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21st-Century Shooters Are No Country for Old Men
We’re breaking into an elevated enemy base surrounded by jungle. We have the benefit of cover, lush overgrowth and ancient ruins. But the enemy has the advantage. The approach to their base becomes Hamburger Hill. I die over and over, sniped by a hundred unseen gunmen, trying to push my way toward the goal. The fight starts feeling pointless.
Am I getting too old for this crap?
I’m currently embedded in MAG, the new PlayStation 3 shooter that puts up to 256 players on the same battlefield. And at first, the notion of running and gunning with so many other people is exhilarating. But after all these shots to the head, I feel like this most complex of shooters may only be navigable by younger players with the free time to learn how to handle a hundred human foes.
I’m 37, and I’ve been gaming since the Atari 2600. Last year, at the peak of Modern Warfare 2 mania, I found myself in a hip Hollywood bar celebrating the birthday of an old college buddy. We’re all in our mid-thirties. As usual in a crowd of aging, buzzed geeks, the conversation veered toward videogames — specifically, the prowess of the young punks swarming the Call of Duty servers.
“They’re too good,” said the birthday boy. “And now they’re killing you with knives before you even have a chance to shoot them. It’s bullshit.”
Everybody in the bar agrees: Young gamers are somehow better than older gamers. Is it because they have fewer responsibilities and more free time? Or is it their youth that keeps them sharp?
And what the hell can us old-timers, with one foot in our gamer graves, do about it?
“The hottest new kid on the Halo 3 circuit is 14,” says Rod Breslau, a journalist who covers competitive gaming associations like Major League Gaming. He says kids are just wired better for shooters. The world’s top Quake players are 16, 17 and 20, he says, and their raw reflexes give them the edge.
Wisdom from Grandpa Walsh
David Walsh is the oldest player in Major League Gaming. The kids call him “Grandpa Walsh.” He is 25.
“The younger guys have much more refined motor skills, [having grown up] with more-advanced systems,” Walsh says. In other words, they cut their teeth on Halo 2 while we were playing Pac-Man.
“I don’t feel like getting older means getting worse,” he says. “I just think that the younger guys are getting so much better.”
It’s tough to argue that free time, or the lack of it, isn’t a factor. Jason Thompson, a 30-year-old South Carolina middle-school teacher with a wife and a 6-year-old, struggles to find a spare moment to play Modern Warfare.
“It is frustrating to come back to the game and feel like I’ve been left behind,” he says.
Thompson is careful not to mix school and gaming — he politely declines requests to play with his students, preferring to mix it up with fellow dads. One of his teammates is expecting his first child, and the gamers discuss birthing classes and day care during firefights.
By building a strong team of grown-ups, Thompson believes he’s found a way to leverage his experience and stay competitive.
“We mostly play ‘Domination,’ which is a tactical game,” he says. “This requires us often to sacrifice our lives in the defense of our flag, or in the capturing of an enemy’s flag.”
“Most younger players,” he says, “are so obsessed with keeping their kill/death ratio high that they rarely play correctly in tactical games.”
Tactics and teamwork
Young players’ superior twitch reflexes might help them keep their kill counts high and their deaths low, but that’s not teamwork. Thompson’s teammate Dave Hill, 32, says cooperation is the secret to their success in modern war games: “We communicate well, play as a team, help each other out and usually stick to a predetermined plan.”
Some oldsters don’t even bother trying to outwit the kids with age and experience. “As you get older, your want to be schooled by a 15-year-old supergamer disappears,” says game writer Chet Faliszek, who works for Valve and worked on Left 4 Dead. “You know you can’t beat him.”
Faliszek says that many older gamers gather on the forums of his company’s Steam service to start private matches in Left 4 Dead, a cooperative shooter that forces four friends to work together to survive the zombie apocalypse. Online, it pits players against each other in teams: four humans versus four infected zombies. The situation seems crafted to suit older gamers like myself, who would rather play together than die alone.
That was supposed to be the hook of MAG. The game’s massive battles are meant to bring players together by throwing them into smaller units, each of which is led by a more experienced tactical player.
These leadership roles would seem to be tailor-made for the older gamer, interested more in tactics than being on the front lines. But the job of trying to transform a squadron of teenage strangers into a well-oiled machine must require the patience of a saint — like herding cats, if the cats stopped every so often to call you gay.
I sync my Bluetooth headset to my PS3 and fire up MAG one more time. None of my friends are playing the game, so I’m hoping I get lucky and stumble upon some good teammates.
I jump into a match. The chatter in my headset makes me feel like I just climbed onto a prison short bus in Mobile, Alabama. My knuckle-dragging squad mates drawl insults at each other, make fun of my handle and call everyone’s sexuality into question.
Maybe it is just a matter of being able to put up with it: Who else but a fellow teenager would stand for this constant abuse long enough to get any good at the game?
I no longer even care to find out if I can hold my own, and I turn off the PS3. After all, when you’re an old man like me, you’ve got to pick your battles.
