Map call-outs are something of a mystery to me. Who are you calling short, I don’t want
to play checkers with you, I don’t know which corner of quad you’re referring to,
nor do I know where clitoris is. But I’m not alone! It turns out that most
Counter-Strike players struggle to find these spots- let alone how to use them effectively.
So the question I ask in this video is: WHERE’S KITCHEN? Is kitchen the market, where shop
is? …or is it in gay-spot in apartments, where there’s actually a kitchen?
It shouldn’t be a problem, because CS:GO has had THIS lovely feature for years. Embedded
in the bot navigation file for the map you’re playing on is THIS, showing the name of the
location you’re currently stood in up in the top left corner of your screen at all
times. This makes it easy to shout out your location whenever you need to! Though I think
it would be even better if it showed the name of wherever it is that you’re aiming. Valve,
please fix.
You’d think that would help to unify the call-out locations. But this doesn’t help
when the rest of the community’s calling those placenames something different, and
have been since long before CS:GO came out.
Plus, even if you’ve memorised the names of places, what good is that if your teammates
haven’t? Being the oblivious player that I am, I must admit that I haven’t memorised
most location names. It sits somewhere far down my to-do list, probably along with other
things like learning setup grenade throws, tidying my room, and completing Destruction
Darius 2. One you might have heard of is ‘diggity’,
which refers to this spot in Australian Counter-Strike. And this one. And this one. And literally
anywhere else they want it to be. The European equivalent of ‘diggity’ would probably
be ‘gay spot’, which seems to be any location where you’re killed from.
One call-out I’ve heard used time and time again on Mirage is KITCHEN, which is somewhere
around the B site. Exactly where is a bit of a mystery, cos it isn’t officially shown
on-screen anywhere. The upper route is called apartment, and the CT approach is called ‘shop’.
So where’s kitchen? I found a reddit post today asking exactly that. And rather reassuringly,
they couldn’t agree on where ‘kitchen’ was either. Apparently, ‘shop’ used to
be called ‘kitchen’ because it had floor tiles and a bench. Kind of like any room in
Counter-Strike ever, if you ask me. But it seems like in recent years, ‘shop’ has
had its name, ‘kitchen’, swapped out for ‘market’. Even though in my opinion, where
the bomb’s planted should be a market cos I can imagine lots of market stalls set up
there when people aren’t busy killing each other.
A much more suitable place for kitchen to be, in my opinion, would be where there’s
a KITCHEN just here in apartments. But to say that’s where it is would be simplifying
a very complicated and confused topic. Problem is, calling out place-names in CS:GO shouldn’t
be complicated and confusing, since it being those things works against the purpose of
using callouts in a fast-paced action game in the first place.
As a Youtuber, I don’t want to further the confusion in my own videos. As much as I can,
I research the most commonly used place names and stick with that in the hope of unifying
what they’re called. Or sometimes I avoid the whole issue by using generic terms like
‘CT entrance’ or whatever. I hope we can unite and agree on place-names,
since I do think it would be for the greater good. But then, I also want everybody speaking
English and using metric… and we all know that’s never going to happen.
Since I will probably never have a better chance of talking about this, allow me to
go off on a tangent about the English language. I used to hate new words. When stuff like
‘mcjob’ got added to the dictionary, I was all like ‘no you can’t do that’
since I saw it as the English language being dumbed down. I particularly hated how two
words would be fused together and called a new one. ‘Ginormous’, for instance. That
isn’t a word! That’s ‘gigantic’ fused with ‘enormous’.
It wasn’t until A-level that I changed my mind. There, I had a lot of respect for my
English teacher. You’d think of all people, he’d be against changes to the English language.
But he actively embraced it! It seems ridiculous that people want English
to remain the same forever when, up until now, it’s done nothing but change. And not
just a little bit- before the great vowel shift, everybody spoke like villagers on Age
of Empires! And while we see ‘English’ as a language, it’s actually more like a
collage of every language that’s ever invaded us. It’s actually made English a really
rubbish, confusing language that doesn’t really make a lot of sense. In the English
language, you could technically pronounce ‘ghoti’ as ‘fish’, cos you get the
‘f’ sound from ‘enough’, ‘I’ sound from ‘women’, and ‘sh’ sound from
‘intuition’ and so on. To add to the confusion, for some unknown
reason, sometime between 300 and 600 years ago, the English language underwent the ‘Great
Vowel Shift’. Listening to English from before this time, I can barely understand
what they’re trying to say. It’s like listening to a villager in Age of Empires.
Yet after the shift, it sounds about the same as English spoken today.
There are theories as to why this happened, like blaming the youth of the day, or the
Black Death, or even worse, the French! It would help if we could speak to people who
were alive back then but unfortunately I’ve checked and it seems like most are now dead.
So yeah, I learned to tolerate -and even embrace- change to the English language. When it comes
to American spellings, as much as I joke about them being wrong, I accept them as being ‘okay’.
I just wish that Americans would give the same amount of respect back to the English
variants instead of correcting me every time I say stuff like ‘Z’.
So English as a language has continually changed and evolved over time, based on what people
say and do. And -with language, at least- I think that’s the right way to be. The
opposite of this would be somewhere like France, which literally has an academy that tries
to keep the French language pure by deciding what goes into a dictionary. And they’re
strict about this! Houngoungne’s on his last warning- one more mistake on-stream and
it’s the guillotine for him. Ultimately, in an ever-more connected world,
I think that language will all slowly merge into one. There might still be weird dialects
in far-out places like the rainforests and Cornwall, but hopefully even they will still
be able to understand basic Panglish. But the point I’m trying to make is, place
names in Counter-Strike aren’t necessarily clear-cut. To fully understand them you need
a huge amount of context and knowledge about the game. And you can’t exactly call some
one wrong for calling shop ‘kitchen’ even though the only literal kitchen is actually
in apartments. BUT, the problem is I find this sort of confusion
works against the very point of using place names in Counter-Strike in the first place.
They’re meant to relay important snippets of information quickly to teammates and if
you have to explain for 10 minutes why you think market is kitchen then it doesn’t
work any more!
And if you still don’t think this is important, allow me to share a heart-breaking story,
posted on
the csgo subreddit 5 years ago.
So what can we do about this? I don’t have much faith in players working together to
agree on call-out locations- since we haven’t managed to do this in all the years we’ve
played the game. In fact, I think that VALVE is in the best position to do something about
it- or at least, to reduce confusion. After all, I feel like they’re the ones
responsible for the Kitchen mess in the first place. The map had a place called ‘kitchen’
before Valve remade the map. And not only did they NOT put a kitchen where kitchen was,
but they put a kitchen somewhere else that WASN’T called kitchen!
And then they didn’t even add ‘kitchen’ to the nav mesh where they HAD added a kitchen.
No wonder it’s confusing!
So Valve really should do something about it to make the callouts easier for all of
us.
They should embrace community culture. To accept that CS:GO, much like the English language,
isn’t fixed in time- but is instead a continually changing construct. If people call a place
‘boiler’, they should add a boiler there. If they call it dark, make it dark. If they
call it gay-spot… then…
To give them credit, they have already helped in some places by giving spots memorable features
the community has accepted and embraced, so it can be done. I wonder if that’s one of
the reasons for adding graffitis, honestly.
I suggest, whatever happens, we work towards agreeing on place names to improve communication
in the game. But in order for this to work, there will have to be compromise. No stubbornly
sticking to gay-spot once it’s renamed cubby. No diggity’ing in dark spot. I for one am
happy to sacrifice what few place names I know for the greater good- let’s drop our
pride and unite to try and make learning place names easier for everyone. It will be like
Counter-Strike’s equivalent of Esperanto… but good.