lailing on the ground, you scream for medical attention.

And a squad mate, Chronic_douche 420, is ignoring your cries.

“Come on man, you’re standing right there; heal me. Dude. I can see your plus sign.”

He bulldozes right past you and out into the open, and starts unloading at something. He misses his target, and takes a rocket-propelled grenade in the mouth.

Now you and Chronic_douche420 are both flailing on the ground. You bleed out, and wait to re-spawn… a long way from the communications array you were trying to capture.

Because your squad mate is A)  chronic, B) a douche and C) unwilling to heal fallen teammates, both he and you are now essentially useless to the team for the next little while. Terrific.

Now normally, the actions of dipshits can’t really ruin your fun in an FPS—you learn to play around the dipshits (and chronic douches) in the universes of Killzone, and Halo and Modern Warfare, and you still have a good time. It’s totally doable.

But as a games writer I’m in new territory here; I don’t know whether to pan MAG or praise it, because MAG matches are really cool when other players play the game as they “should” and when they don’t, you can feel the futility.

The game’s got a terrific concept: a massive-scale FPS where 256 players are distributed into squads, platoons and companies, designated leaders call in specific orders, and their underlings are provided with tangible incentives (in the form of double XP) for actually following those orders and sticking with their people and playing the game like humans, instead of like dipshits, thus creating some semblance of tactical, strategic warfare.

And amazingly, I think Zipper Interactive and Sony got it right. MAG doesn’t break or blow up. It actually works pretty well.

By definition MAG is brainier, more tactical and more of a team game than basically any other shooter, because of its large maps, multi-step objectives and chain of command system. No one player can swing a match the other way, and the best organized and most communicative teams beat lone wolves and dipshits nearly every time.

There might be no ‘I’ in team… but there are multiple instances of the letter I in dipshit. In Week 1, lots of people are playing MAG impulsively and selfishly and without regard for teamwork, and it actually can ruin the fun. Dipshits don’t win at MAG, and they’ll take you down with them.

Zipper must have known they were creating a game where the attitude and behavior of the user base would dictate the quality of the experience, to a greater degree than any software element. After all, they didn’t include a single player mode, and they haven’t provided much guidance, or even very detailed instructions; it’s all in the hands of the users. The community isn’t even entirely sure how the Shadow War contracts or the win/loss system works. And anyway, unless you’ve got 7 friends with shitloads of free with which to form a squad, you’ll be playing MAG alongside dipshits sometimes. And while it is a good game,  at this point I have doubts as to whether it will rise above the douchebaggery and dipshittery. It’s just too difficult to feel like you’re accomplishing anything, in dipshit-riddled matches.

Any of the following may indicate that the MAG game server has thrown you behind enemy lines with a bunch of dipshits:

• The arrows on your mini-map (your squad mates) are not in proximity to one another, nor even moving towards the correct objective

• You die several times in a row without being revived

• Your squad leader has no mic

• Teammates are on the attack despite that the objective clearly says “defend”

• You hear words like, “You stole my kill.”

But I’m trying not to forget it’s a new game. Really new. People are still figuring out how to be good at it, and even how to enjoy it. MAG has potential and I’m going to stick with it for awhile, and try to add players to my friends list who are explicitly interested in forming a squad and playing tactically. But here’s hoping the dipshits get bored soon, and go back to Call of Duty.