Nothing infuriates me more than failure in a game thanks to another gamer’s total lack of cooperation.
Or to be more precise, when I die because XxXSniprnoobz420XxX over there didn’t bother to turn around when his motion sensor announced an enemy coming around the corner. Why are even the rudiments of teamwork so impossible so impossible for the general gaming population to grasp?
Most of us have been at the mercy of uncooperative teammates – a boss fight with an unruly party, a gunfight against the enemy team, or just trying to train enough marines to hold off a zergling rush. You look to your fellow gamers for aid requiring half a second of their attention, but they gleefully keep slamming themselves against the proverbial brick wall, all play snipers when you need front-line combatants, or hoard resources while the invasion bears down on the group. It almost feels like they’re out to hurt the team as a whole, ignoring everything beyond their own self-interest even in games where teamwork offers a measurable benefit.
No matter the situation, these dead weights find a way to hurt themselves and every other unfortunate meat bag cast with them by the Fates and the cruel mercies of the random number god.
I understand that humans are selfish beings. We ignore everything not “me” or “mine,” and even slapping us in the face with community problems that need addressing probably will not motivate us to help one another. Though perhaps being selfish isn’t the only cause of this problem: people are also extremely lazy, and I mean extremely lazy. Exhibit A: the United States, instead of encouraging kids to exercise and eat healthy, redefined the tomato paste in pizza to count as a vegetable!
Back on topic though, it is apparently too taxing to press an extra key-binding or to turn a joystick and press a controller button in order to help another player.
It’s not for lack of options that you see this “lone wolf” play style in team games. In most games, the player who hates everyone but himself has plenty of options: Free for All modes in shooters, questing instead of doing dungeons for MMORPGS, and the versus AI mode for RTS games. I beg you, lone wolves of the gaming world, please pack up your selfish and lazy selves and move the three feet to those modes, where you can do anything you want to anyone you want, and meet only praise.
Want to shoot any other player that you see? That’s a good thing in Free for All. Don’t want to have to heal anyone but yourself? Quests don’t usually involve anyone but your lonely self wandering the vast wilderness of your favorite MMORPG. Tired of stupid teammates demanding resources or saying you shouldn’t be spawning nothing but overlords? Go play against the AI where you will never hear another word from your teammate ever again.
I am not a particularly angry person, I don’t get into many disputes, and I do not partake of this “rage-ing” often spoken of on the internet. But when I see a gamers in a team or objective setting, someone who chose to be there, ignoring the plight of their teammates or too busy shouting homophobic slurs to be bothered with standing next to a flag, I may or not want to join Professor Farnsworth from Futurama.
I might be placing too much blame on the human factor. Perhaps the games of the past have steered the path of gaming that a large portion of us just don’t see the point in teamwork. The FPS genre certainly merits some blame, as the Call of Duty franchise, one of the most successful in the genre, is a major source of frustration on the issue.
Compare with the real-time strategy genre, where teamwork is totally necessary to win, and hardcore gamers and professionals train together for extended periods of time to cover for each other’s faults.
You know what? I figured it out. The one source of all my aches and woes about the lack of cooperation: Jenga. The accursed tower block game encourages everyone who plays it to care only for their own survival and to wish nothing but failure upon every other player.
If only Jenga , or maybe Operation or Parcheesi, had only encouraged us to work together, who knows what kind of world we would be living in? Curse you, family board games of our past! Curse you for making us all selfish and impossible teammates.