A short while ago I was talking with Pandalicious about gaming and the conversation got very interesting. By the end, we were both in agreement that gaming [on the whole] is incredibly enjoyable and should be a national past-time type of thing. But something from that conversation always nagged at me... it was a question that would bubble up to the front of my mind from time to time, making me question my own gamer-geekdom:

Am I missing out on something huge because I do not play games on the PC?

I need to give you just a little bit of history in order for you to appreciate the question... all of my life I have been a console gamer. The first system I remember owning was an Intellivision and ever since then it's been one console or another... from NES to XB360 [and damn near everything in between] I've always relegated my video gaming to a console machine. This is not because I hate PC's [I don't] but I've always thought or had the mind set that a personal computer is for work and a console is for gaming. I have several computers in my home and they are all production machines. By production I mean they are machines that I use for design work or video editing. While all of my machines are powerful enough to play games I do not have the luxury of allotting hard disk space, memory resources, or updates to games that may interfere with my machines running at top speed. I can't let anything mess with my money, or ability to make money to be more specific, so I do not game on any of them.

Pandalicious will tell you that there are a lot of PC games that she owns, plays, and enjoys on a regular basis. Many of these titles are games I have never played... I wouldn't be able to pick out a screenshot of Diablo if you paid me to, nor would I be able to isolate out from a group of screenshots which Civilization game was which. But as our video gaming conversation went on, I started thinking to myself that maybe I was missing out on a good gaming experience. There have been a bunch of titles that I have seen on the PC that I think are interesting, so lack of content hasn't kept me away... PC titles are no more expensive than their console counterparts, so I don't think that has anything to do with my non-pc-gaming-ness either. I think it's partly fear of the unknown and lack of a gaming machine that keeps me away from PC gaming.

I say fear of the unknown because I don't really know much about PC video gaming at all. The people that I do know that play these games usually only share with me their horror stories... some patch install gone horrendously wrong, or game saves corrupting or disappearing, not stuff to get me all excited about getting in on the scene that's for sure. So fear of getting into software that I have no previous experience with is unsettling... if I get that Guild Wars game will I really be able to find the help I need if I get lost somehow? I think not knowing the answer to that or at least not having an idea about the answer to that makes it easier for me to justify staying away from PC gaming altogether. Add to that the fact that I would still have to keep my production machines clean and the idea of bringing in another machine just for gaming becomes a hard pill to swallow because I couldn't just get a run of the mill machine... I would have to get a supped-up boom-phatty of a laptop to game on.

I say laptop because I like being mobile with entertainment, but from the things I've read [from places like EGM, IGN, or CGM] to really have an enjoyable computer gaming experience you need a bad-assed machine... this means heavy hitting processor chips, high, high-end graphics card with lots of onboard memory, a couple of gigs of the high end computer ram, and a big ol' 7200rpm hard drive. My heart start palpitating when I start thinking about getting a mobile machine that can meet those specs... coming up with that extra cash, just for a gaming machine, just never seems to make enough sense to me. I try and I try, but I guess because I just have never had an all consuming "this is the greatest thing ever" experience previously on a PC with gaming [which I freely admit was waaay back in the day] I end up convincing myself to not get into it... one of those "better the devil you know..." kind of deals I guess.

But every so often, the conversation and question pop back into my mind because I feel like I might be missing out on something. I can't quite put my finger on it, but I feel like there are people getting to experience some things in a way I can't which makes it hard for me to relate to them. I've only ever been to one LAN party, and I didn't even play, I just watch other people play because I didn't know the game... and it makes me a little sad. But I just don't have enough of a "sad feeling" to justify getting a PC just so I can play games.

What do you think?

Labels: Computers, Games, Geekdom, Guild, Ninjasistah, Pandalicious, PC-Games, quit