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The Research Group of Immigrant Workers in Minnesota (RGIWM) organized a presentation on immigration at 2 p.m. Friday at the Atwood Theater.

“We don’t come here to take things from you,” presenter Nelly Ortiz said.

Professor Stephen Philion, director of the Research Group of Immigrant Workers, said they anticipated about 100-125 attendants but were pleasantly surprised at the turnout, which was more than 200 people.

During the question-andanswer session, there were still approximately 100 people remaining in their seats.

“We don’t come here to take things from you,” Nelly Ortiz said.

Ortiz, an immigrant worker from Chicago that came to the U.S. about 15 years ago, gave a presentation titled “Why We Leave.”

Her presentation was translated by Tony Nelson. Ortiz, originally from Ecuador, spoke about her past life experiences and explained the hardships that\ she went through in order to come to the United States.

Oritz said at the age of 18, she decided to move to the U.S. due to the lack of opportunities in her own country.

She worked for Coca-Cola for a year, but said she decided to leave the job as she was psychologically and sexually harassed.

She went door-to-door promoting Coca-Cola to people.

Ortiz said she accumulated a debt of $9,000 when she attempted to enter the U.S.

She said she had to pay smugglers, called “coyotes,” to sneak through the borders.

Her journey took her from Ecuador, to Guatemala to Mexico and from there she snuck across the border to the U.S.

“We love this country. We do the right things, we pay our taxes,” Ortiz said.

“We just need to be legal,” Ortiz said she wants people to see immigrants from a different perspective.

She wants people to have a better understanding of immigrants.

She said immigrants working in the U.S. face many forms of discrimination, and even though she holds the position of a supervisor of packing construction tools, her pay does not reflect that.

“Because I’m illegal, I’m given the heaviest and hardest work.”

Because of her illegal status, Oritz said she faces even more forms of discrimination.

After 13 years of working at her job, she said she gets one week of break time a year and she makes $10 per hour.

Ortiz said because of her status, people make many unfair assumptions about her.

“They look at me like I’m ignorant,” Ortiz said. Ortiz said she decided to embark on this presentation trip at the risk of losing her job, as she had lie to her superior to take leave from her job, and even then her employer threatened that she might lose her job if she does so.

“What I ask from you, is to respect us,” Ortiz said. “Respect us as we would respect you.”

Nelson said one of the biggest myths about immigrants is that they don’t pay taxes.

He said that in fact, immigrants pay taxes just as everyone else, but they don’t get the benefits.

Nelson said it is an insult to say that immigrant workers send all their money back and that they steal jobs.

“Our entire economy rests on the backs of immigrant workers, exploited workers,” Nelson said.

Ortiz and Nelson are part of the Mexico Solidarity Network, which runs the Centro Autonomo in Chicago for immigrants to share experiences with the community there.

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Infinity Ward’s decision to remove dedicated server support for the PC on their latest hit-title “Modern Warfare 2” was ridiculous. They decided to replace it with what they called the InfinityWardNet (IWNet).

It was an unnecessary move that made little sense to PC gamers, and severely limited the multiplayer aspect of the game.

The removal of dedicated servers is, at the very least, a tight slap to the PC gaming community, which in the past has been used to having the ability to access to console commands and hosting servers locally to lessen the lag of the game.

Dedicated servers is not a new concept that just recently appeared in the market, it’s something that has been offered and supported at the very least since 1998 with Counter Strike, probably even further back.

It allows gamers to essentially set up custom rules and host clan-matches for hardcore gamers.

I spoke about the online elitist community in my last column.

I wrote about how they could be immature, racist and destructive spawns of Hell that was sent forth to plague online games.

What gamers did to counter this was that clans were born.

Clans were essentially a group of gamers working towards the same gaming goal.

Clans range from competitive, bureaucratic groups to simple and casual groups.

Dedicated servers allowed such clans to have their own servers and rules. Clans could ban a gamer permanently if they failed to abide by the server rules, which many times required that players be polite to each other.

With that being removed, chances are PC gamers will be forced to play with name-calling elitists and nothing can be done about it, except quitting the game itself.

With IWNet, the multiplayer experience has been kicked in the crotch, to say the least.

This IWNet fiasco that they decided to implement has severe side effects too, such as the limiting of players from 64 to a maximum of 16.

The Call of Duty series has, as far as I can remember, always been an intense war game.

The sheer amount of players always made the game a chaotic, frantic and addictive shootout.

True, severs are not always packed with 64 players, but it is the freedom of having up to 64 that made the game so intense.

Servers could set their own manual limit, kick and ban players that were rude and such.

With this IWNet joke, gone are the days where 64 players go headlong against each other trying to get the upper hand in the virtual combat field. All that’s left is a disappointing multiplayer experience.

Infinity Ward even proudly stated that while Modern Warfare 2 for the PC only accounted 3% of its overall sales, but that it is the most successful PC version Call of Duty series sold.

They’re pretty much gloating over the failed boycott that a significant amount of gamers tried to organize.

This is the part where I get disgusted with PC gamers.

Sure, they made a splash in the water when they started complaining about the removal of dedicated servers, but they equally made a fool of themselves subsequently when many of them decided to purchase the game.

Where does the “boycott” in the Modern Warfare 2 boycott movement come into play when the game is still purchased?

I have nothing against people the gamers that bought the game.

I do however, feel that players that made a big rant against Infinity Ward’s decision, joined the boycott and then buy the game, spineless wretches.

I’m aware that some PC gamers do not mind the disappearance of dedicated servers. To those people, more power to you.

But for the people that have experienced multiplayer shooter games in all its glory, Modern Warfare 2 proves to be a disappointment.

What I think, on the other hand, is that overpriced low-quality rubbish is evil and horrendous. What I think, is that the entertainment industry needs to pull its head out of its ass. What I think, is that someone should pull me away from this keyboard now before I go on.

Or maybe not, I need to get this out.

The entertainment industry likes to rail and rant about how piracy is killing their profit and their sales. What they absolutely love is to draw up a number on how a specific movie, song or game has been pirated “x” amount of times, and that “x” is the amount of sales that they’ve lost.

Let’s stop and be a little bit logical here shall we?

Just because some random person downloaded that album or movie off the net, doesn’t mean that the person would have bought the album if it wasn’t available for free.

And just because he downloaded it for free doesn’t mean he’s not going to purchase it either. Because hey, if that album is really that butt-kicking, ear-numbing, mind-blowing awesome, I’m pretty sure that the pirate’s going to pay for it.

A “guesstimate” of 1,000 illegal downloads of a $19.99 movie does not mean that you lost $20,000 worth of sales.

I’m not going to pay $49.99 for a game that may or may not be good. I’m not going to pay $19.99 for a movie that may or may not be good. I’m not going to pay $15 for a music album that may or may not rock my world.

In short, unless I’m pretty sure that it’s going to make me giggle like a schoolgirl or shout like I scored the winning goal in a soccer game, I’m not going to throw my money away.

But hey, I’m not arguing for piracy. I think piracy’s bad, I just think that the entertainment industry isn’t approaching the whole issue in a way that makes sense.

Adding DRM (Digital Rights Management) to games, music and video?! What? It isn’t enough that I paid for your product but now I can only watch the video under certain conditions? I can only listen to my music on a certain computer? I can only install that preposterously expensive software once?

Really? You’re going to screw your customers over in an attempt to keep business?

That’s like going to Subways and having the person serving you spit into your sandwich and handing it over to you with a big smile saying “Thank you and please come again!”

I don’t think piracy is the main issue here. I think it’s the effect of a horrible entertainment industry, and not the cause of the loss of profit for the entertainment industry.

The industry can keep on suing people through the RIAA or screwing their customers over with more and more funny DRM methods, but pirates are just going to come back over and over again.

Because hell, no one’s going to want to pay for rubbish.

Maybe, just maybe, the industry should be looking at what they’re doing instead. Cut the premium price for crappy movies maybe?

Heck, sell me “Borderlands” for $10 bucks and I’ll be able to get at least five other gamers to buy it along with me. But at $49.99 for the PC? Dream on 2k Games.

The media industry is throwing a tantrum because they can’t rip people off as easy anymore. Ten years ago, whatever they said or decided was the rule, and people either bend over and took it up in their rear or they walked away.

Now that people have a say and they’re saying it through rampant piracy, I think it’s time for the entertainment industry to listen and reassess themselves. I think it’s time for them to stop laying all the blame on pirates. I think it’s time they grew up and act a little bit more mature.

But hey, don’t go pirating. Cause when it comes to pirates vs ninjas, ninjas would win.

Never mind me.

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Gordon Freeman, from the Half-Life series, is officially the greatest all-time game hero.

Or, at least that’s what Gamespot found when they started their “All-Time Greatest Game Hero” competition.

Out of a pool of 64 candidates including idols such as Donkey Kong, Snake from Metal Gear Solid, Duke Nukem, Pikachu Niko Bellic and even the all-time favorite plumber Mario, it’s hard to believe that Gordon Freeman came out at the top.

In the final round, Mario the plumber stood off against Gordon the scientist. Gordon barely won with a 7 percent gap.

Mario is the icon with a feature movie under its belt – horrible, but nonetheless a feature movie – and a spectacular 116 appearances in various games.

On one hand, we have a plumber that first appeared in 1981 and since then has been constantly saving his loved ones from weird revolting mushrooms and overgrown bipolar turtles.

On the other hand we have an MIT graduate that works in a research facility flipping buttons and pushing carts, and subsequently resulting in having Earth being invaded by aliens.

Wait, greatest game hero?

An ordinary plumber that rises against all odds and saves his loved one over and over again, or an MIT graduate that starts a world invasion and then subsequently “saves” it.

Also, it is impossible to forget that throughout all his appearances Gordon has remained a mute, never uttering a single word.

Either he’s rude, unbelievably narcissistic or he had his vocal cords magically removed by aliens during his studies at MIT.

We had the chance of a lifetime (maybe a tad dramatic here) to pick a game hero to represent the growing depth and intellectualism that is the gaming community, and we picked a button-flipping, cart-pushing, violent and mute scientist?

Yes, this is violent.

A gun-toting, crowbarwaving, rocket-launching MIT scientist with a deepseated sense of Xenophobia.

The Half-Life series is a fantastic series of games.

Personally loved the games, it’s just a little bit preposterous to think of Gordon Freeman as the “Greatest Game Hero” to ever grace my controller/ keyboard.

The gaming community is often laughed at and poked fun at, with a stereotypical image of people that never managed to mature and grow up.

Games are looked at as mindless violent games or a waste of time on depth-less addictive media.

In terms of character qualities, Mario should have won.

He’s the bunny-hopping, fireball hurling, kart-racing, lady-loving everyday man that rose against the odds and kicked virtual turtle butt while doing it.

He has a dinosaur to ride on for goodness sake.

Heck, Niko Bellic would have been a better choice. A person in search of “The American Dream” in a world that makes no sense at all.

Gordon’s a decent game hero, he just shouldn’t have won the title. At least it wasn’t the semi brain-dead Marcus Fenix or the psychotic God of War Kratos.

At the end of the day, Pikachu should have won. That adorable yellow fluffball that can power up your house almost effortlessly.

Not only does it represent a world without electric bills, but it makes people say “aww” too.

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Simplify, simplify, simplify. That was an advice that William Zinsser gave in his book “On Writing Well.” Valve took the same approach to the zombie-horror survival genre and the result of it was “Left 4 Dead,” a game that took the masses by pleasant surprise.

The game became an unbelievable success. Critics raved all about it, gamers loved every inch of it, and their developers swam in praise and adulation.

“Left 4 Dead” was a success not because it tried to combine different genres together, or that it had a really beautiful graphics engine, or that it had “87 bazillion guns.” It was successful because it’s formula and concept was really simple.

Gamers didn’t need twitch-reflex gaming skills with that game, all that was needed was to aim in the general direction of those swarming zombies and just button mash away.

Players didn’t have to familiarize themselves with the weapons, because they were straightforward enough.

A combat rifle shoots fast, a shotgun sends bodies flying and the sniper pierces bodies; everything was simple and the pace of the game was frantically fast.

Zombies were plentiful and they came in hordes.

They came in such big numbers with a few “Special Infected” that whenever they appeared it would typically result in a shout-scream test. Passionate gamers shouting for help, screaming in frustration, giggling in pleasure and laughing in glee.

Teamwork, something many people these days know nothing about, is vital in “Left 4 Dead.”

It’s practically impossible, save for cheating, for a solo player to get through any one of the campaigns while leaving his/her teammates behind.

It’s a game where everything was made simple, broken down to the basics.

This was what made “Left 4 Dead” so unbelievably successful. A deep and emotional storyline was unnecessary because it didn’t have any real storyline to begin with at all.

The whole game involved selecting a gun and reaching the next checkpoint.

The concept is simple, the game play is exhilarating.

The player is seemingly thrown into the final scenes of George Romero’s “Land of the Dead,” where all he or she has to do is shoot everything to make it out alive.

Game developers should take note from Valve’s “Left 4 Dead.” Simple can sometimes be a lot better than the recent slew of convoluted complicating games.

Spectacular graphics and realistic physics isn’t going to win over simple reward management, because that’s what games are all about.

Reward management involves tempting the player with a challenge that he or she might lose and put a nice reward at the end of it.

It’s like the ‘give the dog a bone’ concept.

Games should still have depth; they should still try to break into new grounds.

But developers have to remember what makes games fun, which is sadly something more and more developers are forgetting.

Every new feature or function or setting should further enhance the “challenge-reward” system, and not hinder it.

Borderlands by Gearbox did a great job in simplifying their game.

It’s a simple cooperative multi-player shooter mode that just emphasizes on teamwork and a lot of shooting.

The storyline is more of a sidebar in this game. Players are occupied with getting their hands on some randomly generated “uber-powerful” shotgun than they were about who stole what from where.

Borderlands has a mood and feel that is completely different from “Left 4 Dead,” but the idea of simplifying the game to a “challenge-reward” idea worked splendidly with it as well.

But game developers often forget what makes a game fun.

In fact, Valve might have forgotten a little of it with their sequel to their first zombie-horror survival masterpiece called “Left 4 Dead.”

Valve will be releasing the sequel to “Left 4 Dead” on November 17.

They did however give over-enthusiastic pre-ordering gamers early access to their demo though.

The demo of “Left 4 Dead: 2” is fun, no doubt, but while Valve seemed to have done an even better job with the frantic pace and feel of the game, and how it takes place during the day instead of the night, the creators got a little too carried away with the weapons.

There are far too many weapons in “Left 4 Dead” sequel.

The inclusion of new melee weapons was a great idea, it’ll add a twist to the game, but Valve got carried away and added a plethora of melee weapons instead of a few select distinctly different weapons.

What makes it horrible is that they function almost all in the same way save for the chainsaw and machete.

The pan, police baton and the guitar (yeah, you can “thwack” the head of a zombie with a red electric guitar) all work about the same. They look different, but have the same range.

Their new rifles and shotguns also add to the confusion.

Valve seemingly forgot the formula they had that made their game successful.

Their new weapons are just going to confuse and slow down the pace of the game as players stand and ponder the weapons.

Game developers should take heed and remember to “simplify,” just as long as they don’t return to the days of Pong.

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It’s that time of the year again where games flood the market, and gamers pull their hair in frustration trying to decide on what to buy.

To make life easier for fans, here are a few titles that gamers might want to consider saving up for.

They come in no particular order and are multiplatform games.

Borderlands

This game has already been released, and is available for PC, Xbox 360 and Playstation 3.

A hybrid of two wellloved genres, RPG and FPS, Borderlands is the perfect game for gamers that love fast-paced shooter action with an almost endless choice of weapons.

Proudly claiming that the game offers “87 bazilion guns,” this game definitely offers a twist to traditional shooter games.

While the storyline of the game may not be spectacular, it really does not matter at all as the variety of weapons at your disposal easily offsets everything else.

Except for the rewards given by quests, all other weapons in the game are randomly generated, encouraging players to go through multiple playthroughs.

The co-op multiplayer is where the game truly shines.

Traversing the world as a lonely treasure hunter can be depressing at times, so take advantage of the multiplayer aspect of the game and wreak havoc with up to three other players.

The enemies are harder, the dropped loot prettier and the game just tremendously better.

Dragon Age: Origins

This game has also bee released already, and also available for PC, Xbox 360 and Playstation 3.

The spiritual successor of Baldur’s Gate, developed by RPG masters Bioware, is simply a spectacular tale of sword and sorcery.

Gone are the simple moral choices of earlier RPG games, replaced instead with decisions that are always bordering on either, much like choices presented to the player in Mass Effect and The Witcher. The consequences of the actions are never clear either, with empires rising and falling unwittingly.

With a complex, and yet surprisingly user-friendly, battle system, the game holds true to the many promises from Bioware and the tremendously high expectations that fans have for the game.

Depending on the player’s choice of race and their “origins”, the game offers a myriad of possibilities.

Coupled with the plot twists and the often unsuspected consequences, Dragon Age easily offers hours upon hours of satisfying gameplay.

Assassins Creed 2

This game will be released on November 17 and made for PC, Xbox 360 and Playstation 3.

The sequel to the hit Assassins Creed, the player is this time thrown into another
open world consisting of Venice, Rome, Florence and Tuscan.

Addressing the earlier concerns of fans regarding Assassins Creed, Ubisoft Montreal aims to provide an even richer experience as players take the role of an assassin with the help of Leonardo da Vinci and his many contraptions.

Running across rooftops, scaling walls, gliding through Venice with da Vinci’s flying contraption, gamers should definitely look forward to this upcoming installment of the game.

Left 4 Dead 2

This game will be released November 17, and will be available on PC and Xbox 360.

Zombies, chainsaws, guns and machetes. A few keywords that easily summarize the chaotic and yet addicting sequel to Valve’s 2008 Left 4 Dead.

In addition to the new melee weapons, L4D2 has introduced new zombies such as zombies in hazmat suits or riot police suits.

Taking place in the South this time and in broad daylight, the added vibrant color to the game works even better with the game.

Graphics of the game have improved significantly, the weapons seem to have a more distinctive feel, and the overall pandemonium of the game can be felt much better.

Smashing the head of a zombie running at you, while carnival music is playing in the back, is unbelievably satisfying.

Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2

This game will be released November 10. It will be available on PC, Xbox 360 and Playstation 3.

For gamers that are familiar with Modern Warfare 1, no introduction should be necessary at all.

Modern Warfare 2, developed by Infinity Ward, is the sequel to one of the most successful shooters of 2007.

While the game features a single-player and co-op campaign, it truly shines on the online multiplayer level.

The game still features its previous experience and unlockable reward system, a new kill-streak reward system is implemented as well where players can order supply drops or missile strikes.

However, PC gamers and fans of modding might want to consider the game carefully as Modern Warfare 2 does not support dedicated servers and modding capabilities.

These are the prominent RPG, Action and Shooter games that gamers should be looking to purchase and play.

Nothing beats the preparation to warm up the blood during the cold St. Cloud winter with the warm blood of virtual villains.

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Video games are competitive, which is nothing new. Even back in the days of Pong or Pac Man, people competed against each other one way or another.

With the advent of Internet however, all that has changed.

I believe that people would nod their heads in agreement if I said that the Internet is both the best and the worst thing that was introduced to games.

Multiplayer games have never been more intense.

With up to 64 people shooting at each other in certain competitive games such as Battlefield 2, and with intense “up-close-and-personal” team fights in games such as League of Legends or Demigod, multiplayer is no more the Robin of Batman.

The multiplayer aspect of games is one of the biggest selling points of games these days.

A new phenomenon has been increasingly apparent in the online gaming community in the past few years, where a new species of gamers have slowly mutated out of the depths of hell and has begun a pesky assault against the gaming community.

These demons are often stubborn, quick to offend (and easily offended), rude, arrogant and at times even outright racist.

These elitist snobs bring a bad name to the gaming community.

Even though many gamers are fairly helpful and nice people, it’s the vocal and rude ones that get the attention.

Their opponents a “noob” (derogatory term, implying lack of skills) when they lose, a “noob” when the player wins against them, and sometimes they’re even excited enough to use racial slurs.

And it isn’t restricted to their opponents either, these horrid beasts think of themselves so highly that they’re quick to insult their own teammates as well.

They fail to realize that teamwork is essential in most multiplayer games; instead imagining themselves as a great hero of which is failed by incompetent lackeys.

It is sad however that these monsters are unaware of their own path to self-destruction.

By being the nuisances that they are, they turn away others from playing online game matches.

By being the annoyances that they are, they will slowly end up in a playing field consisting of mostly their own.

By being the pests that they are, they’re ridding the “community” aspect of the online community.

Here are a few ways that are very useful in annoying these rodents.

Shouting matches against them will not work; they’ll just get excited and act like monkeys on cocaine and LSD.

1. The Big Laugh

Really, just laugh at them. If they say I suck, I laugh at them. If they say I’m cheating, I laugh at them. If they call me names, I laugh at them. And I never offer an explanation either, which just annoys the heck out of them.

They absolutely despise being laughed at, and even more so when they have no idea why.

So just laugh.

2. The Counter-Statement

This is generally restricted to situations where they make a comment about skill-related issues. Such as when I successfully kill them with a knife, and they say knife-kills require no skills, I’d simply reply “Knife throwing is a skill!” even if it really isn’t.

In fact, it works better when what I say is absolutely untrue, because it just turns them into a vein-popping, blood boiling, feet-stomping lunatic.

It’s important however to reply only once and let them go on a rant. Ignoring them after they’ve incoherently pieced their argument is part of the fun.

3. The Dictionary Attack

It’s a sad and amusing fact that many of these pesky elitists don’t spell properly and often use terms and words incorrectly.

“These people are too absorbed in their own world to look in dictionaries; so they assume that what they think it is truth,” Private. Jackass (Glard Chia) said.

Having been at the forefront of the battle against these snobbish jerks, Chia’s favorite technique is to twist their words around and poke fun at them.

It works well too.

A very simple example is the word “gay”, which is often used as an insult against others.

Twist it around and think of it as “happy” and just agree with them, and the tables will have turned. The trick against these cretins is to take it as a joke.

No matter how competitive the game is or was, take it easy and it will be far more enjoyable.

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In 2003, SCSU was reported to the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC) as sexist and racist. In 2007 swastikas were used as hate-speech on campus. And in early 2009 a poster of Dorothy Irene Height was vandalized.

Following the vandalizing of Height’s poster, a group of students defiantly stood up against racism and started an anti-racist movement called the “We Are One” SCSU Student Resistance Movement.

“I think it all stemmed from just wanting to be on the fight against racism and not the racist action,” social work junior Sara Schoborg said “kind of spin it positively as a fight against these things.”

Schoborg was one of the students in the class involved in setting up the poster that was later vandalized.

The class had found out about the act prior to their class, and after pooling their ideas together they started the “We Are One” movement.

As part of their push for anti-racism, they started a bulletin board for students to post their comments, a free dinner for students to intermingle with different cultures and presentations on anti-racism.

The movement also received support from the Student Government Association (SGA).

Ernest Langston, the Chairperson of the Cultural Diversity Committee, wrote a resolution condemning and denouncing the act.

Langston also attempted to invite Height to SCSU but the attempts did not work out.

“One act of violence or one act of hate, created many acts of kindness and goodness,” Langston said.

The “We Are One” movement had a short-lived run as most of the student organizers were brought together because they were classmates.

With the end of the Spring 2009 semester, the scheduling conflicts and time restrictions have slowed down the activities of the movement.

Even though the organization lacks a formal structure, students are still in talks of holding different activities to keep it alive.

There are talks of having the issue presented during freshmen orientation, getting Height onto campus and setting up a scholarship.

Schoborg said the experience gave her the feeling of being empowered to stand up for what she believes in.

Andrea Dohmen, another student organizer of the event, said she still thinks about what she could have done better with the movement every day.

“It was just a very positive, community building experience for a lot of people,” Langston said.

“Although it was short lived, a lot of people jumped on board and a lot of people were in the affirmative of it.”

The “We Are One” movement is currently accepting scholarship donations through www.stcloudstate.edu/foundation/waystogive.

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Americans are ignorant, arrogant and insensitive. “How can they not know that there are two Congos in Africa? Not one, but two! How can they not know that ‘Malaysian’ is a nationality and not an ethnicity? How can they not know tha-”

It’s usually at that point in a conversation that I laugh and walk away or prepare myself to deliver a tongue lashing of epic proportions to the insufferable individual making such statements.

I’ve heard many variations of the above. Sometimes spoken outright, sometimes implied, and at times even from Americans themselves.

I think it’s absolute cowdung. I think it’s buffalo-manure. I think it’s cattle-feces.

Some Americans may be ignorant, arrogant and insensitive, but you find the same type of people in every country in the world.

They’re in every single continent, in every single country and in every single city.

Arrogant, insensitive and ignorant donkeys are not geographically limited to the United States of America.

Sometimes, I would meet a non-American person or two that would pipe in and use themselves as an example of being a person that knows what’s going on outside of their own country.

They would say something along the lines of “hey I know of global economy and politics and yadda yadda yadda” with a large smirk on their face.

Well, there you have it: an arrogant person that’s non- American.

But also, they fail to realize that they are a single individual. Not nearly enough to be used as an example or representative of a nation or continent or land-mass.

And if they’re an international student, they fail to realize that by being an international student in itself they already have an unfair advantage of sorts.

International students usually come from middle to upper-class households. International students know in advance what they will be facing when they pick the country they wish to go to. More often than not, they try to learn of the country of their destination (Surprise! It’s the US!).

Then they come here and they feel surprised that Americans are not familiar with their country, culture or whatnot.

Chances are that the Americans they meet when they first arrive do not come from the same privileged background as an international student that has the opportunity to pursue education overseas.

And how can Americans possibly prepare themselves the way an international student can prepare him/herself?

Is it really fair to hold Americans to such a ridiculous standard? A double standard, at that.

Sometimes I meet Americans that feel the same way as well. They feel that Americans are, well, ignorant, arrogant and insensitive to others. They feel that they know so little of the world and all that jazz.

Just because the U.S. is a superpower in global politics and probably the whole world has their eyes on the U.S. (now now, don’t start inflating yourself!) doesn’t mean that naturally the Americans have to know everything there is about whatever it is that their country may have its hands in.

Is it really fair to judge Americans in such an unfair manner?

Keep in mind that I am in no way saying that there aren’t ignorant, arrogant and insensitive Americans. I’m just saying that there are people like that all over the world, not just in the U.S.

The problem is that while the U.S. is being judged at such an incredulously preposterous standard, the rest of the world is free to go on being their ignorant, arrogant and insensitive selves.

Or, if you look at it another way, unless non-Americans are prepared to start feeling cynical about their own country the same way, they should not judge Americans in such an unfair way.

The whole idea of a diverse campus is that both Americans and non-Americans are ignorant (one way or another) and we’re here to help educate each other.

It is not that the Americans are ignorant and international students are here to educate them.

The same message goes to both Americans and non-Americans: We’re here to learn.

The moment anyone starts feeling superior about themselves and view the others in such a negative fashion, it’s all downhill from there.

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Infinity Ward’s decision to remove dedicated server support for the PC on their latest hit-title “Modern Warfare 2” was ridiculous. They decided to replace it with what they called the InfinityWardNet (IWNet).

It was an unnecessary move that made little sense to PC gamers, and severely limited the multiplayer aspect of the game.

The removal of dedicated servers is, at the very least, a tight slap to the PC gaming community, which in the past has been used to having the ability to access to console commands and hosting servers locally to lessen the lag of the game.

Dedicated servers is not a new concept that just recently appeared in the market, it’s something that has been offered and supported at the very least since 1998 with Counter Strike, probably even further back.

It allows gamers to essentially set up custom rules and host clan-matches for hardcore gamers.

I spoke about the online elitist community in my last column.

I wrote about how they could be immature, racist and destructive spawns of Hell that was sent forth to plague online games.

What gamers did to counter this was that clans were born.

Clans were essentially a group of gamers working towards the same gaming goal.

Clans range from competitive, bureaucratic groups to simple and casual groups.

Dedicated servers allowed such clans to have their own servers and rules. Clans could ban a gamer permanently if they failed to abide by the server rules, which many times required that players be polite to each other.

With that being removed, chances are PC gamers will be forced to play with name-calling elitists and nothing can be done about it, except quitting the game itself.

With IWNet, the multiplayer experience has been kicked in the crotch, to say the least.

This IWNet fiasco that they decided to implement has severe side effects too, such as the limiting of players from 64 to a maximum of 16.

The Call of Duty series has, as far as I can remember, always been an intense war game.

The sheer amount of players always made the game a chaotic, frantic and addictive shootout.

True, severs are not always packed with 64 players, but it is the freedom of having up to 64 that made the game so intense.

Servers could set their own manual limit, kick and ban players that were rude and such.

With this IWNet joke, gone are the days where 64 players go headlong against each other trying to get the upper hand in the virtual combat field. All that’s left is a disappointing multiplayer experience.

Infinity Ward even proudly stated that while Modern Warfare 2 for the PC only accounted 3% of its overall sales, but that it is the most successful PC version Call of Duty series sold.

They’re pretty much gloating over the failed boycott that a significant amount of gamers tried to organize.

This is the part where I get disgusted with PC gamers.

Sure, they made a splash in the water when they started complaining about the removal of dedicated servers, but they equally made a fool of themselves subsequently when many of them decided to purchase the game.

Where does the “boycott” in the Modern Warfare 2 boycott movement come into play when the game is still purchased?

I have nothing against people the gamers that bought the game.

I do however, feel that players that made a big rant against Infinity Ward’s decision, joined the boycott and then buy the game, spineless wretches.

I’m aware that some PC gamers do not mind the disappearance of dedicated servers. To those people, more power to you.

But for the people that have experienced multiplayer shooter games in all its glory, Modern Warfare 2 proves to be a disappointment.