Hork

PS3 users have been without access to online gaming for about a month now and the question remains: what are they missing? For some, they are missing connecting with their friends through their favourite games. Others are missing the unique challenge and rewards that playing against a live opponent across the world brings. Many are missing access to special features and bonuses that games bring with them over an internet connection. All of them are missing the chance of listening to a 12-32 year-old male pretending to hock a loogie onto them through their mics.

At the end of roughly one-in-three matches I play online in Call of Duty: Black Ops for the Xbox 360, I hear someone pretending to spit on me and my fellow teammates after losing a match. It doesn’t matter if we failed miserably, or only trailed behind by one point, we still have to listen to this rude gesture. It’s always impeccably timed as well, so you can’t see which player actually did it. On a good night there’s about 200,000 people online playing. As I said, one in every three matches one person will do it. There’s about twelve people in each match. So about one in every thirty-six people you meet online in Black Ops is a complete douchebag, or 5,555 people total are online at any time. This is an example of poor sportsmanship. Inversely, someone saying something positive like, “Good game guys,” averages once every eleven or twelve games or so. So 1/144 people exhibit good sportsmanship, or 1,388 players total out of 200,000. The remaining players are made up of racist teenagers from the Southern states and one lone, solitary girl.

The weird thing is: how does something like this start trending? Does someone hear it once and decide to copy it, and so on, or is it the same person over and over and over again, every match, win-or-lose? It’s not like online gaming is the forum in which to voice one’s own superiority. Chess masters do not flip over the board and scream, “YEAAAAH, BITCH! HOW DO YOU LIKE THAT?” when they score a checkmate. Why does some dude from Alabama now think he’s a level 100 Warlock because he scored 14 kills/9 deaths in a game of Team Deathmatch? I don’t even give a crap half the time if I win or lose, unless I’ve paid for a contract specifically stating I need to win x game y times.

Call of Duty rewards you for completing unique challenges in a set timeframe, so your objective doesn’t always have to be winning, or rather it could be winning in a certain way. I can come in dead last and still go up two levels inside of a match. Other people aren’t so objective. These are the people who have above level 15 Prestige.

To explain that another way: reaching level 1 Prestige should take a normal person with a normal life over two weeks. These people have Prestieged fifteen times, and are still playing. The came could not possibly have the same allure and interest as when they first started. They’d have to have played the same levels over and over again hundreds upon hundreds of times, just so they could have the honour of adding colours to their clan tags and getting golden guns. Still, they keep playing, keep acting like douchebags, and they’ll still pretend to spit on you when you lose against someone whom the game has become second nature to them. The only satisfaction you can get out of playing them is by sniping them from across the map when you respawn, assuming they aren’t running like cheetas with rabbit’s feet through your hail of bullets, which they are.