Website dedicated to local gaming community

Website dedicated to local gaming community

By Vishnu 'Ramius' Mahmud

JAKARTA (JP): One year ago, I was asked how many local
websites there were; sites that were Indonesian in content or
design. I quickly responded "less then 200". I figured that with
low PC-ownership and even lower Internet exposure, not many
people in the country would have a web presence. Boy, was I ever
wrong.

Over the past year we have seen a wave of new Indonesian
Internet websites. There are countless corporate, commercial and
content-rich websites; not to mention a truckload of personal
homepages. Some of these sites start out big, while others remain
small and sometimes stagnate. Some, however, just keep on
growing. One of them is Indogamer.com.

Indogamer is the brainchild of Sun Lim, otherwise known as
"Shade". A computer science graduate from Bina Nusantara College,
Shade got hooked on computer games relatively late, when he
started college. The first game he played was Romance of Three
Kingdoms II, a medieval strategy game. He played it day and night
during the heyday of the 386 processor and VGA graphic cards
(compared to today's Pentium processor and high-end graphic
accelerator cards).

Although many of his friends thought his new hobby was a waste
of time, Shade found a whole new fantastic world where he could
travel into the middle ages and virtually experience the
friendship, love and heroics of the main character. It gave him
critical thinking skills, provided him with a different
perspective of life and taught him English. Instead of reading a
book passively, Shade actively took part in the adventure,
actions, humor, decision-making and consequences within the game.

As the Internet began to creep into our lives, Shade found
that there were no Indonesian websites that focused on his
passion. There were a few "fan" game sites, rarely updated, that
provided basic gaming information. And most of them were in
English. Thus, armed with a Pentium II computer and some computer
scripting skills, Shade launched Indogamer.com on June 9, 1999.

At first, Indogamer was a labor of love. Hosted on an
inexpensive web server in the U.S., Shade posted information on
the games he played and read about. He would update his site
almost daily, starting at 7 p.m. (when he returned home from
work) to around midnight. With the help of two friends, FireStorm
and JKnight, (both of whom he meet online but never in person),
Shade slowly added more features such as console gaming, demo
download links and game reviews for PCs, Playstation, Sega
Dreamcast and Nintendo. There was even a message board where
Indonesian gamers all over the world could swap stories, taunts
and questions.

At first, he only had a few visitors checking out his site;
one or two people surfing the world wide web would accidentally
land on his piece of cyber real estate. He thought about giving
up since he felt that no one was taking pleasure in a website
that was his pride and joy.

But he persevered. Thanks to word of mouth advertising,
Indogamer.com now has 2,500 page views daily and a membership of
over 120. These numbers may be small compared to the 240,000
thousand average page views and over 100,000 members of the "big
boys" like Detik or Satunet, but for a small community portal
like Indogamer, the numbers can only improve. Gaming is
establishing a foothold in Indonesia with game centers opening up
in major cities and Playstations selling like hotcakes. Jakarta
is still the number one capital of Indonesian gamers, but Bandung
and Surabaya are catching up fast with their hordes of fanatical
game enthusiasts.

Now part of the Astaga Internet Group, Indogamer plans to
expand the site by adding a hardware section that is relevant to
Indonesia. Prices, reviews and places to buy the latest computer
equipment will have their own channel on the site. Shade also
hopes that Indogamer can also host game servers where people from
all over Indonesia can hook up via the Internet and play some of
the more popular games together. Having the game server based in
Jakarta would speed up the connection for local Internet users
since Internet lag is problematic for all modem owners.

Shade's goal of making Indogamer.com the one stop gaming site
for Indonesians is becoming a reality. Indogamer's success can
probably be summed up by Shade's willingness to make a site out
of love instead of profit. One of his goals is to build a local
gaming community the size of Singapore's and South Korea's,
countries which posses not only a large gaming culture but some
of the best gamers in the world. Indonesia may not have the most
PC gamers, but we probably have the most Playstation gamers in
the Pacific region.

Although he admits that online gaming is not that popular in
Indonesia due to high telecommunication costs, Shade is confident
that global competition will lower phone rates. In the meantime,
people will still be playing at home or in game centers to
continuously improve their scores and standings among their
friends in Jakarta, Indonesia and the world.

For further information, log on to www.indogamer.com.

-- The writer is co-leader of Brigade Indo Gamer [BIG], an
Indonesian gaming clan. He can be reached at
ramius@ussenterprise.com.