Infinitely Bored

The angry mob rounded the corner on Bathurst St and turned into George. It was a genuine protest - it hadn’t been sanctioned by the council, the police weren’t gently guiding people away from the throng. This was grass-roots activism. Proper civil disobedience.

“Down with Infinity Ward!” the mob shouted, waving its placards. “Say no to centralised multiplayer!”

Someone set up a chant.

“What do we want?”

“DEDICATED SERVERS!”

“When do we want them?”

“WHEN THE GAME IS RELEASED!”

The Guerrilla Gamer and I sat in a fast food restaurant and ate fried chicken.

“Where’s Vic?” asked the Guerrilla Gamer.

“He’s in the crowd,” I said, still mildly surprised. “He got up at eight, put on a treasured pair of clean socks - the emergency ones - and made a placard and everything.”

The Guerrilla Gamer made that sort of sour expression which meant he was very very vaguely impressed, in a bemused and sour sort of way.

“What does his placard say?”

“Um,” I said, “DOWN WITH DEVELOPERS, something like that.”

“Down with developers indeed,” said the Guerrilla Gamer. He raised a flimsy waxed paper cup of diet carbonated beverage. “Here’s to you Vic. You and your passion.”

The crowd flowed past. There were dozens of them. Yelling and chanting and throwing balled-up cancelled pre-order receipts at the hapless newspaper vendors they have outside Town Hall.

A police car arrived with a squeal of tyres and a wail of sirens, only to conk out immediately as some enterprising militant geek threw an EMP grenade he’d built out of an old vacuum cleaner.

The cops erupted out of the car with batons and capsicum spray akimbo. It was hard to tell if they were nervous about losing control of the crowd, or excited because for once they’d be able to mace, stomp and taze as many people as they liked without anyone - except those people - complaining about it.

Then, perhaps inevitably, Vic burst into the fast-food restaurant, whether because of some innate ability to track me down wherever I am, or just because he fancied some fried chicken - the point was probably moot. Though he did place an order before putting on a big show of seeing us.

“Oh guys!” he gushed. His pallid features were flushed. His mighty bosom heaved. “Oh wow guys, it’s just like so amazing out there. The energy. It’s so spontaneous. People just coming together, protesting, making themselves heard. They can’t stop us now man, no one can stop us. We are the people! We demand to be HEARD!”

The Guerrilla Gamer and I just looked at him.

“Let me get this straight,” said the Guerrilla Gamer. “You’re tearing up this forty metre stretch of Sydney’s downtown, because a US game developer is implementing multiplayer in its latest game, in a way that you don’t like. And by trashing a cop car and getting yourselves all arrested and stuff, that’s going to make Infinity Ward let you use dedicated servers with Modern Warfare 2.”

Vic beamed. “Revolution!” he cried. “Revo-freaking-lution!”

The Guerrilla Gamer shook his head and went back to his box of greasy thighs. Outside, a garbage bin was on fire. Geeks were running up and down the footpaths firing off Reject Shop cap guns. It was only a matter of time before the cops decided that capsicum spray just wasn’t going to cut it.

“Aren’t you worried,” I said, probably pointlessly but hell, I’d started so I might as well finish, “that someone is going to get killed?”

Vic shrugged. “Maybe,” he said. “But they’ll just respawn down at Darling Harbour, then run up here and get right back into it. We just have to hold this control point for 15 minutes to win the round, then Infinity Ward can SUCK OUR GRITS!”

The Guerrilla Gamer and I looked at each other, and yes, the Guerrilla Gamer’s eyebrow was raised.

“Um,” I said, then found myself completely at a loss for words.

A harried-looking waitress delivered Vic’s food, because he’d ordered a weird custom thing where his chicken burger had no bread, just two extra chicken fillets which went around a third chicken fillet which in turn was smothered in cheese, bacon, mayonnaise and a very lonely-looking slice of lettuce.

“In fact,” said Vic, through bites, “I might just run out and get myself shot deliberately so I can change classes to a Spy. That’d show ’em.” And off he ran, chicken ultraburger in hand.

We watched him go.

“Isn’t there something we could DO for him?” I asked.

“I looked into it,” said the Guerrilla Gamer. “Lobotomies are surprisingly expensive. Even on eBay.”

Suddenly every single protestor fell over and lay twitching on the ground. Mildly surprised, I poked my head out of the restaurant and looked up the street. An odd-looking tank sat parked on some hapless ad executive’s Fiat 500 Abarth.

“What happened?” said the Guerrilla Gamer behind me.

“Non-lethal crowd control,” I said. “High-powered infra-sonic. Makes everyone spontaneously pass out and poo their pants.”

The Guerrilla Gamer looked at the twitching geeks lying around him.

“Hmph,” he said. “I wonder how many of them will notice?”