Outside The Crosshair in Counter Strike
After my first round of Counter Strike my friends laughed at me for how much of a loser I was at sucking so much. Shortly after, I bought the game on Steam and embarked on a long 3 year journey to reach the top 3 players on an Australian server of 100,000 for the map CS_Office. But Counter Strike became a lot more than a violent, team based shooter that I was really good at. I learnt a lot about how to preempt an enemy’s decision, adapt under pressure, and coordinate a team – I wish these could be listed on my resume. I discovered mods, hacks, custom servers, custom game modes, friends, and international friends. “In a first-person shooter looking and shooting, tend to overlap” (Bittanti 2006). But it was outside of where you were looking that mattered most to me in Counter Strike. Counter Strike is a universe of servers, and each server was inhabited by recognisable players native only to that world. To describe this experience I’ll use Klastrup’s (2007) fantastic description: game worlds are “persistent online representations, which contains the …