XBox Live
"You're a camping faggot, Dad!"
I don’t have quite as strong an opinion about music, but video games? Man, I could write a song about what’s been going on with video games for the past decade or so, no sweat – the only thing holding me back is my inability to rhyme the whole thing and think up cryptic metaphors.
I grew up playing Goldeneye 64, which revolutionized console multiplayer gaming by making it quick and easy for four friends to get together, huddle around a TV, and have an epic movie quality shootout. Goldeneye took wanton murder, previously only the preferred pastime of the Manson Family and various pro athletes, and made it a cheap and harmless hobby for millions of people.
What was great about this system was that it made video games, which until then had been an activity primarily directed at pathetic, antisocial nerds, and made it an activity that could be enjoyed by pathetic, social nerds, the likes of whom would invite all their friends over to play industry standards like Perfect Dark, Halo, or Super Smash Brothers. All you needed to throw a successful party was one copy of the game in question, four controllers, and one or more friends who lived nearby. Still, this was difficult for me during elementary school.
As time went by, though, things couldn’t stay the same. The Internet came to console gaming in a big way, with XBox Live making it possible to hook your console up to an international network and play against other Asperger’s sufferers in other mother’s basements around the world. Within a matter of years, gaming had gone from a social phenomenon back to people sitting alone in the dark staring at a screen, which is pretty much one step above pornography.
What’s really terrible about online console gaming, though, is that it’s kneecapped the fun of split screen multiplayer. XBox Live killed the Goldeneye star, you could say. Now that online gaming is so big, many developers have started releasing games that only support two player split screen instead of four – some games don’t allow split screen multiplayer at all. Yes, that’s right – if you and your friends want to play Crackdown 2, you need four XBoxes and four copies of the game, not to mention four XBox live subscriptions.
Almost all of the games I play on my XBox are single player only. I never bought an XBox live subscription and when I do play a game with a multiplayer option, I leave it alone on the main menu to gather dust. I do this for two reasons:
1) I don’t want to play ball with the game developers and Microsoft, because the game is basically Rape Ball, and they invented all the rules and created an environment in which it was acceptable to win at the game every time. If in 1999 you released a game that didn’t let four friends plonk down in front of one TV and play together, it was fucking broken, and that was that. Now, if I want to play a game with friends, I’m expected to buy a $60 a year XBox live subscription – and that’s provided that they have XBoxes and copies of the game too.
2) XBox Live has a near intergalactic reputation for being a haven for angry prepubescent middle schoolers with all the decorum of angry, prepubescent middle schoolers. Not only are they better at every game than you are, but they’ll let you know it, squealing insults over voice chat and calling you a faggot in spite of the fact that their user name is JUSTINBEIBER9.
I’m intentionally staying in the past – sort of like the guy who refuses to get a cell phone, except I’m not going bald and driving a convertible Mustang. However, the future catches up with all of us, whether we like it or not, and it’s happened to me too.
My new roommates are all XBox owners, and devotees of the religion known as Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2, a game so fast paced and hyperactive that just watching it puts you at risk of contracting ADHD. While the most popular game mode is a team deathmatch, the title is sort of a misnomer, because in Modern Warfare 2 you don’t so much have a team as a bunch of people who aren’t trying to kill you. Any sort of actual teamplay is nonexistent – everyone charges into the breach independent of one another, desperate to score as many kills as they can in hopes of gaining the most points and bolstering their kill to death ratio (the number of people they kill compared to the number of times they die, which is ranked on the international leaderboards and is just as big a chick magnet as this blog is for me).
My roommates want me to jump headfirst into this violent, angry, hyperactive mosh pit, just like they did, and to entice me they’ve gone so far as to buy me a month’s subscription to XBox Live. I was reluctant at first, but I decided to humor them – these are the same people who introduced me to drinking, and that’s been working out pretty well for me so far.
I’ve been playing for a few days, and I’m slowly but surely mastering the breakneck pace of Modern Warfare 2. It’s not enjoyable yet to repeatedly spawn and be killed by an 11-year-old potty mouth sharpshooter from the other side of the map, but I’m pushing through it because we’ve got a 62-inch TV.
What’s great about this TV isn’t just that it’s absolutely gigantic, but that it’s possible to divide (or, I don’t know split) the screen down the middle and do two different things at once – you can watch two different channels, or watch a DVD and play an XBox game, or have two XBoxes going at once. Using this last option, we’ve been able to huddle together in front of the same TV and fight together. When my other two roommates are playing from their rooms only a few feet away and we’re all screaming abuse at each other, it starts to remind me a little of my Goldeneye days.
So I guess I’m willing to play ball with Microsoft when I’m able to play at least a little bit on my terms – a task that required me to find not only three friends with XBoxes and copies of Modern Warfare 2, but also a gigantic TV and a house to keep it all in. It might be more expensive in the long run, but I tell you, I did miss that old-timey ultraviolence.
Truman Capps knew that if he had his chance that he could make those people dance.