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26 translation contest: "Game on" » English to Slovenian » Entry by Lucija Pavlin


Source text in English

Translation by Lucija Pavlin (#31940)

Computer games were, at one time, unified. We didn’t even have the term “casual game” in 1993, let alone the idea that a first-person shooter (then an unnamed genre) could be considered a “hardcore title.” There were people who played computer games, and people who didn’t. People who got way into golf or Harpoon or hearts or text adventures — those were the “hardcore” players, in that they played their chosen field obsessively.

When Myst and the CD-ROM finally broached the mass market, this ecosystem was disrupted. Myst had, Robyn Miller makes clear, been designed to appeal to non-gamers. It sold to them. Enthusiast magazines like Computer Gaming World couldn’t set the taste for the industry anymore: there were millions buying games who didn’t read these magazines. An entirely new breed of player. In this situation, what could be more natural than concocting an us-and-them formula? In a very real way, it was already true.

The great narrative of Myst is that the “hardcore” game press and playerbase lambasted it when it launched. Disowned it. A slideshow, they called it. Abstruse, idiotic puzzles; pretty graphics and not much depth. “Critics and hardcore game players universally panned it as a slide-show that had little actual gameplay interaction”, claimed PC Gamer’s Michael Wolf in 2001.That same year, a columnist for Maximum PC recalled Myst as a “tedious code-breaking and switch-throwing mess”, and saw its then-new remake realMYST as “a pointed reminder of why the press dumped on the original so heavily when it came out.”
Računalniške igre so bile nekoč nerazdeljene. Leta 1993 še niti nismo poznali izraza “ležerne igrice”, kaj šele, da bi obstajala ideja, da je prvoosebna strelska igra (takrat še neimenovan žanr) lahko smatrana za “težkokategorno”. Bili so ljudje, ki so računalniške igre igrali, in ljudje, ki jih niso. Ti, ki so zašli v golf ali Harpoon ali srca ali igrano branje – ti so bili “težkokategorni” igričarji v smislu, da so izbrano področje igrali zasvajujoče.

Ko sta Myst in CD-ROM končno dosegla množice, je bil ta ekosistem prekinjen. Myst je bil, kot poudarja Robyn Miller, zasnovan z namenom, da privabi ne-igričarje. Prodal se jim je. Revije za navdušence, kot je Computer Gaming World, niso mogle več postavljati meril za industrijo: milijoni ljudi so kupovali igre, a ti tovrstnih revij niso brali. Čisto nova vrsta igričarja. Kaj bi v tej situaciji lahko bilo bolj naravno kot razdelitev na nas in njih? V bistvu je to že takrat bila realnost.

Poznana Mystina zgodba je, da so jo igričarski mediji “težke kategorije” in skupnost igričarjev ob prihodu na trg zaničevali. Se ji odrekli. Označili za počasno, slabo narejeno igro. Nejasne in neumne uganke; ljubka grafika, a brez neke globine. “Kritiki in igričarji težke kategorije so bili soglasno neprizanesljivi do nje, češ da gre za nekakovostno igro z zelo malo dejanske igralnosti”, je 2001 v PC Gamer zatrdil Micheal Wolf. Istega leta je kolumnist za Maximum PC označil Myst za “dolgočasno zmešnjavo s slabo napisano kodo in nepredvidljivim preklopi” ter videl takrat novi remake realMYST kot “posmehljivo opozorilo temu, zakaj so mediji prvotno različico zavrgli takoj, ko je tale izšla.”


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