Hey @onionsports, you know I’m perfectly capable of writing biting satire about myself, right? All you have to do is ask :p

— Chris Kluwe (@ChrisWarcraft) May 7, 2013

Ok, @onionsports. Here’s how it should have gone. Wall o’ text incoming. Also, naughty words. #braceyourselves

— Chris Kluwe (@ChrisWarcraft) May 7, 2013

**WARNING. THE FOLLOWING IS SATIRE. IF YOU DON’T UNDERSTAND THE INTERNET, LEAVE NOW**

— Chris Kluwe (@ChrisWarcraft) May 7, 2013

A day after being cut by the Minnesota Vikings, former punter Chris Kluwe penned an impassioned online screed

— Chris Kluwe (@ChrisWarcraft) May 7, 2013

chastising the entire state of Minnesota for not caring a single whit about his histrionic outbursts on basically anything he felt

— Chris Kluwe (@ChrisWarcraft) May 7, 2013

would make him somewhat relevant in the modern news cycle. “How dare you snot-felching turkeyshits ignore my desperate cries for attention,”

— Chris Kluwe (@ChrisWarcraft) May 7, 2013

Kluwe wrote, while smashing together multiple run on sentences about the plight of the not at all endangered American prairie dog.

— Chris Kluwe (@ChrisWarcraft) May 7, 2013

“I swear to raptor Jesus, if my name isn’t somewhere in the media or on the front page of Reddit in three fucking seconds, I’m going

— Chris Kluwe (@ChrisWarcraft) May 7, 2013

to light your mother’s nipple hairs on fire with her own explosive flatulence.” Kluwe then went on another four page rant about

— Chris Kluwe (@ChrisWarcraft) May 7, 2013

the dangers of poorly maintained water heaters, using such ludicrous phrases like “Satan’s vomiting crotchsphincter,” and

— Chris Kluwe (@ChrisWarcraft) May 7, 2013

“turgid camel cocks,” interspersed with punting stats that not one single person gives a solitary fuck about, and frankly, wishes

— Chris Kluwe (@ChrisWarcraft) May 7, 2013

didn’t exist. When asked for comment, multiple people who claimed they knew Chris Kluwe said, “Isn’t he that whiny dude with the stupid

— Chris Kluwe (@ChrisWarcraft) May 7, 2013

hair?” and, “What the fuck is a punter?” Kluwe’s mother reached out to the Onion and told them her son had died of dysentery twenty

— Chris Kluwe (@ChrisWarcraft) May 7, 2013

five years ago, and whoever claiming to be him now was undoubtedly “some turdgobbling famewhore.”

— Chris Kluwe (@ChrisWarcraft) May 7, 2013

**SATIRE OVER. YOU MAY NOW RETURN TO YOUR DAILY INTERNET**

— Chris Kluwe (@ChrisWarcraft) May 7, 2013

I still remember September 11, 2001.  When I first heard about the attacks, I was driving to a sporting goods store to pick up a new set of raquetball balls.  I don’t usually listen to music on the radio when I drive, preferring to stick to talk radio stations.  I can still remember the swelling anger inside as the news reporters detailed the carnage that happened in New York City.  That anger lingered with me for days, even weeks.  Every time I saw another news report or video, I wanted to hit something.  I was still not acclimated to the world yet, having only been home from a two year church service mission for less than a year.  My reaction was what I’d probably consider to be normal.

That was twelve years ago.  A lot has changed since then.  I finished school, I moved on with my career, and I got into video games.  I started bought my first game console my second year of college, a Playstation 2.  I played a lot of sports games.  Later, I traded that in for an Xbox console.  I started playing a lot of shooters after that.  Since then, I’ve played a lot of the big name game titles…Halo, Call of Duty, Mass Effect, Assassin’s Creed, Bioshock.  These are what the mainstream media terms “violent video games”.  They are all M-rated games, meant for adults.  They feature lots of shooting, stabbing, explosions, killing, etc.  One game even features a scene where you’re mowing down innocent civilians with assault rifles in an airport terminal.

I used to tell myself that video games haven’t had any real effect on me.  Studies have been done, albeit flawed ones, that claim that exposure to violent video games increases aggression in the gamers.  Mostly, I’ve dismissed those.  Typically, those studies have some ulterior motive behind them, usually political in nature.  But lately, I’ve really noticed that my reactions to news of violence is not what it used to be.  It may be game related, or it just may be the fact that I’m a decade older with more life experiences which add to my perspective.

Yesterday’s explosions near the finish line of the Boston Marathon didn’t really phase me.  I listened to the news and got the relevant details in the first half hour or so.  After that, the news just seemed to be repeating itself.  My twitter feed quickly filled up with posts of sympathies for those involved.   I couldn’t bring myself to post my own sympathies because, to be honest, I didn’t feel it.   The same day, at least 20 similar attacks happened in Iraq, killing nearly 40 people and injuring hundreds more.  Should I feel more sympathy for the 3 individuals in Boston than I should for the 40 in Iraq?  I’m no more personally connected to one than the other.  The news of violence in the world is no more real to me than the games on my television each night as I shoot virtual avatars.

Maybe it’s the world that has changed me, maybe it’s the video games.  Either way, if I’m honest, I can’t really say that the bomb blasts in Boston phased me at all.  It’s nothing like I felt twelve years ago as I heard news of the planes crashing into the World Trade Center towers.  Is that a bad thing?  I don’t know.  As our world gets more violent and our news media is inundated with 24/7 coverage of the violence, maybe becoming desensitized can be a good thing.  My reaction (or lack of one) to yesterday’s news let me just tune it out and continue with my work and life, and maybe that’s okay.

There have been a few articles in the last few days in gaming news about the game series Call of Duty and how it affected the FPS gaming population in terms of skill level and strategy.

Over at Destructoid, Jim Sterling references John Gibson (President of Tripwire Interactive, developers of Red Orchestra) and his comments that Call of Duty has ruined a generation of gamers.   His basis was that during the course of developing Red Orchestra, they brought in a bunch of hardcore Call of Duty gamers and asked them what features they liked and didn’t like in their game.  It turns out, the gamer just wanted everything to be like Call of Duty.  Sterling rightly points out that it was exactly what he should have expected them to say.   He points out that what Call of Duty really did, which is what has made it so popular, is to compress the skill gap between the best players and the new players.  By introducing more randomness to the game, such as where players spawn or what rewards they get, new players can jump into the game and not necessarily get completely dominated by people who have been playing the game series for years.

Ben Kuchera over at The PA Report argues that Call of Duty is making us dumb as gamers.   He posts a YouTube video of some commentary on a professional gaming match in the game Quake.  His points come down to how in previous generations of games, players would have to focus on controlling specific weapon spawns on a map and have to anticipate where their opponents were going to focus their efforts and how all that has been ruined by things like Call of Duty‘s leveling system, perks, loadouts and rewards.  He includes at the end of his rant, this gem: “Some people would argue that these games are twitch and not talent,” MLG CEO Sundance DiGiovanni told me as [he] reminisced about classic shooters, “but I’d argue that twitch is talent.”

While Call of Duty may have compressed the skill gap and changed the focus of gameplay by inserting more random elements, it doesn’t necessarily make it any less strategic – it just changes the focus of any strategy.  And I have to disagree on the statement that “twitch is talent.”  Twitch reflexes, while important in FPS gaming, is not the same as talent.  It is a part of talent, but not the complete definition.  Strategy and teamwork are a big part of talent.  I personally think that games like Call of Duty have shifted the focus a bit away from twitch reflexes alone and given room for strategy and teamwork to have a bigger effect.

With the core group of gamers that I’ve been playing shooters with online since about 2004, we can consistently jump into CoD games and pull off long winning streaks. By no means are we exceptional FPS players. Most of us are middle aged guys with careers and families that can only afford to game for 4-5 hours on the weekends.

With CoD, our focus is to limit the randomness that the game designers have put in the game.   We don’t rely solely on our twitch reflexes, because frankly, most of us are losing it.  We focus on staying together as a team and communicating effectively with each other.  We learn each other’s play styles so we can anticipate each other’s gameplay.  We focus on controlling where we will spawn if we die.  This means ensuring that our group is relatively close together on a map by drawing a figurative line across a map and keeping our team on one side of it and the opponents on the other. We have key role players – people who will lock down choke points on a map, covering them from a distance with heavy weapons (LMG, Sniper) in positions that give them strategic advantage when opponents come into their field of fire. We make sure we drop care packages in areas that we’ve secured so that opponents can’t easily steal them. We try and balance our loadouts so that we always have someone running Engineer to flip the packages if desired. We always have 2-3 people running killstreak rewards that help us expand the areas we can cover. This means using Sentry Guns, Guardians, ARGs…stuff that gets us more kills without risking our deaths.

We also adjust our play to our opponents tendencies. Typically random CoD players will run around either trying to quick scope with a sniper (not a great strategy, in my opinion) or choose weapons that are great in close quarters, fast reaction type situations (SMGs) — relying on their twitch reflexes.  We try to make our encounters happen at range, which gives us the advantage.  If there’s a choke point on the map that we’re fairly certain the other team is going to have to come through, we’ll choose to cover it from a distance instead of running up in their faces.  We see no reason to force encounters that put us on equal footing with our opponents and the only difference being twitch reflexes.  This leads to many, many complaints of “camping”.  While we don’t sit in one small room waiting for someone to walk by us (corner camping), and we don’t push and kill opponents immediately after they spawn (spawn camping), we will control our side of the map.  If the other team wants to rush into our field of fire (repeatedly), who are we to stop them?  Every now and then we will face opponents who actually are smart enough to try and counter our strategy, but more often than not, we just win game after game by letting the other team throw themselves into our bullets.

Does that mean we have no skill?  Because we don’t have great twitch reflexes and instead rely on teamwork and communication?  Hardly.   Quite the opposite in fact.  To quote the former New York Jets football coach, Herm Edwards, “You play to win the game.”  We pick the best strategy that fits our skill set.  Yes, Call of Duty is a game that enables us to leverage our skills over other people’s twitch reflexes, and there’s nothing wrong with that.

This is a great video.  Coding is more than just knowing the syntax of a programming language.  It’s about solving problems. It’s about taking a problem and conceptualizing it into smaller, solvable parts.   I got my own start into programming when I was in 5th grade.  I saw the elementary school was throwing out old books.  The books looked in great shape.  I saw one in the pile that caught my eye.  The teacher said I was welcome to take it.

I took the book home and began reading it.  Our home computer was an old MS DOS 5.0 machine, which came with BASIC included.  I started creating small programs, starting simply with stuff that wrote text to the screen.  After a while, I figured out how to ask for input, so that I could have my programs ask questions from the user.  Later I learned how to draw lines on the screen.  I ended up creating a small program that drew a series of lines on a screen in various colors so that the lines danced around the screen .  All that put me on the path to where I’m at today, an owner of a small software company.

Trash talk is an art form.  It’s more than just spewing out whatever racial epithets or derogatory statements that come to mind.   It’s something that takes having a vocabulary more advanced than a 5th grader.  It’s also something that many, many kids on Xbox Live try – and fail – to do all the time.

To be good at trash talking, first, you have to be good at the game you’re playing.  I don’t mean just skills alone.  Knowledge of the game is key to any effective trash talker.  Too often, I see kids that zone in one one particular thing in a game and proceed to trash talk, completely disregarding anything else pertinent in the game.  With online shooters, there are many variants of gameplay rules out there.  Effective trash talk involves understanding what the objective is of the gametype you’re playing.  All too often, I hear trash talk about a completely irrelevant statistic for the gametype we’re playing.  It’s irrelevant that someone may have the highest kill count when the objective of the gametype is to capture territories or flags.  All that really matters is that your team wins the game.  If you’re going to tout your individual performance, it had at least be one that helped your team to win the game.

This little rant stems from a randumb kid we ran into on Xbox Live who felt the need to point out that despite his team losing, and despite him having a negative kill-death count, that he still had a higher kill count than 2 of our team members.  The sad point is though, he had a record of 7 kills and 23 deaths.  In a game mode where the point is to get more total kills than your opponent, this kid only scored 7 kills for his team, while handing our team 23 kills.  That is a severe detriment to his own team, not a help.  The two members of our team that he beat?  They went 4 – 2, so a +2, and the other went 2-2, or even.  Those two had a positive and neutral effect on the final game score.  I will gladly take any teammate who can maintain an even or better kill-death count, no matter how low or high their kill count is.