Playing with others: Characters on Xbox Live

[Editor’s note: XL1ska talks about how he puts on a performance for his friends for his Monthly Musing piece. — CTZ]

I’m that douchebag. That annoying prick that makes you want to end your life every time you play Xbox Live. I am the reason Xbox Live is a completely unfun and terrible place to interact with others. But I don’t care, because I AM HILARIOUS. Well, not really. Allow me to explain.

Every weekend, I go to my girlfriend’s best friend’s house with my lady. Ryan, the husband of the friend of the girlfriend, is a pretty big gamer, so we’ll typically sit down and play some Smackdown vs. Raw or some Left 4 Dead. But the ladies, they do not like that. They can only have girl talk for so long before they want to leave us both and start scissoring far, far away from us gents. It gets boring watching two guys play games together.

What do we do then? We spice it up.
Ryan will go on Xbox Live, usually Call of Duty 4, and start up a team deathmatch game. And instead of going with him, I’ll grab the headset. I do all the talking, he does all the playing. We turn the game volume down, put the headset audio through the TV and the fun begins.

Now if it’s a normal game with nice people just trying to play a game, we get the hell out of there. We look for the rooms with the most agitating, immature, and, well, Internetty people we can find. Young kids, ignorant rednecks, Internet tough guys, whatever kind of people that would piss off any normal person in a round of the Duty. Then I get into character.

Ryan plays, kills people, does his thing and I’ll pretend to be one of many characters. I’ve taken on the role of a morbidly obese Christian (part of the MOC support group, a group of morbidly obese people who love Jesus), a horny Italian named Tony, a Post Office worker named Bruce who is infatuated with getting free root beer floats at Wendy’s, or my personal favorite, a concerned Jewish father named Herschel.

And it gets people LIVID. These people take all their name calling, their faggot slinging and their “I fucked your mom”-isms, and turn it all towards me. Hearing these people who piss me off so badly be the ones getting pissed off is absolutely hilarious. And what’s more hilarious is when people think any one of the characters I’m doing is legitimate. They think that I REALLY AM a 42-year-old root beer float enthusiast, or that I REALLY AM a concerned Jewish father trying to find out of Call of Duty 4 is appropriate for his son by playing the game. The reactions we get are great, and we’ve even gone so far as taping it one night.

Here is us playing as Derek, the singer/guitarist for fake pop-punk band Don’t Kall the Kops. Complete with my New Found Glory/Simple Plan shitty nasally pop punk voice and super lame lyrics, I was able to freestyle a song about eating a lady out on her period (NSFW language ahead).

On a side note, we’ve done the Don’t Kall the Kops bit so much that we actually made a MySpace for the band and I recorded a song to go along with it. So when I give out the MySpace link 100 times in a game, sometimes people actually go and truly believe that this is a real band.

This takes what is typically an alone in the living room scenario, and turns it into an experience that anyone in the room can enjoy. We’ve got the game going and we’ve got me being a retard with everyone in the game getting pissed off. If we get good enough rooms, the momentum lasts us hours and we laugh the goddamn night away. I laugh, the ladies laugh, and we all take a solo experience and turn it into a fun social occasion. The dames go from being bored to being a part of the fun. The women will even give me a line or two to throw into my act that will get a fantastic reaction from the players. They may not be playing the game, but they’re joining in on the fun. It’s all four of us together, having an incredibly fun night.

And don’t even get me started on the time we let the ladies get on the headset and made a group of boys uncontrollably horny, to the point that a 12-year-old sent us a voice message saying “Wanna make the cum fly?”

Hell yeah.

(You can go to my YouTube page to check out more videos of me on Xbox Live, including me as the Jewish father Herschel).