But I didn't mind being killed by Dr Blight, because he had a cool name.

A trend I’ve noticed in online gaming lately — well, I say “lately” though it’s been vexing me for a number of years now — is the apparent obsession of people in team-based games to either jump into a game with a host of strangers and expect a quick, painless, easy victory, or jump ship and frenziedly search for another — supposedly superior — team to integrate with, hoping for a quicker victory. This is evident both in MMORPGs such as World of Warcraft, where dungeons such as the Oculus were so reviled for the effort involved and the potential failure that many people would leave immediately upon entering, and many would refuse entrance to a raid group for those who could not prove that they’ve completed it prior, in fear of “noobs” bringing their team down. It’s also an unfortunate inevitability in other online team-based games, such as the one I’ve picked up again recently after a few years of inactivity, Halo 3.

Now, let me step back a moment and express my general distaste for being thrust into a team consisting of mouth-breathers who probably don’t even know which way up to hold the controller; lament as I may at games where I scored the highest in the entire round and yet my team still lost, if there’s one principle I’ll stick to — largely due to the experience point penalty accrued as a result, which would hinder my progress through the game’s military-style ranks — it’s that I stay to the bitter end, even when left in a short-handed team because three of them ran for the hills when the tables turned, and the last aside from myself resorted to that most heinous act of team-killing, presumably in the name of ill-gotten “fun”. In a fairly childish and unsportsmanlike way, I shot him in the back twice as retribution before spending the rest of the round hiding, and watching my “teammate” repeatedly hunted and slaughtered by the dominant group.

Nonetheless, my ire still holds relative validity in my mind: By simply fleeing the game, these people are not only throwing away a potential victory — I’ve seen plenty of “turnabout” games where the tables turn at the last minute, to provide a satisfying and crushing victory to the underdog — but they’re forsaking the rest of their team, forcing the remaining members to either lope on like a three-legged dog, or attempt to justify the “two wrongs make a right” philosophy and follow their lead, further augmenting the problem. I remember lamenting a similar issue a while ago with online game servers which provide numerous versions of the same world to balance the player-base; rather than accepting the natural balance and helping to keep things steady, players have a disturbing tendency to force their way into the most over-populated and over-crowded worlds, even going so far as to abandon the emptier, dying servers in lieu of something more populace, thus exacerbating the reason they left in the first place!

Is it simply human nature to constantly try to impel ourselves into “easy win” situations and the “best” groups, no expense too great in the quest to be with the “best” — even if they themselves could not adequately be judged as such under this banner — or is this yet another case of online gaming, with all the anonymity it entails, bringing out the literal worst in everyone, turning normally-reasonable people into a pack of drooling, rabid animals?

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