Some time last year a plumber came to fix a radiator in my flat.
He was a guy in his 60s, and on learning I worked in video games, started telling me about how he played Call of Duty on the PlayStation.
He said he had some kind of modded controller that helped him aim.
As someone who enjoyed playing competitive shooters a lot when I was in high school, I found this a slightly disturbing admission, but I tried not to show it and instead nodded politely and let him go about his job.
He must have sensed something was wrong though. I’m not sure if it came from me or if he recognised it in himself as he made the admission out loud. But he started following it up with justifications: “It only helps me a bit, just with aiming”, “some of these guys are really good”, “I bet lots of them are doing it”.
I kept nodding politely. I still didn’t like the idea, but I did start to empathise with him. He was old, and he liked playing video games. That’s kind of cool isn’t it? I never asked why he enjoyed played games, or what they meant to him. But I wouldn’t have asked those questions of a younger person. I think he said he played in a squad with his friends. It’s a shame his enjoyment came at the expense of a fair game for other players.
I played Call of Duty on my PlayStation 3 pretty much every day after school between 2007 and 2012. At first it was Call of Duty 4, then later it was Modern Warfare 2 (I wasn’t into the Black Ops games). On my birthday I got all my friends to bring their consoles and had a LAN party in my living room.
Sometimes in Modern Warfare 2 I used a strategy called Noob Tubing.
The game had a very simple character creator that let you choose two weapons and three 'perks' for you to play with. If you combined the perks that gave you increased explosion damage and allowed you to pick up ammo off the ground, you could essentially have an infinite ammo grenade launcher. Many people online wanted this strategy removed from the game. Getting blown up from behind a corner by someone you couldn’t see doesn’t give you much opportunity to respond or counter attack. Still, I did it. It was fun. Although it did sometimes feel bad when people got on their mic and raged about the Noob Tuber in the lobby.
But it was fair! I was using the same perks everyone else had access to. They were part of the game. And it wasn’t like I was using glitches or mods or going out of bounds, all of which you could easily learn from YouTube. I had a strong sense of fairness. I had a line, and this did not cross it.
Some people called it cheating anyway.
But what’s the point of playing an online competitive shooter? To see who’s best? Best at what, playing the game? What is the game?
At some point I realised some of my friends who played were limiting themselves to only a subset of what was available in the game, only certain guns and perks, out of some kind of sense of honour. They didn’t want to use strategies they thought were ‘cheap’ and they looked down on people who did.
I didn’t ask them what they enjoyed about playing games and they didn’t ask me. But we both knew what was fair.
Different players in the same game.
Playing different games.