New Games Journalism piece

Just posting this to my blog since lots of people did. Also, my blog for sex in games is preceding this one.
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I stood over the edge the ship's wing, watching as my opponent toppled 300 feet to the ground below.

"Honor before reason." I thought. "Honor before reason."


I enjoy first person shooters as much as the average person. I'm not hardcore about them, generally; one can only gun down so many terrorists or biogenetic mutants before his finger gets calloused from pulling the trigger. Consequently, I usually just try a shooter out for a week or so, play a bit of multiplayer, then shelve the game and go back to Virtua Fighter or Tekken. However, Battlefield 2142, the futuristic game in the Battlefield series, grabbed me and held me for months before I gave it up. Something about the game grabbed my attention, wouldn't let go, and I found myself engaged in nightly battles for control of Conquest points, a never-ending war that I was all too willing to partake in.

I speak with no false ego that I feel I was pretty good at the game. I was a passable tank-buster with the engineer class. I wasn't patient or steady enough to be a good sniper, but I could perform acts of sabotage and espionage with the best of them, once I unlocked the cloaking device for my recon class. I wasn't a fan of being a living gun emplacement with the Support class, so I found far more success controlling space and tight areas with combinations of a sentry gun and my shotgun. I was a decent squad leader, as I could follow orders without being so inflexible as to not realize when a better objective might present itself.

By far the role I served my team best with was as a combat medic. I prioritized reviving teammates over all else, to minimize ticket loss in game. Not to mention I gained plenty of kills with concentrated assault rifle fire. Even so, the assault class wasn't the real root of my fun.

Blade-to-blade, I was what in layman's terms could be considered "Unfuckwithable."

The usage of the knife in a game genre dominated by firearms is a very difficult task, and as such a very prestigious one. I'm not going to lie and say I could rush a squad of rifle-armed soldiers and come out alive. No, my skills with the blade were honed and recognized under a specific ruleset.

In Battlefield 2142, a players must choose a server to join before playing, that basically sets what the map-list and game parameters are. One day I was intrigued by the existence of 24/7 knife servers. I joined one, and found a new game experience. In these servers players fought with knives and defibrillators only, and I find it liberating in its confines. There was a whole different set of skills to to be had in knife combat. One had to have a subtle flick of the wrist to follow an opponent's lateral movement or an attempt at a diving slash. One needed to predict an opponent's movements, to know when to crouch to avoid counter-slashes and take out his knees. One had to know how to divide and confine a crowd so as to come out of multi-man battles alive.

I learned to master these techniques. I lived to hear the game's raking noise as my blade cut through armor, and see their collected dogtags on my screen. I ran headlong into groups of the enemy, and put them all down with subtle adjustments and quick slashes. Frequently I ended up on the top of the leaderboards of these knife servers, and with good reason. I was a machine.

The habits I gained from the time spent in these servers started leaking into my normals games, and it is through these lapses I found my most memorable experience. Normally in the game, when you see an enemy running at you with a knife, you pull out your gun and ventilate him for being foolish. Not for me. My instincts now were so ingrained that when I saw an opponent pull a blade, I drew mine in kind.

During the middle of one drawn out battle for control of a canal, I found myself and one other foe without our respective squads, with the only thing separating us time and about 30 meters of open ground. As we spotted each other, one of the two commanders saw fit to drop an orbital strike on our position. Me and my enemy were alike in two respects now. One, we were about to be dead anyway in about fifteen seconds. Two, we were both aching to use not our ammo supplies but our blades.

Our knives came out, and with the first rocket falling on our position, we sprinted to each other, and with blades flashing, matched our knowledge of one of the game's most underused skills.

I swung, overshot my mark, and cursed as I had to whirl around to face my opponent. My avatar screamed in pain as splash damage from a rocket took his health down. He was coming in fast, and I stepped back, making his counter-swing miss by millimeters. Two more rockets exploded to our flank. The damage was fleeting as we continued our dance. The environment was a choir, singing our praise. The resonant explosions of the artillery strike were the baritone, the screams of pain from our avatars the tenor, the swishing and metallic swiping of our knives the sweet soprano.

My knife found a home in my opponent's spine a beat later as he overshot a step and maneuvered around him. For a second I was sad, almost wanted to cry. Here was the death of an opponent that desired what I did; a little more sense in this chaotic world, a chance to prove himself, and a new set of dogtags to add to the collection. I stood over him in peace as one more rocket dropped on me, finishing off what was left of my health. I was serene.


Maybe two months after that, I was playing a heated game of Titan (a game mode wherein two teams attempt to destroy the enemy's titular giant airship), and after the enemy's shield had been brought down by repeated surface-to-air missiles, I was trying to take an escape pod up to the ship. The shot was good, for the most part, but I found my calculations were slightly off as I landed not on the broad back of the thing, but on the wing. As far as I knew, I was stranded, and was about to parachute off when one of the enemy, who must've seen me land, jumped onto the wing with me.

I was about to put a burst into him when I saw he had no weapon about but his knife. Again, any normal player would shoot the fool and punish him for thinking about grabbing dogtags, but by this point I've made it clear I'm not normal. My blade came out, and I met his advance in kind.

Rarely do moments like this happen in games. Here were the two of us, honorable warriors engaged in single combat, perched precariously on the wing of a ship surveying the world from sky. It couldn't have been more epic than if an orchestra had started up.

My opponent had done this before, and as we circled I admired his technique as he no doubt admired mine. We were predators, stalking, waiting, testing. A quick strike by me was met by a sidestep and return strike; any lesser player would have only been so much meat by now. We edged closer to the end of the wing, not noticing how close we were to mutual oblivion.

My knife bit flesh in a gambit; I rushed forward, braving his line of sight to make him miss his timing. His avatar collapsed, and; obeying the laws of gravity, fell to the ground below. Again I felt sadness. The warriors such as these, willing to set aside the vulgarity of firearms for a moment, were a rarity, and here the encounter was over as quickly as it began. I wished there'd been a button in the game to strike a salute; I would have sent my warrior brother off properly.



"Honor before reason." I thought. "Honor before reason."