Arena Nomads

The strange thing about Counter-Strike is that you can strip yourself almost bare - pressing G to fling everything into the air, falling to the ground as an entity, stripping the character to nothing but the knife. In D&G’s Treatise on Nomadology, a section towards the end deals with this concept, that of the assemblage made by weaponry. As opposed to tools, which form an assemblage as part of a larger apparatus of work, where the tool, the product, the raw, the labor relation, etc, all form one machine, the weapon forms a self-contained machine, which operates on the pure principle of its own projection upon the world.

This then creates an interesting situation for the player, where they find their interaction with the world dynamically transformed by their movement through various systems. In Counter-Strike it’s economic, the strategy of full-buy, eco, and pistol rounds making an element of strategy where the player’s assemblage is transformed by their ability to perform within the game. Performance as a pistol is rewarded with SMGs and armor, or with full rifle, etc. In Quake, the environment forms the basis of this strategic manipulation. Duels take place in a game of timing and area control - with all things that make up the player, health, armor, and weapons, being accessed only by moving through certain points on the map, the game becomes one of optimizing self-transformation by controlling the items scattered through the game.

In RTS games, these machines are deployed in the same manner as the formal military does under state capture. The individual soldiers are made into units of a larger mass, deployed towards various goals, often economic. The meta-game of Starcraft is built around colonial accumulation, the one civilian structure being the true heart of the game. One’s army is mere protection as one seeks to continually build more bases and their attendant worker units, in order to continually expand on and on forward. The enemy is an obstacle to be overcome and accidentally win, the strategic goals of war fading behind the tactical goals of economics.

Valorant has gained popularity recently, using Riot’s skill in 5v5 pseudo-gacha multiplayer experiences, adapting the Counter-Strike format to the class based one. They try, but can’t quite recreate it, and the basis of that is in the foundations. The class system is itself an ecclesiastical one. Whereas the strategy game refines the weapon-assemblage into a piece, manipulated by the player in their role as the totally-controlling state, the class based game is an ecclesiastical recreation of the nomad experience of Quake and CS. In Team Fortress 2 or Valorant, the player is defined by their relationship to a supertext of roles, roles chosen before the game even begins, the class/character select screen being presented at the start of every round. Here, we have predestination of course, but more than that, we have the affixation of peoples so common to institutional languages. The Pyro and Heavy are signs which one molds oneself to in order to fill opportunities descended from Heaven, roles coded in latin, the AK47 and the M4A4 are coded in the vernacular, tools that form a unity with the player.

Team Fortress 2 players have plenty of ecclesiastical concepts of duty around this. The Pyro is often a contentious place for its difficulty in fitting into these traditional schemes. Most duties in classes are sourced from their purpose in directly seizing the game’s objectives. If a certain pious subset of the playerbase were to get their way, the game would be minus the Sniper, Spy, and Pyro entirely - perceived as being either useless or individualistic hallmarks of players from a lesser, more nomadic class of game. Mains of these classes are often forced to prove themselves, the Py-Bro as a sort of gimped-medic that exists to help the Engineer, or the endless walls of text produced by Sniper and Spy mains regarding their usefulness to the team. All of this is besides the point - the basis fo the matter is that the three outsider classes will never be accepted - after all, their playstyles all reflect something dissonant to the substance of the game, the brutish repetition of labor towards objectives that makes up the coveted worship of the Church’s preset castes.

Call of Duty and Counter-Strike make for an interesting comparison of the opposite. Call of Duty gives weapons in a proletarian fashion, one simply works at the “grind” and is rewarded. Weapons are chosen at the beginning of the game, earned from working through a progression ladder that’s climbed via rote repetition of the game. What Call of Duty offers is a fantasy, a commodified, structured, fantasy of the martial competition of games which offer a weapon assemblage dynamic to the player’s worth within the game. Counter-Strike on the other hand, is the aristocracy of the wilderness. Weapons are bought from kill-rewards, ones heightened for risk taking, for working as a team, for taking on extremes such as using worse weapons to achieve greater results. It’s telling then that the Call of Duty community is obsessed with imaginary systems of rules to increase “fairness”. The gamer wants a system, a perfect machine they can slot their vitality into that will deliver them up the chain flawlessly. Call of Duty players are known then for their hate for anything beyond, micro-communities of different playstyles endlessly accusing the other of pseudo-cheating for winning or gaining “unfair” advantages. For Counter-Strike, playstyle fights are always punching down, an extension of the rigid selection systems in place already. The most mocked are not rivals to the various ways to grind the latter, but those who play badly, off the highway down dead-end sideroads, the Tec-9 and P90 spammers.