There are lots of things people have done for me, without being asked, but the most generous was in a video game. I used to play a game called ‘Shot Online’, an MMORPG golf game. I know, it’s kinda nerdy, but anyway, I played it for years and years. I still have an account and occasionally go back and play a few rounds. It’s a very in-depth game – upgrading your character, clubs, items etc. The graphics are a bit old school, but it’s a really good game, with a nice friendly community, as you’d expect, in a golf game. There are no 15 year olds threatening to hack you or saying they slept with your mother and that kind of thing.
In the game there are different play modes – a simple 18 holes alone, quests and missions, 2 balls/4 players, 4 balls/4 players, and ‘mastery’. In mastery, you don’t get an aiming target, that is, you don’t get to see where your ball will land, you have to know the courses very, very well to play, as the name suggests. Also, a typical round costs maybe $20 000 game dollars, but mastery costs maybe $5 000 000, although the rewards, if you’re good enough, are very high. I was quite low level, early on in my career, and had saved up around $6 000 000, a fortune for me at the time in that game, but I was only around level 35, nowhere near good or experienced enough to play mastery.
So I’m playing hole 1 of what I thought was a regular 2 ball/4 player game, and to my horror I realized that I’d selected mastery by accident. My $6 000 000 savings, which is about 6 months of playing, had gone – and of course I was nowhere near good enough to recoup it via the rewards during the round. I was genuinely devastated – anyone who plays games will, I’m sure, understand. Kevin Bridges, the famous and brilliant Scottish comedian, says that he once died in Call of Duty and was so grief-stricken he considered buying a poppy.
So I’m playing this round, landing in bunkers, getting bogeys and double bogeys, and basically screwing it all up – meanwhile in the chat, I’m grumbling a little about how I’d accidentally clicked this game type and had lost all my hard-earned loot. A player who I’d never spoken to before said that he’d meet me back in the ‘square’ (the mini town you go to between rounds to buy clubs etc) after the game and he’d gift me the $5 000 000 – which he, to my utter amazement, did. He just gave me like 5 months’ worth of money, for nothing.
Now, I went on to play this game for many more years, reaching, I think, maybe level 140, at which point I had amassed around $600 000 000 or $700 000 000, and $5 000 000 was to me, by that point, virtually (pun unintended) nothing. No doubt it was virtually nothing to that experienced player at that time too, but it meant the world to me. Heartbroken to ‘fixed toy’, due to another’s generosity.
I helped many others out over the next few years – giving away cash and equipment to newer players, so what goes around comes around and all that – but I’ll never forget that one act of kindness.
Just a small addendum, unrelated to generosity. Back then – mid 2000s – I had an old friend, Dave Westoby, who was approaching 60 at that time – but we’d have a smoke and a drink together. I liked Dave – he’d tell me his stories about his wild life – the time he made a porno, or the time he went to jail for smuggling, or the time he lived in flat above a brothel. We’d play boules in his back garden and drink whisky. Anyway, one day I was telling Dave how I’d spent $2 on a virtual golf club to improve my online golf game – and it totally blew his mind that I’d spent real money on a virtual golf club. “You did what? Run that by me again! You can't even hold it in your hand?” RIP Dave, you’re missed, don’t worry about that old pal.
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