Casey Kaczmarczyk
3/8/07
Counter Strike Game Analysis

Counter Strike (CS) is a first person shooter (fps), originally created as a mod on the original Half Life game engine. The game can only be played as multiplayer, although a separate game later came out with first player missions. The premise of the game: two opposing sides (the terrorists and the counter-terrorists) fight using modern tactical weapons to complete their side of one of two objectives. Either terrorist have a bomb which they must deploy in a certain area and the counter terrorists must not let them arm and explode that bomb; or the terrorists have a set of hostages, aka hosties, and the counter terrorists must attack and rescue them. Basically, one side has a more attack based objective and the other has a more defense based objective. Of course, another alternative to victory is one side wins when every opponent is dead. During some rounds of the game, one side may decide to try to attack the attackers instead of defending. For example, when the terrorists begin a round with hostages, they could try and rush the opposition and kill them quickly. A description of all the different tactics could be listed, but time is short and the possibilities are limitless, which shows the giant potential of the game even though the game is simple in design.
One intriguing factor about Counter Strike is its concept of death. Whereas, when a player dies, s/he does not return to playing the game until the next round. Basically, if you die, your team would have a good chance of loosing. The next round would start with every player alive and back to normal health. This system is unlike other fps games which allow players to respawn into the exact same round where they died. As people increase their skill level while playing the game, they soon find it able to tell if they are about to be killed before they actually do die. This idea does toy with the concept of actual death because the player can see their dead body after they die.
A key function of an avatar, according to Bob Rehak in his essay "Playing at Being" (pg. 114-5), is the simulated experience of life and death. Given this game is a first person shooter, the player still sees their ‘dead’ avatar counterpart after they have been shot in the head. If a player dies at the beginning they have the option to simply stare their dead body until the next round starts. Though the player may not care that his avatar just died, s/he could care about how it happened and to try and not let it happen again. Humans, in real life, do not have a chance to analysis the way they died so they will not make the fatal error again. The idea of death is more along the lines of an ultimate loss of the game, not death of the player’s avatar. CS just moves the bar away from one kind of story based immersion of game play to team based tactical game play.
Instead of a game with a deep, gripping story line and full of plot twists created by interaction by the user, the game of CS is looped into the same 3½ minutes. Though each 3½ minutes is different due to what the players do, weapons they use and map played on; the actual game of CS is basically 3½ minutes long, just can be played multiple times in one sitting. A parallel can be made to the example of Quake III Rehak uses in the same essay (pg. 117). He noticed how the variation from Quake to Quake III was the removal of the narrative, whereas Quake III was simply designed to play online against human opponents. CS was just built originally with this concept in the mind of the designers. The premise of the game is to pit two opposing teams together, no over arching story line needed in order to have a good gaming experience and each death has no context on future games, only the players score. The reason why people play Counter Strike is to become better at future Counter Strike games, basically the idea of making their avatar the best avatar in that 3½ minute time frame.
Since, as Rehak says, on pg 122-3, part of any kind of worldly experience is “based on equal parts participation and spectatorship”, he believes there is a constant connection between the idea of being a ‘watcher’ and the idea of being a ‘player’. Rehak continues to say that games can be an outlet where we observe and then “play with being.” We can conclude that we now have the ability to play with the idea of death, and turn it into a competitive sport. The players on each side have the ultimate goal of killing the other team, so why not be the best at killing your opponent? Nothing is stopping anyone; it just requires observation of the enemy team and then the skill to out do them.