It would be difficult to find anything teenage boys cared more about from the years 2007 to 2010 than the hit video game Modern Warfare 2 or Zack Snyder’s ultra-violent action film 300.
I was 13 when these two pieces of media were establishing that there should be a criterion collection for “stuff 8th graders want their parents to let them watch/play.” I had recently gotten access to Xbox Live after begging with the release of Gears of War in 2006. I spent most evenings playing Call of Duty with friends and randoms, using my headset to call out tactical maneuvers to my teammates and hear other players say stuff that would definitely stop them from ever being allowed to run for office.
The film 300 is a 100% historically accurate depiction of the Spartans defense against the Persians in the battle of Thermopylae. It stars very scantily clad Gerard Butler and Michael Fassbender, and is based on a famous late 90s graphic novel by violent auteur artist and writer Frank Millar. It’s sequel, 300: Rise of an Empire stars a very scantily clad Eva Greene and I was lucky enough to see it 3D. There’s not much else to say about these films that is relevant here.
One night while playing on Xbox Live, I joined a match where random people I didn’t know were mid conversation trying to figure out what someone else in the match was talking about. I immediately found out what the context of this mystery was as I heard another player reciting what could only be described as historical fiction with the gusto and cadence of a great audiobook narrator.
The player reading something was moving around in game like nothing was distracting them, and not responding to any of us at all. We were able to rationalize that one person must be playing the video game, while a completely different person was wearing the headset mic and reading.
This went on for multiple matches. The reading did not waver. Players on our side dropped out and new players joined. Players on the opposing teams would ask us between matches what was going on. As players left, they would never learn the truth. They would go on just thinking “that was weird” then likely forget the whole thing within days.
Then a player joined, who was a true participant of the cultural arts. This well-read scholar listened for awhile, then laughed pretty hard. He asked the rest of us, “hey, why is that one guy just reading 300?” He had cracked the code. The player was reading aloud Millar’s graphic novel. Why? Who knows?
It is a bizarre choice. It’s a comic, which means MOST of it’s storytelling is done through visuals. That could explain while only hearing the written language read out loud made it nearly impossible for a dozen brilliant teen boy minds to decipher. The movie had been massively relevant years prior, even spawning it’s own parody film in Meet the Spartans, but I remember thinking that it wasn’t still popular enough to be dominating the discourse of a team deathmatch lobby.
The reader still didn’t acknowledge us after we figured out what he was reading. After awhile, he just suddenly stopped reading, and said “I gotta go, good games guys,” and disappeared.