Two Gamers Named 'Fingers'

Co-worker, Co-Nerd, and all-around good guy Dave and I were hanging out night before last, and he returned to me a book of poetry he'd borrowed almost a year ago. It's called Blue Wizard Is About To Die!. It turned out better than I hoped it would, to have lent him the book; I read it before I lent it to him, and now it's been long enough that it's almost all fresh again. I remember snippets here and there, but most of it has faded so completely from my mind that I'm able to resavour every page as if I'd never seen them before.

It's an incredibly good collection of video-game poetry; I imagine it Means a whole lot less to people who don't play games, or didn't in the 80s, but whatever. It's still a different kind of insight into the mind of a gamer than any other you're likely to get. And it's written by a guy (who's younger than me! And published!) who goes by the nickname 'Fingers'.

So that's one of them.

The other one is a guy from battle.net that I played Starcraft against one time. His name wasn't actually 'Fingers'; it was something like "_.|.._^_^_..|._" , which if you squint looks like a happyface flipping a double bird. He and a friend of his were teamed up, playing against me and Atlas. He was good. He was better than me, for sure; he might even have been better than Atlas. I don't know for sure because he actually cheated, in the one game we played; he accused us of cheating in the typed chat interface the game has, thereby causing us to defend ourselves in the same chat interface. Of course, the time you spend chatting is time you're not spending actually playing the game, and as a result we got steamrolled; he used the totally unfounded accusation of cheating as a way to get a 2-minute head start on us. And it worked. And he admitted that's what he'd done.

That made me really sad. Really disappointed. Really, intensely, angry at the state of humanity that someone would sink to those kinds of depths to win at a computer game. So that's the second Fingers.

I really hope they're not the same person. Assuming we ever met, I'd hate to have to suckerpunch him in revenge after shaking his hand for writing one of my favourite books.