15 June 2010

Co-op or competitive?

Back in the day, competitive meant playing against other people. It meant 1 VS anyone else. Team play meant competitive play in a cooperative environment. You don't play a team game alone. However, it looks like game playing itself has come down to this.
Players do not see themselves as part of a team. They do not control themselves as part of a team, of a greater whole. You watch those people play online and you see them just shooting, regardless of the consequenses because alls that matters to them is whether they, personally, get more or less points. What happened to the team game? What happened to sacrifice and honour?

Did the lack of team play on console over the last few years do this? Or maybe the current trend towards self-glorification? Honestly, it's probably neither and both a the same time. Humans have, as a society during my lifetime, become much more self-obsessed and self-indulgent... they believe that they are more important than other people and so there are corollary effects on how we perceive ourselves both in-game and in real life. It's a never-ending feedback effect that results in people that experience life in a way that is alien to most older people: they are part of a team but soley responsible.... they are not co-operating but innovating. You look at corporate CVs and you see the result of this social experimenteering... none of it is real and yet it all is. But how do you tell the difference?

Every single thing is real and yet it is not the exact experience of reality. *I* am responsible for X and yet, unknown to you, several dozen people were also responsible for X taking shape. It's ego... it's personality.... it's everything and nothing all combined to form a globulous whole that results in a non-definition. I worked in a team that resulted in my own personal goal....

Personally, i hope we move away from this self-aggrandisement because ultimately we are not generally responsible.... nor are we capable. Society is a mass of links and co-operations against other cooperations.... 1 vs 1, or deathmatch.... that is individual skill. Anything else is co-operation. The sooner we acknowledge this, the sooner we see where our strengths lie.

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