Turning Online Gamers’ Tantrums into a Wall of Saltiness
By Casey Douglass
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| The end screen on Dead by Daylight when you wipe the floor with the survivor scum. That was said in character, obviously. I'm sure they are lovely people just having a hard time of things, and my axe was the cure. Ha ha ha. |
‘Camper.’
The word flashes up in
the after-game chat and I fist-pump the air.
I’ve been playing
Behaviour Digital’s multi-player horror game Dead by Daylight,
a game that sees four survivors and one killer trapped on a map, one
side needing to escape, one side needing to bathe in the blood of the
ones that don’t. It’s very good fun but my word, there are
certainly some very toxic people playing it. To be fair, a lot of
games have their share of tantrum throwing keyboard bashers, but
there is something about the Killers vs. Survivors setup of DBD that
throws fuel on those fires. Just check out the game's forum on Steam for a taster.
The problem, as with
many games, comes down to people having different views on how you
should play the game. I
remember playing Call of Duty: Modern Warfare
and seeing the vehement condemnation of anyone that sat in a corner
or used cover for more than a second. ‘Camper!’ was a frequent
insult thrown around, more than likely by people who felt you should
play every first person shooter as if it was Quake
or Unreal Tournament.
Add into the mix people who seemingly have no idea what camping
actually means, or with differing opinions on what camping is, and
arguments fly with regularity.
Of
course, this type of thing isn’t just limited to camping. In
Battlefield 3 I was
accused of being a Kill:Death ratio player, just because I was having
a good game and had something like 21 kills, 5 deaths. It was whined
at me by someone in a tank who couldn’t get it through his or her
head that a big tank can be hit from many different angles, and just
because you can’t see me doesn’t mean I can’t see you. I think
I was called a coward for firing and ducking back into cover again
too. I obviously didn’t fit into their view of how my character
should be dying easily at their hands, rather than serving up a
punishing arse kicking that they were squarely on the end of.
In
Battlefield 4, I
played as a sniper quite regularly. Oh the cries of ‘Camper!” as
I made someone’s head spray red. I could have pointed out that I
wasn’t camping as I barely stayed still the whole match. If I did
stop, it was only until I got a kill and then I changed position, as
snipers are vulnerable if people know where they are and can get up
close and personal with them. Instead I took the high road and said
something like ‘Booooo hooooo!’ That’s not to say I’m down on
campers either, it’s a valid tactic in many video-games,
particularly war-based ones. You can bet your backside that if I was
being shot at in real life, I wouldn’t be running in circles
tea-bagging in open ground, and nor would even the most zealous
anti-camper.
By
way of a slight trip down memory lane, we come back to Dead
by Daylight, a game in which
both killers and survivors tend to bitch and moan about how the other
side plays. There are lovely people playing too of course, but for
the purposes of this post, I’m focussing on the screen-lickers who
give fiery verbal at the end of a game.
I
play both sides of the divide, as the game lets you have a separate
Killer and Survivor Rank, but my heart lies on the Killer side. As a
killer, it really does seem that however you play, it isn’t the
right way for some survivors. If you hook
a survivor on one of the many hooks around the level (your main
goal), you have to absolutely run away as fast as possible or you
will be accused of camping the hook. Even if you see their three
teammates skulking around behind it. You have to practice a kind of
unthinking and unseeing that Orwell’s 1984
would be most impressed by. There are other whiny things that get
dragged out by both sides, but the crux of the matter is, I was
finally called a camper last night, having not even camped, and I
always feel accepted by a game community once I’ve had my first
cry-baby chat message. What took you soo long DBD?
I’ve
decided I’m going to write down any insults that come my way from
now on (not who said them, I mean, who cares?) and I will try to
collect enough to make a nice image, maybe with one of the DBD
characters in the middle, the sniveling words of dejection ghosted
behind it. Something like that anyway. I will call it my Wall of
Saltiness and it will be tremendous to look at and think of all the
gaming experiences I’ve ‘ruined’ for a host of bad losers. I
particularly look forward to the really bad ones like ‘get cancer’
and ‘die.’
I
don’t mean to say that I will play in a way that will troll people
or piss them off. I will just play how I usually do, in a balanced,
sporting way, and see what barbs will be flung at me after the match
is over. I’m quite looking forward to it, and as my killer ranks
up, I’ve been reliably informed that the saltiness after games
increases muchly. Tremendous!
