TECHNOLOGY
My Life in Havic
The important thing to remember about video gaming is that it’s not all mindless killing. It’s also a lot of fun. That much I have learned over the last few months playing Halo 2 with the other members of my clan.
What is a clan?
Well, I guess we’re going to have to start at the beginning, eh?
A clan is the term the good people at Bungie Software, the makers of the video game Halo, have assigned to gamers who have signed up to play the Halo 2 video game in an “online multiplayer environment” using the new Xbox Live internet connection.
If you go to the Bungie website, you will see that 431,970 registered Halo players have played some 935,478 matches against one another -- and 73,774 of them are online right now. Among those who identify themselves as residents of the U.S. they have organized themselves into some 4600 “clans” of gamers who like to play online as a team – using Xbox headsets to talk over the internet VoIP to allies in their clan and the enemies they are about to vanquish.
I belong to a clan named Havic, so named because our founder, our “team leader”, is a boy who can’t spell. As a loyal recruit to Havic, I have grown fond of my many clanmates – Pumkin, Wulf, Chep, Pernod, Cor and even our team leader, Slayer, who is a far better gamer than speller.
After endless hours of playing Halo online together, I feel like know their moves as readily as I would know their faces. They are my own band of brothers. We meet up every night after a stressful day at work; and by the time our game day is done, many hours later, we are rejuvenated by the little structured mayhem away from work our membership in Havic allows us.
On a typical night, I will sign on to Xbox Live around 10 PM and usually find at least two of my clan already online. We enter what is called a Party Screen, talk about our day and select a “party leader” to direct the overall action. At this point, we can either jump into another game already in progress or create a “custom game” where just our clan is set down on the map to play things like King of the Hill or Odd Ball against each other -- both of which require a bit more skill than just knowing how to kill the other guy.
In my clan, I am a girl playing in a boy’s world. But the more I play, the clearer it becomes girls play games in ways boys can't even imagine. King of the Hill, for instance, is particularly suited to my feminine skill set because it includes some things that never seem to occur to boys, like patience.
According to the Bungie rules, the winner of King of the Hill is determined by which player remains on the hill the longest. Staying on the hill requires a certain amount of stealth and the ability not to be noticed, but boys who are used to banging into anything in their path and shooting their way through all obstacles have a tendency to – how do I say this politely – get their damned fool heads shot off pretty fast. So maybe we should rename this game Queen of the Hill.
As the night goes on, my clan invariably move on into Team skirmishes and Big Team battles. These require us to pit our skills against other teams of gamers we don’t know, but whom we are matched against based on the internet ranking of our clan and theirs.
Team skirmishes are 4 on 4, so when we have a smaller group we play Capture The Flag or Assault (i.e. planting a bomb in the enemy camp) against other groups of 4. When there are more of us online, we have Big Team battles, which are 8 on 8.
Big Team battles can get really insane, like the other night when we were playing Assault against a team of eight on a map called Headlong that was, in essence, a construction site with an unfinished highway running through it. The game is played both offensively and defensively. That is to say, our clan starts the game on offense with instructions to plant a bomb in other team’s building. If we do, our clan then switches into defense while their clan tries to plant a bomb in our home base.
As soon as the game starts, my clanmate Pumkin hops into one of the warthogs and I grab the gunner’s seat next to him. (I love the warthogs. They’re like little Volkswagen bugs with machine guns.) Our clanmates are all in the warthog ahead of us. Suddenly, our warthog is sitting on top of their warthog and they’re all dead.
(Oops . . . welcome to the world of Xbox lag, a little computer snafu that occurs when too many players try to move too fast across a server that cannot process them. Our warthogs jump randomly across the screen, our guns lock up, our players curse over the headsets and nothing works until the clan leaders agree to say “reset.” Back to story . . .)
So, after that wonderful start, our Havic clan manages to get our act together and head out again to plant our bomb. No problem there. It’s a stealth thing. We blew them to smithereens. Now it’s our turn to play defense.
As a woman, I’ve learned the best defense is to hide. When our clan is supposed to defend ourselves against a foreign intruder, my favorite thing is to hide in an alcove with an overview of all the approaching highways to pick off any enemies that might approach.
I was sitting there the other night waiting when I saw our team leader – Slayer – pull his Ghost vehicle into another corner of the building and also silently wait for the intruders to approach. We would have done fine except Slayer, of course, got bored and pulled his cannon out of the alcove to machine-gunned the outline of my silhouette against the wall; then he started to spit out “obscenities in bullet holes on the floor in front of me. Boys! What a bunch of show-offs!
As a girl, I like playing offense. The boys never know what you are going to do. Like the other night, after we went back on the offensive, I hopped into the Warthog (did I mention how much I love warthogs?) and my clanmate Chep climbed into the gunner seat next to me.
On the headsets, there was a steady stream of chatter from my team leader about how we were all going to sneak in and plant our bomb in their headquarters. It all sounded fine – except their team leader was listening in. That’s another thing about boy gamers you have to watch out for. They talk on the headsets like no one else is listening. They shout and swear and talk out loud on the Xbox Live like nobody else is listening; then when they think they are sneaking up on you, you nail them between the eyes.
“How did you know I was here?” I remember one guy asking.
“You cursed your way into my range, you dumb shit!” I said.
Chep and I were getting close to planting our bomb when our team leader Slayer came over the headphones telling us to hold up and wait for re-enforcements.
“What do you want to do, Chep?” I asked.
“I dunno,” he said. “Let’s kill somebody.”
“Okay,” I say, “I’ll drive around and you shoot anything
that moves.”
And that’s what we did pulling the whole enemy clan into a merry chase around my wildly careening Warthog. “Somebody get that damn Warthog,” I heard a voice say over the headphones. But by that time it was too late. While all the other boys focused on my erratic driving – and what an easy target it made me -- my clanmate Cor planted the bomb. Just in time the disembodied voice of Microsoft Halo came over the headphones: “Bomb Planted…Game Over.” Victory is ours!!!
And all I did was drive around in a Warthog and cause a distraction. I like that part too, causing distractions.
People always say it’s dumb that we hang out in Halo. Why don’t you just get together in person, they ask. But it’s just the same as talking to someone on the phone, and no one complains about people calling there friends and talking for an hour…and we get to talk and play a game at the same time. Who do you think has it better off?
