FanWords
JUMP, SWEEP, STRIKE, KILL
Rebecca McBryan
They are among us. Silent assassins. Baby-faced killers. Innocence in their eyes, their motions clumsy, and yet they're as effective as Steven Seagal. In his thin days.
I’m talking 2D fighters, and the terrifying unpredictability of first-time players. These people are the true idiot-savants of the gaming world. Practice as much as you want. Perfect every Hadoken and Sonic Boom, every Yami Barai and Power Wave, you’ll still fall to their flurry of limbs.
Jump, sweep, strike, kill.
They come in all shapes and sizes. They could be seven years old, or seventy. You can tell who they are by the things they say…it’s assassin talk. It’s code. “How do I hold this?” “What button do I press?” “Who am I?” “Which button again?”
Of course, they find the buttons. All four: Jump. Sweep. Strike. Kill.
It’s the blind panic of not knowing what they’re thinking. Either they are truly stupid, or they’ve been trained by Tibetan monks. They make you shrink. They infect you. Suddenly you can’t remember what the buttons do anymore, or even where they are. Top face button on the PS2 controller is the square, remember? Or is it a circle? Is it even a shape? Panic.
And they’re on you.
You defend. You know how to do that. Defend, buy some time to compose yourself, pull back. They come in low, sweeping at your feet. You take the hits, panic, ‘back-diagonal-down’, defend low. Just in time for them to start on your face. Their timing isn’t accidental. It can’t be. The world isn’t like that. It’s instinct. They can smell your fear. They don’t only know how to make you panic, they know when you’ll panic.
Jump, sweep, strike, kill. Again. People start watching. To each other: “Look. He’s only seven. He’s never played the game before.” To you, and it’s the question you’ve been dreading:
“How long have you had this game?”
The assassin doesn’t smile. Doesn’t have to. His fingers are a flurry. His gaze unflinching. Apparently, and who could suspect such an innocent face of lying, he still doesn’t even know the buttons.
You raise a prayer to the Heavens. One victory? Just one? Please?
God’s busy. Talking to St. Peter. Proud of his creation. “He’s only seven,” he’s saying. “He’s never played the game before.”
So you make the final, fatal mistake. You try to emulate the assassin. You attack. You try to unlearn everything you know about the game in the space of ten seconds. It’s insanity. Now you’re not only fighting the assassin, you’re fighting yourself. Your fingers betray you. You can’t see. Your gaming life flashes before your eyes. It was never supposed to end like this. Slain by your own vanity, your own arrogance.
It ends simply. The same pattern, unbreakable: Jump, sweep, strike, kill. It’s beautiful in its purity, and you want to learn it. You want to be taught it. But you can’t ask the assassin. Even if he would divulge the secret (and you know that the Knights Templar have probably sworn him to silence), your pride wouldn’t let you grovel before him. All you can do is turn off the machine, and force a smile, and one pathetic word.
“Fluke.”
Rebecca McBryan is a 23-year-old fashion student from Ontario.
During breaks from her studies and her modelling career, she enjoys Xbox Live and, of course, consolevania.
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