Racial animus in the post-election days took a very strange turn. The best XBox 360 games of the year are coming out this month and although I'm playing a new one, I joined some of my online buddies to play an old favorite, Rainbow Six Vegas 2.
The version of conflict we were playing is called total conquest and in our case it was a 5 on 5 team game. The aim of the game is for your team to locate and activate three satellite base stations and defend them before the other team can. Each team has assault rifles and grenades. So your team might have possession of two of the three and the other team rushes you and takes over one of the uplinks. If you keep all three uplinks in your possession for 30 seconds, you win. If you shoot a member of the opposing team, they will respawn in 10 seconds. Each match is played until a 30 second connection is made by one team or the other, or until time runs out. You have five minutes.
Our team consisted of generally middle aged men, black and white from various parts of the country. The lot of us have been gaming together for about 4 years. Later in the evening we were joined by a younger couple who just got married. The other team consisted of some younger kids, one said he was 21, black and white who suddenly got in a squabble about the proper use of the word 'nigger'.
Between rounds, in the lobby where the terms and rules of the game are setup by the host, everybody can hear everyone. During the game, you can only hear your own team. Once the squabble started, the young team started throwing insults of every sort. I swear I heard everything, and I mean every stupid thing ever said about race from the young team insulting each other - that is when I could pick out phrases going back and forth between the five of them. And then the action began.
It took our team about two minutes to win the first round which is pretty swift. We got back to the lobby and they were still going at it. 'Oh you stupid redneck, you're probably in the KKK'. Next round we win with almost no opposition, oh wait, they got uplink Charlie. I grenade one of the commandos, boom, and recapture Charlie. Round over, we win again. We're cracking up because the rabble is going at full blast as soon as we get back to the lobby. 'Nobody you know or I know stole you from Africa, you fucking idiot'. Round three. The guys on our team, especially me and the host who is 60 really start cracking up when one of the kids says, 'Your probably like 34 years old playing video games, what do you know?' And this went on for about 30 minutes straight and in the later rounds they started fragging each other - shooting members of their own team in combat. They managed to take a few uplinks and kill a few members of our team, but they never achieved total conquest. Not once.
Hilarious. Sad.
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