Why quake unites and CS divides…

Well keeping in the tempo developed by me from the last two posts, I will like to continue posting spam again on my blog. There is really nothing to post these days. Nothing seems to be happening now, well there were some really memorable interviews but I am not in the mood to write about them right now. Will think about posting those “experiences” later. As for now, I really miss the college life.
Thinking about college life, I don’t recall anything I studied or “researched”. Let me tell you what I really did in the college life. That is, gaming.
The two games I spent really a substantial amount of time were Quake and CS. Well, through the whole second year I don’t recall anything else other than playing Quake3 in our cozy old lab2. We used to have the potential of quaking day and night, continuously, non-stop.
Now coming back to the title of this post. Why I project quake with a halo on its head lies in its concept of TDMs (if you don’t know what TDM is you really lost your way to this blog… so shooo shooo!). When you are playing the TDMs, you tend to divide the teams on presumed equality wherein the game will be worthwhile and even more entertaining. Anybody can join in any teams and there wont be any effect to the game play. It is played more on the lines of fun and as far as our batch was concerned, there was no ego of being in a specific team. And anyways, the teams were just temporary and we used to switch the teams often after each game.
But when it comes to CS, our college seems to have come up with this crazy concept of “clans”. Now i don’t know but something about these “clans”, the very concept used to erk me. At that time I was not so free to “analyze” the philosophical questions like “Why does clans rub you in the wrong way?” because I had a game to play and kick the so called clans’ a$$.
But now, I presumably have the luxury of time. To smell the roses. To dig the long forgotten graves!
After a good deal of soul searching ;) and brainstorming ;)), I have come up with the following explanation. The very concept of forming a clan means that you want to establish your supremacy (well that’s the general trait.. now if you want to form a clan to be the worst clan ever, then you are welcome you weirdo!). You choose the best players you can bribe and pester till they agree to play their normal game save that little tag before their name and voila! a clan is formed.
This very concept of clans in CS is biased towards the better players and forming a stronger team. Now, I don’t know to whom you want to “prove” your “supremacy”. But what is the point of going through with all the above pains to just prove nothing?
Even if you do form, there will come the virtual copyright associated with the clan. A lesser mortal cant use that name. Or else, the non-existent stocks of the clan fall in value.
Well clans do exist in Quake too at the international level but in our local college level there is no clan as such. The closest thing to the clan concept in quake comes when you are playing inter-batch tourney. But this anamoly just proves the point. If some clan is formed in quake on the lines of CS, I can very well tell you that it will just be impossible to beat that clan because that is the very nature of quake that makes it very biased to the stronger team. So on the flip side, it takes away the “entertainment” quotient. You know it for sure who is going to win.
So what do you achieve from these clans in CS? It doesn’t mean that you become formidable or something like in quake. A magnum even in the hands of a n00b can prove disastrous to the greatest of the clans. An AK in the hands of a person with a two digit IQ, who knows how to differentiate his teammates from the enemies can get a kill even if he sprays blindly towards the enemies’ direction. So why is all this fuss about? I don’t know you tell me!
So the next time you hear someone shout “abe naam change kar” in the lab, just chuckle and think about the banality of life.

(Man I really have to write something meaningful in my blog… but err… that will be against the code or something!!)