I used to find it hard to fully imagine the mind-set of a terrorist.

That is, until I played Halo 3 online, where I found myself adopting — with great success — terrorist tactics. Including a form of suicide bombing.

This probably bears some explanation. I’ll begin by pointing out a
basic fact: A lot of teenage kids out there play dozens of hours of
multiplayer Halo a week. They thus become insanely good
at the game: They can kill me with a single head shot from halfway
across a map — or expertly circle me while jumping around, making it
impossible for me to land a shot, while they pulverize me with bullets.

I can’t do those things. I haven’t got enough time to practice as
they do: I’m an adult, with a job and wife and kid, so I get maybe an
hour with Halo on a good day. I wind up sucking far, far more than most other Halo 3
players, and despite the best attempts of Xbox Live to match me up with
similarly lame players, I usually wind up at the bottom of my group’s
rankings — stumbling haplessly about while getting slaughtered over
and over again.

So after a few weeks of this ritual humiliation, I got sick of it. And I devised a simple technique for revenge.

Whenever I find myself under attack by a wildly superior player, I
stop trying to duck and avoid their fire. Instead, I turn around and
run straight at them. I know that by doing so, I’m only making it
easier for them to shoot me — and thus I’m marching straight into the
jaws of death. Indeed, I can usually see my health meter rapidly
shrinking to zero.

But at the last second, before I die, I’ll whip out a sticky plasma
grenade — and throw it at them. Because I’ve run up so close, I almost
always hit my opponent successfully. I’ll die — but he’ll die too, a
few seconds later when the grenade goes off. (When you pull off the
trick, the game pops up a little dialog box noting that you killed
someone “from beyond the grave.”)

It was after pulling this maneuver a couple of dozen times that it
suddenly hit me: I had, quite unconsciously, adopted the tactics of a
suicide bomber — or a kamikaze pilot.

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