When playing Quake over the internet, there is a phenomena known as lag, which is a result of the fact that it takes time for a packet of information to travel back and forth from your computer to a shared computer that is keeping track of the state of the game for all of the players currently in a level. You can hit the spacebar to jump, but your character might not actually jump for a fifth of a second or so, or sometimes much worse. Home players connected via a modem can have very bad lag compared to players connected via a high-speed ethernet link from work or a university. This has resulted in somewhat of a rift between the haves and the have-nots. A means of measuring lag is to "ping" another player. If the other player has a much lower ping time than you, their connection is faster and they'll be able to kill you easier than you can kill them. "Low Ping Bastards" is the term that some have-nots use for the haves, and as you'd expect, there even used to be a web page devoted to the topic.
Deathmatch refers to playing Quake with other people, or more precisely, playing against human-controlled adversaries instead of computer-controlled adversaries. The game is a lot more interesting that way. There is great ranting and gnashing of teeth from a number of players about some player's tendencies to play the game using a style that is referred to as "camping". A camper is one who tries to stake out a desirable object or area in the game, killing anyone who approaches. During actual play, the camping strategy tends not to work very well because time spent waiting for others to show up is time not spent racking up a high score, but people get riled up about it anyway.
Most experienced players will admit, albeit under duress, that they have
actually been scared playing Quake at one time or another. Accuse me of
censorship if you will, but I would recommend not taking a young child to
see The Exorcist, nor letting the pup have a go at Quake with all the critters
enabled. When I was seven, the animated dogs and demons of Quake would
have given me some major nightmares. If you have a youngun' eager to check
out this game that has grabbed your interest, I recommend adding the
parameter "+deathmatch 1" as you run Quake, or go to the game start menu
and choose to start a Multiplayer Game. This will run Quake in deathmatch
mode, which disables all of the monsters. Your kiddo will be able to run
around and explore the beautifully crafted passages in Quake without
stumbling into your room crying at 3:00 am.
Back in October (several years ago now), the Quake community was set aflame by a software company that ripped everyone off. People who make levels for Quake usually upload them to ftp.cdrom.com to make them available for others to play, but they tend to feel strongly against someone else making money off of their work without telling them, or worse, without giving them credit. Actura Software, and its distributor, Digital Entertainment, was one of those midnight outfits that copies a bunch of free stuff off of the internet and puts it on a CD-ROM for retail sale, but they took the idea to a new low. What Actura did was to deliberately wipe out all of the readme and text files that level authors include with their BSP files to tell a little about the level, give their name, email address, copyright notice, distribution terms, and whatever else they want to say. People got pretty furious about it, and a web page dedicated to exposing Actura was born. Head Games Publishing followed up a little later by ripping off a whole bunch of level authors, including myself, in another net-scraped disc, Tremors. Westwood Studios hired some lawyers to chew their balls off, for a ripoff of another disc containing some C&C stuff. A number of level authors in the Quake community laughed at Head Games' well-deserved misfortune.
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