‘Hell Welcomes All’
When I listen to the voice recording I made at the Irvine, California, headquarters of the video-game company Blizzard Entertainment this past January, I hear a noise that many gamers find blissful: the sound of utter mayhem. Playing a prerelease version of Diablo IV, the latest installment in a 26-year-old adventure series about battling the forces of hell, I faced swarms of demons that yowled and belched. My character, a sorcerer, shot them with lightning bolts, producing a jet-engine roar. I jabbed buttons arrhythmically—click … click … clickclickclick—while trying to stifle curses and whimpers. But the strangest sounds came from the two Diablo IV designers who sat alongside me. As I dueled with an angry sea witch, Joseph Piepiora, an associate game director, gently noted that I was low on healing potions. “But that’s okay,” he said, “because you’re conducting an interview while doing a boss fight. It’s okay.”
The kindness was appreciated if incongruous: The world of is violent and lonely, a classic example of the hard-core-gaming experience. Earlier editions are notorious for beckoning a certain kind of player—typically male—to hunker down alone in marathons of virtual hacking and slashing, immersed in. Blizzard is also a business under siege: an object lesson in how gaming’s old guard is facing new pressures.
