Player Killer

 

            It’s Halloween.  The one day of the year that it’s perfectly normal to dress up as some strange supernatural creature and threaten people unless they give you candy.  The day that kids and parents are ravaging the neighborhood for Snickers and Kit Kats; and most college students are out partying.  Yet, one lonely individual finds himself in front of his computer on this festive All Hallows Eve.

            What’s he doing at a computer on a night when there’s so much fun to be had?  Well, we can see he’s playing one of the popular “Massively Multiplayer Online Role Playing Games;” a game where there’s more emphasis on the social aspect while playing over the internet.  The one he is playing happens to be a medieval themed game, and he is playing a typical beefed up fighter type character.  At the time we begin to observe we can see that his is fighting another player, who appears to be much weaker than he is.  The small, cute looking character is soon defeated.

            “J00 w34k f00!  I p0wnz0r3d j00!”  The player whom we are observing continued to taunt his opponent in this way for quite some time while the incapacitated character had no choice but to listen.  After some time the small character revived and stood in front of the player.  It appeared that the character itself was glaring at the player.

            A speech bubble formed above the small characters head that displayed a message in another language.   This struck our player as a little strange, as he had no idea foreign player could even play with him.  The character he had just fought disappeared and he didn’t give it much thought.

            Over the in-game instant messaging system, the player receives a message from this friend.

            “What’s up?” The message reads.

            “Not much.  Just killed some weaksauce.  After he got back up he said something to me in some weird language.”

            “Dude, maybe he cursed you. lol”

            “Yeah right.”

            For a while our player does nothing of much interest to us, as he had no further battles for some time.  Our interest is drawn back to the game once the player begins to battle some non-player creatures.  He seems to handle them easily enough, with only minor harm coming to his character.  The player, sitting in his chair, pauses a minute after the battle, and looks at his left arm.  There is a small trickle of blood coming from beneath the sleeve of his T-shirt.

            “Must’ve cut myself earlier and not noticed,” the player says to himself.

            The player continues his game, and becomes so in tune with it that he hardly notices that there even is an outside world.  We have been noticing though.  What we’ve been noticing is that after each battle the player has been developing more nicks and cuts.  After a particularly gruesome battle a large cut appeared on the players face, reaching from his hairline to his jaw.  The pain of this wound forced the player to scream out loud, though as soon as he did it became a scar.  Though this was apparent to us, since there was no evidence that he could see that something happened, the player ignored it and continued to play.

            Soon, the player faced a large “boss” enemy.  The player wasn’t having any luck fighting this enemy, and was losing health rapidly.  The player himself was generating new cuts just as rapidly, and they were large enough that the player could no longer ignore them, screaming in pain as he fought on.  The boss delivered a brutal blow, which cause the players own blood to splash the screen as he was knocked out of his chair.

            “What the hell is going on?”  The player asked himself as his wounds continued to multiply.  Then a there was a spark in his eye as he remembered what his friend said.  “Cursed… no… can’t be… shit, I’ve gotta turn this off.”  After this thought, he lunged for the power button on his computers tower.  We can hear the hum of the fans powering down, and we see the monitor fade to black.  This is where we leave the player; on the floor, lifeless.  His wounds have are gone, but so is his life.  We exit as swiftly and silently as we entered, having our fill of Halloween evil, in search of more jubilant Halloween celebrations.

 

“You are the fool.  Be cursed from this day forward!  May you and your character become one.  May you live and die as one.”