Magnavox Videogames and the Entertainment Revolution Trigger Happy manual 290

Trigger Happy

connect games such as Quake III, Half-Life or Starcraft to an Internet server and play in real time against hundreds or thousands of other people all over the globe. Sega’s Dreamcast, of course, now incorporates a modem to facilitate precisely this activity.

Richard Darling sees immense possibilities for this phenomenon in the future, especially when it is widely available to more people than can afford thousanddollar PCs.

With Dreamcast and PlayStation2, you’ll be able to put the disc in, turn it on and choose multiplayer, automatic connection to the network. Everything will be easy to choose and set up, and you can just play against other people. And although they’re other people who you won’t know initially, it won’t take long before online communities emerge where there are other ways of communicating—online chat maybe, or voice discussions back and forth.

Or maybe, if it gets mass-market enough, the fact that you’re connected online doesn’t mean you have to be playing with people in South Africa, the United States, Zimbabwe or whatever—you could potentially log onto a Touring Cars multiplayer site and choose to play against people in your hometown. It might be that there are

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