Frustration with the gameplay style of other people is nothing new, as my friend’s N64 controller-throwing tantrum of a previous post has shown. As least back in the day when your friend, little brother, or neighbourhood aquaintance made a dick move you could punch him in the arm, because he was sitting right next you on the couch or the floor. Yeah, there were controller hogs, fighting game idiot savants, and jerkwad Oddjob players, but you had recourse.
Stole the powerup you needed in Contra? Punch. Sent a homing shell at you in Super Mario Kart? Punch. Hogged the controller when you were meant to be taking turns? Punch. Pulled off an 80-hit combo you couldn’t do anything about? Punch. Moved their selection cursor even close to Oddjob? Punch. Most bad behaviour was either self-correcting or someone was gonna get a hurt. If your gaming session involved Bomberman and a multi-tap, there could be so many chokeholds and windmill punches it’d look like Wrestlemania.
When you grew up a little and were either trusted to take the family PC along to a LAN night, or could afford to buy and take your own to play some Quake or Doom (or for my LANning era, more likely Counter-Strike and Battlefield 1942), it was a bit more anonymous, but generally by standing up, yelling out “HEY, STOP SPAWN CAMPING YOU FUCKING SPAWN CAMPER,” and watching who smirked, you knew where to aim your stale pizza crusts. More difficult and less satisfying than just punching them in the arm, but at least you still had dick-move recourse.
LAN parties weren’t really a satisfying solution to large-scale gaming though, as by the end of a long night, the smell of BO and grease clings in the air, but we put up with them as they were the only way to get your game on with so many people at once. Fortunately, internet connections got better, and cheaper.
Unfortunately, internet connections got better, and cheaper.
Now, you can game with many other people from the comfort of your own house, BO free. All you need to do is log on to just about any game on XBox Live for a dose of screaming tweens, mouth-breathing frat boys calling everyone ‘fag’, people proudly displaying their shitty taste in music by having it blasting through their microphones, inane chatterers, stoners who leave their mics on so you can hear the rolling-boil noise of their bongs and references to how stoned they are, and a significant group of northern Americans making fun of your accent if you’re either from the southern US or anywhere else in the world, via one of two lame jokes or banal references that form all they know about your part of the world.
If that doesn’t strike your fancy, you can play an MMO (most likely World of Warcraft) and deal with gold sellers, gear beggars, Chuck Norris jokes and the same question repeated a hundred times a day. If you devote enough time to it to get to max level, you can then increase your fun by raiding with a large group, and dealing with the chronically clueless, loot whiners, 1-plys (ie. one wipe and they’re done), and time wasters. ‘BRB, 5 minutes’ from someone in a key role is a sentence that still sends chills down my spine, from the 40-man days of WoW raiding. 40×5 = 3 1/3 man-hours wasted waiting for one guy to finish rolling a joint. Yeah, I love WoW, but it’s a conditional love, and some days are worse than others.
Sure, there are friend lists and party chat, and ways to play with people you actually want to play with, but that only works if they’re all actually online at the same time, unlike when you were a kid and you knew exactly when everyone finished school and would be available to play. Sometimes you can’t deal with the logistics of getting your friends online, and just want to play. And it’s either stupid computer bots or an unholy combination drawn from the motley crew above.
Anonymity breeds stupidity. I’ve posted a link to this before, but I think showing you is very important:
Don’t be this guy.
Image from Penny Arcade.
