Is there honor among nerds? Among dweebs who play video games online for fun?
What is honor? Can you eat it? Isn't that the thing that knights and all that nonsense used to get hung up about? Is it contextual? Does it only matter if there are stakes? What if there are no stakes? Or rather, the only stake is winning?
I keep running into people in Overwatch 2 who swap to the most overpowered character after getting gapped. I get that in competitive, fine. But in quick play? Is there honor among dweebs?
The answer is yes, in a stupid way. David Graeber in his book Debt, the First 5000 Years wrote about honor. Some words I still enjoy thinking about every now and then--
"At its simplest, honor is that excess dignity that must be defended with the knife or sword". And second--
"We can speak of honor as simple integrity. Decent people honor their commitments."
Let's reframe the conversation now.
Can we have "Honor" in the latter context, in the unspoken social engagements of video games? I believe the answer is "Yes, but only if everyone involved has the same goals in playing that game, and follows the basic rules of the game." What this means is, if I play a fighting game with someone else, and they're playing to win, but I'm playing to dick around, there is an inherent mismatch in our goals, so the entire concept of "integrity" kind of goes out the window. We can have our spoken agreements, but if our goals are fundamentally different then what I might consider to be fine might be completely different from what they consider to be fine. Between people you know, this isn't really a problem. Humans are social creatures, my buddy can just go "Hey man can you X" and I'll just go "yeah sure dude", but the rub is when you remove that component from the equation.
Fighting games are complicated for this, because their inherent core is very competitively driven. At a certain level, it's implicit that everyone is playing to improve long term, and short term to win. But other online games like fps games, where they can change from casual OR competitive, the lack of communication, as well as the mismatched goals can lead to something like earlier-- someone making a decision in a game that feels "dishonorable".
We're playing quickplay to have fun right? Why are people trying so hard? Well, we might not have the same goals. There is no communication, I don't know these people, there's that inherent disconnect, so maybe my ego does get bruised when I'm implicitly challenged by someone who only wanted to win (my excess dignity suddenly has me taking up the sword, that kind of nonsense).
Long winded post, but I had some thoughts I wanted to get out about the nature of competitive games and what the concept of "honor" or playing fair is. At the end of the day it's not that serious, but there'll always be that inherent disconnect when playing with people you'll never speak to or see again. Video games.