At the time, I had no intention of getting Diablo II. It wasn't really my bag and frankly, my friend's dedication frightened me a little. Think about Jonestown, or Tom Cruise on Oprah, and you've pretty much got the picture of him before every Blizzard release since Warcraft II: Tides of Darkness.
"Man, I dunno. We don't even know when it's coming out for sure."
"Look, just roll your paladin. I've got to see how these two go together."
"Why can't you do it yourself?"
"Because you're going to be playing the paladin, and you need to be comfortable with the character. So make him yours. Then let me know how you spec him."
Guys like my friend Zach are the reverse of Cypher in The Matrix. They stop seeing the games and start seeing engines, probability tables, dice rolls and modifiers. He once interrupted my account of a recent StarCraft match to explain the absurdity of my Firebat-centric strategy.
"Look, unless you've got a guy coming at you with Zerglings, the Firebat is just taking up space in your bunkers. That fire animation looks nice, but that's about all it has going for it." Then he went into a detailed explanation of how StarCraft calculated splash damage, did a range comparison of the Firebat to other units like Hydralisks and finished by explaining that after their first armor upgrade, Zerg units were far less vulnerable to area-of-effect weaponry.
By the time he stopped talking, I had failed shop class.
People like Zach are also likely to participate in betas and leave detailed (some might say obsessive) messages on the developers' forums explaining exactly what they feel is out of whack, how that one small problem drastically upsets the balance of the game and what should be done to fix it. Although developers are free to ignore these observations, it's telling that Blizzard has instead become notorious for tweaking its games for years following release.
Prior to the internet, someone like Zach could only deconstruct so many games at once, and he couldn't share his knowledge with more people than he could corner at school. But once we were all plugged into the same the stream of information, he and his kindred spirits began to change gaming. The reality of gaming in the last 15 years is that gamers can instantly find help with a difficult section of a game - or, at the very least, some assurance that others have experienced the same problem. The game is stripped bare by the collective scrutiny of the smartest players and the suspicions of the laymen.
