Getting out of the game.

It’s that time of year again. The time when I leave gaming and the family behind for the weekend and head off to the green slopes of a small mountain boarding centre near Hereford. The event? The annual 22nd Global Gaming Clan meet part IV: The Search for Carlsberg!

I first became serious (or perhaps I should more accurately say dedicated) to online gaming around 3 or 4 years ago. I had at that time acquired, for the first time in many years, a rather shiny and supercharged new gaming PC.


The PC purchase had been ‘inspired’ by the imminent release of Doom 3 which had been branded in my mind as an absolute must have because of my love for its prequels. Needless to say my high hopes were dashed a fair bit when I eventually did play the game, but the Half Life 2 release around the same time ensured that the new PC didn’t go to waste.

Much like its excellent predecessor I played Half Life 2 to death and loved every fragging minute. But once it had offered all it could, I nervously ventured online to play Half Life 2: Deathmatch. This was in hindsight an action that would very much have a large impact on my life.

My first steps in the online world of HL2DM were not pretty. Every time I spawned, I died before I could really work out what the heck was going on and I was constantly the victim of more insults than I care to recall. ‘Noob’ was certainly the most common but it usually came after a harsher expletive!

For a while I gave up, I hadn’t enjoyed my online experience that much after all, but my love of the Half Life world eventually drew me back a few weeks later. This time though, I vowed to do things differently.

Before I went back to play, I ventured over to Valve’s very own Steam forums (itself not always the friendliest of places), and started asking questions about the game. HL2DM has never been the most popular of online pursuits (and certainly the game and community can be fairly regarded as rather niche, even back then), but I found a few friendly souls, one of whom pointed me in the direction of 22g.

22g as it turned out was a clan who primarily played HL2DM but did not play the game in a competitive (i.e.: league) manner. That’s not to say they didn’t have good players, far from it, but they were not actually bothered about how good or bad your game was. Far more important to them was your attitude and having a laugh together. Finally it seemed, I had found a place I was safe.

And safe I was. I quickly became a regular on the servers and forums and discovered to my delight that the regulars there enjoyed all forms of video games and not just HL2DM. The clan was strictly invite only so I never asked about joining although I’d be fibbing if I said I hadn’t wanted to. Not long later, my game improved enough so I could hold my own a bit on the servers and I was also lucky enough to be invited into the clan.

From that point in time I eventually graduated from ‘stupid noob’ to ‘f#*king hacker’ and played the game almost non-stop bar the inevitable need for sleep. I wrote guides on the game and helped out other players, always remembering how bad my first experience online was. I dreamt about the map layouts in my sleep. I daydreamed at work about new ways to take my opponents down. But most importantly, I made new friends.

The funny thing with online game play is that you never really know who you’re talking too. We all create our online name/persona, wear proudly our affiliation tags and quite often behave in a manner which does not reflect how we are outside of this specialist virtual world.

I’ve often wondered if this change is brought about by the fact you are around fellow enthusiasts. Perhaps here, around ‘our own’ so to speak, is where we can be our natural selves, where our passion for games doesn’t have to be hidden for fear of being labelled a geek or simply not being taken seriously at work. In this environment we can let it all out with people who understand, with people who care as much as we do.

Of course online gaming also brings out peoples worst sides to, the insults that are free (mostly) from recrimination, the one-up-manships (or should that be 1 up’s!) that you couldn’t possibly use in most areas of your offline life. Specifically, it’s pretty easy to be an arse if you choose too with little come back.

You are after all just this digital persona, someone that can act how they please with little affect on anything that’ll land you in serious trouble; something that can be changed and somewhere you can come back anew.

And it’s here (finally!) where we come full circle to the point of this post.

Because tomorrow, for my 3rd time, I’m off to actually meet my gaming comrades. And I don’t just mean in Second Life! We are actually meeting in the flesh; flesh which not long after will be hurtling down Herefords finest grass hills on little more than a piece of wood with wheels on. This time though it’ll hurt when we fall, we won’t just feel a small electrically powered rumble, screw up our multiplier and lose a tiny bit off our health bar.

And what a motley crew we’ll be. Because when you’re online, you don’t see the person – you see the persona. And what shocked me when I did this meet the first time was just how utterly diverse the whole group is.

The age range alone is fairly large; our backgrounds all for the most part completely different; personality, looks, size, views – everything. This is a group of people that you realise would never normally be put together because they are just so damn different.

And that is what makes this meet so bloody great! I couldn’t even begin to imagine meeting these people through any other means, that’s not to insult in any way who they are but just to re-emphasise how different we all are. And yet meeting with these people, my good friends, is one of the highlights of my year.

Enjoy your gaming, be passionate about it (but be nice to) and get involved. There’s so much more to it than meets the eye. But be bold too. If your part of a clan, go meet them. A group of enthusiasts? Get together.

Because sometimes the best thing you’ll ever do in this hobby is get out of the game.

Happy Fragging,
[22g] Nana
http://www.22g.co.uk/forum/