The one time I had power
was about 6 years ago.

~Wavy lines to a long time ago, in a galaxy far, far away~

Back then, me and a few mates, five of us in total, having given up all pretenses of trying to acquire girls (granted, one of them had been bummed the year before and was still in the closet), at the tender age of 16, we thought "fuck it, lets be ultimate geeks", and each got a copy of Star Wars Jedi Knight: Jedi Academy (a PC game) and threw ourselves with some abandon into it.

If you know about the online bit of JKA, and understand when I say we formed a clan and got our own server, skip ahead to the bold bit. Otherwise, read on if you don't know.

Now, for those of you who are A) still around and B) don't know what the fuck I'm on about, Jedi Academy was an alright game. I didn't bother much with the singleplayer, choosing instead to play the multiplayer a lot. This usually involved scores of Luke Skywalkers kicking the shit out of each other and capturing the enemy flags and suchlike. There were many, many mods for the game, user-made content, and some of it was interesting (original characters and original maps and suchlike), and some of it was downright hilarious (I'm fairly certain that at one point I saw Cloud Strife of FF7 fame dive into the middle of the arena, only to get simultaneously flamethrowered and receive a lightsaber to the head and goolies at pretty much the same time), whilst the vast majority of user-made stuff was shit, to be honest.

After a year or so of bumming around on various servers, one of our crusty greebos thought "We'll get a server!" - thus allowing us to both waste money, AND essentially have an online treehouse-type area, where we could restrict our guests. Because we'd been playing for so long, we started our own clan (group) and started allying with other clans, and generally being muppets. We were 17, and in my case, were drinking and getting high almost every night so I was pretty fucked up.

Here's where the Absolute Power of sorts kicks in. Because we had complete control over our server, we ended up being a bit power-mad, to say the least. We had all adopted different styles of lightsaber fighting, and as we were the leaders of the clan, we were forced to teach newbies all the tricks and how to fight well with each weapon (or, as nobody used guns and every man and his monkey wielded various lightsabers, how to fight well with them). Every time one of the new recruits fucked up, the teacher went mental. We used to use a three strike system, first strike being a warning, second strike being publicly humiliated before a quick session offline, and the third strike being banned for however long we decided. And because we were drunk on power, we usually kept throwing out warnings for the most minor of infractions.

The strange thing was, we did actually have power of a kind. Despite the fact that any sensible person would have thrown their hands up in disgust and either switched servers or the game off and gone for a kick-about, people would still clamour to come back to our server. Fuck knows how we did it, but despite being batshit insane and mental with the banhammer, we prospered.

At least, we prospered online. Offline however, the original five were slowly disintegrating. It started off small, name-calling and angry phone-calls and the like. Things came to a head when A, having gotten drunk with me one night, went over to N's house, calling him a traitor and trying and successfully piledriving him into a bed, all because of something that N had said the night before on JKA. I can't remember the offending statement, but I do remember thinking to myself "Whoa, the fuck?" when N rang me up a while telling me what had happened.

After the piledriver incident, things quickly deteriorated, with us trying to ban each other and lock the server to prevent anyone else coming in, forgetting that we all had access to the server and could unban ourselves remotely. After another real-life punch-up the original five of us met, and having decided that we couldn't actually handle any positions of power on a game, let alone in real life, that we weren't to have any more positions of power together until we were mature enough to not try to kill each other.

Apologies for length and lack of unfunniness, but we were batshit insane. How else would you explain us getting so worked up over a crappy game?
(Ghost Atreides enjoying incontestable health benefits on, Sat 10 Jul 2010, 1:51, 2 replies)

That sounds like the end to that shite film "Sphere"
No-one can control this power.....
( Jeccius Steam Borderlands 2 junkie, Sat 10 Jul 2010, 16:25, closed)

Except with less Dustin Hoffman
And indeed, less women than there were present in that film.

Fairly certain some of the maps we had downloaded had more gigantic golden balls than Sphere did though.

Still, I'm not sure whether to take that statement as a compliment or an insult, as Sphere was pretty dire... :D
(Ghost Atreides enjoying incontestable health benefits on, Sat 10 Jul 2010, 22:31, closed)