Pwn Thugs in Harmony

Despite being an avid gamer myself, I find that certain aspects of the First-Person Shooter culture (e.g. Halo, Call of Duty, etc.) violently clash with my own sensibilities, like its wanton rampage on the English sentence. Still, curiosity overcame me this summer; I tried my hand at the multiplayer mode on one of the PS3's two or three good games, Resistance: Fall of Man.

Resistance has earned recent notoriety because The Church of England has actually demanded it be pulled off retail shelves. It cites one of the levels, in which you are to blast alien uglies in a realistic representation of Manchester Cathedral, as a "desecration of the Church" without Sony seeking any permission to portray the building in such a way.

(I should point out that the game carries additional insensitivities toward English culture, like referring to London's underground transit system as "The Subway").

Floored by Resistance's one-player mode, blasphemy or no, I thought I'd volunteer myself as a moving target for its thousands of practiced online warriors. I'll admit that there was something intimidating about the leap into such an ultra-competitive community. I mean, these are people who not only play video games, but who also struggle to prove something by them. I was inclined to do some homework, first.

Every online game has its own unwritten honor code, and to familiarize myself thus, I perused the enlightened discourses of Resistance's forums. It was all so I would not be recognized as a "rocket whore" or "tagtard", which, believe me, would not have been the first time.

In an FPS, you can never underestimate the importance of a cool profile name. Mine is Macdeth ("You Were Killed by Macdeth!" or, "You Killed Macdeth!") but to better fit in with the typical Resistance gamer, I'm considering a change to either Posthaste Killah or pimpNcircumstanz.

My experience so far is pretty superficial, especially since I'm not playing a mic headset to chat on, and therefore I'm deprived of communication with fellow players. That doesn't bother me. For the same reason it doesn't bother me that I can't hear other drivers on the highway. And even then, a great deal of those people are at least old enough to drive.

Like most good online shooters, Resistance has a Matchmaking function, which is to say that it makes some proclaimed effort of grouping you with competitors of equal skill. Let me just say that early on, its accuracy left much to be desired. It was a trifle disconcerting to be the lone "Private" competing against 35 "Four-Star Generals" and "Supreme Commanders" It was akin to hazing, but I was beginning to see the fun of this, especially should I figure out where the hell the grenades are on the maps.

Which helped. I started playing about five or six matches a night, eventually ranking in the middle of the pack or slightly higher each time. The other night I finally won a free-for-all of 11, and I punched the air like Tiger Woods winning his first Masters. It was time to re-evaluate. I had just referred to the bottom finishers as n00bs, and it was time to rethink this new obsession.