The Blogoff - "Video Games Gone Wrong"

(here it is.  Round three of the ongoing war between yours truly and the rival impostor newt.  So, you should know the drill by now - read both entries, and then vote on your favourite.  The winner will be able to retain the title of "newt", while the loser will have to suffer with the title of "Steve" for all time.... or a month or so, whichever comes first.)

The Unfortunate Tale of the Chaw Lord

Today's topic is "Video Games Gone Wrong", and while I'm not really too much of a video gamer (I'll play a game here and there, but I don't really get super involved in them or anything), I do have a special spot in my heart for Halo.  There's just something special about a game that involves shooting people in the face.  Repeatedly.  So, when the topic was selected, I instantly knew I had to write a post about Halo.  And, when I think of Halo, I instantly think of the Chaw Lord.

Who is the Chaw Lord?  To put it simply, he is the awesomest Halo player in the universe.  Or, at least, the southern united states (as some looters were to discover).  Allow me to explain.

Way back when, I used to come home from a long day of work and unwind with an hour or so of Halo 2.  Now, for those that don't know the game very well, Halo 2 is a game where you get together a team of people, and do your best to beat another team of people into submission.  And a lot of the people you seem to be shooting at are twelve year olds who try to talk smack, but can't pull it off.

If you don't get a team together, you're randomly assigned a bunch of friend-less jerks, or those afforementioned twelve year old douchebags in training, and your team seldom works well.  It becomes in your best interest to get together a group of similary skilled individuals if you want to rock the various game types.

Different players have different skillsets.  Some people are excellent snipers, or rocket jockies, or combat freaks.  As for yours truly - you're looking at a highly proficient jeep driver (ironic, as I have no license in real life) and a strong defensive player.  I was also pretty good at trash-talking, which was one of those things that made Halo 2 super enjoyable. My skills, natch, made me a good addition to the team that assembled over the months of my semi-regular Halo 2 days.

We were led by... the Chaw Lord.

The Chaw Lord was, quite simply, the awesomest player out there.  He was good at everything, and led our group with respect and integrity.  He was also very skilled at talking trash, which seeemed to be the main requirement for being in our group (seriously:  it didn't matter if you could shoot straight, but if you could come up with a new way of calling someone a "dickhead", you were in... Halo 2 was where I first heard the term "Dangling Chad" and decided it was the awesomenest thing ever). 

Chaw was a deep-voiced southerner who would constantly berate the other team - "Grow some testicles, kid," or "What, am I playing Helen Keller?  Are you friggin.... Helen Keller?  Because you suck."  Or, my personal favourite "You don't fuck with The Chaw Lord". 

(oh, yeah... he always referred to himself in the third person.  Which was kind of weird.)

Usually, when we won, we'd sing some random song as directed by the Chaw Lord at the top of our voices, so the other team would hear nothing but rambunctious shouting until they left the lobby.  Because it's never fun to be serenaded with "Take my Breath Away" or "Tub-Thumping"  Once, after we lost, the other team pulled the same trick on us.  Chaw Lord quietly requested they be quiet a few times.  "Come on, I have something to ask you guys.  No, seriously, stop singing, please...?"

And when they shut up, to hear Chaw Lord's "Question", it was simply "I'm writing a paper on gay gamers, and I was sort of curious - what does a penis taste like?  I thought you guys would know." 

As they signed off, in a huff, Chaw delivered his motto.  "You don't fuck with the Chaw Lord."

I played on the Chaw Lord's team for about four months.  They were a group of people I had never met in real life, never knew their real names, and knew very little about in reality.  Yet, for a little while, they were people I knew quite well.  In between games, we discussed, well, things you would discuss with co-workers:  good movies, troubles at home, politics, and why twelve year old boys should be locked into a basement until they hit eighteen.  In short, we got to know one another.

Then Hurricane Katrina hit.  While Kanye was making ludicrous claims about George Bush, and George Bush was doing his best to prove Kanye wasn't a liar, we were all worrying about The Chaw Lord.  Because, as you can guess, he happened to live in N'Orleans.  Every day, he wasn't there.  The team assembled, anxiously inquired about the Chaw Lord's fate, and then would proceed to blow the heads off twelve year old kids from England. 

It got worse and worse.  There were some people who had Chaw's e-mail address, and they would send message after message - and get no reply.  Others checked his online history, using web magic.  We even had a hacker wannabe offer to trace his IP address and figure out what was going on at home - though we never got a reply.  Every day, though, I'd watch the situation in New Orleans and remember "The Chaw Lord is there right now."

We finally got ahold of him about three weeks after the Hurricane.  And he filled us on in exactly what he had been doing over the last few weeks.

See, when the floods had started, Chaw sandbagged the ground floor of his apartment.  How he had sandbags handy, I'll never know.  When the waters really started to rise, though, and reports of looters were everywhere, Chaw moved all his furniture upstairs and camped his family in the attic.  However, he took all the debris (crappy desks and couches and whatnot) and used them to barricade the doors and jam the stairways - a technique he picked up directly from yours truly, who would use crates and boxes to block doorways in bases while playing Halo. 

Then, Chaw took all his MREs (yes, he had military Meals Ready-To-Eat for some inexplicable reasion) and used those to feed his family.  And then he camped in a good sniping position during the day, waiting for the looters to come. 

Literally, he spent hours crouched in his building, waiting for looters to come into his crosshairs - another trick he learned from Halo.  One night, a bunch of guys came by on a motorboat - and then fled when The Chaw Lord opened fire ("they were just warning shots, but the pussy bitches didn't know that", we were informed).  He kept diring at those men until the boat disappeared down a flooded street. 

People say video games can instill violent behaviour in people.  And I used to argue against that incessantly.  But after hearing about the Chaw Lord, who used a high-powered rifle to take potshots at unarmed looters, and enjoyed this immensely, I'm thinking maybe video games had some part to play.  But I'd never say that to Chaw, of course. 

Because you don't fuck with the Chaw Lord.