Out of interest, I played some Counter-Strike 1.6 this evening, just to get a little experience of online play, measure myself against actual humans and so on. I certainly wasn’t as appalling as I’d anticipated, and managed to at least maintain a 1:1 kills to deaths ratio. Not setting the world on fire, but not getting utterly schooled either.

I found the whole thing weirdly impersonal without voice, though. The opposition might as well have been bots for all the difference it made. That said, knowing they were real people, and then following them as we all left our starting area (CT spawn) felt oddly sweet… like I was a small animal who had had those particular armed men imprinted on me as my mother. I toddled along after them, deeply trusting.

Then one of them threw a flash-bang without warning, blinded me, and left me to die in the dust.

Thanks, mom.

I played through the Call of Duty: World at War demo today because I was interested in seeing what the Call of Duty thing was all about (I’ve never played any of the games). There was a lot to be interested in in the short sequence I played through, but the most striking thing was how blurry and dirty and smoky and generally hard to see everything was. I think I spent about 50% of my playing time literally not being able to see what I was doing.

Now, that’s ‘just’ realism of course – the designers are trying to create the disorientation of a real battle and so forth. They seem to have done a good job of that: I was very disorientated. I’m not convinced I’d want to spend an entire game feeling that way, but for the brief sequence it did make me feel interested the strangeness of a war setting.

The other thing it made me think about, which I find more interesting, is just how tidy and spic and span the world of Counter-Strike is. It’s only on playing a game full of grit and smoke that I can see that the world of de_dust2 and so on is really extraordinarily clear. You get shot, well then you’re shot and your health goes down. Your vision doesn’t blur or turn red. There are smoke grenades, but they’re not especially worrying and it’s not like you spend any appreciable time lost in the smoke. Likewise explosions, bullet-strikes, and so on nearby and so on are presented by the game engine as visually inconsequential.

The soldier’s path lies through the filthy trenches with tank shells and blood spatter, but the terrorists and the counter-terrorists run around in bright day-light, fine weather, and immaculately swept courtyards.

I played some Counter-Strike: Source with a bunch of nice people last night. It was a real tale of two halves as far as I’m concerned.

At the start of play, I was on a random team and essentially played without much interaction with my teammates. As such, I spent a fair bit of time running around the map (de_dust2, for what it’s worth) and getting shot. I tended to die because I just stood it awkward and probably stupid positions. In a nutshell, I just didn’t know where to put my virtual feet so that I’d have a chance.

Eventually, we formed into teams such that I was physically co-located with two people from my team, with the third on Skype. As such, we were able to communicate about what we were seeing, where we were, and what we were planning to do next. This is all fairly obviously the stuff of good old team-work, but I was most interested by how the core effect, for me, was to change the space I felt I existed in. Specifically, because I had the knowledge of the other players’ locations, status, and plans fed to me, the space of the map changed fundamentally into something comprehensible.

This is the aspect of playing with other humans that I find so valuable. I could really care less if I’m shooting a terrorist played by my friend or an AI, but the radically different “socio-spatial” nature of playing on the same team as people I know is a fascinating and liberating experience.