Thursday 11 January, 2007

Okay so today I was playing NBA 2K7 and I started thinking about something as I was getting my ass handed to me. Why is it that in video games just as in real life when your playing a sport or any sort of multiplayer game people's demeanors change completely. For example with my friends and I, we play NBA 2K7 and Madden and when we play there's nothing but trashtalking coming from both sides, even the losing side. It's amazing to witness, but I have noticed this with almost everyone I know that plays video games or sports recreationally. Is it that nobody can stand losing or that we just want to show our friends that we are better than them at something, even if it is at something as dumb as a fake basketball game. We have to win and we have to win by a lot. Could it be our animalistic instincts coming out in us that one of us has to be the alpha male or female? And as we are winning do we have to rub it in our oppositions face? Well it could be the fact that I lost by 23 points, but I find that this competitiveness that comes out in us during games maybe not alarming but definitely something we should look at and see if it's really healthy to have. Especially if the competitiveness we experience in games starts to follow us into our daily lives when we are not playing. But this tangent is probably me just venting out my frustrations because I'm pissed I lost by 23 points.

I've always wondered if the trash talking, n00b calling and the like are part of a sort of unspoken set of rules in the games genre. Maybe you could think of it as an implied dynamic. I mean, take Unreal Tournament and the auto-taunts...even companies see it as an important part of the gameplay experience. Perhaps we like games because it gives us an excuse to vent the underlying animalistic competative instinct without social consequence? Sort of like using "I'm drunk" as a plausible explaination for why you're jazzercizing on the roof in spandex.