During the first day of the public beta of Quake Live, the free-to-play web-browser-based version of Quake III, there were as many as 80,000 people queued up to get into the server. All of them were in front of me. It was like trying to buy an iPhone or a Nintendo Wii.

I left it running in the background and eventually got into the servers for a ten minute tutorial followed by three and a half minutes of superfast deathmatching. Literally three and a half minutes. I got six kills and died ten times, which is really good for me. See? It was simultaneously exhausting and dull. Three and a half minutes was all I could take.

But the beauty of Quake Live is that an hour later, I was ready for another three and a half minutes. It's the perfect casual game, regardless of the fact that it's a hardcore competitive first person shooter. Open a new browser tab, log in, play something mindless for a few minutes, and then hop off.

Of course, there's the issue of those long queues. Here I am trying to get in at 7am on the East Coast, and there's still a line:

Who are all these people?