Retrospective Thinking

A long stretch of nothing today has got me considering last night's personalities encountered on Halo 3. A lot of these persons acted in a very precise manner. They expected everyone to work in a team, though not in the sense that you would in a game like Team Fortress. Especially since the mod in question was "Team Slayer", an objective where your only goal is to be the team with the highest amount of kills at the end (usually 50). "Team" here can be considered more closely linked to a militant "team", that effort where you move as one group and strike as one entity.

I encountered one man who claimed to be in the Army last night. Before hand, he engaged in a polite conversation, glad to have the day off to relax and play some games. Mid-game, he cheered on team mates, and helped others by actively backing them up and alerting people to an enemy's position.After the game, he greeted everyone with "Good Game", showing good sportsmanship during competition. He was the most polite person I met that night.

Flash forward a game or two, and people are screaming into the headset. The same type of casual conversation I just held is now frowned upon, in a sense, and attempted to be drowned out through someone's literal screams. People seem more focused on gameplay and competition than in a conversation.

It moved from people frowning on conversational aspects, to then ridicule about skill. These people blamed the lack of "team work" for losses, even though they did nothing to encourage a positive "team" atmosphere. Halo 3 is a military sci-fi FPS, and people attempt to play Team games as though they were channeling a captain in the Army Corps. If on a team with someone like this, they expected you to be as involved as they were in the game.

What kind of team is supposed to form when the only objective is death? Everyone plays the same role. There are some rules to follow: if everyone has died, hold back and wait for a team mate to continue a charge. That's common sense for Halo players. But rarely are you able to be synchronized closely enough with a stranger to be able to form a fully functional team. Skill certainly comes into play at higher levels of gameplay.

Team Fortress 2 is a game based specifically off of meeting strangers on a server, and being able to work as a fully functional unit to achieve a similar goal. The main difference here is that there are different classes that play different roles on the team. Thus people are able to jump into a role to perform. While some are focused on co-op efforts and others are purely individual, they work in sync to fulfill a similar goal. With Halo, its hard to have a "team" atmosphere outside of militant-cooperation, mainly due to the fact that there is no difference in character or role, only skill and understanding.

"Team" was referenced a couple of times yesterday. It is a fact that we were playing the mode "Team Slayer", yet rarely is there anything shared but the headcount at the end. There is a way to work as a team in a military shooter, and the only means of doing so is to follow a military strategy. This is something that is hard to follow for casual gaming. To recap, no mention of my gender or no single attack was made of anything about me EXCEPT for skill level. Skill and teamwork were the biggest criticisms.