By Pentadact

I’ve now killed a thousand people. I’ve died fifteen hundred times doing it, but I’ve saved three hundred and fifty lives along the way. It’s taken me forty-six hours. I’ve won a hundred and one games, and lost ninety-one. That makes me a positive influence. If you see me on the enemy team, you should think “Uh oh, they’ve got Tom. That makes them more likely to win (than they would be otherwise).” I’ve killed twenty-four people with the knife in seven minutes of using it. My single worst-performing map – the one on which my win-to-lose ratio is lowest – is the one that comes up most often in the rotations on the servers I play on. I am cursed.

Battlefield 2 stats are interesting. More interesting is the game itself, my love for which was rekindled tonight when trying out Special Forces. Virtually nothing that’s new in SF had a bearing on the match, so it was basically just a revival. I hadn’t played online for months because Craig, Steve and I had discovered how much fun it was to try aerial stunts on a private LAN server – jumping from one helicopter to another in mid-air, for example. It’s completely different to the normal game, but somehow replaced it in my affections, leading to total neglect even after we stopped really doing the stunts thing too.

Tonight I played Medic, as I always do. I’ve spent less than fifteen percent of my time as classes other than the Medic. Sorry, it’s hard to shake the stats thing. It was a spectacular, incredibly tense and fiercely competitive game tonight – me, an excellent player on my team, and the star player of the enemy team all jostling for the top spot, all pretty sure we’d get a medal (Bronze, Silver or Gold) but all extremely ‘interested’ in which one it would be. I began swearing a lot, even though I was ahead. But somehow my complete jerkishness when playing Battlefield 2 never detracts from what I’m actually doing to get this score up – killing bad guys and saving lives. That remains an utterly pure, deeply instinctive and almost medatative act. When I see a black bar – a dead ally – the defibrillators come out seemingly without me moving my fingers, and he’s resurrected and his foes killed in almost the same motion. Even as I ask the enemy if they like that, cocksuckers, ha, didn’t think so, I care profoundly about the friend I’ve just saved, drop him a medkit in case he gets hurt again, respond to his manly “Thanks man,” with a stoic “You got it.”

I am a pure force, tipping the balance in our team’s favour in both ways – giving to one, takething away from the other. And I score one and a half points per minute.