Flow and Coliberation in Counterstrike
My first encounter with counterstrike began in a LAN café next to a local community college. My friends all got a free pass for two hours playing most high-tech computers. We were going in there to team up and kill everyone else. There was just one major problem: I had never played counterstrike while all of my gamer friends spent their whole lives online. Counterstrike is a first person shooter made as an online modification to Half-Life where one side is terrorist and the other side is counterterrorist. The objective is to either rescue hostages or prevent a bomb from being blown up. The team that successfully meets its objective or kills all players on the other team gets money. Every 30 minutes the map changes.
The first time playing counter strike, I spent more time watching the game and waiting for everyone to die than actually playing it because I was always killed first. That was frustrating. Furthermore I played with a group that had friendly fire on. So, even though it started out being hard to aim and get used to see maps, is even harder telling the difference between your own teammates and the enemy. The terrorists are supposed to have a lighter colored uniform, but when in shadow this detail is hard to see. My friends are very supportive, but the people who didn't know me were sure to yell over the microphone that I was stupid. After all, they had spent half a day and $20 only to have their statistics ruined by a newbie.
Luckily my mouse controlling skills increased, and I learned the nuances of shooting automatic weapons. However it was still hard to maneuver while shooting. I was still never able to get more than one kill for every time that I died. Had my friends not come along with me, I might not have continued playing. But there's a feeling that we were all in this together. Even though I was holding everyone else down, I knew that in areas outside counterstrike I was smarter or better than them: after all I was going to a top university for performing better in high school and they were going to state schools. So, I knew that mastering a mouse hand, quick shooting, and agility in counterstrike was possible.
Bernie DeKoven points out that Coliberation is a state of flow most attainable when others nearby are doing the same action. After the first map rounds, I was less concerned about winning and more concerned how when I went to us very specific corner and crouched behind a certain box with a shotgun I could run out, surprise my victim, and blast them to smithereens. I would then be shot by another player, but it was fun. In a way, it reminded me of the original Doom where you could take a chainsaw to a zombie bull repeatedly and always get the same shock of extreme pixilated gore coming out of a large animal that was about to kill you if you didn't charge at it. Perhaps, this is deep fun. But just as cutting up the last zombie becomes routine, so does shooting a terrorist with a shotgun become monotonous.
To keep our interest, the map changes and new tricks are added. In one level you can fall through ice, and you're so close to your enemy when starting the levels take less than two minutes. Aim comes secondary to being able to crouch or charge without being hit. Then, on the next level everyone only gets a sharpshooter rifle, a knife, and just enough money for a hand gun on a large open field. The challenge changes and our skills must adapt slightly. If the map doesn't change, then we don't experience flow. Instead, we leave the game but not without first deliberately shooting everyone on our team and hoping that they don't know who did it. This offers its own challenge in trying to shoot one team member in hopes that he will then go and shoot another player thinking that that teammate was treasonous.