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| This is a view of the console that logs game play events as well as some talking (although it selects only certain parts to include, not really sure why it does that). it is also where you input commands concerning the game. |
Cyberculture Report
Counter Strike 1.6 came out in 1999 and is an online multiplayer first person shooter, that was originally developed as a mod of Half Life. It is offered online through a platform called Steam that manages hundreds of games and monitors them all for authenticity of both game and gameplay (ensuring nobody is hacking) and costs $10. Once you purchase the game you click install and your ready to go. First you have to pick your name or you will be stuck with the default “Player” which is no way to construct your online identity. Many players are in clans and will display a clan tag before their name such as “sS-|” (which stands for silent soldiers) and others will have text based pictures such as “<(‘.’<)” (kirby). When I first started playing I had no clan to be a part of so i was simply “Baked_face_Mike”, although now i have started a “clan” of sorts with some friends and have added my clan tag, “4L^” which stands for team four loko; classy, i know.
Once you have your name picked out your ready to start playing the game and creating your virtual identity in a community. Counter Strike consists of 2 minute rounds in which the terrorists will try to plant a bomb while the counter terrorists try to stop them, what this means is that discussions through the games chat system typically take place when your dead waiting for the next round (watch the video to get an idea about the game play, you can also see some of the conversations that take place typically. the green font means that somebody is an admin which i'll explain later). This simple fact shapes the way that people interact with each other and limits the discussion to game play related conversations. That’s not to say that conversations unrelated to the game don’t happen, but rather that they are more rare.
When i first started playing Counter Strike I didn’t take part in any of the online discussion that was happening, mainly since i was always dying and didn’t really have much to say other than “damn”. What I did do though was see what other people were talking about and I noticed that there was a sort of unwritten hierarchy. The best players would talk significantly more than the bad players, and the players that were on the server consistently also talked. I say hierarchy because as with any competitive game that is played against people you can’t physically see, everyone likes to be a jerk. So when the bad players would try to say something, whether it related to the game and was valid or it was unrelated, the better players tend to resort to name calling and talking smack. One situation that repeatedly comes up goes a little something like this: someone dies and types in a derivation of “wtf how did you kill me” to which the person that killed them responds “because your a f**king retarded noob”. As you can see its a very civilized response, not to mention informative.
However, there is more civilized discussion that does go on, that takes place when the top players, clan members, and the people who frequent the same servers talk. The top players often have conversations pertaining to the game, but they are more intelligent than the situation i provided above (the top players and clan members are typically the same, so I will refer to them as the top players). The top players will typically greet everyone they know when they join a server, and their friends will respond back to them and strike up a little conversation, such how are or whats up. people answer pretty honestly and tell you things about their life that they need not share. The anonymity of the Internet allows for people to be honest about what/how they are doing because there is nobody to impress, and nobody really seems to care what other people think about them. I’ve seen them talk about personal problems to people they’ve never met before and carry on brief discussions in a way you would never see on facebook or other social networking sites. Unfortunately getting screen caps of this is very difficult since the game is in real time, not static like a discussion board, and only about 6 lines of text are allowed to be displayed so things get bumped off the screen before i can take a screen cap. One interesting thing i discovered while playing was an online Counter Strike relationship (I do have a screen cap for this one but its not really workin in google docs). hMni PwnAlone! <3 Superjb0x! and hMni Superjb0x <3 PwnAlone! are a guy and a girl who are dating in real life and decided to declare their undying love for each other on Counter Strike. PwnAlone! is the man, as well as an admin and will stick up for his girlfriend if people start bad mouthing her, to the extent that he will kick them from the server. While this may seem like an abuse of administrative power, kicking people is not the same as banning them and they can immediately rejoin.
Which brings us to how the servers are run and who’s in charge of them. As i mentioned earlier there are administrators that run the servers which are usually their members of the clan hosting the server, although anyone can become an admin by donating $5 to the clan. There are no set number of admins a server can have, it could have a hundred or just one, but there is always someone who’s in charge. To ensure that nobody is hacking and that people are playing the game properly the admins are required by their clan to spend a certain amount of time, this is different clan to clan, monitoring the servers and keeping them clean. Failure to spend your allotted time monitoring the servers and your administrator privileges will be revoked. This allows for rules to be enforced upon the community and for enjoyable game play.
The avatars for the game are based off of real live terrorist and counter-terrorist groups. There are various terrorist organizations from the middle east and from Canada, as well as counter terrorist teams from France and the US, although picking a character model has absolutely no bearing on the game play what so ever. The only difference between them is how they looks, for example there is arctic camouflage as well and jungle and desert camouflages. However there are certain players that consistently pick the same character model and you begin to associate it with them. One of the players I know is 5hroom, I know him in real life and can say that his online persona hardly differs from his actual persona in real life. He is one of the best players on the servers that I frequented during this project and has a standing rapport with most of the administrators. During in game discussion we will carry on more lengthy conversations than most people ranging anywhere from what is going on in our lives, to game strategy. This is a unique relationship on Counter Strike, as most people have never met in real life and only know each other through their online interactions. Another person is sS-| JarG (you can see him in the screen cap above. He changes his name around sometimes but it always centers on JarG), he is someone that I met through the game and have no connection to him in real life. JarG has been player Counter Strike for many years and is an administrator on the servers that I most frequently play. As an admin he is very proactive and spends a large portion of time playing Counter Strike and monitoring the servers for hackers. We initially began talking when he started to make fun of my name and essentially troll me for the better part of a game. I rolled with his punches so to speak and as a result we became friends and commonly great each other and have brief discussions. Most of these discussions are commentary on the game and do not extend beyond the realm of Counter Strike. Another player I met is $uperpuma, when I initially met him he was just another player on another server, but he then joined the AIC clan (americas illest crew) and became an admin. We don't talk a whole lot throughout the game, but we have a running joke about constantly breaking even in the kill death ratio (how many kills you have vs how many deaths) and are always congratulating each other on achieving mediocrity. Although recently I have seem him talking to other clan members that he knows well and have began to form an actual relationship that goes beyond commenting on our averageness.
Discussion of game play demands that you have a certain literacy to be able to understand what people are talking about. The most commonly used phrases are abbreviated and so often used that if you do not know what the mean then you will have to ask since everyone is literate in these terms. First are the terms of hacking, or names that are used to define what type of hack the alleged hacker is using. Wall hacking is perhaps the most common hack in Counter Strike, it allows the player to see through walls, tipping them off to an opponents whereabouts. This is especially useful since some walls can be shot through and the hacker is able to shoot you without you being able to tell where he is. The second most popular is aimbottting which is usually called aiming for short. This hack directs the players bullets towards their opponents head regardless of where they are actually aiming, giving them god like accuracy. Then there are some of the usual computer terms such as: owned or pwnd, hs or headshot, noob, ns or nice shot, and nt or nice try. Most of these are pretty self explanatory except for pwn which is just another way of saying owned which denotes that you killed the other player very easily. These are terms that commonly come up in online gaming and aren't particular to Counter Strike, however terms like: nade spamming, flashed, team flashed, and awped are more exclusive to Counter Strike. Nade spamming is when you stay in the buy zone and continually buy grenades and throw them. This can be advantageous on some maps but is usually just annoying and will result in an admin kicking you from the game. Getting “flashed” is when somebody throws a flashbang grenade and you are blinded by it, this turns your screen white for 3 seconds then slowly fades back to the game. Team flashing is when your team does this to you and is typically followed by everyone on the team getting angry at the person who flashed the entire team. Awped is a totally unique term to Counter Strike it refers to a particular gun, the AWP, which is a high powered sniper rifle that kills you in one shot. The term awped means that you got shot with the gun and had no fighting chance as it has a greater range and does greater damage than any other gun.
Outside of the actual “literacy” involved in discussing the game, there is a literacy in learning the game. You have to become comfortable with using the wasd layout and a mouse to aim. The wasd set up is used in most computer based video games and uses the keys w, a, s and d to direct your characters motion forward backward and side to side. Other buttons are utilized to switch weapons, jump, crouch, walk, etc. and are also a pretty standard throughout computer based video games. Where Counter Strike introduces a new type of literacy is with the console. Since Counter Strike was created as a mod it has a console button, the ` button, that brings up the interactive console. From here you can control various aspects of the game such as frame rate, heads up display option, and a multitude of various factors that allow you to run the game to your exact specifications. Certain alterations I have made in mine are increasing the frame rate so that the game runs smoother, I added a center of the screen id tag that shows me the players name and health as well as what team they are on, and a fast switch that allows for quicker weapon switching among other small tweaks. This allows you to customize the game play and control how you view the game, the more interactive with the console you are, the more you can enjoy your game.
I spent a lot of time playing Counter Strike this semester and feel like I really had a chance to get in depth with the community. However what I found was that there was little discussion going on in the actual game, and what discussion did come up it was incredibly had to capture since the game is in real time, not static like a discussion board, and therefore capturing the discussions was near impossible. What I did notice though is that most of the discussions were akin to those I have experienced in other online FPS games, lots of trash talking, and not a lot of real communication. Granted it isn't exactly the place to go on and discuss your emotions and life, its a video game and the purpose is to kill other people so those discussions won't really be a part of the game. But what I was hoping to find was some sort of community that operated smoothly amid the perceived chaos of the game. This was readily apparent within the structures of the admins, and the unspoken hierarchy of noobs, frequent players, pros, and clan members. I was also shocked to see that some players have a great respect for others and will stand up for them as well as address them differently from other players, which greatly surprised me. Although I'm not sure why I am so surprised to find some order among the chaos, Counter Strike has been around for 12 years now which is more than enough time for an online community to become stable and for players to get past the trash talking and actually respect some of the other players.
