Angry Gaming 8.28.06: Gamer Civil War
Posted by Damian Sarcuni on 08.28.2006
Here come the bastards!
Welcome to Angry Gaming, where we kill more gaming ideas than Electronic Arts during a menstrual period. I'm your host, Damian Sarcuni and ain't nothin' gonna break'a my stride. Bring the noise!
Gamer Civil War
Nothing gets me more nostalgic than seeing how far video games have come in the social eye of the public. Gone are the days of poorly animated time wasters that made our parents sneer at the mindlessness of it all. No, today good video games are finely crafted interactive works of art, to be experienced like a good movie or book but in a whole new way.
But let's be honest: sometimes gaming just isn't fun. In fact, sometimes being a gamer can deal a severe social blow to your mind. It's not because gamers are looked at as social derelicts. Far from it, these days gaming is a staple of social interaction. (Would you want a girlfriend/boyfriend who didn't appreciate games in some way?) No, gaming has its bad moments, and as nice as it would be to blame developers for being inconsistent with their gaming content. Sadly, more often than not the true dark spots in video game history have come from the bad seeds of us, the players.
Don't get me wrong, the game industry gets plenty of blame for catering to the little rodents that consider themselves our peers. But realistically, it's the vermin gamers' fault for being who they are in the first place, and our fault for not doing anything about it. Nobody ever questions where these fools come from, what goes on in their pea-sized brains, or how we can actually get rid of them. Still, like the old saying goes, take the good with the bad, right? Well, not exactly.
Anyone feel like starting a revolution? Well, I certainly do. What follows is a list of the most annoying types of gamers that are slowly decaying the industry and ruining our gaming experiences. Your mission, should you choose to accept it, is to hunt down, ostracize, and generally ruin the bastards before their steadily growing empire of disgrace dominates our precious gaming careers. Shoot on sight! It's open season on the front lines.
While not necessarily the most common threat in the video game player's world, obsessed are the most difficult to identify, as well as the most infectious. Look, we are all fans here, and quite from the "overly straight" gamers who are too cool to be interested in anything other than the new Madden NFL each respective year. However, there are those hopeless romantics who take things just a little too far, who somehow know just how to make us shake our heads solemnly, ashamed at not just them, but ourselves for liking this crap in the first place.
A good example is the new Mortal Kombat: Armageddon game. To promote it, Midway released the above screenshot which shows a ludicrous number of familiar characters from past Mortal Kombat games. Naturally, there was a huge response from all kinds of MK fans about just who all these characters were, and more than one friend passed that screenshot along to me asking if I could name everyone. Now, did my friends laugh at me if I got something wrong? Of course not! But the obsessed did. Really any time you can berate someone for not knowing information about a game that you do, you've crossed the fan boy line. We all love games, they are great works of art, but art they are and information about them is still trivia.
The Street Fighter obsessed are far worse. I remember it like it was yesterday: my first time trying out Street Fighter: 3rd Strike at a local arcade. I picked Sean and wondered who the hell that new character with the metal face and wide brim hat was. Then I started playing. I did relatively well with a severely gimped character, and it wasn't long before some guy weighing oh... about 9000 POUNDS sauntered up to the machine and challenged me with Ryu without a word. He won the first round normally, I won the second, and in the 3rd round he parried everything I threw at him followed by one of those 200% combos that ended in Ryu's triple fireball. When the kid finished the combo, he literally got off the machine and MADE THE MOTION OF THE FIREBALL AS RYU CHARGED IT. As I stood there, staring at him, I realized two things at that moment: 1) if he wanted the machine that badly he could have it. 2) I had lost the battle but won at life. Anyone who spends their time learning a game that flawlessly can't have much else going for them.
There are all kinds of obsessed fans for nearly every type of game out there, but the worst that I have encountered by far are the mech fan boys. I swear that every time I see a Battletech, Armored Core, or Front Mission fan I am looking not at a human being but at a soulless husk. And that's saying something as I am a huge fan of all 3 of those games.
Mecha fans live in some strange alternate form of existence where the most important things to learn in life are the facts about great wars that never happened, the names and ranks of people who never existed, and weapons statistics that don't really matter. These people are more concerned with proper layout for a dual wield hip cannon than the fact that giant robots are stomping the city surrounding them into dust! There is so much useless history and facts surrounding these games and for some reason mech fans eat it up. Why should I care that corporation A usurped government B on planet C during the Red Dragoness Concubine wars? The result is always the same: giant robots blew up a bunch of shit. Hooray mechs!
Obsession isn't a political view. It's a disease, and whether you're a casual gamer or a hardcore one, you must check yourself daily for signs of infection. If you feel superior to your friends due to your game knowledge, if you spent more time learning a game skill than it takes for you to learn the same skill in real life, or if you have had more than one daydream involving yourself actually mimicking a game character in real life, its time to drop the controller for awhile and seek other hobbies. Don't worry, the game world will always be here for you, and we welcome those who detoxify back with open arms.
Net Geeks
If you've ever played an online first person shooter or a massively multiplayer role playing game, you can guess where I'm going with this.
Ever since the invention of the internet, words like "noob" and "suxor" have become gaming staples. In a world where we can preorder, play test, and often strategize gaming challenges long before they even hit the store shelves, there has been a weird expectation from online gamers. That expectation is something that no one has ever talked about before, and I hope everyone is reading this. When you play an online game, you are expected to instantly be good at it and have it thoroughly researched long before you go online. It does not matter how old the game is or even if you admit you are new. If you don't know, and you haven't magically learned through some form of internet osmosis, then you're a noob and no one will have anything to do with you, never mind actually teaching you what you are doing wrong.
Pick up any MMRPG and choose a character class people don't like. Personally, I've been playing Red Mage/Summoner and Red Mage/Dark Knight for months now on Final Fantasy XI, and I love it. I love it because people literally get offended at my character selection and go out of their way to tell me so, even if they don't know me or have never seen me play. RPG players assume that anyone who doesn't fit into a certain archetype character role isn't going to be effective at all and will forever remain outcast from any group actually enjoying the game.
To make matters worse, these fools use the same formulas the above mentioned mecha fanatics do. They are more concerned about how to get +20 int equipment to combine with their 2 dmg per second rate spells than actually enjoying the fantasy aspects of magic and mythical creatures. To these geeks, we aren't fighting a giant dragon; we are fighting a mob with 2000hp who hits at an average rate of 48hp plus crit damage. In other words, while normal players are enjoying fantasy games, the geeks are glued to their math lessons.
The ultimate net geek, however, can only be found playing one game: Counter Strike. These geeks would have you believe that somewhere out there, there are 50,000,000 players currently all participating in the CAL gaming league. They all have the ability to see through walls and fire recoiled guns with pinpoint accuracy, and they all just happen to be on your server right at this moment. When they do well, it's because they are just naturally the best. When they lose, it's because they were either talking on the phone, letting their little brother play, or they just "aren't playing seriously". In other words, they are a bunch of low lives pretending to be something they aren't, which brings me to our next category, actually.
Hackers
And to think all this time I thought it was just PC gamers. With the gap closing between console hardware and computer hardware, the hacking industry has grown ten fold. The worst part is that hacking has become so common that it is actually difficult to find a public online game instance without at least one person cheating. It's commonplace to load up Need for Speed on Xbox Live and see one or two cars floating in mid air above the starting line. Don't even bother playing a round of Diablo unless you have a console loaded up to instantly kill opponents before they do the same thing to you. Cheating is blatant on all online games because designers either can't or simply won't do anything about it. Thus as gamers we are left with an infinitely sized internet, full of giggling little kids and smarmy, asshole adults who are incapable of enjoying games for what they are and thus have to find a way to ruin your day. Rest assured, as long as the geeks dominate the net, fans of single player console gaming need not worry because that genre will never die.
Money Makers
For those of you from my day, these were the kids who went around from arcade to arcade selling move lists for brand new fighting games. These days, money makers appear in the form of hustlers, MMO gold sellers, and aspiring pro gamers. Like many of the above listed, these little weasels have lost all definition of the word game in their vocabulary, and they see video games as a lucrative money making scam where they can do what they love and earn a quick buck at the same time. The joke is on them, though.
Let me put this to rest once and for all. The rumors are false, there is no one who ever paid their way through college using video games. I doubt even game designers earn enough money for books and tuition. If you try to earn money on a video game, the rate at which you actually make it will be quite detrimental to your overall sum, even if you make a large amount of money. Let's say you sell a certain amount of gold to an online game site for $100. I guarantee that for the amount of time it took you to earn that $100, a person with a normal job could have made $200. Plus there is no stability to it, so if somehow gaming companies do catch you making a buck off their work, your "job" could be gone by this time tomorrow.
Money makers don't really care who they screw over, because they have convinced themselves they are serving a much hire purpose. The reality, however, is that they are just misleading themselves and annoying others while they do it. Sorry guys, but you aren't that bright. If there really was a way to earn a good living off of games, somebody else would have done it already, far better and faster than you.
The Anger
Of the above categories listed, there are plenty of hybrids and crossovers. When encountering these enemies, use extreme caution and they are dangerously short sighted and could explode at any moment, frying your very brain in a sea of illogic and useless arguments. Above all, when someone or something annoys the crap out of you, let the game industry know! They may seem like they don't care or aren't listening, but voices carry in numbers and the more vocal good gamers become, the less we will have to deal with the snide insolence of vermin gamers. Support the revolution and help out, the future of gaming depends upon gamers themselves. RISE UP!
