While playing the game Left 4 Dead the other night for a couple hours, I learned a lot about the people whom I used to call my “friends.” In case you are unfamiliar, Left 4 Dead is an online cooperative zombie-survival game, albeit most of these “friends” I speak of view the “cooperative” element as optional. Here are a few things that I’ve learned about these people whom I used to trust:

  • One of my friends solves all of his problems by throwing Molotov cocktails at them, including “Oh no, there is a zombie in this very small room with us,” and “Hey, I can’t get this door open.”
  • Once you make it to the rescue boat, it is perfectly acceptable to burn the dock to the ground. However, if your teammates aren’t on the boat with you, apparently the appropriate response is to burn the dock to the ground and then laugh.
  • The number of times your friends call you an idiot is directly proportional to the number of times you say, “Watch my six.”
  • If bored, your friends will hurl themselves off of the edges of buildings just to get attention.
  • Some of your friends will shoot you at point-blank range right after helping you up just to make the point that “they can giveth, and they can also taketh away.”
  • When you are the only female character in the group, all of the male characters seem suspiciously quick to give you pills.
  • The phrase, “holy shit, guys, there are zombies in here,” gets a laugh only the first and twentieth time it is used.
  • Don’t walk in front of armed friends who are easily bored.