Day 18: Pwning

Looking back on the internet gaming sensations of the past few years, one thing always stands out, or rather over, everything else when it comes to similar aspects of playing the games involved.  One person is always better than another and that person is most likely going to be an arrogant asshole because of it.  I myself end up in that type of situation often while playing Halo, but most of the time I attempt to curb my arrogance and just move on with the game.  However, there are those players who, from time to time, will "assert their dominance" as it were by using the above maneuver.  Let's get a bit of history on this phenomenon before we just jump in though.

This could be a normal person.

Counter Strike is definitely one of the greatest and most memorable internet shooters of all time, there's no doubt about it, but it started a literary trend that has been guided into the language of every gamer to ever play an online shooter.  To a normal person, owning something is to have ownership or to have something be your property, but to a gamer owning has become something much more.  For instance, in Counter Strike, if you kill someone without even having to try or with an extreme amount of skill, you may "own" the person because you're able to assert your dominance with your abilities.  Whomever first coined the word own to be used in this manner for online gaming started a flash fire in the vocabularies of players everywhere.  Now instead of saying, "Oh damn that guy killed the shit out of me," we now say, "Oh damn that guy owned my ass!"  Notice the differences.

This is only one step too far.

Moving along the timeline that I'm imagining, it's not hard to see how an infectious use of the word own could be misspelled at some point close to it's origin.  Considering that everyone and their mother makes a million spelling errors every second, someone at some point hit the p key rather than the o key and the world ended up with "pwn."  Now clearly not everyone uses pwn, there's still a large segment of the internet population that uses the original own, but the pwn population ended up migrating off the beaten path of insults and took things a few steps too far.  Take a look at the image on the right.  How many of us remember My Little Pony?  Well, this is what happens when the internet and the pwners get a hold of decency and cartoons.

This is demoralization.

Remember the image at the beginning?  The Teabagging gaming community, members of which run over to a downed corpse and crouch repeatedly to mimic the sexual act of teabagging though for an aspect of humiliation rather than of the actual act, at some point along the timeline merged with the pwners.  What you have now is a mutation of not only the original word own, but also of the acts that they entail.  This is also partially caused by the lack of both speech and type capabilities when playing the newer games that include the option to not listen to everyone's inane bullshit chatter about what they did last night.  Now when a victim is downed in Halo, they are owned by the killer's abilities and then teabagged, thus resulting in a pwn.  It's been scientifically proven that the only way to stop someone from pwning is to pwn them yourself. So join with me and declare war on pwners.

Let's all be bigger people.

In war, demoralization is just as important as inflicting actual casualties, perhaps even more important.  So here's my proposition to stop the pwners that pwn just for the fun and humiliation: pwn only the people who pwn you first.  Pwn them so hard that they won't ever want to pwn again.  Of course there's always the sane option of just killing them and moving on without the added humiliation, and thus being the bigger person, but I doubt that many gamers can be convinced to do that.