Punching Bag

Today, I'm going to take a minute to explain what I meant by the Punching Bag status, so my brother doesn't look so bad.  This status isn't literal.  My brother and his friends never beat me up, or anything like that.  At least, not in real life.  Generally, one only becomes a Punching Bag in two types of games: pvp and co-op with friendly fire.

PvP (Player-vs-Player) is any game where the objective is to beat the other players.  Now, in a straight two player pvp game (such as just about every fighting game), there isn't really a Punching Bag, though there's a good chance that the player that loses the most often is probably the Punching Bag in other games.  Where Punching Bags really come into play are multi-player pvp games.

In these games, more than two players are fighting each other, usually in a free-for-all, every person for him/herself battle.  The best examples of this I can think of from my childhood are the old wrestling games and the Smash Bros. series.  There are two outcomes for a Punching Bag in these games.  Either the rest of the players will ignore the "weakest" player till they've dispatched with the real threats, or, worse, they will all team up from the beginning to get rid of this player so they can focus on the "real" battle.  Either way, the Punching Bag is either ignored or overpowered, and the game is not at all enjoyable for them. 

Once I began to understand and accept my role as the Punching Bag in these types of games, it became a simple matter of just refusing to play.  However, in the other sort of game, the co-op with friendly fire, it was a less certain outcome, and so it was harder to turn away from.  These games were, after all, co-op: my favorite kind of game.  The difference was that in these games, while you were playing together for a common cause, as an added "challenge" the two players could hurt each other if they weren't careful with their aim.  In practice this is, at best, mildly annoying, but what made it truly irritating was that these games often devolved into "beat the crap out of the Punching Bag" (who just wants to get on with the game).  This seemed more likely the more of my brother's friends who were present while playing.

So, that's what a Punching Bag is.  They are the default target for any video game bullying (at least, before the internet, wherein any random person might grief any other random player for no real reason).  But, to be fair to my brother, I was a year and a half younger than him, bent on following him around and doing whatever he's doing.  Not a big deal once we got older (which probably didn't happen till after high school), but back then I'm sure a bit of the Punching Bag status came from wanting to get rid of his annoying little sister. 

I couldn't decide which picture to use, so I used them both.