Essays and More

CEASEFIRE:

AN END TO FRAGGING AND BRAGGING

An Essay by Michael Bowser

(Copyright © 2021)

I patiently await my prey.

I know they’ll be coming up that elevator shortly, and when they do, it is my destiny to charge them off the edge of this ruined, multi-storey building and into oblivion. My fellow monsters are relying on me: if I do not succeed in my task, the humans may make it to safety and we won’t get another chance. Everything depends on me.

They’re in the small lift now, travelling towards the third floor where I wait. They’re very nearly here. I brace myself; my oversized right arm twitches. The elevator arrives. The rust-encrusted iron gate noisily opens. One of my companions unleashes a volley of acidic green spittle into the lift’s tight confines, forcing the humans out and scattering them to the four winds as planned.

There’s my quarry. That one. The one in the white suit who’s erred too close to the building’s wide-open, wall-less edge for his own good. I take aim. My heart beats quickly; I can sense the nervousness pulsating in my throat. It’s now or never.

I hit the left click button. I charge forward – all seven foot and four hundred pounds of me – and miss the man in the suit by mere inches. I run over the lip of the building all on my lonesome, and continue running another twenty feet or so on the swampy ground below before I slow to a halt…and realise that I have, indeed, failed.

A blunt hissing noise as one of my teammates hits the “talk” button, engaging their headset. “You’re shit, mate,” says a low, threatening voice. I’ve never spoken to this person in my life, and these are the first words he deems to say to me.

I take my headset off, and the only thing that stops me from hurling it across the room is the fact that it’ll cost me a hefty thirty bucks to buy a new one.

***

I’m willing to confess that I have nearly 2000 hours of gameplay “up” on a video game called Left 4 Dead 2. I’m not so keen to cough up my Steam username, as you may have run into me, and may already despise me. All’s fair in love and war, right?

Yeah, right.

Let me tell you why I’ve had to quit competitive multiplayer video games altogether. (Well: almost.)

I’m told that we human beings are, by nature, quite competitive creatures. In my life I’ve certainly possessed more than my fair share of ambition, but that can often mean setting personal challenges and achieving them, as opposed to necessarily “beating” someone else. I’m not sure that competition, specifically, has ever really been my bag.

I’ve never gotten into sport – not spectating or participating – and even when I play board games with friends, I favour the cooperative ones over the competitive ones (yes: there is such a thing, believe it or not)! I even recall a friend from my teenage years who was a breeze to beat at board games, whom I would intentionally go easy on just to prolong the game session. Even then, I guess I favoured the experience over the almighty “win”.

So how on earth did I find myself addicted to a four-versus-four competitive team game, especially one with such a legendarily “toxic” community as Left 4 Dead 2? One word: family.

My father is English and my mother Australian, so following their divorce he returned to the Motherland and proceeded to have limited contact with his only child for two-and-a-half decades. In the late 2000s my Dad had a bit of a health scare, and my parents pitched together to send me over to visit him (he didn’t die there and then; but it did turn into the last time I would see him).

During those two months I was, most unexpectedly, inducted into the world of online gaming by my seventy-year-old Dad and fifty-year-old cousin. It turns out these two were looking for recruits to fill out their not-quite-four-man team, so by the time I returned to Australia I’d promised to purchase my first-ever computer with internet access and join the party.

I should stress that at this point it was purely non-competitive. Left 4 Dead 2 has a “Campaign” mode in which the players must cooperate to get their four “survivors” from safe room to safe room in the midst of a zombie apocalypse. One thing tends to lead to another, though, and I’d soon ventured outside of the safe Sunday night bounds of family gaming into the wild and woolly world of Left 4 Dead 2 “Versus” mode, in which two teams take turns being the humans then being the zombies, and scores are tallied based on how close the survivors come to actually reaching those coveted safe rooms.

My earliest experiences were decidedly positive. Sure, there was some evidence of differing skill levels, and a new gaming mode is always going to be a steep learning curve for any “noob”. But on the whole, people seemed quite polite at this stage. Perhaps this was because the game was still in its relative infancy. Rest assured, the tone of the community would get much, much uglier as the next few years progressed…and it wasn’t just the temperament of others that would change for the worse.

***

There’s a term that’s become increasingly popular in the last ten years, though it has existed almost as long as the internet itself. That term is “troll”.

No, I’m not talking about grotesque Scandinavian giants who live under bridges and accost human beings. I’m talking about the more modern definition, i.e. perfectly normal-sized persons who elicit no end of delight from causing distress to others over a cyberspace connection. People who would no doubt enjoy watching others squirm, if only they were courageous enough to be in the same physical space as those they are tormenting.

Competitive online computer games are full of these individuals. I’m not going to say they’re in the majority, but believe me, they’re there. And what’s more, they often travel in packs, and you’re doing pretty well if you play five “public” games in a single night without encountering at least one or two specimens of this loathsome species.

In all fairness, though, not all of the nasty types you’ll meet in these games are “trolls” (technically speaking). Many are just incurably arrogant turds, and/or medical or law students who are simply sharpening their “diplomatic” skills for success in their future careers. I’ve even had one law student expound his “me versus them” philosophy in detail while he kicked my digital arse six ways to Sunday from the other side of Oz. He’s probably a High Court judge by now. But for the purposes of this essay, let’s lump all these jokers in one bag and refer to them as one big, unhappy family.

So what forms do these “trolls” take in online video games? Well, there are the ones who join games, only to murder their own team and leave, laughing, rendering a forty-five-minute game-in-progress null-and-void in seconds. There are the ones who constantly nag and berate their teammates, and threaten to “kick” them from the game if they don’t magically improve their motor skills sometime in the next fourteen seconds. Then there are the ones who, like the charming chap in my introduction, feel the compulsion to accuse everyone in the game of being their inferior, be it for laughs or out of some genuine need to be acknowledged as “the best player in this epic eight-person game at this particular point in space and time”.

There’s a saying that comes with this territory, that you’ll hear spoken time and time again: “Don’t feed the trolls.” I quickly discovered this was one rule I’m not good at adhering to. I’ve been told by many that I don’t suffer fools lightly, so if someone joins a game and starts ruining it for me and everyone else, I do feel the need to speak up. I believe the well-meaning logic, in any case, would be that “if you ignore them, they’ll eventually go away”. This is, sadly, far more assured in theory than practice. There’s also the option to “vote-kick” people from teams, based on majority rule, but if the troll has friends in the same team…you’re shit outta luck, I’m afraid.

And so it was that I found myself calling these people out, be it over my headset or keyboard (there’s on-screen “chat” in one corner of the screen, if desired).

“So, I guess you’re the kind of person who likes to trip up little old ladies for shits ‘n’ giggles, eh?” That was always a witty one, I thought.

Or how about: “What’s the matter, dude…didn’t Mummy and Daddy love you enough? Have to take your revenge on the world while you hide behind an anonymous username, and in situations where no one can physically look you in the eye and tell you to go fuck yourself?” Okay, things were starting to heat up a bit now, but I was still keeping my voice to a volume that wouldn’t have the neighbours calling the cops. Yet.

The thin veneer of civility wasn’t to last long, however. “Fuck you, you sack of steaming donkey turd! It’s arsewipes like you who are the reason why a freaking meteor should just hit the earth tomorrow and obliterate all trace of you and your whole stinking kind, so that aliens don’t mistake us all for screaming, monstrous fuckwits when they finally decide to come down to say ‘hi’!” Okay, so things were officially getting ugly now. The hunter was slowly transforming into the very monster he sought to expose.

And I had begun to fancy myself as just that: a “troll-hunter”. I began to find myself logging into games not to have a bit of frivolous fun, but to track down and confront these wretched excuses for human beings. In the process, I began to get a reputation as being a bit of a “troll” and “game-wrecker” in my own right.

How did this happen? How had I, the well-intentioned good guy, turned into the villain? Had I actually reached the point where I was calling people out for the tiniest of infringements, or worse yet: was I misinterpreting certain cheeky behaviours – we all have a jibe at our besties from time to time – as heinous crimes deserving of all but the most capital of punishments?

Yes. Yes, I had reached that point. And then some.

So ravenous was I in the pursuit of troll blood that I had feasted upon the flesh of the innocent as well. I wasn’t just a troll-hunter: I was an old-fashioned witch-hunter, using the most spurious of evidence as justification for tying people to stakes and burning them alive. I had become every bit as bad as the people I attested to hate.

A realisation gradually dawned on me that, while it’s conceivable that competitive activities like this can sometimes bring out the “best” in people, they often tend to do the opposite. That was certainly the case for Yours Truly. I even found myself succumbing to the ultra-competitive urges that I frowned so much upon, and found myself occasionally boasting about how good I myself had become at the game. And while my boasting never quite reached the “you’re shit!” heights of the worst offenders, I still found myself increasingly ashamed of what I had become.

Something had to change.

I started uninstalling the game every Sunday night following the session with my family, and only reinstalled it when it was approaching the weekend again. It wasn’t long, though, until the temptation loomed large enough that I started to allow myself brief bouts of “Versus” mode immediately before or after the family session. I’ve since scaled the habit back further, and now that the family sessions are less frequent – following my father’s recent demise – I’ve reduced it to a few evenings a year at most. And good riddance, I say.

***

Do I feel like a “better person” these days? Better, yes; perfect, hell no! I’m by no means a fully rehabilitated man.

Just lately, I’ve found myself getting into shit-fights (sorry, “debates”) with idiots (sorry, “people I disagree with”) on Facebook and Steam forums. This need-for-conflict thing does appear to be a part of human nature after all, and the fact that I’m happily single and live alone and get along fairly well with my Mum perhaps leaves my life a bit wanting for “excitement” at times. And at least I can tell myself that these recent debates are more constructive, with two or more human beings genuinely challenging each other’s preconceptions about important things like personal moral values, and industry ethics, and world politics, and…and…

…And video games.

Okay, so maybe I haven’t matured that much. But at least I don’t take my frustrations out on innocent bystanders anymore. Disagree with me in a forum, though, and the gloves are well and truly off, I’m afraid.

“All’s fair”…right?

Yeah. Right.

(Pathetic post-script: Since writing this essay, I'm officially back to playing Left 4 Dead 2 on a semi-regular basis. Old habits sometimes die hard; even the really horrible ones. Pray for me, if so inclined.)