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By Kevin Kelly

On any one day, about 5,000 people will find their way to a couple of nodes on the Net and pick up a game of Netrek. Playing Netrek is like playing team chess on speed, or playing mind hockey. At first glance, the game's spare and simple graphics resemble the classic old '70s video arcade game, Spacewar. But Netrek bears all the marks of a raging '90s phenomenon: It's graphical, it's played very, very fast, and it is played in teams, on the Net.

Someday we'll look back at the videogame era of the 1980s and '90s, and wonder why anyone played solitary games. How Dull! How sorry.

In Netrek, you storm planets in a squadron of ships piloted by you and your teammates. You sit at your console and when you fire a missile, everyone else playing the game, whether they are in Denmark or Pittsburgh, watches it zing to its target. Sixteen people romp in intergalactic real-time dogfights.

Netrek was invented by Berkeley undergraduate students Chris Guthrie and Ed James about five years ago. It began as a game called X-Trek and was played over the campus network on X-windows machines. That early version was later revamped into Netrek by three other Berkeley students, Scott Silvey, Kevin Smith and Terence Chang. Now there's a league - The International Netrek League (INL) - with eighteen teams that engage in weekly games and seasonal playoffs. Chang went on to graduate work at Carnegie Mellon University, and now CMU and Berkeley are the heavyweight teams in the Netrek League. CMU has a reputation for "playing with an attitude and being into big ships," Chang says.

Team names sound like names of bands. The CMU team is "EIEIO." Los Angeles has "Will Riot for Food." Seattle has "Lagg U," a joke on the frustrating time delay that long-distance Internet play sometimes induces. The Berkeley team calls itself the Golden Bears, in mock reference to the Berkeley sports program. Most of the Berkeley guys are former students who gather every Saturday afternoon in the computer science building to play in cyberspace. They probably could login from their home nodes, and sometimes they do, but in a very telling reversal of what we expect from network culture, they like to drive once a week to the campus and cram themselves into a couple of work cubicles to play each other over the Internet, and then go for a beer afterwards. Could be an Iron John thing.

I like to think of Netrek as the first online sports game. Two teams of eight players meet in a Netrek arena - a local "galaxy" with 40 planets in it. The object of the game is to capture the planets by ferrying troops onto them. So while you and your seven teammates are trying to transport your armies to the far edge of the galaxy, the opposing team is sacking your established planets and filling them with its troops. The overt military plot won't win any theme awards, but as I said, the game is like team chess. The thrill comes from the thousands of moves, set-ups, and real-time team plays that can happen in this spare, almost archetypal game.

Like chess pieces, there are different kinds of space ships with different powers and moves. The current standard version of Netrek has six varieties. One ship type can haul lots of troops, but slowly. One ship has lots of fire power but no endurance. One ship is fast but small and has fuel-costly defense shields. And each ship might have choices in armaments. For instance there are two kinds of weapons. You can fire a laser that hits its target instantly; but, since it is light, the power of its impact decreases geometrically with the distance of the target. Or, you can fire a torpedo- like missile; its power won't diminish over distance, but because it takes time to travel you need to anticipate the inertia and countermoves of the target in order to hit it.

There is an option to create a stealth ship by donning a cloak of invisibility. This allows a number of interesting attack formations. But it uses up tremendous virtual fuel.

The sport thus becomes a fast-paced game of strategy and tactics not unlike basketball. Team members charge toward a planet in a kind of power play. The defense responds in its well-practiced formations. But in Netrek there are twenty or more balls loose on the court, so it can get pretty frantic. "Team play is very important," says Scott Northrop, a Seattle player. "Several roles have evolved over the years, like deep bomber, planet taker, escort planet taker, kill enemy planet taker. And there are a bunch of maneuvers that everyone knows, such as the 'ogg' - jargon for a suicide attack on an important enemy player, or the 'base ogg' where everyone kamikazes on the enemy starbase (when your ship blows up, it causes damage to everything around it)."

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