Thursday, 09 July 2009

• Video Game Lexicology: Blitzing

  

  Most video games fall in line with a basic tenet of sportsmanship: when your opponent is down and out, the match is over. You've won, and there's no need to denigrate them with excessive celebration or additional strikes to their player. A select and proud few, meanwhile, throw propriety out the window with an emphatic boot to the faces of the fallen.

  I guess one of the earliest and certainly one of the most memorable examples of this is Fatalities from the Mortal Kombat Series. With these you not only defeat and embarrass your foe, but you can literally impale, incinerate and otherwise tear them limb from limb. As the old saying goes, "It's all fun and games until someone loses an eye...or is brutally eviscerated." I've never been a huge fan of Mortal Kombat, but I appreciate the literalness of the title, as well as the fact the stakes are so high. With Street Fighter, you KO your opponent. Big deal. With Mortal Kombat, you KO your opponent, as in Kill Off. There's a greater sense of urgency when your goal is to not die.

  

  If you're looking for, ahem, cleaner post-match fun, there are other games to choose. Sticking with the fighting genre, the Soul Calibur series jumps to mind. Not only do you kick a man or woman when he or she is down during the course of play, but after the match, you can still piledrive them while they scream in agony. The favorite among my group of friends, though, is NFL Blitz, where they actually keep tallies of your affront to good taste. Truly, you haven't gamed unless you've watched a man get elbow-dropped by another man turning into an actual dolphin on a computer-rendered football field. This phenomenon I call Blitzing, so named for the game.

  Blitzing (v.) refers to the act of striking or otherwise injuring your opponent after the official play or match has ended. Most often, it functions purely for entertainment value. And well, it kind of makes you a jerk, but hey, the game lets you do it, right?

  On a grander, more existential scale, there really is no reason to not blitz your opponent. It's not like your in-game karma is really going to be affected. In fact, there are lessons to be learned here. Namely that violence solves all of our problems, and there are no repercussions to your actions.

  Young impressionable children, I hope you're taking notes.

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