Quake players at FragFest 97

San Diego — At noon on Labor Day it was 97 degrees in Santee. On the radio they were talking of thunderstorms in that part of the county, and in a dusty industrial parking lot off Cuyamaca Road, the air didn't move. At the rear of the lot, cars clustered near Calvary Chapel of Santee's offices had bumper stickers that commemorated the Harvest '97 Crusade in Anaheim, or said things like "California Sheriffs Say No on Drugs," "Liberals Want Misery Spread Equally," and "OK! The Joke Is Over - Bring Back Bush."

Overhead a Piper Cessna droned and droned in the gray hot sky. But inside Calvary Chapel's offices, the air-conditioning blasted down from the ceiling in the reception area, rustling neat piles of pamphlets (Baptism: How & Why) and Jack Chick tracts (This Was Your Life, That Old Devil).

From down a cool, dim hallway to the left, a woman's voice groaned halfheartedly, "Who shot me? Oh, my God. Who shot me?"

"Where's my ax?" asked a man's voice.

"You shot me, you fool. You shot me," the woman answered.

The room from which this bizarre dialogue drifted seemed to be a youth hall or rec room. The pool table and the Foosball game and two Exercycles had been shoved against the walls to make room for three large tables filled with cables and ibm clones. Nine men and one woman sat around these tables under harsh fluorescent lights and stared at their monitors and fiddled with their mice. They paused every now and then to sip Dad's root beer or Simply Cola. But mostly they clicked on their mice and hollered and moaned.

Tom Wilson, a handsome, robust 24-year-old Calvary Chapel member and computer technician, brought these men and one woman together. He's fair-skinned and dark-haired, and his eyes flash and he gets a little overexcited when he talks about Quake, the year-old computer game that he and the others love.

"I posted invitations on aol and on all the five or six Quake-related newsgroups on the Internet for FragFest '97, which is what I called today," Wilson said, pausing to electrocute a monster that has risen, on his computer screen, from a pool of molten lava. "It took me forever to figure out how to kill him. See, you have to run around the second floor and step on these buttons that lower those two giant electrodes. That's how you fry him."

Quake is your basic shoot-'em-up game. Played from a first-person perspective, its story revolves very loosely around a government research facility that has been invaded by a giant alien creature, which looks like asparagus, and its nasty cohorts - ogres, shamblers, and a swarm of things that look like airborne shrimp. Other enemies of the humanoid variety are, like you, armed with an array of weapons - shotguns, grenade launchers, rockets, and axes. The research facility for some reason resembles a medieval castle filled with stonework and dark hallways and dungeons, and perhaps most strangely, open sewers. The sound effects are lavish and the visual effects are detailed: when you blow folks up, body parts - heads, legs, hands, lumps of bloody pulp - fill the air and land with a squishy PLOP!

But what makes Quake different is that it adapts easily to multiple players, or at least to multiple players familiar with "ethernet controllers" and "10 base-T hubs with bnc connectors" - which are things Wilson asked his guests to bring along to FragFest '97. Of the ten people there, almost all work in one capacity or another with computers and, like Wilson, they are familiar with "code tweaking" - getting into and customizing a game's software. Wilson tweaked Quake for FragFest '97 so that he and his guests could play "capture the flag." But he's seen bigger and more elaborate Quake-tweaks on the Internet - some people have added new monsters of their own creation or even better weapons, like harpoon guns.

While code tweaking isn't itself new, this coming together of many people for simultaneous play of a single computer game signals a subtle shift in geek culture.

"It used to be that people would spend hours and hours alone playing a game," Wilson said, eyes glued to his monitor, index finger rapidly tapping his mouse. "And I imagine that for some people who aren't very sociable, that sort of play is still attractive. But what makes Quake so great is that you can get a large group of people together to play at the same time. It wasn't so long ago that the closest you could come to that was for two people to play a game - first one player would play, then hand the controls over to the other. But now you can get a whole bunch of people in one room and play and yell and make jokes. It's more like a party, but it's better than a party. It gives you something to do, instead of everyone just standing around yakking at each other."

Not much yakking at FragFest '97. There was yelling and sighing and the interminable noise of muffled gunfire as Wilson and his guests blasted away at each other. When they took breaks, their conversation centered around the game, around its developers, and around Quake II, which should be out sometime in January. Wilson and the others also expressed enthusiasm for Cox Cable's new Cox@Home service that provides Internet access via fiber-optic cable that's 100 times faster than access obtained through conventional phone modems.

"There are Internet sites now where you can play Quake simultaneously with other players," Wilson said. "But there are still some problems with it. People who have fast Internet access, through isdn lines for example, have a better reaction time. When they click on their mouse to fire their gun, say, it fires immediately. There's no lag. But if you don't have isdn or a fast modem, your reaction time is slower by maybe tenths of a second. But tenths of a second do count. And the guy with the fastest access always wins."

It was difficult to tell who was winning at FragFest '97. Folks seemed happy enough just to be together in one big room, playing the game. They played and played from noon till around 3:30 when they stopped to order pizzas - pepperoni and sausage, cashew chicken, ground beef - from Round Table but were soon lost again in aimless blood sport until 7:30, when they stopped and wandered outside, where at last there was a breeze and the thunderheads had moved off to the mountains in the east.