Fight Club Needs Fighters

 "Stuck in this hole with the shit and the piss
And it's hard to believe it could come down to this
Back at the beginning
Sinking, spinning"

NIN - The Wretched

Weekend's here. Time for games. Or, you know, in my case more so than usual.

Time for some AoS games. Quick multiplayer matches with a set win/loss condition. Time to lose because once again I've been doing too well and the matchmaking system is punishing me for it by putting me on teams with all the sorriest mouthbreathers to reward them for doing badly by making me carry them - except it's impossible to carry quitters. Ten minutes into a forty-minute game the score is 8-10 and three of my four teammates already throw their hands up in desperation and start spamming the surrender button because oh emm geez too hard!
This this is exactly what I was talking about last new year's eve. This is the perfect encapsulation of Generation Facebook, the utterly spineless detritus of the primate order who cannot live even half an hour without constant endorphin boosts, without being praised and patted on the head and told they're pretty.

You know what? This isn't even about fighting for the chance at a win anymore. Forget how easy it is to overturn what may seem like a losing game. This is about hating yourself. This is about the importance of self-hatred, of retaining the intellectual fortitude to lose, to play through a loss, to feel like a loser. Fuck the real world. I mean in games. Games, especially PvP, are not there to give you easy wins to make you feel big about yourself. They're there to force you to square off against other players in a battle of wits, planning, reflexes, whatever. They're a medium in which you should have to prove yourself, not constantly hit the reset button until you get an easy win. You will lose, often, and losing is every bit as much a part of the gameplay experience as winning.

Losing hurts. It should. Every loss, every failure is a confirmation of your worthlessness, and guess what, that is fucking reality. Games are an escape from the world, not yourself. You don't get to escape your failings, ever. Fine, the world's a piece of shit, and you have every right to escape it into a laser-gun duel on Brontosaur-back but you don't get to escape yourself. Every time you miss a shot, make the wrong decision, miss a detail, every time you get pounded into the ground, you should revel in the entire experience, from self-deluding beginning to bitter end. You deserve to suffer through your losses every bit as much as you deserve to enjoy your victories. Fight. The other player beating your face in deserves to enjoy your loss. Feel every gut-churning moment of your shame as you throw yourself into the fight again and again, learn to hate yourself for it, for your slow reflexes, insufficient knowledge of game mechanics, poor strategy, and every other one of your mental deficiencies. Suffer. Feel like the lowest speck of filth in the world, through every second and every minute of your abject failure, until you finally lose as you deserve to. Learn to fucking hate yourself.

Games are not an extension of your imbecilic quest for social rank, your moronic ladder-climbing and backstabbing and office politics and lipstick and expensive car. PvP games are the medium in which you, the individual, throw yourself against other individuals. Not your computer, not your body or your trappings of social class, not your fawning social network but yourself, the loser, the mind, the self. Good or bad, proud or ashamed, you get to play yourself and not the mask you wear for the other reeking apes on the street. This infinitely valuable struggle for the sake of reality without delusions will never become possible in real life if you cant even make it possible in a medium without further consequences. Before Project Mayhem, we need to learn to duke it out in the Fight Club.

"You are not a beautiful and unique snowflake
You are the same decaying organic matter as everything else
We are all part of the same compost heap
We are the all-singing, all-dancing crap of the world"

The surrender button should not even exist. If it does, it should exist only as a trap for those spineless imbeciles who only want easy wins. Hitting it should immediately ban you from the game. If you're not willing to play through a loss, then what you want is not a PvP game but a mirror to kiss. I don't give a fuck if you're young, old, male, female, smart or stupid. When you log into a multiplayer game you implicitly agree that losing is part of the experience and nothing excuses your imbecilic, spineless, mealymouthed whining and running from the results of your worthlessness. As much of a cliche as it is, games are not about winning or losing. You don't get to hit the reset button until you win. You always, always play it through to the end. Multiplayer games are not about feeling good about yourself. They're about fighting and if you can't do that then get your worthless retarded ass back to designing your automated head-patting machine. Make room for someone who can put up a fight.

I want you to hit me as hard as you can.