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SOUTH JORDAN — Two friends, one going by the moniker of That One Guy and the other known as Toxic, were in a heated race and lost sight of each other while driving on a virtual race track containing several figure- eight sections. Trying to locate the cars by communicating over headsets, the two realized their cars were in the same intersection, where Toxic's car was t-boned by That One Guy.
"It was the most epic crash in online gaming history," said That One Guy, known outside of gaming circles as Jeff Litster.
Litster has been a gamer since the age of 3, when his father brought home the family's first PC. Shortly after building his first gaming computer in 1997, Litster started an online gaming clan, Friday Night Gamers, which assembled a group with the same interest in the Tetrinet and Warcraft II games. But he has added games such as Starcraft, Motocross Madness and TrackMania into the mix and continues to add new games as the group grows.
In an the era of Massive Multiplayer Online Role Playing Games (MMORPGs), in which a large number of people who have never met get together to play online, Litster feels that his group is unique because, "it has always involved players that have been friends in real-life first, and we often times do other activities together outside of gaming such as going out to lunch or getting our families together."
Another unique charateristic of Litster's group is that he doesn't play first-person shooters.
"I have always veered away from the shooter genre in the Friday Night Gamers group because of my experience in another clan years ago that only played shooters," he says. "The feeling coming out of those gaming sessions was a polar opposite to how I felt coming out of a Friday Night Gamers session. People were much more aggressive and angry the majority of the time."
Lister adds, "I also don't like the idea of having to pay for a game on a monthly basis and hence have never subscribed to an MMORPG."
Litster has expanded his passion for online gaming by taking the clan to the Gamers and Electronics Expo (GEEX). In 2008, Litster discovered there would be a TrackMania competition at GEEX and helped get the word out to his clan. He took second and another member of his clan took third place in the tournament.
"When GEEX came around a second time in 2010, the original tournament's organizers weren't participating. I was blogging about the show on our clan's Website and GEEX found me. They invited me to be a volunteer tournament organizer for the TrackMania tournament," he explains.
In 2010, a South Jordan-based software company sponsored the TrackMania event at GEEX by providing "a $1,700 laptop, $500 video card and $300 monitor as the prizes."
Probably most exciting for Litster was at this year's GEEX. "We (played) TrackMania 2: Canyon," says Litster, "It was bigger and better than ever this year with popular track authors from around the world creating tracks for our tournament. We had authors from Germany, India, the Netherlands, Switzerland and the United States" as well as "competitors from all across the United States and Canada."
As for the future of online gaming, "Digital Rights Management is a huge deterrent that frustrates thousands of gamers on a daily basis. I can see it driving gamers away, or at least to something easier to deal with, like online gaming via consoles instead of PCs," Litster believes.
Digital Rights Management is a technology used by copyright holders that restricts how and where software can be used. Many gamers feel once they have paid for a software license, they should be able to install the software on the same machine multiple times or make a legal backup copy, but Digital Rights Management restricts this. In some cases, Digital Rights Management also makes it difficult for libaries to share some copyrighted material such as music and electronic books.
Roger Douglass has a bachelor's degree in information technology and master's of business administration. Most importantly, he is married to a wonderful woman and has eight beautiful children. He can be contacted at roger.douglass@gmail.com.
