Counter-Strike: Global Offensive

Counter-Strike: Global Offensive is a competitive online multiplayer game, with the vast majority of players residing on the PC platform, the game is available on the Xbox 360 and Playstation 3 but they have never been updated so are at their 2012 edition forever.

Taking a different approach for this week's diary to avoid just writing about music for eternity, I figured I'd just look at a video game. Counter-Strike: Global Offensive, or CSGO, is something I play pretty often with friends (and strangers). The main gamemode in the game, 'Competitive Mode', consists of a very simple formula. The aim is to plant the bomb if you're on the Terrorist side and defuse the bomb if you're on the Counter-Terrorist side. The game is split into rounds and halves. If a team is eliminated then the round ends. If the objective is achieved then the round ends. If the timer runs down then the rounds ends. It's extremely generic and incredibly simple to understand but at the same time it's also one of the most difficult games to master.

The game falls under the 'First-Person Shooter' genre and normally has anywhere between 200,000 and 600,000 players online at any time. It's a very mainstream game, mostly due to it being popular with all ages and also it being very easy to run. I'd say that only a small minority of players are actually playing the game on high end machines, most are probably just playing on a laptop. I think that's the beauty of the game, anybody can just start playing it.

Personally, I play the game to get better at playing the game. There's no real storyline to complete, this isn't a Role Playing Game or anything so there's no characters to get attached to. It could come under the idea of escaping reality. It isn't like I often get the chance to go out and defuse a bomb with only 6 seconds left in the round while you're friend shouts at you over Skype so you can't hear where the bomb is. That being said, with the casual nature of the game at parts, I tend to just talk about real world stuff like what I had for tea or the person who fell onto my lap on the bus and then didn't even apologise. CSGO is really entertaining for this fact, you can just hop on with your friends and mess about. There's a huge Russian community for the game so 9 times out of 10, if you don't have a full team of 5 friends then you'll be stuck with a random Russian guy who can't speak English and just is generally unhelpful. It's all good fun really.

The themes of the game if they were analysed are pretty shocking when considering current world events but the fact that the maps in the game are set in pretty nondescript places help to break the connection with our actual world. The Terrorist side are a huge stereotype. Middle-Eastern men with AK-47s as their main weapon of choice.

Terrorist

There is a fair amount of humour in the game, even though it isn't designed that way. Chickens roam the maps and you can press a key when looking at them to claim them as your own. If you claimed chicken is killed then you will get a message in the chatbox telling you. It doesn't sound particularly funny when it's described but it's more of a situational 'haha'.

CSGO revolves entirely around having a team, preferably a team that understand the game and all speak at least some of the same language. Playing with strangers can sometimes yield new friends that you'll eventually end up playing with again. Finding another British person on the game is like winning the lottery, it's an instant everlasting friendship. CSGO is incredibly social, there is item trading features that allow you to trade in game items with other players. There is also features to watch other peoples' gameplays and online livestreams and interact in that way. I personally don't care much for livestreams, I'd rather play the game myself than watch another person do it.

I don't tend to talk much about the game outside of the game itself as it doesn't provide much of a talking point but I know that other people will more than happily talk about it. 

In terms of the Uses and Gratifications model, the game doesn't provide any information apart from telling you're when you are bad at it, I wouldn't really come to the game to learn anything valuable. I kinda touched on it in the other bits of the diary but the game really panders to the Entertainment and Social Interaction models, not much with Personal Identity unless you count being personally attack by your team mates when you make a wrong move. I don't find I identify with being a Terrorist much.