Tuesday, August 07, 2012

How Many Idiots does it Take to Take a Screenshot?

It's been about two months, and the [famiry] is gonna break up.

We started playing Team Fortress 2 last year, when it came out Free-to-Play. Since then, we've had a small, slowly growing group of players, culminating in about eight to ten guys running around a virtual battlefield killing each other with rockets and fish. The [famiry] was an inside joke born in Japan when Lou Ee brought his laptop over and played TF2 on the Japanese servers.

We had a good two months, we brothers-in-arms; pushing karts, building sentries and übering heavies. We have fought together and died together, captured intelligence and defended points, and now the war is over. And we're all going home.

This morning, we tried to take a photograph - a screenshot - of us, the famiry, in-game. It took us two whole hours. Most of it was due to technical difficulties, but once we all managed to get into a single server, people kept killing the photographer, or backstabbing each other, or building sentries in a crowd of people.

I thought it was exasperating at first. Frustrating, that a bunch of supposedly mature twenty-one year olds couldn't stand still virtually for five minutes so that a screenshot could be taken. That we couldn't supress our trigger-happy urges to maim, ignite, and riddle everything in front of us.

But when the shots were taken and everything was said and done, I realised that that's what a family is. It's not perfect. They are going to annoy you at times, and be obnoxious, and irritate the hell out of you. But all that is what being a family is all about. You hate each other to death, then you laugh about it and meet up for lunch.

There are two types of family you can have. One is the one you are born with.

This is the one I made.
The Edna Man

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