The Memes in eSports: Counter-Strike: Global Offensive Edition
So, we talked about LoL memes last week, this week we will move to Counter Strike.
The community of Counter Strike is also huge. Since CS takes a different approach to the competitive scene, it is possible to watch the greatest teams fight against each in a short period, in multiple tournaments.
And of course, during tournaments, there are great plays everywhere.
Besides the matches, the interaction between pro players, audiences, casters, analysts are also interesting; memes were usually born during those conversations.
When teams are taking a break, they will stream their game play. Players can earn more income (stream revenue) and got to interact with their fans, so streams are also a good place for memes.
For the first meme, let’s talk about something related to one, and I think “wun teps” fits very well.
The actual name should be “one taps”, but the CSGO community has derived “wun teps” since the creator of this meme, Adil “ScreaM” Benrlitom has a deep accent and it sounds like he pronounced like this.
The “one tap” mechanic means to kill an enemy with 1 headshot. Sometimes there will be another word “one deag”, which means one shot kill by deag.
Deag refers to the weapon Desert Eagle. The headshot damage on this pistol is a guaranteed kill, but the mechanic itself is very hard to master due to factors like moving targets and distance.
So, what about the player ScreaM? He has many nice one deag in tournaments for sure. But the meme becomes famous when he is promoting the gaming mice. ScreaM collaborated with Finalmouse to create his gaming mice, called the Scream One.
The promotion video is first shown during the MLG Columbus 2016. The community thinks that it is very cringeworthy due to ScreaM’s heavy accent and the wordings. Therefore they started to mock ScreaM for that.
If you are interested, that’s what ScreaM said in the video:
“They know me as the headshot machine. They know me from the highlight they see. They know me from the matches they watch. They talk about my one taps and they think for me aiming is so easy. I just go into a match, and that’s it. But my aim, it’s comes from more than just a game. For me — aim — it is about precision, this part people don’t see. This part, it does not show up in highlights. When I sit down to play everything already is a part of me.”
However, ScreaM has embraced the meme, later on he tries to sell
the t-shirt with the word “one taps” on it.
There is another meme that is related to one taps, and it is called “Que Ota?”.
This is started by the Brazilian player Lucas “LUCAS1” Teles. In the video clip, he did a one deag to enemy team and he said “Que Ota?”, which is actually “Quer outra?”, which means want another(bullet)? in Portuguese. This is often used when there is a one deag in the match.
The third meme is very common in the competitive scene, it only contains three characters, but it is widely used.
It is called VAC.
So, what does VAC mean? It means “Valve Anti-Cheat”. It is a system that is used by Valve Corporation to detect if any players are hacking or cheating in games under their brand.
When people spammed VAC in the chat room of stream, you know a good play just happened, it is because VAC here doesn’t mean the player cheated, but praise to the player’s ability to pull off some great shots or plays, saying that their mechanics are similar to using hacks.
Besides using guns as a weapon, the use of utilities is also important. Decoy can fake gunshots noise to confuse the enemy, use flashbangs to blind the enemies so they cannot aim correctly, fire grenade, Molotov, and smoke grenade to zone people out, and the hand grenade to deal damage.
There are several memes for the use of utilities.
- *Region or Country name* Smoke
It usually refers to a badly placed smoke grenade that didn’t fulfill any purpose. The region name people insert is the region they don’t like or the nationality of the opposing team. For example, I am a North American team fans, whenever the opposing team failed smoke, I will type “EU smoke” in chat since I dislike the European team.
- 1G
1G refers to a famous streamer, Jaryd “Summit1G” Lazar on twitch.tv. Summit1G was asked to sub in as a player for Splyce in DreamHack Austin 2016, In the 26th round, the score is 15–11, Splyce got a chance to close out the game since Summit1G can defuse the bomb. (In CSGO, players are divided into two teams, Terrorists and Counter-Terrorists. There are two ways to win a round, eliminates all enemies or successfully detonate or defuse the bomb. Whenever Terrorists planted the bomb, they need to defend the bomb from Counter-Terrorists.) However, Summit dies to his own Molotov so they lost that round and eventually they lost the series 0–2 to Counter Logic Gaming.
Afterwards, whenever there are a player died to Molotov, the chat will spam 1G. Some players argued that 1G technically means die to your own Molotov, but both situations are accepted.
- Kobe
Well, some people say this is a reference to Kobe Bryant (WOW thanks captain!), I think it is just partly correct since it is based on a behavior, even though the behavior is related to Kobe Bryant.
People will say “Kobe” whenever they shoot a paper ball into the trash can. The Kobe in CSGO is similar. Instead of shooting a paper ball, whenever a player throws out a hand grenade and get a kill from it, it is called Kobe.
Besides terms or memes for utility, there are some moves or special nickname for pro players.
- Boostmeister
This is a negative nickname refers to a move by Team Fnatic player Olof “olofmeister” Kajbjer Gustafsson. During the DreamHack 2014 Winter, Fnatic was playing against Team LDLC.com. Fnatic is in a huge deficit and they decided to do something unusual. They have olofmeister to buy the auto sniper gun, the team will squat at a special location, so olofmeister can get to a special location with help (aka boosting) and take down LDLC members with obvious advantage. Fnatic abused the boost and severely damaged LDLC’s team economy so they cannot afford weapon, thus losing more rounds. The game ended with 16–13 for Fnatic.
However, the boost itself is considered illegal since it is against the rules, so both teams need to have a rematch and LDLC won the game.
The community thinks that the boost is disgusting and has little room to have a counterplay so the hate on Fnatic raised and olofmeister is called Boostmeister for abusing this mechanic.
- BOT allu / GOD allu
This is a very straight forward meme. It refers to the performance by a certain player, Aleksi “allu” Jalli. Whenever allu performed badly in games, the chat will call him “BOT allu", saying that his plays are just as bad as the AI (BOTS) controlled characters.
Of course, when allu pulled of great plays or perform well, the chat will call him God allu. This one is funny since the trend of God/Bot is very fast, allu can do well for 1 round and die next round for no reason at all. The contrast of his performance is why it is often used.
Of course, there are so many memes for CSGO too, but I really, really cannot include them all so I picked some funny (at least to me) memes.
I think it is time to move on from funny stuff in eSports to more serious issues or deeper look into the whole scene.
As I said before, eSports is growing in a large scale, and it attracted more people in. I totally understand that some people do not take eSports as a real sport, but obviously there are some famous people disagree with it, since they have invested in eSports too. Let’s talk about them next week.
