Cal Jacobson's Blog

What's on the roof? Not pigeons. Not Santa.

One of my favorite games right now is Left 4 Dead. You can’t possibly go wrong with zombies, guns, and cooperative multiplayer action.

Or so I thought, until this past weekend.

Up until now, I’ve been pretty fortunate in my online play. Sure, I’ve been teamed up with some real dopes from time to time, but mostly I’ve had the good luck to play with fairly intelligent adults.  But the past two nights have, with rare exception, been a different experience.

Along with the undead and the near-dead, I’ve now played with the brain-dead: individuals apparently devoid of the gray matter that zombies crave so much.  Individuals with unimaginitive, all-lowercase names like will and thomas, who find shooting their teammates or clogging the voice chat with anemic attempts at humorous banter to be far easier than actually fighting off the legions of Hell.  Many more remain nameless, since I seldom saw them — they were too busy racing through the level to offer their teammates any kind of support.

Actual picture from our last trip to Pennsylvania

I realize that my experience is not unique.  Ever since I started playing Quake online in 1996, I have run into horrible players.  I read about foul-mouthed 13-year-olds on Xbox Live all the time.  An environment that allows for anonymity and easy communication at the same time is bound to cultivate that kind of activity.  The studies into the phenomenon are legendary.

Maybe it was the fact that it involved zombies, or that I had waaaaay too much caffeine in my system, or that I was suffering from some sort of bug that prevented me from sleeping soundly the night before, but when reflecting upon this sad state of affairs last night I had a revelation.  Not an uplifting spiritual revelation or a world-improving scientific revelation, but rather a “oh crap, we’re screwed” firefly-flash of insight.  It is this:

Left 4 Dead is not simply a brilliantly-conceived and executed first-person shooter, it is a hyperaccurate simulation of a zombie apocalypse.

When the zombie apocalypse comes, who will survive?  The Ted Nugents, the Heidi Grimms, the Les Strouds?  Nope.  They’ll either be killed off by the mutated supervirus or by tragic accidents in the midst of riots and civil disorder as the citizenry panics.

Instead, the survivors will be the aforementioned wills and thomases, the Octomoms, the ShamWow guys, the Ward Churchills.  They’ll be the hapless Taco Bell crewmembers who can never get a drive-through order right (I’m looking at you, Powers and Palmer Park store).  They’ll be head shop employees, minor politicians and the shrillest members of your homeowner’s association.

Cooperation between armed survivors won’t be the norm…because you’ll want to shoot them in the head within minutes.  You’re not going to be marooned with the Professor, you’re going to be teamed with Gilligan.  And Lucy, and Urkel and Bobcat Goldthwait. Everybody on MTV, the E! Channel, and Bravo.

Yep, the truly dead will be the lucky ones.

A crisis on the family front involving the health of one of my children has been consuming my time as of late, but I haven’t abandoned my blog. I’ve composed quite a few posts, unfortunately they were all composed in my head, in my car, while driving to work and without means to record my brilliance. Damn this primitive 21st-century technology! Had I been able to store my wit and wisdom, why I would have shared with you my thoughts on the following:

• Seven months later, Truevision3D 6.5 is still nowhere to be seen by the non-paying public.
• Silverlight looks like it will be enough to kick Adobe in the pants and give Flash a run for its money. I could never get into ActionScript and decent online tutorials on Flash that went beyond “hey I’m gonna make a cool intro webpage” were few and far between; I look forward to doing this sort of thing in C#.
• Ah, Paris Hilton.
• Spambayes is still working marvelously; again, I recommend it for anybody who is drowning in spam.
• Google’s new Street View feature is damn impressive. I can’t say I buy into the paranoia that the privacy advocates are attempting to whip up: if you take a picture of my house from the street in front of it, you’re not exactly peering into my windows. If some cretin has the mind to break into my home, I’m willing to bet that he’ll case the place in person and that the Internet may be a tad too sophisticated for him anyway. Besides, by the time the magic Google vans get to my city, any pressing privacy issues and legislation will have likely taken place. Thanks for taking the bullet for small-town America, San Francisco!
• Dwarf Fortress is, by far, the best ASCII-based game I’ve ever played. Not that I’ve played that many — certainly not in the last 10 years or so — but it beats the crap out of most Roguelikes. I suspect what keeps me playing is not the random-generation element (and certainly not the graphics, the other Roguelike characteristic DF shares) but the fact that you can build rather complex fortresses and gently nudge the inhabitants in a particular direction. In fact, I think Tarn Adams should pitch the concept to Maxis; SimMoria sounds like a winner.