Plumbers, or The Lessons I've Learned Playing Battlefield 2042 Online

I know these two things don't seem to go together but stick with me.

Here is a rework of a post from February 2023. It looks at some things relevant to my writing that I've picked up while playing Battlefield 2042. Then, I leave you with some prompts you may find interesting.

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Last Saturday morning, I found myself on the rear gun, a 60mm mortar pod, on a Marine Assault Vehicle (MAV) as it wound its way through a shipyard in Alang, India. You see, I woke up kind of late, around 10:00 am, and while the Adderall was seeping into my nervous system, I flipped on the Xbox to play a couple of rounds of Breakthrough in Battlefield 2042.

The driver, let’s call him Tanner, was probably too young to have a license in the real world. He steered the MAV towards a gaping hole in the side of a massive container ship. The behemoth was being dismantled in the rusty brown mud, and our objective was in its belly. We rumbled through the opening in the ship's hull with no smoke for cover, and it was at this point that I realized I was in the wrong fucking place.  

I have been playing these online first-person shooters as a plumber almost since their inception. And I'm using plumber here, in the old hockey sense of the word, to refer to someone that comes to work, does their job, and doesn't expect to get much in the way of accolades. In that time, I'm pretty sure I've been along for this ride at least once or twice, and I've learned some things that can be applied to writing, thumping over rutted ground in a virtual Armored Personal Carrier.

Anyway, we were beyond the objective’s event horizon by the time the “wrong place” realization hit. So, finding myself out of other options, I pulled the trigger on the mortar pod as quickly as the damn thing would reload, launching high explosive rounds into the crevices where the enemies usually hide. I did manage a few kills in the 3 seconds, or so it took for the MAV to be turned into a smoldering pile of debris.

My wife, Trena, sat on the couch beside me. She sipped tea and watched a hair-braiding video on her phone while I wandered off on a rant about the dumb-ass driver who had just got me killed. It was a good rant too. I touched on all the pertinent points. But mainly, I just bitched because little Tanner drove us into an enclosed area filled with enemy soldiers, and from the looks of things, he hadn’t given much thought to how he was going to get us back out.

This is one of those lessons I've picked up in first-person shooters (FPS) that directly intersects with my writing. You see, you have to have a plan. It doesn’t have to be a detailed plan; after all, no plan survives contact with the enemy, but you need to have some sort of plan.  

Now I can hear some of you pantsers saying, “But Geno, I never know where my stories are going.” That may be all well and good for some, but for most of us, if we don't have some idea about how we're going to get our characters out of the shit we put them into, it's probably not going to end well.

In FPS, you can find top-tier players on YouTube, like Ravic or Jackfrags, who skitter around wreaking havoc on the battlefield like they're jacked up on meth. In truth, these guys have spent years of their lives playing these games, and their plans have become instinct. Oh, and it doesn't hurt that they have the reflexes of a mongoose. For the rest of us, regular players, it's necessary that we have some idea of how we are going to get out of things before we get into them.

I'm sure there are authors who can spew out a novel without any idea of what's going to happen until the next sentence falls out of their head. They probably have years of experience, and their plans have become instinct. For the rest of us, regular writers, that's not going to be the way it works at all. At least not at first.

Back to that Saturday morning. A few respawns later, I hitched a ride on a passing MAV, only to realize that Tanner was again my Lyft driver. I rained 60mm balls of death all around us while thinking that surely the little guy must have learned his lesson. But nope. The second I wasn’t paying attention, he made a hard right and pulled us back into a hole we weren't climbing out of. I'm not sure if he bailed or was injected by the ball of fire, but either way, we were both lying dead on the objective.

When I started on my rant again, this time focusing on Tanner’s inability to learn from his mistakes, Trena patted me gently on the leg and asked, “Why’d you get back in with him?” A question to which I had no good answer. Maybe it was the Adderall tightening my thinking, but I realized I had made the same mistake as Tanner. I was doing the same thing and expecting a different result.

Doing the same thing over and over is also something I struggle with in my writing. I spent a weekend slogging through all of my old brown leather notebooks a while back. They’re filled with short stories from a time when I thought that putting pen to paper was the only way to go. After getting over the mild embarrassment, I realized that the stories all had the same structural errors. They all follow a character going through a thing, but there’s no theme or character arc or any of the stuff that makes a story a story.

Maybe it was because of the distance from their writing, but I could look at them critically. I was able to see the flaws, like flashing red neon signs, and more importantly, I was able to see things that could be done to fix them. If you're anything like me, you get stuck in your patterns. You write the same thing with the same old flaws, and it can be hard to find your way up out of the ruts that you've worn into the ground.

As for Tanner, I have to give some credit. He was playing the game the way it was meant to be played. In the old days of Battlefield, you would hear or see players saying in the chat, “PTFO” or “Play the Fucking Objective,” and Tanner was certainly getting his boots onto the ground that counted. He was being a good plumber and just doing his job.

To be writers, we need to strive to be good plumbers. We need to go to work every single day and Write Some Fucking Words (WSFW) because, without that, all the rest of the shit is pretty useless.

If you're not writing, WSFW.

What do I think of Battlefield 2042?

In case you were wondering, I love Battlefield 2042. Now that is. At its release in 2021, it was a running simulator. Some maps required minutes of running with no cover to get back into the fight after respawn. I stuck with it because I’ve been a fan of the series since Battlefield 1 was released in 2016. After updates, balancing, and map fixes, the game plays well. There are still some maps that are a pain in the ass, but it seldom feels like the game is working against you.

Get out of your rut.

If you are writing, write a piece of flash fiction that takes place in Church Point, Louisiana.

If, in the unlikely event, you're from Church Point, Louisiana, write a piece of flash fiction that takes place in Anchorage, Alaska.

Write it about someone with a gambling addiction who owes the narrator or someone else a significant amount of money.

Learn from your mistakes.

Find an old piece of your writing, something you haven't thought about in a long time, and read it critically. Mark it up with a red pen. Find its flaws. Then beat those flaws out of it by rewriting the whole damn thing.

Me, I'm going to do my best to stop getting up at 10:00 AM and playing video games for an hour before I WSFW.