It is said that there is no honor among thieves. When you have a group of people whose lives are filled with deceit and taking things from others, it is inevitable that there will be betrayal. Naughty Dog used this idea as the backbone for their smash hit Uncharted 2: Among Thieves. Now, I don’t know any thieves personally, so I could not tell you if they had an honor code, or if they ran around betraying one another at every opportunity as seen in Uncharted 2. Who I do know are people that love games, and judging by their tales and my own experiences, I can safely say that the old saying can be adapted to the online world of games. Unfortunately, it seems to be that there is no honor among gamers.
Ignoring people who pirate games, who are technically thieves, saying that the moral codes of thieves and the people who play games are similar may seem to be a bit of a stretch. But the more I play games online, the more it has become apparent to me that winning has superseded having fun as the primary reason for playing games online. For people who appreciate the contest more than the conclusion, like myself, this mentality ruins the online experience. It is my personal belief that when you are playing a game online, there are certain behaviors that you do not engage in, for they ruin the experience of other people.
The behavior that gets me riled up more than anything else has and always will be people who camp in first person shooters. This is a practice where a person hides somewhere on the map with an overpowered weapon, and sits there while attacking their opponents. Many will argue that this is a legitimate strategy, that snipers in real life employ this tactic so I just need to quit complaining and move along. And this is true, the act of sniping is a legitimate strategy. But people have taken this idea of hiding in one place and perverted it. I cannot tell you how many times I have screamed at my television after being killed by someone who has taken to crouching just inside a doorway, waiting for someone to walk by. This sort of camping takes skill out of the equation, and makes the game more about random chance than ability. Single instances of this and similar behaviors can be annoying, but when it is widespread, as can be seen on a daily basis in Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2, it can make a game almost unplayable.
Questionable tactics are but the tip of the iceberg. While they may not be sporting, they are a part of the game. However, when developers create games as massive and as complex as the ones that can be found in this current generation, not all of the bugs are found before release. But you can rest assured, come launch day, that some gamers will search out the bugs that give them an advantage and unleash them upon the community. These so called glitches are technically part of the game, but were not intended additions by the developers, and can grant extreme bonuses to people who have figured out how to use them. A famous example of this was the rocket sword glitch in Halo 2. A person who knew how this glitch worked was able to fly across the map at their opponents, and kill them. There was no reason why you would expect this to happen, and no way to stop it if you did. There are many other examples of these sorts of glitches, ones that allow you to walk through walls, to turn into walking missiles, or to score on an opponent with ease. Developers usually try and patch these glitches away, but that takes time, and sometimes they never get to all of them.
The only good thing about glitches is that they are short lived. For the most part, games will be full of virtual anarchy until a patch comes out, and then things will return to business as usual. But the most desperate people do not wish for their fun and games to end, and so will turn to actual hacks in order to gain victory. These can be expensive, such as custom controllers that allow you to program combos for fighting games that can be activated at the touch of a button. These specialty devices can set you back several hundred dollars, but there are also cheaper devices that can cause chaos. Devices called lag switches have snuck onto the scene, and their presence can mostly be felt in popular games such as those in the Call of Duty franchise. Lag switches are simple things; essentially light switches have been inserted into a person’s internet cable. When it is in the on position, the circuit is normal, and the game plays normally. But when the switch is flipped, the connection to the internet is somewhat broken, causing the hacker’s system to run normally while their opponents are frozen and “lagged out.” Anything that the hacker does on their system is immediately transferred over when the switch is flipped again, allowing them to basically freeze time. The advantages of this are immediately obvious.
Many people may not experience these precise examples in their online excursions, but I am positive that in their time online they have found people acting in a selfish manner which has ruined the experience for the rest of those playing. Recently, it has come out that the number of hackers and cheaters in the PlayStation 3 version of Call of Duty: Black Ops has caused such a problem that people at Activision have floated around the idea of simply shutting down the servers for the game. This is an extreme solution, and likely will not be used, but it does call attention to the magnitude of the problem. I’m not sure if there is a solution, since you cannot force others to hold themselves to higher standards, but it is something to think about. While these are simply games and not representative of real life, the decision to engage in this sort of behavior does connect back to what we as individuals deem acceptable. The people who terrorize the online communities must know that this sort of behavior is wrong, but choose to do so anyways. My talking will do very little to persuade anyone into choosing the “right” path, but to those people who game the right way, I would like to say thank you. It may be difficult and we may lose often, but when we win, our victory is just that much sweeter.
