Philips Magnavox Videogames and the Entertainment Revolution Trigger Happy - Manual (Page 288)

Trigger Happy
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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