Published on December 27th, 2009.
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I've been playing games for a long time. Did you have Mario? I had the original Atari.

I've gotten pretty damn good at just about anything that isn't a sport game. I got my micro up with Starcraft, and I started on the cutest RTS in existence: Dune 2000. Guild Wars? 1,400 hours since about 6 months after its release, as of this writing. WoW, another 600. I've always been an FPS guy, though. I'm writing this to give you perspective into my experience with the competitive scene of games, and why I don't participate in it.

I started to get really serious about FPS when I got Counter-Strike: Source (CS:S hereon out) in 2006. I was pretty casual until I met this guy in school who was really into it. So I played on his favorite servers for a while as Pride, and he was Wrath. You know, the deadly sins? But he was amazing. I thought he was hacking most of the time to be honest, but I saw him doing it in person at a LAN tournament and it was nuts. Someone once said "I think wrath has aimbot" so he says on the mic, "yeah, I got aimbot... in my right hand". So alright, back to the clan. The Rushing Party, they called themselves, because their tactics were based on rushing. I started to get good and people started to know me on the server, so I figured whatever, I'll apply to the clan. That's where it starts to gets sad.

I love the deagle, but my favorite weapon is a sniper rifle. My clan notices this and the leader's like "hey I really hate sniping, wanna try taking the sniper position for our squad?" so of course I said yes. After a few practices (practices!) I was starting to get into it. I'd go to school, and sometimes I had work, but mostly I couldn't wait to get home and ask them. "Scrim today?" if not, I was practicing strats. I read Ender's Game during this time and Ender said, to play better than a bot, you must act like a bot. That was really inspirational for me, so I was always trying these crazy moves and eventually, I got pretty damn good at rushing and flashbangs and - well, I guess this is where it actually gets sad.

I was becoming familiar with the guys now and I had to get my wisdom teeth pulled out, so besides being incredibly sedated, I spent a lot of that time gaming. At 1 AM in the morning, I message my friend to see what's up and some girl responds - his girlfriend.

"Whoa, I didn't even know he had a girlfriend!"
"Yeah... he lives with me in my apartment. He's sleeping now and I'm doing a report. We only have one computer."
"I thought he was in school, what's he do?"
"Well I mostly pay for everything... he doesn't really work. Sometimes he'll get a computer problem to fix, or a landscaping job, but mostly it's just me."

I regret I can't remember every detail of the conversation, but she ultimately said, "I love him, I do... but he spends all his time playing these gun games, and I can't even get on for a report, I have to do it so early in the morning."

Well that tore at my heart strings. I started to rethink. I swear I spent the whole next day on it, like, do I find this game fun? Do I feel obligated to them? I was never actually in the "real" squad, the guys who did CAL were. (wrath was) That made it a lot easier to just kinda fade into obscurity, and you know what? No one gave a damn. I think one person asked me why I wasn't practicing and I just said I took more hours at work. Jeez.

The moral of the story is if you're gonna get all into "competitive" (a silly term to begin with) gaming, you need to make sure you're still having fun. We play games for fun. It's stress relief. Maybe the guy who had his girlfriend pay for everything simply felt that's all he had to do... but you, the reader, should not approve of his lifestyle. I admit I'd like to get to the point one day where I can wake up and actually justify dicking around in some MMO for four hours, or even powerhousing some GalCiv campaign, but I don't think I could stick with it. At least not while I'm still young.

In conclusion, my reasons for not competiting are that I cannot typically adhere to a schedule of "practice" or even scrimming, nor is that fun for me, and that I find it hard to stick to a single game. I also admit I tend to like hardk0re gamers a lot less than casuals.

And for the record, "noscoping" is nothing to be proud of - if you're in the position to be proud of no-scoping, you should've had your secondary or tertiary weapon out. (even melee, if it applies)

The term "competitive gaming" is a bit off to me. I have no doubt that people can think of a better term for it, but the problem is that one is not being thought of. The closest mainstream term is electronic sports. Just what I want, my headshots to be compared to a 275-pound beast tackling another, similar beast, in football. An average person watching the TV for news on the up-and-coming craze known as "e-sports" will be - for good reason - put off, with it calling the participants e-athletes. E-mail is one thing, e-athlete is another.

I have a solution that no one will take up because I don't have 100,000 readers: netlete. A 'net athlete. There, no e-athlete suggesting that they are the equivalent of e-mail for real-world athletes. Not only does this settle the 40-year-old man watching the news on TV, but it even rolls off the tongue! Try it. Netlete. Net. Lete. 1337.

Now back to the term "competitive gaming". You know, from two paragraphs ago. It's a bit off to me because it's like, well, I'm competitive in every Player vs. Player game that I play. To call what I am doing anything but competition, is merely haughtiness, compounded by the fact that people in public games tend to... suck. Just because they're bad doesn't mean I face no competition when I destroy them. I understand that in a relative sense, it may seem that you face no competition, but that doesn't mean a better term should not be made. The term is, in its literal sense, wrong. Even in a singleplayer game I will compete against the computer. The difficulty of the competition does not, ultimately, affect the fact it is competition.