When Mr. Coscolluela beefed up my computer, he left the default connection to the Microsoft Network spades game on the menu. Curious, I played a few rounds and was reminded that spades is a fun game. But MSN spades is not fun, and not just because the chat menu is painfully limited. The players themselves ruin it.
At first, I thought the problem was just the skill level I'd chosen. Naturally, I got my feet wet with the beginner difficulty, and the engine tries to match players of like ability. ?Beginner? in this context, judging by the quality of play I saw, means ?incapable of tactical thought, and quite possibly ignorant of the rules.? When your partner bids zero tricks and holds the ace and king of spades, you have to wonder what the point of playing is. More frustrating, perhaps, was the common habit of quitting a game immediately upon losing a hand badly, leaving the remaining players in the lurch with a dim-witted computer opponent filling in. It spoils the game to be denied a well-deserved victory, or to lose a chance to fight back from a disadvantage. Some players take this breach of etiquette one step farther, bidding double nil ? an enormously risky ploy with a huge payoff if it succeeds ? on the first hand. If they get lucky, hey! Clear sailing. If they blow it, well, there's always a new game to join once they dump the one they've demolished.
I hoped this behavior would cease when I moved up to intermediate difficulty. It diminished, but players still quit when they start losing.
MSN spades is not unique in suffering spoilsports. On-line RPGs (and I use the term under protest) have ?player-killers,? or ?PKs? who delight in killing other players' characters and making them start over again. On-line strategy games have players who sever the connection, later to claim their system crashed, the moment they fear they're about to lose. And of course, there's cheat codes. Coders who make the games often find it useful to alter settings at will to test whether everything works properly. Later, these cheat codes make their ways to public forums, and a handful of players can't resist temptation.
For all the joys of easy connection to fellow players, the internet and its associated anonymity is also to blame for an explosion of bad sportsmanship. Friends would ostracize a jerk who demanded restarting any game, score set to zero, the minute his own bone-headed ploy failed. But with easy access to new players, and no repercussions for abusing the old ones, spoiled brats run amok. For extreme cases, pissing people off becomes the object of the game. Perhaps it's just as well that MSN spades has a limited chat menu.