The Aerie
It's weird where you learn your lessons sometimes.
I've been playing a lot of XBox-live Halo 2 recently. What this means is that I run a little computerized person around a playing field - a valley, an underground cave or something, and I fight with other computerized people. This is live over the internet, and the other players are real people elsewhere around the world, usually grouped in two teams, blue and red. The kinds of fights range from simply shooting at each other, to carrying a bomb from your base to their base, arming it, and letting it explode. There are vehicles like cars and flying motorcycles and tanks to drive, a variety of weapons, and an audio channel over which everyone can speak to each other. It's very realistic and engrossing, although extremely violent.
This is not the kind of environment that makes one think of kindness, and for the most part there's nothing kind about it. But when kindness has reared its head, it has been all the more notable for the setting. I remember one time I had been part of the red team which thoroughly beat our blue-team opponents, a real humiliation. After each game is over a results board of sorts is displayed, and the audio channel remains open. And this time, one of the guys on the losing team came on the channel and said, "Good game, red team."
Sportsmanship. Good natured sportsmanship, but it really stood out among the whining and complaining among both the losers and the winners alike. I remembered that, and have tried to be equally sportsmanlike, frequently failing.
Last night I was playing and the game was going very poorly. The two teams were supposed to carry their bombs into each other's bases, but my blue team was not interested in playing. Instead my team immediately started shooting at each other. Everyone was yelling and laughing on the audio channel, spinning the computerized jeep in circles and repeatedly shooting each other. Whenever your character is shot there is a short pause and then the character is recreated in the game, so this process went on indefinitely.
Meanwhile the other team had no such problems. While my team laughed and shot each other up, the red team just ran right into our base and set off their first bomb. In frustration, I tried going up against them alone, but that was even more frustrating because I'm frankly not very good at this game. Mostly I'd run towards the enemy base for about fifteen seconds and somebody - from either team - would shoot me and the game would restart me in my base.
But one guy on my team was actually playing the game. While the rest of my team goofed off, this guy picked up our bomb and successfully snuck past all the enemy players. So instead of a humiliating abject loss - which my team deserved - we lost by a respectable 3-2. People tend to drop out of bad games, so by the time the game was over the other team still had seven players, but our team was down to three: me, the other serious player, and one goofball driving around in a tank shooting randomly in all directions.
"Good game, red," I said in to the audio channel, trying to be sportsmanlike, even in abject defeat.
"Good game Doompickle," said my single, serious teammate, using my online handle. ("Doompickle - the Pickle of Doom!")
I launched into the next game feeling a bit better for the exchange, and found myself in a capture-the-flag game with the very same fellow on my team.
This game went better - my other teammates were normal people, not braying fools, and the game was close.
Now, mind you, I stink at these games. I'm a crotchety old man up against eighteen- and fifteen-year-olds with lightning reaction time. So for me, I'm happy when my team wins, and I spend most of my time just getting in the way of the enemy hoping that the two or three seconds that they spend shooting me allows my teammates to advance. That's all I can do. So I never actually captured any flags or set any bombs or any of that stuff. I just ran around and had fun.
The game was even when I returned from being shot and saw my teammate from the previous game running across the field, carrying the enemy flag. He was being pursued by three of the enemy. Now, this isn't a tale of how I singlehandedly saved the day. I basically ran across the field and got in right behind my teammate, so that the enemy's shots were hitting me, sparing him. Maybe I prevented him from getting killed, maybe I didn't, but some other teammates showed up and delayed the enemy so that it was just he and I running towards our base with the flag.
"You know what," he said over the audio channel, "I'm gonna let somebody else score this." And he dropped the flag right in front of me.
"What?" I said, and quickly picking up the flag, "Why, thanks! You da man!"
"No, Doompickle, you da man," he replied, as I ran the flag into our base, tying the score 2-2.
The final round started, and my teammate jumped into our team's jeep. I jumped in the back and we roared across the field to the enemy base. I leapt from the jeep without waiting for it to slow down, skidding to a stop right in front of the enemy entrance. I ran in, the round so new that the two people inside didn't suspect that an enemy could already be arriving, grabbed the flag, and ran out the opposite side before they could react. My teammate had driven around the building and pulled up as I exited. I leapt into the jeep with the flag, we drove back across the field and I ran into our base to win the game, 3-2. The whole round took about 20 seconds.
I had never captured the flag before. Never even come close. And because this fellow had a sense of teamwork, and was willing to drive the car so that I could score the win, I had a chance to do something that otherwise would probably have eluded me for who knows how long. It was very kind, and I really appreciated it. He was perfectly capable of scoring those wins without me, as he had shown in the prior, chaotic game of seven-against-three, but he was happy to help me do something I couldn't have done alone.
"Great job, Doompickle," he said, as I signed out with my own thanks.
It was just a fictional game, but it was real kindness. And it was a lesson for me about how a little kindness can make such a difference. In a competitive, impersonal game of violence and conquest, a small gesture of kindness transformed the entire experience into something real.
Posted by Albatross at March 16, 2006 2:18 PM | TrackBack