Truly there is nothing on this earth more annoying than a spawn camper. Words cannot adequately express the derision, the scorn, the overwhelming contempt deserved by the practitioners of this craven, cowardly, profoundly unchivalrous practice. All players are human beings, but he who camps repudiates that humanity for the sake of a tainted, squalid victory.

Sorry. I really needed to vent.

Playing all these FPS games has taught me one thing though; that the notion of fair play doesn't have any place in war at all. A masterful piece of generalship, assuming you're unable to avoid coming to blows altogether in the first place, involves placing the opponent in a position where they are unable to fight you on equal terms and then capturing them or, more likely, slaughtering them. If you have five vessels and your opponent has twenty, you pick your battles such that your five vessels face only one or two of his at a time; and what you don't do is attack five of his vessels with your five, to give him a fighting chance (which would be the fair thing to do). Of course this is all very obvious. The thing that took me so long to grasp was that the aim in warfare is specifically the unfair fight. Although it's hardly a difficult conclusion to reach, unless of course you're constrained by a basic naivete like my own at least. I don't know. For the obviousness of the idea, though, nobody ever really seems to acknowledge it in public.

So given that, camping is a wholly legitimate and indeed commendable tactic in warfare. But Enemy Territory is a game, which complicates things a bit. Games are supposed to be fair. On the other hand, if you put a tennis racquet in my hand and sent me off to play Agassi, then that probably wouldn't be particularly fair either; although it depends on your definition of fair, really. According to the rules he's not allowed to use his money to hire thugs to beat me into a coma and win in that way, so it's fairer than it might be. I suppose camping simply belongs to the gamut of recognised playing styles; not that that makes it any less annoying. Hmmm. For what little good it does me, I try to comfort myself with the thought that the definitions of heroism and valour entail overwhelming odds to strive against; and it does me very little good at all, let me tell you. I also try to get the hell out of the office into the sunlight and air more than once in a goddamned blue moon, which is arguably more effective, and it's surprising then how seldom I actually do.