Sportsmanship in Gaming

A lot of people play multiplayer FPS games online. We all know the same cliche, too. People spewing hate, racism, sexism, cursing. Kids with no business being online shouting slurs into the microphone because they're parents either don't know or don't care. Anger and harassment are so common that they have become an accepted feature of many games.
I'm not going to analyze the phenomenon too deeply. If that's what you're looking for, I suggest checking out the latest episode of Extra Credits: http://www.screwattack.com/shows/partners/extra-credits/extra-credits-season-4-episode-11-harassment

I don't play online that much, but I've still seen some pretty nasty stuff. I was going through Portal 2 coop a couple months back and was hooked up with a random opponent. I was just about to finish the last level, and he had already gone through it. So I went through, taking my time and trying to figure out the puzzles. The guy I was playing with spent the entire match denouncing me and calling me stupid because I had not gone through it already and while he had all the solutions memorized.

I only put up with it for a couple rooms before I left, but it ruined the experience for me. I started the game excited to complete the final test chamber and have fun, and ended up quitting while feeling like I wasted my time.

One of the worst examples comes from my brother, who used to play a shooter called Soldier Front, which is similar to Counter-Strike. I occasionally watched him play, and was shocked to see some of the worst sportsmanship I've ever observed in a game. Whenever he was killed in the game, he would immediately and automatically type the word "tank," a term used to accuse somebody of cheating. He did it every time he died. Every person who played that game did nothing but talk trash and disrespect each other. Poor sportsmanship was so rampant in that game that being rude had become instinctive to my brother.

Fortunately, that was a long time ago and he has gotten much better since then. However, many others have not. This does have the effect of making nice, kind players look better by comparison. It's refreshing to make a kill in an FPS and have your victim reply with "ns" instead of "fag."

The entire point of this blog was because I wanted to talk about something that happened to me recently. A couple days ago, I was on the recieving end of one of the most awe-inspiring acts of sportsmanship I've ever seen in a game.

The game was Killing Floor, a first-person shooter on Steam that many have compared to Left 4 Dead, although it's actually closer to Nazi Zombies from Call of Duty. The game on the whole is more prone to good sportsmanship, as the game isn't very competitive. It's a co-op game, with all players on a team against computer-controlled mutants.It's in everyone's best interest to help each other, so naturally players are more helpful.

I was playing with my brother and one of our friends in a clan-owned server, on a map we had never played before. We were alone at first, until somebody else joined us. We let him go about his business while the other three of us continued to play with each other.

It happened a little more than halfway through the game. We were on a particularly difficult round, and being on an unfamiliar map wasn't helping anything. We soon found ourselves backed into a corner and succumbing to defeat in rapid succession, leaving the other player alone against an army of about eighty monsters.

For starters, he survived by himself. While not unheard of in this game, it's not exactly an easy task, either. As he neared the end of the round, he began talking to us over the microphone, asking questions about where we had died. When he managed to narrow the horde down to one enemy, he did something I have never seen. He tracked down the area where we died, tossed all of his equipment, then picked up our weapons and brought them to the post-round meeting point so that when we respawned, we could pick up our weapons again.

That might not sound like much to people who haven't played the game. Usually, if you die late in the game, respawning means begging teammates for cash and getting just enough to buy a low level weapon, essentially forcing you to start over in terms of progress of equipment. This person that we played with went out of his way to ensure that we would have everything we would need when the next round started.

Things like this are amazing to experience. As this was going on, I watched my brother's jaw literally hang open as we watched what this person was doing for us. In a realm where n-words are commonplace in online gaming, this one player's generosity toward his teammates made me proud to be a gamer. It inspired me to want to try harder to be a more polite and helpful person in games.

Sorry to waste your time going off about a simple personal story that you probably don't care about. I just wanted to share something with you that spoke to me as both a gamer and as a person