Robert E. Waring believes an underground society of gamers has sprung up around Deathmatch games, and he's taking it upon himself to not just educate those left out, but to teach them how to kill. Waring's new book, The Deathmatch Manifesto, (due in March from Sybex) is the first to focus strictly on the phenomenon of Net-based play of popular games such as Doom and Quake. While mostly a how-to strategy guide, his book is also a look at the culture of players driven to kill each other in three-dimensional networked games.
"Playing with a live opponent from anywhere in the world, and trying to prove yourself, is a powerful experience. It's really easy to get sucked into that," Waring says. He points out that many players not only get addicted to playing the game, but use built-in editors to construct their own worlds and hack the game to play out their dark fantasies. Some popularly created mutations have included Quake soccer played with a human head, or a Quake-based car racing with multiple players.
All sorts of cultural artifacts make appearances, reflecting the violent and whimsical mental landscape of the gamer's imaginations. A new Monty Python and the Holy Grail-based plug-in, for instance, features opponents dismembering each other in a shower of blood. Teams of players, or clans, change their appearance to look like everything from Borg to cavemen or Crack Whores
This frenzy of gameplay has lead to a self-generating wave of commerce. Waring says that teenagers are being hired by games companies purely on the strength of the scenarios they design to share. Some more predatory companies have become targets of community hatred because they put out commercial CD-ROMs containing user-created scenarios without the creator's permission, even going so far as to remove the author's name. (Actura, Waring says, is a popular subject of scorn.)
Just as players have borrowed from other media in creating their virtual worlds, they are now creating their own media devoted to those worlds. Waring notes the rise of Quake-based comic books and a weekly radio show (transmitted using RealAudio) where different clans challenge each other and share strategy and mythos. Waring expects the trend to continue, and gamers to get ever more deeply involved: "Some people have really started devoting their lives to this."
