hardware and the hardware market works, until I did something with my machine that actually pushed it to its limits. Now planning to build one from scratch.
Nice to meet y'all (I did earlier, technically... but it wasn't mutual, I was lurking) :E
