Martyr Complex?

Ran for the truck last night. Or plane, rather.

Only one who made it away alive.

And y'know, it didn't feel very good at all. Bit of a hollow victory.

At least if you died, you get the warm fuzzy feeling of having sacrificed yourself to save someone else.

I suppose it was because it was a really good game and team, who watched out for each other a great deal, so it felt like a bit of a downer that three men were left behind at the end.

Logically, I know if I didn't run, then we would have ALL lost and the map would have repeated to make us go through a whole bunch of shooting yet again. Which wouldn't be so bad except it was past 2am and bed was calling out.

It would have been ok if there were two survivors. Then you can kinda shrug and say the other two were a bit slow.

What is this...survivor's guilt from a video game?

Kudos to L4D for giving some (not INTENSE, but some) emotional experiences that an MMO would be hard pressed to achieve.

In a related revelation, I realized that L4D forces me to be -very- situationally aware. More so than any other FPS.

I'm always checking out for where the other three on my team are. Not just to make sure that no zombie has dragged them off, but to put myself out of their lines of fire and making sure I don't get separated from everyone. The game design helps by providing blue outlines when they're out of LOS.

Contrast that to nearly any other FPS. Since when do we really care that we're moving around with a bunch of teammates? Seems like it's just...run around wildly, towards the enemy if possible, oh hey, someone! Oh, not enemy. Teammate. Hi. Bye. Any teamwork is fairly incidental unless you've got a real life friend or have just decided to stick like a leech onto somebody (who won't really bother looking out for you anyhow.)

The only FPS that has come close before L4D is Natural Selection. Where it was safer to travel in packs - marines benefitting from having many eyes gunning for aliens coming out from vents and around corners, and aliens trying the occasional co-ordinated attack, mostly because you tend to die if you just run up alone without additional distracting targets.

I suppose TFC before that had random bouts of inspirational teamwork. Mostly on the Hunted maps, where you had to coordinate or get picked off by a gazillion snipers. And there were still many random people wandering around in Brownian motion patterns. You just needed about 2-3 soldiers and a VIP who knew what they were doing. Maybe on normal maps, if two engineers decided they would coordinate sentry gun fire, or two people just happened to be guarding the same position. But yeah, really incidental, imo.

L4D forces you, through its elegant design, to be aware of what everyone else is doing - or waste ammo, accidentally murder or be murdered, and in a hundred myriad ways, end up ultimately losing the game.

Then there's the whole sound indicator for enemies - which is truly inspired. The creation of expectation gets your heart pumping, and yet gives you a bit of an edge if you know what's coming.

And there's the whole trap setting mini-tactic, if you can see choke points and hurl Molotovs with the right timing, or set up fuel canister flame traps...

Game training situational awareness = cool.