The New Extreme PC Gaming: Underclocking

Outdated hardware can pave the way for a true challenge. It's time to get zen.

Any teenager with too many post-midnight hours to kill can hone their gaming skills to the point that the most righteous level of difficulty becomes a candyland and the only challenge lies in ever-faster, ever-more assured domination. With their primo computer rig and overclocked processor boiling away in a vacuum sealed bath of liquid nitrogen, the only thing slowing them down is the speed of their caffeine-fuelled reactions.

Where’s the challenge in that?

Do you want to step up to the plate and really test yourself? Do you want to push yourself beyond mere reaction time and explore the realm of subconscious zen gaming? Underclocking is for you.

During the holidays I was stuck in a house with an old PC and some spare time. Logging on to Steam I dug through my library and tried to find something that would run on this ancient box. Sure, some of the indie games are low spec, but I had a bunch of impulse buys from the sales and they called out to me. You never did play Assassin’s Creed II,they said. You bought it cos you knew you should, but you never did. YOU NEVER DID! So on an optimistic impulse I loaded it up.

It quickly became obvious that I was pushing this sick old dog to its limits. Loading took forever, the sound doubled up and de-synced to the animation in the opening scenes and building the environment in Florence made the PC whine like a Labrador under a Christmas table.

But it worked - sort of - and I began to explore medieval Florence and dabble in some eye-opening time travel. No, I’m not talking about Desmond in the animus – I’m talking about gameplay time travel. Everything I did occurred in an undulating time-scape. A key stroke wasn’t a decisive action, it was an estimation of intent.

Thankfully, intent occasionally becomes decisive action.

Faced with the familiar red pulsing circles of approaching militia I pointed my protagonist at the nearest cart and flagpole decorations. I want Ezio to clamber up the boxes, bound to the swing rope, leap to the roof and scamper up the wall, said my fingers, and usually that would be enough, but this is the world of underclocked hardware. I may have hit the buttons and moved the mouse in the correct sequence but the processor was firing faster than the graphics card, or vice versa, so the way those commands actually influenced Ezio, that was an entirely different matter.

Gazing at the screen the sequence fell out of time, so Ezio was looking the wrong way when the jump command hit the motherboard. He opted to ignore the gutter and instead leapt out and across the alley. As my intentions unravelled I was dealing with a forever evolving eventuality, adapting it on the fly. As Ezio hung, windmilling in the air above the townsfolk of Florence, I sent out another flurry of keystrokes, attempting to push Ezio’s narrowing options toward a survival event.

Every action was an exercise in gambling, forecasting and precognition, a thousand potential multiverses unfolding in the digital delay. I was pushing at the limits of my consciousness, communing with the hardware, reaching out to an unstable, unknowable future. After a liquid moment of shifting movement cycles and stuttering scenery, the code sequences collapsed and Ezio would make his move.

Not that way!

I began to listen to the processor whine, feeling the spikes and reading delays. I read the environment and felt out low lying paths that kept the renderer from having to look to the horizon but also didn’t start to draw in near field versions of human models and their overly complex walk cycles.

Crashing to street level didn’t mean a danger of attack from guards; the greater peril was the audio from the citizenry. I’d land in a crouch amongst the robes and a local would begin: “That’s certainly an adventurous… sssssssszszsztttcktck,” the sound loop would collapse and my next jump would be out of time. The walls would begin to flicker and colour-shift, movements became spasmodic, or worse, episodic. How do you fight a group of guards when you have to telegraph every punch and foresee every attack? You evolve into an Underclocker.

This is what sorts out the hardcore from the soft-centred. This is not some Max Payne faux slo-mo that’s actually giving you more time to target, Underclocking is a veil being drawn between you and your reality. You must peek through this gauze of stalled code, see through the mist rising from your scalding circuitry and make a call.

I bent in hard to the keyboard: listened to the howl from the motherboard; watched the flow of shapes; tried to ease the texture streaming. Where’s the opening in this shifting world? It’s like feeling your way through a thousand uncertain paths for the elusive way through. This is where you truly see what sort of a gamer you are, here as the probability engines and physics models of the game hold your intentions and decisions in judgement, and you see every stroke and press being strung out before you in slow motion. No lightning fast processor to let you grease through, no gold wiring to give you amulligan.

Then with a burst, the force of computation kicks in, an outstretched hand that stutters and then decides that yes, you catch the edge and Ezio is popping up and away, the complex character models below, the yawning openness of horizon rendering above. He crouches in a safe haven, the computer cools and I lean back and take a deep breath. That was a close one.

Don't make a scene... it will bring your rig to its knees.

Philip K Dick wrote a fantastic novelette called Golden Man about a mutant in a post-apocalyptic earth who could see forward into the multitude of possibilities and choose his actions to create the best of all possible worlds. It was then turned into a Hollywood monstrosity, as is the PKD curse, but at least this one, Next, starred Nicolas Cage. The mutant is seen as a threat by the authorities who try to kill him, but he sits in his prison cell and waits. He sifts through all possible eventualities until a moment when all the variables - the patterns of the guards, the threats of the security and the one weakness in the authority - align and he knows he will pass through to freedom. Underclocking feels like a training simulator for this super power, you are bending your mind to push its tentacles into the future, probing for the one true way.

That’s where an Underclocker is heading, they aren’t just becoming a better gamer, they are evolving. Our synthetic realities are becoming more and more closely aligned to the real, physics engines mimicking more and more detail of our existence. By reducing all this to uncertainty, you are creating a training exercise, a simulation for precognition.

Or, put another way - where you're going you won't need roads.