The Future of PC Gaming is Windows
By SteveThat’s some crazy insight, no? Of course Windows is critical to the future of PC gaming. Duh. Major, major duh.
But I’m not talking about Microsoft Windows; I’m talking about playing games in a window.
Consider your lifestyle, or at least that of everyone around you. We’re all multitasking whenever possible. We’re sitting at our computers—or have them on our laps—while watching TV or a DVD. We’re reading or working on public transportation. We’re talking on phones while we drive… or waiting in line, or walking down the street, or cooking, or… doing other things. There isn’t enough time in the day to do everything we want, so we optimize our time and tasks to group as many things as possible together. We feel like we’re wasting time doing one, single, linear task.
(Is this why people see fewer movies? Would people go more frequently if they could IM friends while watching? God help us if that ever happened.)
Let’s consider PC gaming. Most games require 100% of your attention, all the time. That’s fine and dandy—and how it should be for many games—but they also occupy 100% of your screen real estate. And this absolutely flies in the face of most people’s typical PC usage. We run multiple applications in multiple windows, constantly switching between them. It can be as simple as working on a document in Word or Excel and having a browser open for quick Google searches. Or maybe you’re doing some file copying in the background, or listening to music via iTunes, or torrenting your favorite episodes of Star Trek. We gotta use all of those cores on our Core 2 Duos, right?
Even consoles are getting into the act. They used to be 100% game centric, but the 360 lets you pop-up the dashboard during a game and make some changes to music, talk to friends, etc. (I understand the PS3 doesn’t let you do this to the degree that the 360 allows it, though I suspect it will go down this path at some point.)
This isn’t as a huge deal for consoles, though, because once you’ve moved to the living room, dug out the DVD, and fired up the console, you’re 100% committed to gaming. You have little or no expectations of multitasking because your console can’t really do much else anyway. (And for those who have a laptop or a PC near their console, I suspect they keep those nearby or within eyeshot so they can check IMs, look things up, listen to tunes, download their Torrents, etc.)
MMOs, casual games, browser games—Flash-based or otherwise, like Kingdom of Loathing or Travian—are good examples because they so easily integrate themselves into the player’s own natural computer workflow. You can run them in a window while doing other things.
Now try to do this while playing Bioshock. (Which I, like everyone else on the planet, am doing. And if you’re not, you should be playing it.)
This doesn’t mean the future of PC gaming is Runescape; it’s hard to call any MMO “casual.” But the pacing of MMOs and casuals games is such that they allow us to multitask while playing. We aren’t just “wasting time;” we’re doing work, we’re socializing, we’re updating our blogs, etc, while playing.
There are times when we still want that full-screen, linear, full-attention experience—say, when playing Bioshock. But PC games need to stop monopolizing a person’s PC. All games should give players a clear option for playing in a window, and realize and acknowledge that we may jump over to another application or want to do something else while there’s a pause in the in-game action.
It’s one of the things that make PC gaming unique, and more games that embrace and extend this idea may find greater success.
August 24th, 2007 at 5:38 pm
I have no idea why you hang out with me since my response was actually, “Wha? Really?”
I’m a major duh!
August 24th, 2007 at 5:52 pm
When I launched Bioshock, one of my wife’s first questions was whether or not it would run in a window. And it does.
(But not for long because Bioshock keeps crashing.)
August 24th, 2007 at 6:06 pm
I had one apparent sound-related Bioshock crash, but it’s otherwise run perfectly. Are your videocard drivers up to date? Sound drivers? Are you running Vista or XP?
August 24th, 2007 at 6:16 pm
All drivers up to date. Window XP. I’m going to try a little tweaking this weekend.
It usually crashes on area transitions, if that helps. I’m tossing in some more RAM to see if that makes a difference.
August 24th, 2007 at 6:41 pm
If you only have 1GB of RAM, that could be an issue. Or if you have a bad RAM stick, though it’d probably lock up rather than crash if that was the case.
You might consider finding Prime95 and running it in memory test mode for a while, just to make sure your existing RAM is OK.
August 24th, 2007 at 7:30 pm
Good idea.
It’s been 1 GB of RAM for a while with no issues with any other game, but it’s time for an upgrade in any case.
August 24th, 2007 at 8:30 pm
Yeah, 2GB of RAM is practically a requirement. Even games like WoW run considerably better, with quicker load times, as it’s not having to dump out anything to virtual memory on your hard drive while simultaneously reading from the same hard drive.
August 24th, 2007 at 8:58 pm
That’s what I get for playing all these RTSes. No real push on the RAM. Oblivion ran really smoothly, I had no issues with any MMO I sampled. The machine works great.
But shooters have higher benchmarks. 1 GB is the min spec, and we know what that means.
August 25th, 2007 at 11:43 am
Dual Display! That way you can still play your games in a window, but taking up the entire screen. You can also peek onto the secondary display and even alt-tab over if you need to address something out of game.
I’ve been using dual displays for years, and with the dropping cost of LCD’s, along with their slim profile, it’s a simple but incredibly useful PC upgrade.
August 25th, 2007 at 3:13 pm
Yeah, I actually had a section about dual monitors, but deleted it. I run them at work, and have now set it up at home.
Games could do a better job of being cognizant of two monitors, though. id’s 3D engine, for example, wants to render across both. So in order to play DOOM 3 or even the new Quake Wars, you need to disable your second monitor otherwise your frame rate is halved.
And to get most of the benefits of the second monitor, you still run in a window on your primary one.
August 25th, 2007 at 4:02 pm
My wife loves the dual monitor thing for work. Not sure how it would help most gaming.
(BTW, RAM did the job. I’m now Bioshocking like the rest of the cool kids.)
August 25th, 2007 at 10:05 pm
>> “Not sure how it would help most gaming.”
Ask Nintendo?
August 26th, 2007 at 2:38 am
It’s not that dual monitors help gaming. It’s that it allows you to use your PC in a way you’re more used to, with your primary application on one display (a game), and your secondary one containing other things, be it playlists, IM windows, e-mail notifications, whatever.
August 28th, 2007 at 12:03 am
I remember the day somebody taught me how to Alt-Tab (being a DOS junkie from the age of 4, I didn’t know Windows very well in the early days) and how it changed (some of) my gaming life. Multi-tasking was born!
However, now I do it far more efficiently than anybody using a dual monitor setup to avoid popups crashing their CAL match in CS 1.6. I just have two computers. Both monitors are on the same desk, much like a dual monitor setup, but they’re on entirely separate CPU horsepower, so if one is hoggin resources, the other one is fine. If one is freezing up, I can still access things on the auxilary. If I’m playing a game on my primary box, I can be communicating on forums, three different IM programs, typing an email, & checking the news all without so much as a hitch in performance in my game. I just have to remember to switch keyboards once I respawn…
Now try to do this while playing Bioshock. (Which I, like everyone else on the planet, am doing. And if you’re not, you should be playing it.)
I’ve been gone for the past week and a half (plus the fall semester at college started today, so I’m a little busy for a short while even now that I’m back) going to places like Huntington Beach, California for POGOPALOOZA IV (Google Xpogo – you can’t miss it) and Las Vegas, Nevada for OVER 100 PINBALL MACHINES IN ONE BUILDING!!! CLASSIC PRE-COMPUTER GAMING!!!!! Oh yeah…
But seriously, the dual PC thing is great, especially when programs crash & cause a 30 second delay even on an overly-overclocked Core 2 Duo.
October 9th, 2007 at 11:01 am
The first thing I do with every MMO is switch it to windowed mode. It’s a maximised window, but it allows quick switching to another task, or having something over it when there’s a lull in the game.
Frankly, I rarely notice while I play that it’s a maximised window and not full screen.
Surprisingly, both WoW and EQ2 (at least when I played it) don’t remember the maximised window setting and create a non-maximised window on next startup, which is inconvenient. City of Heroes remembers things fine.
I used to really want things in a window. In the old days I ran Star Control 2 in a window on OS/2, because it allowed DOS games to run in a window (though it was often inconvenient due to size or DOS incompatibility). In games where it’s useful to take notes during the game, playing in a window is very helpful.