XFunc_ 'SERVICES • The CS Doc'

Counter-Strike is almost more of a social movement than a computer game. At any given time there are twenty- to a hundred-thousand people playing on the internet (not taking LAN games into account). "CS" is responsible for millions of internet hours. It goes on 24 hours a day, seven days a week, on thousands of servers many of which are "dedicated" (set to do nothing but run this game, non-stop). It is now being played professionally - with prizes for specific tournaments reaching US $150,000 as of this writing.

Part of the story of CS is its unusual birth - it came about from the efforts of a team of amateurs, working in their spare time on the internet. "Gooseman", from Vancouver, and "Cliffe", from Virginia (their "game names") were the two guys who set it in motion.

Counter-Strike essentially combined two prior-existing first-person shooter ("FPS" or "shooter") games that were both popular in their own right: Half-Life, by Valve Software, and Tom Clancy's Rainbow Six/Rogue Spear ("RS") series, by Red Storm. The theme of CS is counter-terrorism - the subject of Rainbow Six - and many of the "maps" (scenarios) are directly inspired from the RS franchise. But CS was built as a modification (a "mod") of Half-Life - a breakthrough shooter in the science-fiction genre with realistic overtones. (In Half-Life, the player is trying to escape from aliens and hostile soldiers in a secret desert laboratory.) The Half-Life creators had released their source-code to the gaming public, inviting them to make different games from it.

As a result, CS combines the high lethality and strategic teamwork of Rainbow Six, with the Half-Life's more stable and attractive game engine, and speed-of-play.

In many respects Rainbow Six was the true breakthrough game. It was the first realistic shooter to dare believe that players wanted more than the mindless semi-comic violence offered by the first shooters (i.e. Doom and Quake). But while RS still enjoys a strong following of purist military enthusiasts, CS is arguably a more enjoyable experience - which may explain its much greater popularity. CS is faster-playing (RS forces players to go through an evaluation phase after each round; CS does away with this). CS enables players to more freely "ghost" around the board when they are "dead". Also, unlike RS, CS has a money system that is completely unrealistic for its subject matter, yet somehow adds an appealing poetic layer - something that just feels right with many players. (It is best to view the money as "victory points" than strict dollars.) This money system adds an additional "game on top of the game". Winning teams earn more money and can dominate over successive rounds. The losers in turn must struggle to retake the initiative. You often see a "tide" during play, with the initiative gradually changing sides over successive rounds - something that seems to mimic the ebb-and-flow of winning and losing in life in general. Anyone who has watched the shifting fortunes of any major sports team will understand this.

These things might explain the phenomenal popularity of Counter-Strike; a popularity no one anticipated - certainly not the makers of Half-Life. Originally you needed to own Half-Life to play CS, which was available for free over the internet. But the unprecedented popularity of CS soon compelled Valve to release a stand-alone version.

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The theme of Counter-Strike is counter-terrorism - meaning half the players form a "terrorist" team and the other half a "counter-terrorist" team. This stems, again, from its Rainbow Six inspiration. (Rainbow Six is based on Tom Clancy's novel of the same name.) In single-player RS, the player plans and executes highly-complex and realistic raids against terrorists - to rescue hostages, disable bombs, and whatnot. (So realistic that a criticism of RS was the planning - like real counter-terrorism - was much too meticulous and complex for an entertainment-oriented game.) However, in multiplayer RS, players never adopt the terrorist role - owing no doubt to the conservative American lineage of the game. Rather they form "Blue" or "Gold" teams of counter-terrorists. (Yes, you aren't even allowed to join a "Red" team - owing, no doubt, to fears of communist overtones - despite the long Red-vs-Blue tradition of wargames.) Of course, this made things a little weird in multiplayer RS: Why would one SWAT team be fighting another SWAT team?

The amateur creators of Counter-Strike, lacking public-relations savvy, saw no harm in just calling one team "terrorists" and the other "counter-terrorists". That solved the central problem of "Why are these two teams fighting each other?" Today, this may cause squeamishness among those who have never played, but it must be understood that terrorism doesn't really explain the popularity of Counter-Strike (or even multiplayer Rainbow Six for that matter).

No one plays Counter-Strike specifically to be a "terrorist" - any more than they play the various WWII multiplayer shooters (including Steven Spielberg's Medal of Honor) to be Nazis. Counter-Strike is, like any wargame, politically neutral. (Trust me. As a former soldier I can tell you that when an entity, such as an army, is politically invested in one side winning, the wargames they produce - e.g. military training exercises - tend to be made so that it is rather easy for the side that's supposed to win to... win.) Most of the CS scenarios are laughably unrealistic, if viewed in the light of real terrorism. You have, for one, the implausible situation of terrorists "guarding" hostages against counter-terrorists. (This defies the very reason terrorists take hostages - the threat they will shoot them on the spot if counter-terrorists launch a raid. In CS, shooting a hostage is detrimental, no matter if you are "T" or "CT".) And the "bomb" scenarios inevitably have the terrorists charging kamikaze toward a fully-alerted counter-terrorist team (something they would never do, at least not in the kind of team-based scenario that CS depicts), to plant the bomb (there is only one) - with a timer mechanism no less - to blow up something of little strategic value (in "Dust2" they want to blow up boxes of army supplies). Players frequently switch between teams, typically to balance play if one side is hopelessly outclassed, further circumventing any suspicions to some loyalty to the CT or T side.

No, CS is not really about terrorism or counter-terrorism at all. It may be about violence (a whole other issue) - and it may wear the trappings of counter-terrorism and terrorism - but it is not really about those things. There are no real-world politics here - only the semblance of them. There are just two teams and some unknown "cause" that lets everyone have a big cops-and-robbers shoot-'em-up on their computer.

You must look elsewhere to explain the phenomenon of Counter-Strike...