Upgrading your PC can be a perilous thing. While a PC can ostensibly play most computer games made in the history of this world, often a new version of Windows will no longer run old DOS games. A those early works you might want to study inaccessible!

Case in point: the classic Civilization-clone that one-upped Civ itself, Master of Magic. A UK developer called SimTex replaced "culture" and "technology" with "mana" and "spell-research," and "the huns" with "lizardmen" and ended up with an excellent ten year old strategy game that people are still trying to make run in Windows XP.

Well, they won't have to try any more - the next generation of pre-1993 DOS emulation has arrived. After some starts like VDMSound, finally DOSBox has solved pernitious extended memory problems to run Master of Magic (with sound!) after just a little bit of command-prompt tweaking. Now I'm trying to configure DOSBox to keep my MoM saved games.

The first reports from the Sims Online beta test are filtering out - between planned protests, commercialism and unauthorized sexual advances, the Sims Online looks like it will be a rollicking mix of identity issues and social permutations. Not just a game or an online community, the Sims Online promises a masked mix of id and suburban superego.

Here, game researcher Celia Pearce is quoted on an early SIMS Online experience:

Pearce, who is among a group of people helping to test the game before its launch, said she had an experience that was "very telling" early on.
"I went into one of the houses and within 10 minutes I was kissed by another Sim. And I don't even know why or how," she says. "I spent many hours trying to get these two Sims to get together and have a relationship. And to be in the world and be kissed by someone I never met was completely a digression from what I was used to experiencing in the game. And it struck me at that moment that The Sims Online is in fact a fundamental digression from the core philosophy of the game, precisely because it's not a simulation any more.
"I think, intellectually, the idea that you have a mental model of the whole world, and you are the one who's influencing whatever's going on, is fundamentally different than there being a real person on the other end of the line. This guy who just kissed me is a real person and that was weird."

When the Sims first came out, many active gamers worked to break the system, make their characters have sex, or die in creative ways. Now people will likely try similar things, but their actions will have a broader social context. Viva Sims Online! Here come troubled, troubling customers!

I've been playing the fantastic sad-future RPG Fallout for about three years now. It's got great writing, nice grim story, witty pop-culture references, great art, and a wildly non-linear world that consistently helps me lose track of my place in the narrative.

So I was explaining to Jane where I was at this point, having restarted again: now deep in the Glow trying to recover some mutant spawn method data. And I finally confessed, guiltily, that I had been reading some walkthroughs to keep me on track.

It's interesting that one of the first video games being developed for blind gamers would be a driving game. But what better fantasy could there be for a visually handicapped person than to get behind the wheel of a race car? Driving can seem sort of mundane to a sighted person, but to most blind people it's just as inaccessible as casting magic spells would be to the rest of us.

A useful resource for people studying electronic entertainment:a list of game researchers. Included are summaries of their specific research subjects, as well as links to their web pages and web projects. This is a good chance to see the field of game scholarship emerging, developing. The rest of the site is a bit out of date though, so this list might also be out of date. Either way it's reassuring to see thinking and analysis proliferate!

For the first time in years, I played paintball this past weekend. I approached the game with my usual sense of dread and glee; I'm always excited about playing, but the possibility that I'm going to get marked out early or injured is always in the back of my mind. Typically, I tend to start out doing fairly well, and then it all goes downhill from there when I start getting tired and careless.

But this time, I had an ace up my sleeve: I'd been playing Counter-Strike relentlessly for the past two weeks since I recently had DSL installed. This time, I played better than I did even in my best glory days of paintball.

I know what you're thinking. That internal dialog is saying "uh-huh, sure Bowler. Paintball and Counter-Strike. Now you're starting to sound like those lame reporters in Maryland who tried connecting the Montgomery County Sniper to video games."

But think about it for a second. There's too many similarities...

Halo 2 was featured in last month's eloctronic gaming monthly magazine. I know Halo 1 is poopooed by such gaming afficiondos as, well, Jane, but reading through this article, Halo 2 promises to be pretty damn hot...

All this attention is paid to South Korea as a capital of video gaming - what about gaming in North Korea? This piece, Personal Computers and Games in North Korea, written by an ex-Professor at Kim Il Sung University, describes how the content of a fighting game was seen as anti-Communist and ultimately threatening to the state:

A guy, whose girlfriend was kidnapped by a gang, had to beat his enemies in their den one by one to rescue his fiance. So well was the program prepared and so hard, yet so fascinating was it made to get to the goal, that once a person started it, he or she could hardly stop until they had finished it.

The crux of the matter was that the young man of justice symbolized a capitalist society and the gang a Communist group.

The 2002 World Cyber Games are drawing to a close, and it looks like Russians "own" First Person Shooters this year. Russian players took top honors in both Quake 3 and CounterStrike. These have been the two most significant games for serious first-person shooter players. That Russia dominates this year is a testament to that country's dedication to the sport of FPS computer gameplay. Alex Hafez of Gamers.com wrote a bit of commentary on this for us:

It certainly sounds like the Russians are rocking the proverbial house over there at the WCG. Crazy. Their Quake players are so far ahead of the curve right now, it's sick. They have 20 times as many lan competitions as we get over here, and well over a dozen top notch duelers that are as skilled as any in the world. You simply can't put a price on being able to get that kind of practice so regularly, and it shows in their play. It's a testament to the sick depth of the scene when one of their top duelers, Lexer, who won Quakecon this year, didn't even crack the top three at the WCG Russia qualifier to make the finals.

(Photo: Russia, on the left, battling Canada in the Counter-Strike final - the match broadcasted on two large screens in a large hall cold as Siberia or the distant Yukon).

A day-long series of presentations from Korean Game Makers shows that in Korea, electronic entertainment has more Genres, more Online, more Multiplayer, and more Girls.

A report by Justin Hall and Jane Pinckard.

Games are hot news all over the world - at least you might get that sense from the mix of Malaysian, Russian, Thai, Peruvian, Korean and Turkish journalists in the press room at the World Cyber Games. For our use, free international phone lines, ethernet drops, power outlets, Coca-cola, coffee. A private hive amidst the gaming cubicles from which to broadcast to the world up to the minute news of national standing from these swelling cybersports contests. But not too many reporters from the United States have been able to drop by.