A Pikeman's Tale

The game is called Partisan, in reference both to the supporters of royal claimants in times of civil war and to the late medieval halberd of the same name, known for its distinctive broad spearhead. It’s a first person medieval brawler, where the player creates a warrior out of an array of weapons and tools and armor and takes it into battle, allies and enemies both composed of similar players and similar player characters. It caused a great deal of commotion at its launch, gaining 9/10s and 10/10s from prominent video game reviewers that praised the depth of its combat and the addictiveness of its gameplay loop. For the better part of the year, the game on the top of the streaming charts and the front of gamer’s minds was Partisan.

The player is Taylor Lowry, a 21 year old college student with 3/4ths of a history degree and a Diamond skill ranking in Partisan’s competitive game mode. The ranking goes Bronze, Silver, Gold, Platinum, Diamond, Master, and Grandmaster. Taylor is higher ranked than roughly 80% of competitive Partisan players. He plays as a pikeman, a lightly armored class that uses a polearm to keep enemy combatants at a distance, and a falchion to defend itself in close quarters. It’s not the flashiest position, but Taylor loves the feeling of clogging a chokepoint against enemy advance, or getting a stab through on someone who believes they are out of melee range.

The developers of Partisan like to boast complete player freedom: Any weapon, any perk, any combination, and if you’re good enough you will thrive. This does not work in practice. In competitive Partisan, a team of 10 players gathered from the queue with no knowledge of each other’s personalities or playstyles must organize into a set composition metagamed into existence through the trial and error of hundreds of high level competitors. Three players hold the front lines with tall shields and bastard swords while two pikemen stand behind them and stab over at the opposing frontline. Their flanks are protected by two wreckers armed with heavy axes or warhammers, while another two assassins try to position behind the enemy and pick them off with arrows and throwing knives.

The tenth player, the quarterback of the team, the position everyone fights over, is the knight. Fast and deadly, the knight takes advantage of openings created by the rest of the team to get kills and take objectives. Other players can use swords as sidearms, but only the knight gets to use a full, two handed greatsword, like the hero in a fantasy book.

Something Taylor learned early in his career is that the best way to leap from a lowly Silver ranking to a respectable Platinum is to simply fill in as one of the less glamorous roles. The knight is powerful with a team to support it, but if all 10 players decide to be a knight the game devolves into a disorganized free-for-all. If he had been told at the beginning of his Partisan career that he would be forced to play pikeman, he likely would have quit. But now he’s familiar enough with the game to know that winning feels better than losing, and despite rarely feeling like a hero hiding behind a shield and poking, he’s better at it than most.

Right now Taylor is playing a match with Spade, a wrecker main that he met a few months ago in game. Spade has a slight southern accent, but beyond that Taylor does not know much about him. Based on his tag he might be into cards, or maybe gardening. They don’t talk about real life when they play.

The map they are playing on is called Acre, a recreation of a Crusades-Era middle eastern city. During the first half of the game, Taylor and Spade sacked Acre, claiming checkpoints and pushing back the enemy until time ran out, leaving the city roughly 25% un-sacked. That was a decent half. The final checkpoint of Acre notoriously favors the defenders.

The second half sees the roles swapped, and now the pair are on defense, fighting hard to keep the enemy from beating their first-round record. It’s a good game, which means that everyone on both teams is focused and communicative and playing to the meta. Taylor gets a cheeky thrust on the enemy knight, nearly killing him and forcing a short retreat, and then he says, into a voice chat that the whole team can hear, “Knight low, push mid.”

At this point in the game, the allied Knight should charge forward, finishing off his counterpart and breaking the enemy formation. He does not. He’s somewhere in the backline, trying and failing to win a duel with an enemy assassin. “Our Knight is a fucking moron,” Spade says in their private chat, and Taylor laughs.

They end up winning the game by a hair, holding out the final checkpoint just the slightest bit better than the enemy did in the first round. The text chat is filled with GG, which stands for Good Game, and Taylor types ‘GG EZ’ because he feels proud of how he played.

He and Spade hang out in their voice channel for a few minutes after both of them have closed out of Partisan. “Did you see they’re adding a Game of Thrones tie in?” says Taylor.

“You’re kidding me,” Spade replies.

“Yeah. New armor skins for all of the Game of Thrones houses. If you buy them all you also get Jon Snow’s sword.”

“That’s so dumb.”

“Yeah, who’s gonna buy that shit?”

“My little brother, probably.” Spade says this with a self conscious laugh. Taylor laughs along. He did not know Spade had any siblings. They talk for another 10 minutes or so about Partisan and then they log off.

* * *

The next day, before playing, Taylor messes around with his avatar. It looks sorta like him, or as close to it as he could get. The customization options are wide but they aren’t exhaustive, so Taylor’s avatar has a slightly fuller beard than him and longer hair and, because he can’t quite get the fine tuning right on the face, a preset face that has the same general shape as his if not many of the specifics. As he waits for Spade to join the voice chat he drags his nose to make it long and thin, and then short and squat, and then he makes himself morbidly obese and skeleton-thin and bulging with muscles. There’s an option to cover himself in leprosy sores, so he does that and then gives himself an eye patch and then he covers himself with scars so that there’s a gaping wound where his nose is and all his teeth are missing. Then Spade’s voice fills his headphones and he exits the character customizer without saving.

They play a game and win, and then they play a game and lose, and then a win, and then another win. The fourth game of the night is on a map called Bivouac, where the two teams compete for control of a single control point, in this case a military camp on a hill in the middle of the woods. During the initial fight Taylor is separated from his shield-wielders and swaps to his secondary weapon, a one-handed, single sided sword. Fortunately, the enemy team’s formation has also been broken and the surviving participants in the melee sub out battle tactics for a series of 1 versus 1 duels. “Watch this,” says Spade, and then he parries an attack from the swordsman he’s fighting before jumping, spinning in the air, and then overhand throwing his axe into the enemy’s face, causing the avatar’s head to explode in a shower of simulated blood and brain.

“Haha nice,” says Taylor.

They win the fight and capture the point. A timer ticks down from 3 minutes. If they lose the point, the timer will stop and the enemy’s one will start. Whoever hits 0 first wins. As their slain teammates return to the point, the swordsman that Spade had bested sends in the text chat, “you asked for it big boy.”

When next they see him he has changed class: No longer does he have a shield or a sword or even armor, instead he is completely naked and wielding a crossbow. He shoots Spade, and then draws a second crossbow and shoots again, and then again, and then again. He kills Taylor and Spade and their entire team.

“Haha holy shit,” says Spade.

“We got got by the crossbow goblin,” Taylor replies. “How many crossbows did he have?”

“Lemme check.” There’s a pause as Spade loads up the character creator to see how many crossbows can fit on a single character. “15 crossbows,” he says.

“That’s so broken.”

They regroup and head back to the point, but the crossbow guy gets them again. And again. And again. He repositions each time, hiding in tents or trees and popping out mid fight to rack up a full 10 kills before finding some new hidey hole for the next round. By the final fight, with 15 seconds left on the enemy timer and 2 minutes on their own, the humor is gone from Spade and Taylor’s communication.

“This is the stupidest fucking game of all time,” says Spade.

“Yeah.”

“Like, how is this allowed? Seriously? No skill at all. He’s just a fucking gatling gun.”

Taylor types in the chat “go back to Call of Duty.”

Spade, in voice, says “Don’t do that bro. Don’t feed him that shit. Fuck him.”

There’s then a moment of tense silence, because Spade has caught up with the crossbowman and landed a heavy blow with his axe. It doesn’t matter, though. Through the wound the enemy shoots his crossbow and equips another and shoots that one too and Spade is dead, and then dour music plays and Taylor’s screen is filled with the words DEFEAT in big red letters.

Spade doesn’t say anything and neither does Taylor, but they queue up for another game. They lose that one two, and then they lose the next two games. “Good games man,” says Taylor at the end of the night. “No they fucking weren’t,” says Spade, and then he leaves the chat.

Taylor is left in a bit of a purgatorial state after that. Ending on a win is always nice, because he feels accomplished and thrilled and completed and can ride that high right to sleep. Ending on a loss never feels good, and whenever he tries to sleep after one he finds himself laying awake for hours. To try to put himself in a better mood he pulls up Youtube and watches a video.

The video is published by Grogman, a streamer and an influencer and one of the highest ranked Partisan players in the world. Grogman has a crew of similarly employed friends called the GrogGang, and whenever he doesn’t have anything else to do Taylor will watch their content. In this one, Grogman is meeting his best friend, Goosetooth, in real life for the first time. “Yooo no way,” says Goosetooth. “You’re so tall dude,” says Grogman. They hug. The video was posted 18 hours ago and has 15 million views.

* * *

The next day Taylor turns on Partisan to find a prompt blocking out the screen, saying ‘It’s Time to Reset Your Password.’ This happens every six months or so, to help protect Taylor and his fellow players against hackers and scammers. He switches the first letter in his password from a capital to a lowercase and boots up the game. In another six months he will switch it back.

Spade is on and the two of them get right back into it. They are playing Retinue, a map where they have to escort a royal caravan through an ambush. This map is widely hated by the competitive community, because the normal meta doesn’t apply and teams generally have to rely on map-specific tools like horses and firebombs to win. Taylor likes it though, and so does Spade.

The game is pretty easy. The enemy team doesn’t know how to work together, so the fights are one sided and neither Taylor nor Spade has to dedicate much focus to maintaining their lead. As such, it’s pretty quiet in the voice chat. Their relationship is built on mid game commentary and complimentary playstyles, and without it Taylor is struggling to find anything to talk about. Spade takes the initiative. “Hey man, how old are you?” he says.

“21,” says Taylor.

“Oh shit really?”

“Yeah, how old are you?”

“16.”

“Damn. So you’re like. In high school?” Taylor wishes he didn’t know that. The friendship seems disjointed now. He’s mostly an adult now, and being friends with a high schooler seems transgressive. He lets Spade talk about high school, though. He has a crush on a girl in his Art Club. Taylor tells him to bite the bullet and ask her out, but Spade says he can’t because she has a boyfriend. Spade also asks him what he thinks about religion and Taylor says that he hasn’t thought much about it since his phase of militant atheism in middle school. Spade laughs nervously and Taylor feels more like an emotionally unavailable father than a friend and peer.

They win the game and Spade types in chat “GG losers.” They play a few more and win those too, and then Taylor decides to quit early so as not to tempt fate.

* * *

Sometimes when he’s not doing well in school Taylor thinks about what it would take for him to go pro. He would need to work really hard for it. There’s no interest in 80th percentile gamers. To even enter the Partisan minor leagues he would need to be in Grandmaster rank, and from then it would be an uphill fight through low paying, lower viewership matches until, maybe, he gets lucky and is scouted by the official Partisan League. It’s a pipe dream, obviously. He knows this. A college degree is a much safer life path, and besides, pro gamers tend to be younger than him. By age 20 the reflexes that you need have dulled ever so slightly and you start getting dominated by people only one or two years younger than you.

Spade does not come online and so Taylor plays alone. Solo matches are a gamble. Partisan is a team game and it helps when you can rely on at least one other player to back you up. The first couple games are good ones, a win and a loss, and then the next one is a one-sided stomp in which Taylor gets 40 kills and does not die once. There’s a trick to being a good pikeman: If you stab straight at an enemy, they’ll see it coming and parry, but if you stab away from them, you can quickly move the spearhead over into their head and it will register as a hit, even though what it looks like is a powerful stab into thin air and then a light tap on a helmeted skull. When he first discovered the technique he thought it looked silly, a defiance of the laws of physics, a reminder that despite the gritty sheen and high fidelity graphics this was still a video game, not a simulation of reality. Now it makes an instinctual sort of sense to him. The laws of the game overwrite the laws of nature as he plays.

* * *

Spade returns to Partisan a week later. “Hey man where have you been,” asks Taylor. “Dealing with some bullshit,” says Spade. They form a party and queue up for a game.

“Check this out,” says Spade when they load in. He’s made some alterations to his character. Now his plate armor is bedecked with a white and red color scheme and the tabard over his breastplate is adorned with a templar cross. His battle axe has been traded in for a heavy greatsword. “Pretty cool, right?” he says. “I’m like a crusader.”

“Yeah,” says Taylor. “That’s sick.”

They are playing on Bivouac again. The crossbow troll isn’t there, and it’s a pretty good game. Spade decapitates two guys with a single swing of his sword. “The power of Jesus,” he declares, and Taylor laughs.

The next one is a loss, and same with the one after that.“I parried!” Spade exclaims as the enemy knight takes off his arm and then his head. “I fucking parried. This is bullshit.”

The next game doesn’t go any better. Their shieldmen have little interest in being shieldmen and so Taylor is constantly being killed by people who dash inside his spear’s range and overwhelm him before he can draw his falchion. “Can we get some fucking cover?” he asks in team chat. “Can our wrecker stop using a fucking greatsword?” comes the reply.

Spade responds by team-killing the shieldsman, taking his head off at the shoulder. They continue the match in silence and lose and in the next one, the greatsword is gone and the battle axe is back. They still lose, though. Spade does not talk in voice chat and Taylor can tell he’s angry. When they finally call it a night after eking out a meager win from a string of defeats, Taylor says “Good games, man,” and Spade leaves the call without a word.

* * *

Over the course of the next month Taylor and Spade lose enough to drop them out of Diamond and into Platinum. Then their luck turns and they start climbing the ranks again. Spade gets into Masters for a few games before a short string of losses normalizes his rank into high Diamond. At some point as they climb, Taylor realizes he doesn’t feel like he’s playing better on the winning streaks than on the losing streaks. It’s like there’s two games, one that rewards him for playing by matching him up with players who he is able to beat, and one that, because the game must be fun for all its players, relegates him to cannon fodder for better players so that they can have their turn.

There’s a phrase in competitive video games that Taylor feels describes his and Spade’s position: Hardstuck. It describes a player who climbs to a certain rank and then exhausts their capacity to improve, stuck forever at their rank with no hope of rising higher. When he was in Bronze, the lowest rank, he was teased by Silvers for being a hardstuck Bronze. When he climbed to Gold, Platinums would call him hardstuck. Now, having dedicated nearly 900 hours to Partisan, Taylor finally feels like they might be onto something.

Spade, for his part, has begun showing interest in Christianity. It feels sort of farcical to Taylor, a major in early modern history. In times long past peasants would join the church for a chance to transcend their stagnant economic class. Now Spade is doing the same thing virtually. He hasn’t been to church, as far as Taylor can tell, and only read select passages from the bible. His faith consists mostly of posting memes and dressing his avatar up like a Templar. A simulated conversion to escape simulated stagnation.

One night, as Spade taunts a freshly decapitated enemy by typing ‘read gospel bro’ in text chat, Taylor finds himself wondering what his life might be like as a monk. He wouldn’t be able to play Partisan, probably, but that was fine. The church would care for him. He could spend his days reading, or gardening. Maybe. He’s learned a decent amount about monastic life in the 1500s but he realizes he doesn’t know much of what it’s like now.

A few days after Spade's brief foray into Masters, the pair find themselves on a new map called Borderland, which takes place in a snowy mountain pass defended by a cliffside castle and a wall. It’s similar to Retinue, where the normal meta doesn’t apply and the players have to use unconventional tools to win. Taylor and Spade are defending. From the top of the wall they throw down stones and arrows at the invaders, who push a battering ram through the snow and try to undermine the wall with explosives.

The update that brought Borderland also brought the long awaited Game of Thrones tie-in. “Look,” says Taylor, as an enemy runs up to the wall clad in a Jon Snow preset skin. Spade throws a stone down and Jon Snow’s head explodes like a watermelon.

After a while the outer wall is breached, and then the inner wall, and then Taylor and Spade find themselves in a small, snow-filled courtyard, holding back the enemy from the keep. Most of their team is dead and waiting for respawn, but most of the other team is as well. The enemy knight stands at the end of the courtyard, twirls his authentic Jon Snow longsword, and charges.

Taylor jabs with his spear, aiming up and dragging down to try to avoid a parry. Jon Snow does not fall for the trick and catches the spearhead with the blade of his sword. Spade comes in from the side with his axe and somehow Jon Snow parries him too. Taylor throws his spear, and it is swatted to the ground, and he draws his falchion.

The three fight for what feels like a full minute. Taylor takes a hit to his leg, and Spade takes one to his head that would have killed him if not for his visored helmet. Taylor parries at the wrong time and his sword is flung from his hand, and Spade has to fight Jon Snow alone while Taylor finds a weapon in the corpse-strewn battlefield.

The clock is in overtime and both of them are wounded, and then Jon Snow shatters the rapier that Taylor had recovered and stabs him through the chest. As he completes the kill animation, which involves removing the sword through Taylor’s shoulder, cutting him in two, Spade throws his axe.

It hits. Jon Snow's sword hard is cleaved off, and Spade recovers the officially branded longsword before his enemy can, and with one strong blow cuts the foe’s head in half, so the jaw and half of the nose is still attached to the body. Spade screams with joy. Taylor screams with him. “Lets goooo! Lets fucking gooo!” They say. “GF,” says Jon Snow in the match chat, which stands for Good Fight.

The next half of the game they attack the castle they previously defended. They are high on the victory of the previous round. Spade has reequipped his greatsword. “I deserve it after that kill,” he says, and Taylor agrees.

The first death happens as an unfortunate accident. Taylor strays too far out from under the battering ram’s protective turtle shell and an arrow catches him in the throat. It’s shocking, a bit of a jumpscare, and as Taylor’s imperfect avatar spits blood and sinks to his knees he feels his own throat tense up. He rubs the spot where the arrow hit and is surprised, a little, when he finds nothing but smooth unbroken skin.

Spade dies next, as Taylor hurries back from respawn. One minute he is hacking at the oaken gate with his sword, the next a stone falls from the battlements and breaks his shoulder with a glancing blow. Spade is knocked to the ground and before he can get back up a hail of arrows drops his health bar to zero. “That was crazy what just happened to you,” says Taylor. Spade grunts.

The deaths continue. They break through the gate, making incremental progress with each life, throwing their bodies toward their objective in hopes of getting one inch closer before they die, the tradition of Towton and Stalingrad alive and in miniature, happening on a server farm somewhere in California, fought by a handful of pale young men who would not know real combat for years to come, if ever. But the gate breaks and they enter the inner walls, crawling over piles of their own corpses that get created faster than they can despawn. Taylor is flattened by a catapult. Spade is stabbed through by an enemy pike. Spade has his gut opened by a battle axe and bleeds out with his entrails in his hands. Taylor is knocked to the ground by an enemy kick and trampled by his own horse. Their frontline is killed by gunpowder charges and Taylor and Spade flee, limping and injured, until they reach a wall and can flee no more and are dispatched by 5 arrows each.

The clock ticks down and they are nowhere near a victory and Taylor watches as he waits to respawn as Spade, alone on the field, faces down the full enemy team.

They do not kill him straight away. Jon Snow steps forward, and the rest step back, a sign that they know that they have won, that Spade is just passing entertainment before they move on to the next game. They will win that one too, Taylor figures, and the one after that, because the game favors them and forsakes him and Spade.

Spade attacks first, and Jon Snow ducks under the swing. Without a parry to reset his stance Spade is forced to complete the swing animation, and before he can recover his sword Jon Snow flashes his upward and into Spade’s gut and it is over. Spade’s body crumples and overtime ticks to zero. Jon Snow and his comrades cut off Spade’s limbs and head in the time between the game ends and the server closes, and the last thing Taylor sees before they are sent back to the lobby is three of them huddled over his friend’s shattered vessel, spamming the crouch button so it looks like they are fucking it.

Spade says nothing and so Taylor, not really wanting to play any longer but not really wanting to do anything else, says “Wanna do another?”

Spade screams, and Taylor quickly lowers his volume to save his ears. Quickly the voice chat compensates for the outburst, cutting out any sound that peaks the microphone. Taylor hears the beginnings and then ends of loud collisions, what might be glass smashing, but the meat of the contact is obscured by the software. There is a crunch and a wail and then the wail cuts off and there is no more sound. A few moments later Spade is removed from the voice chat by an auto-moderator for premature disconnection.

* * *

The next day when he gets home from class Taylor sits down in front of his PC and surveys his room. Double bed, red bed sheet, minifridge, bookshelf, desk.The blinds are closed and the room is lit by strings of fairy lights. To Taylor it feels cool and futuristic, and besides the light from his window adds an annoying glare to his desktop.

He thinks about turning on Partisan but he’s afraid to talk to Spade after last night, and he’s even more afraid that Spade might not come on at all today. If Spade had broken his computer he wouldn’t be able to play for a while and by the time he saved up for a new one the two would be on to new and different games and likely would have moved on from each other.

Taylor thinks about reading a book, but nothing on his bookshelf calls to him. He thinks about watching a TV show, but he can’t decide what to watch and he doesn’t think he has the patience for a movie so he doesn’t even consider it. He pulls up Youtube and watches Grogman and Goosetooth and the rest of the GrogGang play a modded version of Partisan where a tall, naked Shrek chases you around and tries to kill you. It’s pretty funny. When it’s over Taylor boots up his computer, bathing in the red light of his keyboard and the white light of his string lights and the blue light from his screen and he turns on Partisan.