From Ivy, Out Middle and Through with this Game: What the Banning of Bunny-hopping in Counter-Strike Can Teach about Freedom of the Individual in the Justice System
It has been five years since Phoon last logged into ESEA. This sentence likely means nothing to anyone who has never played a video game, or has never taken playing a video game professionally into consideration. To the surprisingly fanatic and devoted millions that dedicate themselves to playing the best Counter-Strike possible, Phoon’s departure from North America’s most popular league represents the end of an era for the game, and a massive turning point in the type of authority that Valve, the game’s developer, holds over the use of their product. Phoon, a storied veteran of the series’ early days, mastered a technique known as “bunny-hopping” to crack the competition wide open. Within three years of the Counter-Strike’s most recent installment, Global Offensive, however, the once lauded and often controversial player found himself fed-up with the direction the game was taking, quitting and never coming back.
To understand Phoon, his talent, the controversy that surrounded him and his dramatic departure from the game, it is necessary to first understand the ace up his sleeve. Bunny-hopping, or bhopping, is an in-game movement technique (read: exploit) that, if properly executed, allows players to generate nearly limitless movement speed. The bhopper would initiate a jump using either his left or right strafe keys, and simultaneously wiggle his mouse back-and-forth horizontally while airborne. Due to quirks in the way Counter-Strike’s engine, the Source engine, calculated directional movement into velocity, combined with a properly timed jump input as soon as the bhopper touched back down after the jump to cancel a loss in momentum, players could chain hops and strafing together for as long as they could maintain the trick. While a complicated and difficult maneuver to accomplish or continue for very long, a successful and accomplished bhopper could pounce and slither his way across the game’s maps at nearly three to four times the average player’s movement speed, access hard-to-reach locations on the map, or, as often happened, beat their opponents to valuable strategic points.
It’s important to note that the Source engine is based upon, and borrows heavily from, the Quake engine. Quake was a fast-paced, movement-oriented arena shooter that shared nothing in common with Counter-Strike, the more realistically grounded and tactically oriented of the turn-of-the-millennium shooters. Counter-Strike’s metagame centered itself around slow information gathering, and prided itself on hearing audible footsteps to determine enemy positions and laying down walls of smoke grenades to shape the fog of war, transforming the battlefield. These traits, in practice, would be made arbitrary when a talented bhopper made too few footsteps to be tracked easily, and could jump straight through the smoke walls at metaphorical mach speeds. The two sides of the game’s mechanics were at odds, and those in the playerbase who practiced playing smart were completely outmatched by the mechanically gifted bhoppers, who lacked a proper counter-play.
Imbalance, and, to Counter-Strike’s most dedicated players, injustice, sparks outrage, and the disgruntled playerbase voiced their concerns about bhopping to Valve. This outrage was soon quelled by a popular third-party server plugin entitled zBlock. The plugin mainly focused on patching and weakening many of the game’s engine exploits, including bhopping, particularly through the denial of third party scripts that would make the techniques automatic, easy, and arbitrary. To many of the most talented bhoppers like Phoon, who had never been using scripts in the first place, zBlock did nothing. Phoon especially taunted the ineptitude of the new plugin, entitling his newest frag movie “Too Much for zBlock.”
The release of this particular video was a watershed moment on the state of Counter-Strike. Uploaded, taken down by Phoon himself, and eventually reuploaded in October of 2010, the nearly seven-million-view YouTube video demonstrated his effortless ability to soar around maps, surprise opponents around corners, race enemies to their positions, and otherwise bully helpless players in spite of the plugin enforced against his type of player. Phoon would hit and sustain a bhop in almost every single round of play, his victims spouting profanity-laden spite as a last resort to Valve not solving the problem.
Phoon’s tirade had taken place in Counter-Strike: Source, the third installment in a four-game series. Its successor, Global Offensive, brought severe changes to the base game, including a near neutering of the movement that had made Phoon popular. It was official: Valve had made the executive decision to condemn bhoppers and focus on the intelligent dynamic of play that had given life to the game on paper. These changes didn’t necessarily stop Phoon from playing the game seriously following its release in August of 2012, but by 2015, struggling both to improve following the ban on his talent and to maintain his fame within the game’s scene, the once larger-than-life star took a permanent leave from his favorite hobby.
These days, the name “Phoon” demands reverence amongst modern Counter-Strike players. The same crowd that had, a decade prior, attacked him for being nothing but an exploit-abuser now worships him as a god amongst mere peons, and a martyr who did nothing wrong only to feel Valve’s wrath. With the general consensus of the masterpiece that was “Too Much for zBlock” being one-hundred percent legitimate mechanical skill, free of any sort of cheats or hacks, the decline of Phoon’s career stands as a marquee example of when a developer should not be able to justifiably restrict, change or otherwise determine how a player uses their product. It could be said that restriction, and subsequent alienation, restricts the rights of the players to play as they please.
