Ssshhhh!

Last night I was playing some Insurgency, a modern combat themed mod for Half-Life 2. The game focuses on effectively working as a team to shoot more of the other guys than they shoot of you, otherwise you don’t win, and this is bad. A key aspect of the game is communication, this being a Source game, you get a pretty big step up on that with the integrated voice chat made available to everyone who doesn’t suck.

More often than not you can count on the fact that there’s going to be some mouth breathing armchair general there at least attempting to direct the flow of action, which I appreciate. I don’t mind this because it means you have someone who at least most of the time has a general idea on what the fuck it is they’re talking about which means it’s far more likely you’re going to win. Everyone likes to win.

Last night, however, I wasn’t quite this lucky and as a matter of fact, something that I usually never see, or hear in this case, occurred. No one said a word. Not one person even cracked out a, “MOVE, FAGGOT!” over the voice chat. It was dead silent all 4 rounds I played. This of course made me feel weird about talking, so I too, not being much of a leader due to sucking at the game, kept my mouth shut. It went on like this for a good thirty minutes until I just couldn’t take the wall of silence pressing in on my mind. It really ended up feeling like sitting in a room full of people staring at each other and not saying a word for half an hour.

I’m not really going anywhere in particular with this, it’s just something that does happen every now and then and every time strikes me as bizarre.