FUN AND GAMES IN CYBERSPACE

By MICHAEL KRANTZ

You're alive again, and eager to see Grrrl die. She has been abusing you for a while now; last time she blew you away with a fusillade from her nail gun. And as you glide along the blue gray corridors of this ghostly computer-generated world, finger itchy at the trigger, it's Grrrl you're after. The fact that in real life Grrrl is a pretty twentysomething who rudely shooed you out of her office just before the game started has nothing to do with it, you tell yourself. This is war--or its virtual equivalent.

It certainly looks like war, as you turn a corner into heavy fire. Several combatants are blasting away in an alcove just beyond your reach. You move closer, annihilating one warrior and zeroing in on a second. Then you sense a presence over your right shoulder. Before you can turn to defend yourself, however, the scene on the screen lurches and topples. You've fallen, and you aren't getting up, as the line across the top of the screen makes clear: "Reviser is pierced by Grrrl's nail gun." Again.

Welcome to the brutal world of Quake, this season's hottest new computer game. Created by id Software, the maestros of carnage who created the phenomenally popular shoot-'em-ups Doom and Doom II, Quake was released late last month and quickly shot to the top of the game charts. More intriguing, though, was last month's roll-out of Quake World, Quake's "networked" cousin, which can bring together in simultaneous mortal combat as many as eight players--players who may be sitting, like Grrrl, in adjoining cubicles, or on opposite sides of the world. The game stands at the vanguard of a new breed of software designed to combine the enduring fascination of interactive computer games with the explosive growth of the Internet.

This could be the year such games take off, if the business activity of the past few weeks is any indication. Total Entertainment Network (TEN), one of the leaders in the field, unveiled its long-awaited commercial online service two weeks ago and last week announced that it would add Quake to its roster of games. Meanwhile, TEN's chief competitors--Mpath and Engage--are testing services that they expect to be fully operational this month. A fourth competitor, Sendai, has just been purchased by Rupert Murdoch's News Corp. All four companies hope to make a killing, or at least a decent living, bringing interactive fun and games to cyberspace.

The rationale for these services is simple. Video and computer games are a $10 billion business worldwide, and multiplayer games are among the most popular. Meanwhile, interest in online communication is exploding. A system that combines the two should be a sure thing, right?

Not necessarily. The industry has been down this road before. Remember GEnie and the ImagiNation Network? Don't worry--hardly anyone else does either. Both were private online services specializing in multiplayer gaming; both all but disappeared beneath consumer indifference and the long shadows of America Online and the World Wide Web.

Why should the new guys succeed where their forebears failed? Several reasons: computers are more powerful, modems are faster, graphics software is more sophisticated, and latency--that annoying lag between when you pull the trigger in Topeka and when the bad guy blows up in Boston--has been sharply reduced. Most important, the Web's maturation means that gamemakers don't need proprietary networks to get customers online. Even the mighty home-video-game industry, which should get a much needed kick in the pants this week with the release of the hotly anticipated Nintendo 64 machine, has seen its sales figures slacken dramatically in recent years as its target audience graduated from Mario Bros. to modems and PCs. The Net, says Glenn Crocker, vice president of engineering at software developer Chaco Communications, "gives us a cheap way to connect a national audience."

Though not necessarily cheap for the audience, TEN and Mpath will charge subscriber fees of about $2.00 an hour, which adds up quickly with games as addictive as Quake and Duke Nukem 3-D. Engage, taking a safer tack, is offering its wares through Prodigy and AOL. Eventually, these services will probably have to adopt flat monthly rate structures more in tune with the free-for-all spirit of the Internet--and much easier on the pockets of habitual game players. Indeed, TEN is already offering subscribers a $29.95, unlimited-use option.

Whether customers embrace the new services, however, may depend as much on technical issues as on cost. Gamers hooked on such "twitch" titles as Quake and Duke Nukem live for lightning-fast action. This is easy to reproduce on high-speed office networks; it remains to be seen whether it can be delivered over standard modems and phone lines. "The allure of being in front of those 30 million people is awfully attractive," says Bob Huntley, president of DWANGO, a network gaming operation. "But I wouldn't put Doom or Duke Nukem on the Internet."

Then there's the competition. AOL, for instance, with more than 6 million subscribers, is revamping its popular Games Channel, which already offers scores of multiplayer games, from strategy and combat games like Air Warriors to classics like chess and Trivial Pursuit, and recently purchased inn to add to its gaming roster. "We're focusing on games that are designed specifically for an online environment," says Lawrence Schick, AOL's general manager for games. "We're really developing a community."

So, apparently, is everyone else. "It isn't just about games," Goldman says of TEN. "It's about creating a place, a club." TEN will offer E-mail, live text chat and bulletin boards; Mpath boasts software that lets players speak to friends and foes while they're playing. Eventually, say online developers, such features could even supplant the games themselves, spawning software genres that take advantage of the Internet's capacity for intense social interaction. They envision games that look less like cartoon carnage and more like movies in which the audience writes the script.

Sound farfetched? In fact, primitive versions of these self-created environments--known as role-playing games--have been a staple of the geeky sci-fi set since the heyday of Dungeons & Dragons in the 1970s. Computer networks make it easier for D&D enthusiasts to find one another and to create game sites that can support hundreds of players at once. The single most popular content area on the Games Channel, says Schick, is a role-playing game called Gemstone III.

The Net's most sophisticated self-propagating sites are the so-called MUDS (multi-user dimensions). These virtual worlds have flourished in text-only form for years; now faster networks and better software tools let developers create graphic 3-D versions. Trippy futuristic environments such as Time Warner's Palace Website and the landscapes of Worlds Inc. invite Net surfers to wander in and explore, chatting with strangers, flirting, picking fights, hatching plots.

"We want to create games that are totally socialization-based," says Moses Ma, CEO of the San Francisco-based software developer Velocity. He offers as an example a door in a maze that can't be opened unless four people do it at the same time. Ma, who hopes to release his first online 3-D MUDS early next year, says gamemakers and MUD designers are trying to do two very different things: "The game designers come in and say, 'I want to make a game.' The mud designers say, 'I want to manage the ecology of an environment.'" Designers John Sanborn and Michael Kaplan call this technique liquid narrative. "The Web is about chaos," says Sanborn. "We create a world, populate it with unpredictable characters and then just let it expand."

It's an idea that is catching on--and not only among the Bay Area digerati. "By next fall about 85% of our games will have some kind of online capability," says Jeffrey Anderson, director of domestic licensing for Viacom Consumer Products, which is talking to Velocity about building a Star Trek-based MUD. "Everybody recognizes that that's where the money is going to be."

Everybody has recognized that before, of course, and turned out to be wrong. Ultimately, it's up to the Net's notoriously finicky denizens either to embrace these latest software gambits or to banish them to the dustbin of digital history. Let the games begin.