Statistics, Damn Statistics, and Lies

Okay, so PC gaming might not have the biggest commercial audience anymore, but it certainly has the largest number of organisations dedicated to its interests. There’s the GDAA, the ABGD, the QBEF, the PDP11, the AFK-180 and the CHCHXKCHTCU.

I don’t even know what any of those stand for (and that last one might actually be the asteroid that killed the dinosaurs), and I don’t even know which one of them has called this press conference about the state of PC gaming. I DO know, because there ISN’T some kind of commotion taking place at the bar, that it must be one of the ones that William H Liability - CEO and chief toilet presentation engineer of games distributor Blind Drunk - doesn’t currently chair.

As is the way with PC gaming interest groups, the main topic of conversation is the formation of yet another umbrella organisation to group all the warring sub-groups under the one sort of banner. This is the problem with the open PC platform: there aren’t any corporation shock troops in heavy Kevlar vests milling through the crowd and keeping order with a well-placed stun-stick here and there.

A commotion at the bar announces the arrival of the Guerrilla Gamer. I squint: he looks a bit different to last time I saw him. Must have regenerated again. He spots me and elbows his way through the crowd.

“Dude, this is fantastic!” he splutters. “A real watershed moment in the PC games industry. All these people crammed together in one tiny, humid space. Just think of the cross-pollination!” He coughs heavily into the neckbeard of a passing milsim developer. “Of ideas is what I mean,” he says. “Cross-pollination of ideas!”

“Excuse me!” says an acid female voice from somewhere up the front of the room. There’s a woman standing behind a podium. She has the look of a person about to bust out some serious PowerPoint. Someone in the crowd makes a ribald comment and so she blinds him with her laser pointer.

“My name is Ada Remainder,” the woman announces. “And today, we celebrate the ascendency of PC gaming!”

The crowd roars and I’m given to frown. Ascendency of PC gaming? I’d got the impression we were in a bit of a slump, at least commercially. Ada Remainder holds up a piece of paper.

“Do you know what this is?” she cries. “This is a press release from Microsoft’s Xbox 360 division boasting that 360 sales have surpassed thirty million. Thirty million!”

She pauses for dramatic effect, then hawks a truly impressive wad of spit onto the press release. She tosses it into the crowd and grown men fight over it as she beams.

“I spit on their thirty million!” she announces, rather redundantly. “At last count, there were over one point two BILLION PCs in use! One point two BILLION!” The crowd, for its part, goes mad.

Ada Remainder stabs some kind of control on the podium and the inevitable PowerPoint presentation begins. It shows a graph depicting Xbox 360’s install base, and then the graph zooms out in a tacky and over-the-top animation to show PC’s install base towering over it by a factor of 40. The crowd goes even wilder.

The woman folds her arms and stands back. She looks triumphant. Eventually, after several minutes and most of what’s left of the bar, the cheering subsides.

“Any questions?” Ada Remainder cries, like a goddess.

The Guerrilla Gamer looks at me in horror. I follow his gaze and realise my hand is up.

“Yes you, with the ridiculous footwear?”

“Um,” I say, “so, like, great result and everything, but obviously not every one of those 1.2 billion PCs is used for gaming.”

There’s a silence, both shocked and stunned, broken only by someone vomiting quietly into the Lamborghini Murcielago that a notebook vendor hired to be driven into the conference centre and set up as a display for absolutely no reason at all.

“Yeah,” I say, weakly. “Obviously.” The Guerrilla Gamer tries to melt away into the crowd, but keeps bouncing off the ring of frowning PC game developers and publishers that surround us.

“I’m not with him!” he shrieks desperately. “I’m not with him!”

Ada Remainder, up on the podium, laughs indulgently. “My dear… boy,” she says, after a brief pause. “Every PC owner is a gamer.”

“Really?” I say. The Guerrilla Gamer whimpers and assumes the foetal position.

“Of course. Are YOU a gamer?” she asks.

“Well, yes.”

She smirks. “And what about your father, is he a gamer?”

Here I feel on firmer ground. “No,” I say. “Definitely not. He hates games. He doesn’t have time for them. And he thinks they’re morally bankrupt and in extraordinarily poor taste. He’s a war correspondent.”

“Really?” says Ada Remainder. “Have you ever seen him do that thing where he clicks and drags on an empty part of the desktop, making the dashed marquee box which he can resize, and use to put little frames around bits of his desktop background? Does he spend hours fiddling around doing that when he should be working?”

I shrug. “I guess.”

“GAMER!” screams Ada Remainder. “GAMER! Mark him up boys!”

“MARK HIM UP! MARK HIM UP!” chants the crowd. “MARK HIM UP!”

Seconds later someone’s upended a bottle of champagne on someone else, another person has thrown a punch, and the whole thing degenerates into a massive melee. Part brawl, part orgy, part dance party.

“Ah,” says the Guerrilla Gamer, on his feet once more. “PC games development. Man I love it!”