Grayson Walloga

Grayson Walloga

ENC 2135-15

Project 1 Final Draft

18 February 2018

The Wonderful World of Xbox Live

 

            One of the happiest moments of my life was booting up my Xbox 360 that I just gotten for my 13th birthday. I could not wait to set it up and play with all my “cool” friends who already had gaming systems. The online world was a completely new frontier for me and I had no idea what to expect from the other players. It was honestly a little scary for me, and I could only ever bring myself to talk to people I knew in real life. Eventually I worked up the courage to communicate with the rest of the players on one of my favorite games, Call of Duty. I remember this weird feeling I had when I first started talking to the random players during matches. We were all strangers to one another and we couldn’t see each other so we had no idea who we were talking to. Playing and talking with these people made me feel like there weren’t any restrictions on me, and I could be the real me instead of wearing a mask, ironically enough. I always felt like I was putting on an act when I was around certain people. Most people act differently around their parents compared to their friends. I was the same way, except I also acted differently around particular friends compared to other friends. I kept my friends from school and my friends from ice hockey separate, mainly because I acted one way around my school friends and another way around my hockey friends. Sometimes I would have one of those shower existential crisis, where I was trying to figure out who was the real me. I acted like a goofball idiot around my school friends, but toward my hockey friends I was a stoic, yet always sarcastic, leader to them. All of my experiences on Xbox Live helped me take off my different masks and throw them all away. I didn’t have to act a certain way, I could just act like me.

          The Call of Duty community was a real work of art. This is a community built up by angry, vulgar, squeaky-voiced twelve-year-old boys who would say whatever they wanted, whenever they wanted. I was no different. There is a certain feeling you get when you realize that you are in a place where no one knows you, and they never will. Because of this anonymity, I felt like I didn’t have to act a certain way. These people were not my friends from school, so I didn’t have to make jokes or act funny. They were not my friends from hockey, so I didn’t have to be a leader and act like a good person. I was free to act however I wanted. It allowed me to make some discoveries about myself that I would not have been able to find, had it not been for all the well-mannered youths on Xbox who would espouse such considerate tips and tricks to other players like “kill yourself” and “git gud”.

          The first thing I discovered was that I hated actually trying to effectively communicate with my team of intelligent primates. I was more interested in having a good time messing around with people, instead of actually winning the game. My favorite game mode by far was and still is Hardcore Search and Destroy. This is where all the try-hard MLG pros go to play. It’s also one of the few game modes were friendly-fire is enabled, which means you can kill your own teammates. I would try to make as many people angry as I could before I got kicked. Now some people might call me a terrible person for actively hurting my team and costing us every match. To them I will say that trolling is an art and it takes a long time to truly master. I wanted to get the best reactions out of people so that I could regale my friends with the tantalizing tales of my extraordinary exploits. I couldn’t just join a random game and shoot a bunch of my teammates all willy-nilly because that was too predicate and boring. I would seek out games that had an active game chat and then wait for the best moment to strike.

          One of my proudest moments was during a high stakes match of Search and Destroy at the match point. I had been a wonderful teammate for most of the game, so my fellow comrades didn’t expect me to completely destroy our team. We were all huddled up in a small room just outside the bomb site. We needed to plant the bomb, but we had no idea where the other team was so we just posted up in the room and watched all the doors. Our MVP was in the middle of telling us his master strategy when all of the sudden a random grenade was dropped in the middle of the room. Was it from the other team? Did they know were we were? Nope, the culprit was nonother than their fellow teammate. The fallout from what I did was beautiful. There was a lot of screaming, some laughs, and some choice words were said by a number of my teammates.

            Actions like these were pretty much the norm for me whenever I played Call of Duty. I learned that I really enjoyed messing around with people and I was pretty good at it too. I made a ton of new friends from playing online, in addition to a few of my school and hockey friends who also had Xboxes. I noticed that I could act the same way around my new friends and my friends from school. The few friends I had from hockey who has Xboxes got to see a different side of me. At first, I was very anxious because I didn’t know what they would think. I was expecting a lot of awkward silences and I even considered not telling them I had an Xbox just so I wouldn’t have to deal with them. I was pleasantly surprised that we all got along very well when we all started to play some Call of Duty together. The next time I saw my hockey friends at practice, we acted very differently toward one another. Not differently in a bad way, but I really good way. I felt way more connected to them and I’m sure they felt more connect to me. I think this was because we were all united through anonymity. It’s hard to explain, but I believe that because we could say pretty much whatever we wanted and there wouldn’t be any consequences, we all became a lot closer to one another.