ABSTRACT
I ignore the insults and posturing challenges coming over the voice chat, instead focusing on where I’ll position myself once the game starts. I decide on one of the bunkers that’ll give me good visibility over the dusty Afghan battleground. I’ve got my custom load-out, a holographic scoped assault rifle and a stock of claymore mines to use to cover my back as I look out over the wreckage of the downed transport plane for insurgents. The game starts and I spawn on the south end of the map. I sprint past the Humvees, watching out for potential hiding spots in the wrecked fuselage, and pause, scanning the ridge to the north for the silhouette of enemy snipers. Finding nothing, I break back into a sprint across the poppy fields, seconds away from the entrance to the bunker. … Then it all goes wrong. Rockets rain down from the sky and I am killed in a plume of smoke, dust, and debris. I spawn somewhere else on the map and die almost instantaneously. Each of my attempts to escape the rockets fails, but my opponents aren’t on the ridge, nor in the wreckage of the plane. Instead they are hovering in the air, firing streams of missiles that would normally be restricted to one or two per spawn. It is clear the rules of the game have been ruptured and subverted and the game has been modded. After perhaps sixty seconds more, a klaxon sounds, a towering mushroom cloud erupts on the edge of the screen, and the map is engulfed in flames as the match comes to its jarring conclusion.
