"That gun could go off any minute, if you shift it around too much," adds Coleman, another formally trained gun collector. "The game is forgiving," he says. "Real life is not."
At the very least, Coleman suggests, the yahoos swinging the AK should switch from playing Battlefield to Rainbow Six.
Gamer Matt takes aim with Major Tom's AR-15 assault
rifle. "The game is forgiving," says Cedar Coleman."Real life is
not."
The action at Desert Bash 2.0: What looks like a makshift
office at first soon begins to resemble the pod scenes in
the Matrix movies.
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Photograpy by Emily Piraino
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"That game was made by people with military background," he says. "In that game, you can't just run in and shoot everybody. It's a lot more tactical.
"Plus," he says, "in Rainbow Six you can't get recharged health if you get shot. If you get shot in that game, you're pretty much done."
Tattoo boy fires off a few more rounds at some Mountain Dew cans not more than 10 feet in front of him, and Coleman and Tindle shake their heads.
"If you're gonna learn to shoot from a video game," Tindle says, "at least pick the one that's the most realistic."
In a gaming clan, just like in a real infantry, players quickly find their area of expertise. Some find they're best at firing missiles from an off-shore aircraft carrier. Others excel at manning the turrets on the tanks.
For Young, who discovered he could master the difficult task of piloting a helicopter with a few precise mouse-clicks and keyboard strokes, the chopper immediately became his thing.
Young, in fact, got so good at flying the choppers in the Battlefield mod Desert Combat, he began to wonder if the skills he picked up in the game might actually work in the real world. The military, after all, uses its own game, titled America's Army, to train recruits before turning them loose on the real machinery. Eventually, Young became so curious about the science of transference, he wound up spending $15,000 on helicopter lessons at a Scottsdale flying school.
"I did it for almost a year, spent a ton of money on it. And it was probably all just because of the game," he says a few days after Desert Bash, hanging out with Czechowski and fellow LanCamper Brian Lick in the front yard of his north Phoenix home. "I went out and dropped 15 grand on flying lessons I'll probably never use in my future. It's not something I wanna do with my life. But when I learned how to fly in the game, I just wanted to compare it to the real thing. And sure enough," he adds, in his amiable country drawl, "it was dang close!"
The real flying experience, Young feels, has given him an edge at piloting the helicopters in the game. "TeNjin's the other good pilot in LanCamp," he says, motioning toward Czechowski, "but he hasn't flown the real thing."
"That doesn't make you better!" Czechowski protests.
"You say it doesn't, I say it does."
Young criticizes the latest update to his favorite game for making it just a little too easy for players to keep the choppers steady. "In Battlefield Vietnam, when you pull up on the collective, it'll stay up," he says. "But in real life, if you let go of the collective, the helicopter starts to come down. And in Desert Combat, that's the way it was: You had to cap to keep it up.
"Now," Young says, "anybody can fly the helicopters. And that's not the way it should be. I spent a year of training on flying -- not just in the game, but in real life, too -- and I was considered the best pilot. Now, in Battlefield Vietnam, anybody can be the best pilot."
Young still thinks his actual chopper experience puts him at an advantage in the game, if only because his understanding of helicopter dynamics gives him a better idea of how to take one out from the ground.
"What do you think, TeNj?" he finally says at one point. "Could I take down a helicopter with an RPG?"
"You mean, in real life?" Czechowski asks.
"Yeah," Young answers, extending his left arm up under an imaginary rocket-propelled grenade launcher. "I mean, if I ever got the chance to shoot a real RPG at a helicopter. I think I could probably lead it enough to take it down by at least the fourth shot."
"Yeah," Lick offers, sitting down on the porch with his wife and young son. "You might have to take a couple of practice rounds, but you might be able to take it out."
Young just smiles.
E-mail jimmy.magahern@newtimes.com, or call 602-229-8478.
