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Killing is fun; obscenities are doubly so
Do online video games make us rage-a-holic maniacs or simply entertained?
By Tyler Gaskill
I tried to rush into a room with my AK47, when my newbie teammate jumped in front of me. Instead of killing opposing team members, I killed my teammate, Newbie McNoob, by sending a bullet through the back of his brain.
Before I know it, the opposing team is on me like the Bush administration on terrorists — an all-too-typical online video game situation.
An eruption of curses spewed out of my mouth as I sat in front of my computer screen. That freaking moron got me killed in my first-person shooter! ’Cause every gamer knows it’s never your fault when you die. Another given for avid online game players is that everyone playing on the server — except you — is clearly a clueless “Noob”
I can’t let McNoob get away with this. I type him a message chalk full of language so colorful it would melt the innocence off a 5-year-old at Disneyland.
While typing this, a consistent assumption runs through my mind: all the players on the server are 28-year-old men living in their parents’ homes and getting yelled at by their moms to take out the garbage or get a job.
Why do video games bring out our ugliest sides? I honestly can’t recall any time in my non-virtual life when I let that kind of sentence escape from my inner monologue.
Suddenly, I was rapt in a back-and-forth with McNoob, each trying to out-do the other’s horrific trash talk.
I ask myself the question most college students ponder at some point: “Am I crazy?” Where did this alter ego come from?
The logical answer is that the safety of not being physically near the person I’m playing the game with frees me to speak my mind. It’s not my mind though, since in the non-binary world I never say these ugly comments, and I would rarely think them.
If that’s the case, I must be suffering from an alter ego — let’s call him Durden. Durden takes the reigns of my mind during my bloody online rampages and ignores my 23 years of trained social etiquette. Further, those “damned vida games” have to be infecting my mind with a blind rage and fueling Durden’s control over me.
There is an alternate possibility. Maybe, just maybe, I’m playing with the medium solely because it’s fun, and I can’t get away with it anywhere else. It’s similar to a child whose parents say, “Don’t watch rated-R movies.” What do they do? The child goes to their friend’s house and watches every “B” horror flick they can get their hands on.
Violent video games are not a release for a malevolent entity inside my mind, nor exacerbating any dark thoughts already present. They’re fun — nothing more.
Perhaps the PC police should try and recall when life wasn’t an agenda or a constant battle to tell people what they should do with their lives, and remember when they were curious and had fun.
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