Tuesday, February 17, 2009

Today I played with a 9 year old girl

Yes, that sounds a bit wrong. Anyway.

I was playing Left 4 Dead tonight when one of my team mates announces in local chat "I'm 9 years old and a girl". Whatever, I think, as I had just witnessed her eat some guy's face and do a bunch of damage. But then I heard the voice chat.

Holy crap there was indeed a 9 year old girl playing this (15+ rated) game. And you know what? She's probably better than about 80% of the people that I play with. She:

- Advised us whenever she didn't know how to do something, instead of doing something stupid instead.
- Followed instructions to the letter.
- Called out whenever affected by the attack of a boss zombie, along with supplying the name of said zombie.
- Got lost only once.
- Saved comrades in trouble.
- Mowed down infected (more than me in one map!)
- Attacked at the same time as the rest of the team when playing the infected, as opposed to dying quickly alone.
- Thanked us for the games when she had to leave.

This was, seriously, a dream team mate. What gives? How come a 9 year old is so much better than a bunch of young adults? Seems to me like most more mature players bring an arrogance with them to a new game that is roughly inversely proportional to their actual skill level with the game. Young kid, clean slate, 100% willingness to learn, and no snarky "lolpwnt" mentality.

Time to go start recruiting clan members from Free Realms or something.

P.S. It was her SECOND DAY playing the game.

2 comments:

Chappo said...

was she asian? O.o
If so it doesn't count :P

Melf_Himself said...

Haha. I don't think so, her accent was pretty neutral to me (i.e. Australian) and she had good ping on the Australian server I was on.

Do Korean kids not raised in Korea acquire the same clicky-clicky super skills? Nature or nurture? :o