The Only Paul Steed-Based Content On This Site -- I Swear

by Robb Sherwin

It used to be cool. Id Software's Paul Steed used to just freak out and rip guys apart in his .plan files. I had a .plan once when I was a freshman at SU and all I ever attached to it was quotes from one of  Queen's later albums. You know the one. They were all dressed up as chicks and teenagers everywhere slowly scratched their heads and wondered "Hey, Freddie looks better as a chick than he does as a man. Wait a sec... you don't think..."

Mr. Steed apparently doesn't engage in .plan wars anymore. Which is really too bad. Regardless of your take they were like traffic accidents. You don't want to watch them but you do anyway because of all the gruesome carnage.

But. Anyway. Let this be a reminder should interactive fiction ever get immensely popular again. As soon as you start to approach the mentality of movie stars you inevitably get movie star disdain for your fans. Nobody knows anything about the guy conducting the interview, but he's talking to Mr. Steed, apparently in reality.

"'Play much UO or EQ?' I asked him.
"How 'bout 'RL' as in Real Life," he said."

Ha-ha! Yeah, you got us, Paul! Hee hee hee. I would have normally translated that as "Play much Ultima Online or Everquest" but the guy makes a special claim towards the initials. Who the hell goes around talking the way the interviewer does? I mean really. "Play much you-owe?" Well, I guess that's kind of an adequate description of Ultima Online but I'm sure it's wholly unintentional.

"Listening to single males who are obviously undersexed talk about their big plans to play either game when they go home for the evening really scares me."

Enough of this hatred-for-your-audience crap. Without these undersexed males no one would buy your now-derivative gaming engines. Jesus. Enough of this single=loser crap as well. Name me one guy since the beginning of time that didn't turn into a complete sour pussy once he got a girlfriend. Face it, your friend is sucked into a black hole of tupperware parties and damp mattresses once they get a "better-half." Besides the fact that they never want to leave the house anymore, they can't leave the house without checking with the virtual-missus. Soft. Real, real, soft. 

"The best thing UO or EQ could do right now is institute the practice of getting laid in their virtual universes. It'd be hard to beat and really up their sales (in a manner of speaking)." Yeah, shit, I'd buy that. Then I'd run out and buy stock in Origin and Verant."

Er, yeah. OK, this I admit you have to agree with. There's respecting your audience and then there's just the greasy reality of it.

"For those that don't know, Paul was once in the 'D'nang...er in the Air Force' so is no stranger to weapons. He told me he's tried paint balling but, 'I usually end up going after someone if they nail me and see how many paintballs I can feed them. After I rifle-butt them unconscious of course...' Remind me never to play paintball against Paul Steed."

Is anyone else tired of hearing how tough these net.chuds are? Look, it's like this for all of netdom -- you are a squid. Your friend in your Everquest guild is a squid. Your friend's chick is a squid. The dev team are a bunch of squid. The publishers are squiddish. The marketing guys consist of David Squidley, former quarterback for the Miami Dolphins.  There isn't a single person associated with computer science, computer information studies and entertainment software that doesn't closely resemble a certain tasty, sea-roaming invertebrate. The backup nose tackle for Greece Arcadia High School could single-handedly wipe every last one of us into a gaseous,   maroon smear -- and that's after completing a two-a-day. All this "King of the Hill" shit from guys that couldn't catch an Ethiopian chicken is like arguing who's the best team in the CBA.

This later goes on to some sort of net.drivel.top-ten.list.  

"10. Trying hard to keep a smile on my face as someone fucks with me because they don't really believe I'm prone to spontaneous acts of physical violence, and I've ever REALLY been in a fight before, and I'm the way I am because I'm insecure and at heart: a pussy. "

Again -- more of the same. "Spontaneous acts of physical violence"?! Christ. Enough.

You can't be a part of this hobby without being OF this hobby. This isn't Chasing Amy where the comic developers are eighty times more exciting and gorgeous than their legions of boil-infected fanboys. The geek-on-geek hatred has to stop. My little brother grew up a jock and he was always getting crap from the various steroid-based lifeforms that were a few grades above him. Case in point: he would bring in gatorade every day. 'Cos it's like thirst aid for that deep-down body thirst and all. Anyway, every single day some guy two years older than him drank it. So he decided one day to bring in an empty bottle of "Lemon" gatorade and simply piss in it. Of course, you can imagine the hilarious hijinx when the upper-class wastrel consumed that little bit of sports energy drink.

I'd like to think that we're all better than that. This caste-within-clique crap is really silly. If you need someone to rage against, for God's sake, mailbomb a jock. And, apparently, if you can't find any chix, just start playing Quake III: Arena. Possibly, that will help.